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'Workflow' for Apple Watch Brings Automated Tasks to Your Wrist
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Does it actually work? Live experience please
I hadn't heard of Workflow so looked on iTunes for the iPhone app.
There seem to be so many ridiculously positive reviews that I smelled a rat (read a few and you'll see what I mean).
So I looked at the "most critical" reviews, and found some very interesting comments.
People are upset with:
- privacy - app won't work unless you allow access top camera/other. why?
- not all features available unless you pay for them in-app.
- very limited functionality
- most workflows are gimmicky and not really useful for power users.
So, my question: are there any power Automator users out there who have used workflow and think it's really good and useful? (And no, not just for adding a button to my home screen to call my wife - whoop-de-doo!)
I hadn't heard of Workflow so looked on iTunes for the iPhone app.
There seem to be so many ridiculously positive reviews that I smelled a rat (read a few and you'll see what I mean).
So I looked at the "most critical" reviews, and found some very interesting comments.
People are upset with:
- privacy - app won't work unless you allow access top camera/other. why?
- not all features available unless you pay for them in-app.
- very limited functionality
- most workflows are gimmicky and not really useful for power users.
So, my question: are there any power Automator users out there who have used workflow and think it's really good and useful? (And no, not just for adding a button to my home screen to call my wife - whoop-de-doo!)
I have this. Very handy when you want to do several tasks in sequence or just want to complete a routine without you doing it. Sounds crazy? But can be done without messing up with codes and programming. Just drag and drop apps into the sequence, add timing or location to execute them automatically. However, it's rather limited at this stage. I do see a huge potential though in future.
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Probably the access to camera is part of the task that required, such as: "Take a shot of my room at 5PM every day then send the image to my wife." (Just an example). Then obviously it needs an access to camera. Otherwise if your task does not involve taking picture, the App won't ask for camera access.
I would say it is useful but situational. Not necessary but helpful if you use it. Does it make sense?
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Probably the access to camera is part of the task that required, such as: "Take a shot of my room at 5PM every day then send the image to my wife." (Just an example). Then obviously it needs an access to camera. Otherwise if your task does not involve taking picture, the App won't ask for camera access.
I would say it is useful but situational. Not necessary but helpful if you use it. Does it make sense?
(1) The app works just fine without camera access, but it obviously limits your freedom to build/use workflows that rely on it.
(2) There are no in-app purchases.
(3) Depends. It’s in active development and building blocks are added in every update. What is limited to one person is perhaps already overwhelming to the other.
(4) What is a power user anyway in the context of an iPhone? All the app does is provide simple actions that you can arrange into a workflow, which you can launch from the home screen, a share sheet or within the app itself. It’s by no means as powerful as Automator, but I’m quite sure that it’s currently unmatched by anything else on iOS.
Not an attck of you - this is one of my huge bugbears. When people with an $600-$1000 Phone and potentially a $1000 iPad and potentially a $1000 Laptop wont buy apps for $3 or consider that price expensive. I pay that for a coke.
What this has driven is the rise of in-app purchases and free aps that are awful.
Back on topic _ i have heard about this app a few times and it is the sort of thing I would like but I can't get into it yet. Maybe the Watch version will make it more relevant. I like the idea of a quick tap to send a standard message. More to exlpore on this I think.
I'm already enjoying this app on my iP6_Plus... Yet to think about using it on my soon to arrive Apple Watch, causes me to wonder if I will immediately be put off at the thought of issuing commands by swiping with one finger on that minuscule display. Instead whipping out the phone for speed.
Every time I come across this app, I think about grabbing it but none of the examples given seem useful or relevant to me. I'm either not looking at enough examples, or perhaps I am a boring person. People seem to swear by this app and think it would make a good Apple purchase.
I start this way with some apps. Evernote for example I just couldn't see the point of. Now it's an app I use all the time.
With Workflow the best thing to do is just play with it. Think of things that take a few taps, and often you can consolidate that down to 1.
A good easy example is the Uber workflow. Instead of opening the app, setting your location etc., you can with one tap order an Uber. And with the ability to save workflows as 'apps' to your homescreen launching them is really quick and easy (I just dump them all in a folder and use Spotlight to open).
Another favourite of mine is deleting photos from my iPhone. I use both Dropbox and DS Photo to backup photos from my phone to the cloud and my home server. Once backed up I have no way of deleting all the photos on the device without manually selecting each and every photo (still hoping Apple adds a select all!). A thousand pics could take a few minutes. But with a workflow I can delete all the photos on my device very easily. Tap, tap, boom - all gone.
I personally don't, but there are a good number of users have both. Some examples can be found in the Workflow sub-Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/workflow/search?q=IFTTT&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all
Some of the things people put together are crazy great.
EDIT
And as much as I'm fighting the Gen 1 Apple Watch and had pretty much decided I'm waiting for Gen 2 - this app may just tip me over the edge! Feel like Michael Corleone... "Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in".
I didn’t say that the app is expensive for what is does, I said that it’s expensive enough to prevent people from trying it. The crucial differences between buying an iPhone and an app are that you know what to expect from an iPhone and people typically don’t make impulse decisions with that kind of money. I don’t see anything wrong with offering a demo and unlock it with an in-app purchase, it’s the closest we get to try-before-you-buy, especially for a novelty app like Workflow. I don’t mind paying for apps, but I do mind wasting money on apps that I kick off my iPhone within 10 minutes.
Every time I come across this app, I think about grabbing it but none of the examples given seem useful or relevant to me. I'm either not looking at enough examples, or perhaps I am a boring person. People seem to swear by this app and think it would make a good Apple purchase.
There's a workflow that lets you save a webpage as a pdf. A steal for that feature alone, not least because another app that does the same thing is like $7.
There's one workflow I particularly enjoy, which allows me to search a website for a term.
On my iPhone, I use it to hack together a share-to-whatsapp and share-to-instagram shortcut. Not quite as seamless as native sharing, but still more convenient than opening the app itself.
I have a spreadsheet on Numbers that I'm adding to everyday for something I'm doing, along with a graph. And so I am using Forecast.io's API and I have it set so it builds a new row of data from it every time I run it, along with a space for notes that I write every time it runs. This all gets written to a Drafts note which I send to iCloud Drive every few days or whatever, and then I just open it in a Markdown previewer on the Mac and copy and paste the stuff into Numbers.
The workflow was a nightmare to put together, but I'm really happy with the results. I run it off my Launcher notification widget.
I'm also using it to save out transparent layers from Procreate, combining screenshots/phones, sending my clipboard to iCloud Drive, and I'm playing with some other stuff. I have found that the more complex your stuff is, the harder time it has because it starts getting REALLY laggy.
The workflow was a nightmare to put together, but I'm really happy with the results. I run it off my Launcher notification widget.
I'm also using it to save out transparent layers from Procreate, combining screenshots/phones, sending my clipboard to iCloud Drive, and I'm playing with some other stuff. I have found that the more complex your stuff is, the harder time it has because it starts getting REALLY laggy.
I have a friend who buys the new iPhone every year, eats out for lunch every day, will go to a bar 1-2x per week [these examples are all normal things to do for many people, but my point is only that he's not exactly penny pinching], but don't ask him to pay $0.99 for an app though - if it's not free, he doesn't download it. The only exception is when he receives an iTunes gift card or I gift him an app because I can't stand it, lol. Yes, people like him are to blame for your last sentence.
You should check this comic from The Oatmeal. It's exactly what you're saying and it came out around the time the 3GS dropped. I was working at AT&T at the time and saw this every day.
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/apps
