∞ /notes/workflow-programming-for-ios-on-ios | 2017-01-07 | programming

Workflow: programming for iOS, on iOS

I had this post by Manton Reece in my reader and wanted to share it on Twitter. But posting about independent microblogging on Twitter seems so wrong. So I picked up a plan I’ve had for a while: to use Workflow for posting to my blog from iOS. In particular to share stuff I read on my phone (where I actually do most of my online reading).

This basically involves picking up the browser URL and clipboard content, ask for some text like a title, tag, and content for the new post, provide defaults for these, construct the path and file expected by my blog, store a file in Dropbox, preview the post in a browser, and finally tweet a link to the post.

I was surprised to see how quickly I could set that up with Workflow. Changing the workflow and testing it in the browser (it hooks into the share functionality in iOS) without any deployment, refreshing or even saving is really nice. Combined with its ability to use all the system stuff (including Dropbox and Twitter integration), this makes Workflow feel like a truly native development environment for iOS, much more than actual native iOS development, which happens on a different platform, the Mac.

So yay, I was able to share Manton’s post on my own blog and cross post it to Twitter, from my phone.