In this issue: Hype, Federico's Most Used Workflows, Home Screens from our very own Federico and Graham, plus the usual Tip, Links, and recap of MacStories articles.
MacStories Favorite
Every week we highlight one app that is truly great and deserves to be on everyone's iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
Graham: I can’t code anything, but I’ve been able to make a few HTML5 widgets with Hype. Unfortunately, a last minute delay in App Review means that one of the widgets I made with Hype has not yet been published to MacStories, but you’ll hopefully be able to see it next week.
Hype can be used to make everything from a simple animation for a banner, infographics (like the ones I’m making), widgets for a multi-touch iBook, or even entire websites. Although the functionality of Hype can be quite heavy-duty (you can even animate elements with Physics), it’s surprisingly easy to pick up if you’ve got some basic understanding or experience in using a keyframe-based animation system.
Design your next iPhone app with OmniGraffle and a brand new iOS 9 stencil available to everyone on Stenciltown. (That’s right. Stenciltown.)
All the tools are included to do nearly anything involving shapes, design, layout, drawing, images, iconography – you name it. In practice, that means it’s easy to mock up your next iPhone or iPad app.
Download a free trial of OmniGraffle for Mac, or purchase for iOS and get started right away. And simply search for “iOS 9” in Stencils to start designing your next iPhone app.
MacStories Collections
Federico's Most Used Workflows
Embed Tweets with Editorial
I often need to embed tweets in articles on MacStories, but instead of using screenshots of tweets I want to include their actual HTML code that allows users to tap links and follow the author. Grabbing the HTML code for tweets manually is a time-consuming process, but thankfully there’s an API for it. Using Editorial 1.2 and its built-in support for Twitter, I created a workflow that, given a link to a tweet in the system clipboard (or even multiple tweets), generates an embed code I can paste anywhere. This takes a second and doesn’t require me to interact with anything on the Twitter website. Plus, it also works for Instagram and YouTube embeds, which I also use on a daily basis.
Also in Editorial, I came up with a workflow that lets me see prices for apps and that generates an affiliate link without having to use the App Store. The workflow asks for the type of app it needs to look up on the iTunes API and its name, then displays a list of apps with associated prices and returns a link for the selected app. I use this workflow in all of my app reviews, and you can obviously change the affiliate parameters to your own.
Whenever I write about iPhone apps, I like to display screenshots side by side in a single image (like this). While I used to write Python scripts to automate this task, the creation of these composite images is now handled by Workflow. In the Photos app, I can select a bunch of screenshots, hit the Share icon, choose Workflow, and tap my Combine workflow to automatically stitch all selected images together and end up with a single image in the Photos library I can then use on MacStories. Workflow has built-in support for image combination with a side-by-side option, and its action extension with Photos integration makes it faster than a script in Pythonista.
This simple workflow lets me unfurl shortened URLs I may come across Twitter and RSS so I can save the real, long URL somewhere else with extensions. All of this happens thanks to Workflow’s Expand URL action, which can receive any URL and expand it until there are no more shortened domains between you and the final webpage. Short and useful.
I’ve been playing with Alloy, an advanced app and action launcher for iOS that combines various ideas from Launch Center Pro and Workflow with some deep automation that includes regex support, initialization and runtime workflows, and tons of variables for system actions and features. Alloy is not easy to learn and I’m still reading through the documentation, but I managed to put together an action that allows me to easily open links to tweets in the Twitter app for iOS from Notification Center.
Alloy supports variables for the system clipboard and it can do search and replace via regex on runtime, which means that whenever I copy a link to Twitter.com the app can replace the relevant portions of the link with the URL scheme for Twitter, and then open a tweet in the native app. Alloy has a Notification Center widget that makes it easy for me to copy a link to a tweet from anywhere and let the app take care of converting that for me and launching Twitter with one tap.
Alloy doesn’t currently have a way to share workflows publicly, so I took screenshots of the various actions and steps required to replicate this workflow. You can find the (large) image here.
Tips with Graham
Tips and tricks to master your apps, this week by Graham
A simple but useful tip this week. One of my absolute favorite aspects of OS X is the built-in Preview app, which sounds really dull, but it’s an app that frequently comes in handy and saves my time in various ways. For example, in the last week I had to organise some PDF documents which required me to merge some PDFs, split others, and even re-order the pages of a few PDFs. To accomplish those tasks in Preview is as simple as opening the PDF, activating the Thumbnails panel (which shows thumbnails of individual pages of the PDF) and then selecting the relevant individual pages to delete, move, or copy.
Whilst we’re talking about PDFs on OS X, another super useful but basic tip is that if you can print something in OS X, you can also save it as a PDF. Just open the system print window (CMD + P) and press the PDF button in the bottom-right corner.
Finally, if you’re on Windows and need to merge/split/re-order PDFs, there is a free app that I’ve found that can accomplish this: PDFill Free PDF Tools. It is nowhere close as easy to use as Preview is on OS X, and it is very crude, but it gets the job done.
Rovio has announced Angry Birds 2 will be released on July 30. The original Angry Birds was released in 2009 as a paid game, but given the recent history of Rovio on the App Store, the long-awaited sequel is likely to go free with In-App Purchases.
My iPhone’s Home screen changes a lot during the summer. I’m evaluating Apple apps again for the upcoming release of iOS, I’m reconsidering my workflows, and I’m trying to optimize for the year ahead – therefore, everything is in flux and not well defined. And I thought it would be interesting to capture this iOS 9 Home screen at this moment for this very reason.
Apple Music has replaced Spotify thanks to its superior curation, Beats 1, and integration with the system. I’m trying Apple’s Podcasts app again on iOS 9, but it feels strange to listen to my favorite shows without Overcast (which has effectively created its own “listening platform” on iOS). I’m already a fan of the new Notes app in iOS 9 and I’m using it everyday to take short notes as well as plan my review of iOS 9, so I put it in my dock for faster access. I continue to be impressed by the work The Iconfactory puts into Twitterrific, so I’m trying to see if I can live without Twitter for iPhone (which is in a folder now).
As for other Apple apps, I’m also testing Mail, Calendar, and Reminders again. I like some of the new features exclusive to these apps (such as “Remind me about this” and Time to Leave alerts), but I’m not sure I’ll want to keep them (that’s why Fantastical is still there. It’s just too good). iThoughts is helping me visualize the review of iOS 9 I’m working on, while Alloy is an app launcher and automation tool I’m testing that has a Notification Center widget. Last, I’ve been experimenting with 2Do, primarily to understand why I’ve ignored this excellent app for such a long time. So far, I like its advanced search options, smart lists, and ability to create repeatable checklists
I have no doubt that my Home screen will change again once iOS 9 is about to come out. I’ll have another update by then.
Since last September I’ve made some modest changes to my Home screen, but it is still quite similar. Firstly, the app I use for music streaming is now Apple Music, replacing what used to be Rdio. I always liked Rdio (I never felt the need to switch to Spotify), but just two weeks into using Apple Music and I'm convinced it's the better service, with the far superior curation being the key reason. The other switch that I’ve made is for tracking TV shows: last year I used iTV Shows but I now use iShows 2 (launching very soon); again, this is just a case of me finding an app that better suits what I'm looking for. Another change I've made is removing the Clock app from my Home screen (I frequently set alarms) but now I just open the Clock app from Control Center or directly set/turn off alarms with Siri. I’ve also removed the Phone app from my dock and my Home screen altogether. I don’t know why, but I had resisted doing this for so long, but I finally made the change last week. Replacing the Clock and Phone app is Slack, which I use multiple times a day, and NYT Now, which I’ve been really enjoying. Finally, although I was also using OmniFocus last year, I actually only just switched back to OmniFocus in the last week – this year I had also used Things and Todoist for a few months each. I'm perpetually switching to-do apps, but hopefully I'll eventually get into a productive rhythm and get stuff done...
My lock screen wallpaper is Empire Nights, and my Home screen wallpaper is a blurred version of it (made with Blur Studio).
