Apple’s recent purchase of DeskConnect and its popular app Workflow has come as a boon for iPhone power users who were often frustrated by the lack customisations offered in iOS. This brilliant tool, that Apple has now made free, lets you string together several apps and their functions and automate the process under a single button.
At first I found the Workflow app a little difficult to manoeuvre. But after I looked in the gallery at the pre-crafted workflows there, I began to get a hang of it and realised why Apple had awarded the app an Apple Design award in 2015. You create a workflow to tell a bunch of iOS apps to perform some work for you. If you are familiar with Mac’s Automator or IFTTT (If This Then That) then you can work the app in a jiffy.
There are basically 12 categories of action — Apps, Calendar, Contacts, Documents, Health, Maps, Music, Photos and Video, Scripting, Sharing, Text and Web. When you first open the app, it will take you to an untitled Workflow page where you have a choice of what type of workflow you want to build, Normal, Today Widget or Action Extension. Swipe to the right and you will get the Suggested Action page. Tap on Actions on the top and you will come to the Action page. At the bottom is a tab saying ‘all’. Press that and you will know what type of action you will get. Such as under Apps, you will get details of App Store app, open App and Search App Store. Your workflow will allow you to do all this with just one tap.
To create a workflow from scratch press the ‘+’ sign on the extreme top right. Select ‘Normal’ for the type of workflow you want to build. Click on the gear icon and give your workflow a name and add it to the Home screen. You can also add it to the Launch Centre if you have the Launch Centre Pro app. Lets us call our workflow ‘Photos to GIF’. Swipe right and tap the Action tab. Choose ‘Get latest photos’ and drag it to the right. Next tap and drag ‘make GIF’. Finally, tap and drag ‘quick look’. Then play out your Workflow. You will be amazed how quickly by just tapping the button on the Home screen you can create an animated GIF.
There are different ways to quickly get to your workflow. Other than saving to it the Home screen, you can access it from the Notification Centre by pulling down from the top of the screen or from the share menu inside other apps. This will depend on whether you choose Today Widget or Action Extension when you create a new workflow.
You can call an Uber to pick you up from a specific location with just one tap or you can turn a PDF into an editable version in a flash. With Workflow you are basically compiling all the actions you would normally take by tapping different tabs and apps into a single tap. And you don’t need to be a programmer or hot on tech to do these actions. While you are making your workflow, you have to decide on the sequence of actions to take. This operation takes a while to learn, but once you have mastered it using an iOS device becomes even easier. No wonder Apple bought this app made by a team of three, including a former iPhone jailbreaker.
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