Where I am with iOS automation now

I’ve been talking about this a lot over the last few months and probably one of the biggest issues I’ve had with automating things is actually finding things that I need to automate.

That might sound a little strange but in many ways it has been a solution in search of a problem for me rather than the other way around. Of course when you start to find things that need automating the solutions become more obvious and you start to wonder why you could see them before. Or at least that’s how it feels to me.

Anyway I thought I’d write about a few of the things I’m starting to find that warrant some form of automation. They’ll sound obvious no doubt, but it’s taken me a while to get around to sorting them out.

The first thing I’ve started doing is using drafts a lot. That sounds obvious. I said that it would. I’m writing this using drafts. It’s such a simple app for just getting ideas down and writing wherever I am. I probably should have started using it before. So for notes and that sort of thing I’m using it more and more. It’s great. So far so good. But what of the automation stuff. Yep, that’s a good question. We’ll with some very simple actions I can send articles posts etc wherever I want. No problem. One app, multiple destinations and no issues. I can write things for here or for palm sounds or wherever, easy!

So that’s my start for automation. I’m sure I’ll do more over time, and when I do I’ll explain. I also hope to be able to share some useful stuff too. At some point.

What I think that iOS automation needs right now

I was thinking about this today whilst reviewing some links on general automation stuff. One of the best tools for automating stuff on iOS is Editorial. I love its workflow generator. It’s great but it doesn’t go far enough. What’s needed is a simple editor for creating iOS workflows that span multiple apps and even incorporate web services like ifttt. Perhaps that’s too far. For a start anyway.

But something that could just help you use the available building blocks and get things moving would be amazing. Rather than having to use loads of URL encoding and stuff like that. It’s a thought. I would certainly buy it anyway.

Disappointed at the Reporter App

I bought this app as I liked the idea of it recording information during the day and acting as a form of journal. However, after a few days or maybe even a week of using it I found that it was asking me lots of questions but not giving me much back in return. It’s a shame really. I was hoping it would give me much more and maybe show me what I did with my time etc.

Perhaps I missed the point of it, and maybe I should give it another go, but I’m not sure it’ll happen soon.

iPhone 5 external battery experiment: Day 4

Day 4 followed the same pattern. I let the iPhone drain down to 30% charge and then charged it with the external battery. Once again the battery did very well, but after getting my phone back up to 100% charge it gave up itself. So, 4 days and 4 charges. Not bad going I’d say. The battery was  certainly worth the money.

However, the power loss on my iPhone is terrible now, so it’ll probably need replacing anyway. Even so I think that the battery will come in handy in the future.

So, experiment over for now.

iPhone 5 external battery experiment: Day 3

So, day three and the external battery is still going strong. It did flicker around between three and four bars or circles on its display, and after a little while it went back up to 4 bars. I guess this sort of thing isn’t too precise. Anyway, it charged the iPhone 5 again. I let the iPhone get down to 30% again and charged it back up to 100%.

So let’s see what day 4 brings.

iPhone 5 external battery experiment: Day 2

So, day two of my experiment to see how I can get more life out of my iPhone 5. Today I let the iPhone run down to 30% before I plugged in the battery. Once again the battery charged it up with no problems at all. Neither device got hot or anything like that. It got the device back up to 100% and stayed at 4 bars, or circles to be precise.

So far so good. Let’s see how it works out tomorrow.