Using Workflow with Multiple Apps

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I have so many Workflow recipes, which prompted several emails asking me to share. I already shared quite a few of them in the Workflow Video Field Guide but since publishing that I’ve added several more. Over the next couple months I’m going to share some of the more interesting ones.

The Home Screen Post Workflow

I occasionally post the home screen of interesting readers and friends on this website. Setting up those posts require several things. First I need to send the questions to the home screen guest along with some instructions (like requesting for headshot). Next I need to set up the publication task and OmniFocus. Finally I do all the edits and preparation of the post in Ulysses.

After doing this manually for what seemed like the millionth time, I finally got wise and created a Workflow automated process. The Workflow steps are in the screenshot below.

The Email

If I start this process on my Mac I do with a TextExpander snippet but since I’m going to be using this workflow to also create an OmniFocus and Ulysses project, I decided to combine it all in workflow on iOS. The workflow asks for the name of the person and any additional text I want to add to the email. It saves those two items as variables and then opens a body of pre-written text and drops in the name and additional text data I just captured. It then combines all of this into a third variable for the combined text.

I appreciate that using Workflow’s Magic Variables, I don’t need to necessarily declare variables anymore. Nevertheless, this one was prepared long before they added magic variables and I’ve never bothered to change it up. It works fine as is.

Next I take the variable containing the combined text and drop it in a new email message. Because I know that this is going to be an email about a home screen post I can even insert the subject line in the Workflow. All I need to do when the workflow activates is pick a recipient and the email fires off.

The OmniFocus Task

Next the workflow opens up OmniFocus and creates a new task to publish this home screen post using the variable for the person’s name. The beauty of this is I’ll have to type their name and once and it gets used in several applications. (Note this does not create an OmniFocus Project. I’ll show that one off in the future.)

The Ulysses Sheet

Finally, I create a new text file with the name of the post, dropping in the name variable one last time. I then use that text to open up a sheet in Ulysses to hold the text for the home screen post. Having that text file ready in Ulysses is a nice reminder for me and when I receive the responses from the home screen guest, I simply drop them into Ulysses and work from there. You’ll note there is a long string identifier for the group name in Ulysses. This is how Ulysses knows to put the text file in a specific location in my Ulysses hierarchy where I’d expect to see these posts.

Overall, this is a very simple workflow but when it saves me a bunch of time. Indeed, this is one of those things that is now faster for me on iOS than the Mac because of the way all these apps can work off a few variables. Do not underestimate the power of Workflow to take one little bit of information and use it in multiple key applications. To me that is one of the application’s best features.

Capturing Variables

Capturing Variables

First I get the name of the home screen contributor and any additional text I’ll add to the cover email.

Combining Text

Combining Text

Next I combine the variables with some canned text and save that as a new variable. Then I open an email with the subject line filled in and drop in the combined text as the message body.

Create OmniFocus Task

Create OmniFocus Task

Next I create an OmniFocus task again using the contributor’s name as a variable.

Adding to Ulysses

Adding to Ulysses

Finally I set up some more text using variables and use that to create a new Ulysses sheet. One variable used in three apps. Nice.

Sponsor: Daylite CRM for Mac



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This week MacSparky is sponsored by Daylite, the CRM & Project Management app for teams on Mac, iPhone & iPad.

Daylite helps companies manage more leads and projects by organizing all your data so you can work more efficiently and gain valuable insights into your business. 

Recently a law firm in Georgia shared that Daylite has helped them grow from a team of 2 to 13 in just two years. By using Keywords in Daylite to tag how new lead and client heard about them, the firm was able to filter and uncover which methods worked best for attracting new clients. 

They also use Daylite to filter and identify which clients were referring them the wrong type of leads. By educating their referring clients about their services, they saw a big improvement in the type of leads they were getting, which led to more clients.

By using Daylite to capture important information, this firm was able to leverage that data and grow their business.

If you are managing a small to medium sized business, you can’t go wrong with Daylite. It works on Mac, iPad, and iPhone and gives you and your team one place to manage tasks, contacts, calendars, email, and all those other bits you need to make your business successful. Head over to Daylite today and learn more.

Free is Never Free

The New York Times piece on Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is pretty damning. There’s a lot to consider in the article but one bit that stood out for me was this:

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“They (Uber) spent much of their energy one-upping rivals like Lyft. Uber devoted teams to so-called competitive intelligence, purchasing data from an analytics service called Slice Intelligence. Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber.”
— Mike Issac, New York Times

As I read this, I had to wonder how Unroll.me users felt about their email getting harvested. Unroll.me is a free service that looks at your email for you and helps you unsubscribe from unwanted junk mail. The most important word in that last sentence is “free”.

Free is never free.

Indeed in this case, where unroll.me is owned by an analytics service, it appears that the entire purpose for the service is to get access to user email data for monetization. So apparently Unroll.me, with access to its user email accounts, collected their Lyft receipts, anonymized them, and sold them to Uber. I’m pretty sure people signing up for unroll.me don’t expect that to happen.

The Unroll.me CEO wrote a sort-of apology where he explained that the biggest mistake was not communicating to users how much unroll.me does with subscriber data. “And while we try our best to be open about our business model, recent customer feedback tells me we weren’t explicit enough.” Looking through the unroll.me website, I agree. They could definitely do a better job communicating what they’re up to.

It’s often argued that you should only use web services that require payment because free services won’t be able to stay in business. However, even scarier in my book are the free services that manage to stay in business and the things they do with your data to keep the lights on.

Be careful out there.

 

Free Agents 19 – Nobody Grades You on the Scaffolding




Every independent worker will agree that being organized is important. But should you adopt an organizational system? How can these systems help you, and are they worth the investment? In this episode Jason and I detail our own personal organization systems and discuss approaches to getting more organized, as well as tools to use to help in the process.

Sponsors include:

  • Sanebox: Clean up your inbox in minutes. Sign up for a two-week free trial and a $20 credit.
  • Freshbooks: Online invoicing made easy.

Setapp Update


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Setapp, the Netflix for Mac Apps service, got a nice update yesterday improving on App discovery with better App summaries and categories of apps. The overall user interface is much nicer now. Both prettier and more accessible. 

I first signed up just to try it out but I’m finding Setapp pretty useful and I’m still using it. For $9.99 per month you get access to 73 apps from 65 vendors, worth a total of $2,387.22.

I have talked to a few developer friends about this business model and everybody is curious. Right now, it’s very tough to make a living in the software business. If something like this takes off, it could be quite lucrative for developers. While it’s not the only answer going in the future, it certainly could become one of several revenue streams for successful software developers.

Anyway, if you like to tinker with quality Mac apps I recommend giving it a free month trial and seeing if it fits for you.

Apple’s Green Ambitions

Yesterday Apple released it’s 2017 Environmental Progress Report. The company has come a long way on this front in the last few years. They’ve got most of their operations working off renewable energy. They’ve also developed a robot that takes iPhones apart so they can better recycle. The big announcement with this latest report is the aspirational goal to, at some point in the future, make their products entirely from recycled goods. Apple wants to stop digging in the earth.

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“It sounds crazy, but we’re working on it. We’re moving toward a closed-loop supply chain. One day we’d like to be able to build new products with just recycled materials, including your old products.”
— Lisa Jackson, Apple VP of Environment and Policy

I spent some time reading the various spins on this position around the Internet and I think it’s a mistake to look at this as some hippie-lipservice from Apple. I think they really mean to pull this off and we’ll see further steps in this direction going forward. Also, I don’t fault Apple for stating their intention to do something they still haven’t entirely figured out how to pull off. I think the fact that Apple is publicly working on this will encourage other big tech companies to do the same and maybe they’ll even collaborate on finding solutions. Wouldn’t it be great if they pulled it off?

A Few Rules to Avoid Getting Stung with Crowd-Funding

Three years ago I backed this project on Indiegogo that was a clever iPhone battery/cable/locator/camera trigger. At the time it seemed pretty useful and I was still in those heady days of believing that anything listed on Kickstarter or Indiegogo would necessarily ship.

Well it’s been three years and I’d pretty much written off the idea of ever receiving my GOkey. A few days ago I received an email from the project organizer making it official by explaining he was out of money and unable to ship. He concluded the email:

“I feel terribly shameful for letting you down.
I am sorry.”

I actually felt kind of bad for the guy despite the fact that he got my $69 and I never received anything in return. I would have been more upset about this in the past but I’ve become much more realistic about these projects in the last few years. 

The idea behind crowd-funding is a good one. Somebody has a great idea and rather than going to the bank, they get funded by their first customers. Unfortunately, you’ve got to be pretty discriminating if you don’t want to receive any emails like I just did from GOkey. I’ve got a few rules now for backing crowd-funding campaigns:

1. If it has a circuit board, don’t back it. 

It often seems to me that the biggest fails on these types of projects involved finalizing, approving, and sourcing electronics. I know that this was part of the reason the GOkey never shipped. These days I’ll only back something that has a circuit board if it is made by a company with already a proven and reliable track record.

2. Smashing success is often a bad thing.

If I’m watching a Kickstarter or Indiegogo that starts blowing up, I’ll take a step back and look very closely before I get on board. Being required to make millions of a product when you originally only expected to make thousands adds a lot of complexity and opportunities for things to go wrong. You may recall how long it took them to ship the original Pebble watch. People I talked to said a lot of this was due to them having to ramp up for so many units.

3. Simple ideas are also subject to peril.

Another problem showing up is intellectual property theft. A clever designer will come up with a new way to solve a problem and the project will get some momentum. That very same momentum, however will attract rip-off artists to start flooding the market with similar products, sometimes before the campaign even ends.

I still think the idea behind crowd-funding is a good one. If you see something you feel passionate about and you want to play a role in making it a reality, there’s nothing wrong with backing it. Just be warned that no matter how good of an idea a product is, it still may never ship.