Category: Tech

At times wonderful, and at times totally frustrating too. That’s technology, my experience of it anyway. I do a lot of stuff with technology and I suspect I will continue to do that.

Building an Android version of my buzzword generator

Posted by on in Tech

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I thought it might be fun to build an Android version of this little fun web app thing. I’ve been using MIT App Inventor as it’s very easy to use, in fact, much easier than I thought it would be to make this app. So, when it’s a little bit nearer to completion I might put a video up. I haven’t decided if I want to put it on the Google Play store, or if I’ll just make it available here.

Anyway, it’ll be coming along soon enough.

A huge and amazing guide to iOS automation and workflow has arrived

Posted by on in Mobile Applications, Tech

I was recently contemplating setting up a page to collect all of the various resources for iOS automation and then today, Mac Stories published this guide to automating iOS workflows! It’s huge! I haven’t actually read the whole thing as yet, in fact I’ve just started reading it, but it has enormous promise, and I’m very hopeful that it is, in fact, just what I’ve been looking for to get me going.

So, I’m going to read the whole thing and then embark on my task of getting things properly automated in iOS. I think I probably will put together a resources page as well soon, and I think that this guide will almost certainly be on it.

Of course, if you don’t know about drafts (for iOS iPhone or iPad) then this won’t mean a lot to you. However, if you’re an iOS user and automation is something you’re interested in then this is the app to start with according to this guide.

Drafts (for iPad) on the app store:

My app of the week is Dispatch

Posted by on in Mobile Applications, Tech

As far as dealing with email goes, I’m not the best, not by any measure. But with an app like Dispatch, I find it a lot easier. Why? Good question, that’s easy to answer. One of the things I find myself doing a lot of is needing to deal with URLs / links from emails and send them to the right place or places quickly. With most email apps for iOS that means selecting the link to copy it or open it then copy it from inside safari then paste it into whatever app I want, Pocket, or Instapaper for example. With Dispatch I don’t have any of those complications. Tapping a link brings up the options I want in terms of sending it to the right place quickly and simply. No fuss.

In fact, that’s the main reason I bought the app in the first place, but it has a lot more besides, and, as usual, I’m scratching the surface so far and just beginning to find out what else the app can do.

I only just found out that the developer has published a URL scheme for Dispatch. This means that you can launch and run Dispatch from another app with parameters from the calling app. So, for example, you could use Drafts to ask Dispatch to open and create an email to a particular person, from a given account, and with a specified title. In fact, you could even tell it what to put in the body of the email too if you wanted to. That’s quite impressive.

The other thing that I like about Dispatch is that you can include snippets or blocks of text from within the app, like per account signatures and more. That could also be really helpful, but at the moment I’m not using that, so far.

So I’m slowly moving over to using Dispatch as my main email app on my iPhone, and I hope that the developer will eventually make it available for the iPad too as I think it would be brilliant there.