First off, I don’t use the iOS Facebook app because in the past it has been a huge battery suck and I honestly don’t trust Facebook. I have a similar Shortcut automation that I use for Facebook but this one has a couple of additional steps. The shortcut I have for opening Apple News is pretty simple (Image by Skip Owens) I limit my time by setting a 5-minute timer before I open Apple’s News app and I do that with a Shortcut (which you can download here). The group text action lets you quickly send a text to more than one person (Image by Skip Owens)Īnother way I use automation with LCP is to help me limit how much time I spend browsing news. An example group text Shortcuts automation can be downloaded here. This ends up saving quite a few clicks (navigating over to the messages app) and then it also saves you from having to search for the group thread that you want to text. Shortcuts lets you pre-populate a text with numerous recipients so that all you have to do is press the “group text” button in LCP and Shortcuts will kick off an automated sequence that will prompt you for text and then send that text out to a group of people. For this I use the iOS application Shortcuts to automate sending a text to a group of people. But I also have more complex actions like texting a group of people. The group I call “Text” has several actions, most of which are very simple like sending a text message to a single person (and this is a basic action that can be setup in LCP). Once you get used to where all these buttons are you develop muscle memory and this press and slide method ends up being a really fast way to kick off an action. In order to access the buttons in a group folder like this you first press and hold the group button and then slide your finger over to the button you want to choose and release your finger. In the image above you will see a button labeled “Text.” This button is actually what is called a group in LCP and when used it opens up a second screen under that button that you can then fill full of other additional buttons or actions. My main Launch Center Pro launch screen (Image by Skip Owens) If you look at the LCP main screen I have below from my iPhone you will see that I have a couple of “buttons” assigned to communication related tasks. That way you can eliminate the vast expanse of colorful app icons from which you can choose to go down the rabbit hole with. For apps you only occasionally you just use the search function (swipe down from the center of the screen and type in what you are searching for to launch it). By force I mean you put all of the apps into folders so they are out of sight and out of mind and use LCP to get into your most frequent and important apps. Using an app like LCP can help you do that if you “force” yourself to use LCP to launch/open pretty much everything on your phone. So let’s start by putting the critical communication functions of our phones front and center. That may be the most important use we have for our smart phones, but for most of us we spend far more time doing other less productive things. If you ask most people why carrying a smart phone with them everywhere was so important they would most likely tell you it is so they can always be in communication with family members and close friends. If you haven’t already done so I suggest reading Part 1 before reading the rest of this article. So, check out Michael’s video and then head over to his blog post to grab the URLs and add these various shortcuts to your own setup.Images by Skip Owens with Launch Center Pro icon from Ī few days ago I wrote “Part 1” of this article, which talks about what makes our phones so addictive and at a high level how an app like Launch Center Pro (LCP) can help. Sure, all of this can be done from OmniFocus itself, but anyone who has used launchers like LaunchBar or QuickSilver on OS X knows that they make things a lot faster. Thus, you can quickly make a note from an email, or remind yourself to call a particular person, all with the main text already filled out. Launch Center Pro will send various pre-defined snippets (similar to TextExpander Touch) to the app, including the contents of the clipboard. OmniFocus uses URL schemes which let you create a task, to add text to that task’s title and to add notes. At its simplest, it lets you launch an app, but the real meat comes when an app lets you send data directly inot it from elsewhere. Launch Center Pro is an app which uses URL schemes to hook itself into other apps which support them.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |