# It was always going to be too early for Apple to announce anything about automation at WWDC. We're probably looking at iOS 12 before the Workflow acquisition starts to bear any native fruit.
Perhaps we'll see some fledgling - and by that I mean beta - functionality in a later point update but, if we do, it will be minimal.
Seeing as so much of what I do now goes through Workflow I've been thinking about the implications of becoming so reliant on a single solution. Likes, replies, microblog posts, titleless posts, the microcast, they all rely on Workflow.
Apple won't have acquired the app without having a plan for it or its developers, and some form of native automation seems almost inevitable, although most likely in the context of Siri and AI rather than in Workflow's current remit.
Once any native automation arrives I can't help but feel that the Workflow app will be pulled from the App Store potentially leaving quite a vacuum in its wake.
Perhaps other solutions will appear by then. Perhaps native automation will be more powerful and versatile than I imagine. Perhaps I'm worrying over nothing, however, I doubt it.
We may be some time from any changes but the sooner we assess our options the better.
Comments
# I couldn't resist the temptation and installed iOS 11 beta 1 on the iPad - I'll wait for the public beta to upgrade my phone.
First impressions are good.
Drag & drop is going to be very handy and may actually make me use the iPad more than I do. As it's an Air 2 I only seem to be able to drag one thing at a time rather than gathering a few items together at once as in the demo - that is presumably reserved for the iPad Pros.
The new on-screen keyboard is very nice, being able to type numbers and punctuation by just dragging down slightly on a letter is great but it makes you wonder why they didn't also add dragging up to capitalise.
# Des rightly pointed out that when listing Micro.blog accounts in the webmention directory the entries only point to Micro.blog itself and not the user profile.
Having originally excluded these links I hadn't taken them into account when getting the value for the author url - an oversight on my part.
As such we need to apply a little logic:
if ( $parse['host'] == 'micro.blog' ) {
$host = substr( $author_url, 0, strrpos( $author_url, '/' ));
}
This gives us the content of the url prior to the last slash which should equate to the account address.
This would need to be inserted within the following 'if' statement as below:
if ( $check != 'yes' ) {
if ( $parse['host'] == 'micro.blog' ) {
$host = substr( $author_url, 0, strrpos( $author_url, '/' ));
}
//existing code below
$people[$count] = $author;
...
}
Comments
# In reply to: ...
As mentioned earlier, I use Workflow for posting #indieweb likes and replies. This is in conjunction with the Likes and Replies WordPress plugin I have been blogging about over the past weeks.
There are two separate Workflows which are actually pretty simple - one for each action.
Likes
The like flow is intended to be triggered from Safari so is set up an Action Extension. When I'm on a page I want to like I go to Share > Run Workflow and select the 'Post a Like' flow. This takes the URL as the input, asks me to comment then simply posts to WordPress with the URL passed as a custom field.
The plugin then takes over and uses the custom field to add a properly formatted link to the start of the post.
For my own benefit, the flow also gets the page name and displays it just so I can check what is going to show in the post, but that's not essential and doesn't affect the actual process.
Replies
The Reply flow is also an Action Extension but acts a little differently.
It accepts text as the main input so I write the reply in Drafts, share it using the flow which then prompts me for the URL I am replying to and passes it as a custom field.
Again, the plugin takes over and adds the reply link to the start of the post content.
And that's how this post was published.
Comments
Liked: What is a Decentralized Web? Part 1 – Michael McCallister: Notes from the Metaverse...
"The problem today is not that far away from the early 1990s."
Colin, I’d love to hear about how you use Workflow for likes, replies, etc. I hadn’t really contemplated doing that, and trying to think through how it might be achieved. As for Workflow app’s future, I agree that its too soon to contemplate that it would be incorporated into iOS 11, at least now. But it wouldn’t surprise me that if over the coming months we saw aspects of it incorporated into the various beta releases, before the final release. Ot I can at least hope. I think that Apple will probably keep the app around until there’s a reasonable parity with native features in iOS and those currently in the app. I think (wishfully thinking, perhaps) that the users of Workflow, and the uses of Workflow, represent a higher end of the user market place than often corresponds to apps Apple purchases. As such, this is the exact group of users/uses that Apple wants to see using iOS for ‘real work’, and not just for ‘consumption’. Time will tell, but early signs are encouraging.