Workflow for iOS Update with Article Parser

Workflow for iOS is certainly a handy little application. While not as powerful as Pythonista, it’s far more simple to work with, due primarily to the clever action design.

The latest update brings support for parsing “articles”, which I assume just means the body of a webpage. Whatever it means, I like it. I recently wrote about converting webpages to Markdown for sites that are visitor-hostile. The “Get Article” action in Workflow does something similar.

Here’s an example that is a Workflow share-sheet action that accepts URLs. A URL goes in and a plain text version of the page comes out. Here’s an example of the process (this is an example from Safari, but it can be used anywhere that I can get a URL).

It may take a second or two based on how much crap is on the page. But it creates a basic reading experience that suits me. It preserves hyperlinks and makes selecting and using the article text simple.

There’s a lot more than that in the latest update. Image converters and Giffy search are just two that seem nice.