I was really excited when Tim Nahumck agreed to come onto Automators to talk about Drafts! In the last year the app has increased in power so much, as well as gaining a Mac app, and now seemed like the perfect time to cover it. Today I thought I’d share a few bonus tips that were mentioned in the ...
I really enjoyed this episode of Automators. I’ve used drafts for a long time, one of my favourite iOS apps. Listening made me realise I still mostly use the older features. I need to spend some time getting up-to-date. A lot of digging to do in the shownotes.
The audio on this post was recorded and uploaded with the Workflow.app on my phone. The images were too. The posts was written in drafts and posted from there with a Workflow action.
Yesterday’s post was just about using workflow.app to post to a blog in a way that other tools can do. The method might suit some people’s needs better than using the WordPress app or the browser. It could be altered and improved too. But essentially it is just another way of doing something. I think this next step is a much bigger deal.
Workflow has actions that allow you to record audio or take video. It also has an encode media action.
This looked promising. I have now got a workflow that will record audio, encode to MP3 and upload to my blog.
I will end up with the link to the MP3 on the clipboard ready to paste into a post.
Getting the url to the MP3 took me a while to figure out. The action returns the url to the attachment page. I had to uses a few more actions to get the content of that page and then get the url to the MP3 with a regular expression. I don’t know much about regEx and less about the flavour used by Worpflow.app. I got there in the end.
A couple of OSs ago this seemed impossible on iOS. Now you can save an MP3 created with one of the myriad of audio apps to Dropbox, iCloud, one drive ect and upload through mobile safari.
I like to think this is a bit better. It is certainly a wee bit quicker if you do not need to edit the audio.
There were always apps that would record and publish audio to the Internet. What I like about this method is it goes along with the idea of owning your own data, posting to your own domain and having a little more control.
I am now wondering if it would be worthwhile seeing if you can trigger workflows from a draft.app custom script. This post on the drafts blog: Drafts 4.1.2 – Workflow Integration | Agile Tortoise makes it look as if that would be possible. This would turn the drafts app into a WordPress editor. One could upload images and audio directly from drafts, perhaps inserting the image or audio code at the insertion point.
Rosemary Orchard (rosemaryorchard.com)
