I first heard about it on Slack and then on Macstories.1 Apple acquired the venerable Workflow app for iOS. From Apple’s statement to Techcrunch:
“The Workflow app was selected for an Apple Design Award in 2015 because of its outstanding use of iOS accessibility features, in particular an outstanding implementation for VoiceOver with clearly labeled items, thoughtful hints, and drag/drop announcements, making the app usable and quickly accessible to those who are blind or low-vision.
I’ve long used nvALT and Dropbox to maintain my collection of notes on my Mac. The benefit of this system is that so many iOS applications sync with Dropbox. I can search and edit my large collection of notes almost anywhere that I’m sitting. But 2016 brought some new innovations and concerns. The tremendous improvements with DEVONthink on iOS and the secure end to end encryption with their Mac application have made it a compelling capture and reference manager.
Today DEVONthink 2 Go 2.1 is available it adds a major new feature: Document Provider service on iOS. There are not many apps on iOS that do this, but DEVONthink is a perfect fit. From within a compatible app, like Textastic or Ulysses, open a provider and browse to a file you want to use. There’s no need to manually shuttle a document back and forth.
Turning on the document provider isn’t always obvious, and each provider needs to be activatecd one by one.
I’ve rewatched David’s entire series on Vimeo and it’s great. It works everywhere Vimeo works plus you can still download the videos if you want. As with GTD itself, I find that an annual OmniFocus refresher is time well spent.
This is a long and tedious post. It’s not really about beer, rather it’s about:
Text files Note taking Python scripting DEVONthink Keyboard Maestro Beer Ok. It’s a little bit about beer. Let’s start this story already…
I miss TapCellar, the iOS beer tracking app I helped make. It was my favorite app. But, we killed it because we are not idiots with bottomless bank accounts and free time.
While I really like DEVONthink for iOS, I’m frustrated by the lack of shortcuts and user editable smart lists. I can’t do much about the lack of smart lists, but Workflow gives me a very easy way to configure launchers for my most used DEVONthink documents and folders.
The entire workflow is just three actions long. The first action is just a dictionary with a nickname and a URL to the location in DEVONthink.
Bookmarking services like Pinboard are great. I capture almost every web article I find interesting as a Pinboard bookmark. But if I’m doing actual research on a topic I don’t like to rely on the Pinboard link to the page.1 I prefer to capture as a PDF.
On the Mac, this is ridiculously easy. I just use the DEVONthink plugin for Safari and capture the entire page right to my database as a PDF.
Oddly enough, pushing images to an FTP server on iOS is easier than pushing a plain text file. Many text editors for iOS only share the text. Few apps share an actual file object. 1Writer does this perfectly and makes pushing text files to Transmit dead simple.
From 1Writer, just share the file as normal.
Share to Transmit or DEVONthink or whatever app you want to accept the text file. In my case, I want to push the file up to an FTP server using Transmit.
AutoSleep is an iOS app for analyzing Apple Watch movement data. You wear your watch throughout the night and AutoSleep applies some filters and analysis to provide insights about your wakefulness and quality of sleep. The convenience of AutoSleep is that I don’t need to do anything other than wear my watch. There’s no need to launch an app or tap a button, which makes it much more likely I’ll actually use it.
Sure, I’m a little down on the AppleTV and the new MacBook Pro. But already in 2017 Apple has released one of their very best products, and it only costs $150.
Street Cred I own way too many headphones. I have closed-cup, open-cup, noise canceling, expensive studio monitors, and cheap ear buds. I’m not an audio-quality-phile but I do listen to an inordinate amount of audio during the day. By my estimates I listen to audio a minimum of 12 hours a day and most of that is done with headphones.
