Apple news, app reviews, and stories by Federico Viticci and friends.

Released in December 2011, App Cubby’s Launch Center re-ignited interest in iOS URL schemes – shortcuts to automate communication between apps and get specific things done faster with less manual tapping and interactions. Its direct sequel, Launch Center Pro, was released in the summer of 2012 and doubled down on the entire idea of automating

In moving back to Safari as my main browser on every Apple device I own, I thought I should mention a hidden feature of Safari for iOS that I discovered a few months ago and that I remembered today thanks to a Twitter exchange between readers Jordan and Jerry. On iOS, you can launch Safari directly

iCab Mobile is one of the oldest third-party browsers for iOS, and, even though Chrome is my go-to browser on the iPhone and iPad, I was intrigued by a feature introduced in the latest iCab update, version 7.1. In short, iCab now lets you launch other apps using URL schemes and multitouch gestures. I had

Note: The following is a complete update of our original Launch Center Pro guide published in April 2014. It has been rewritten and updated for the latest 2.3 and 2.3.1 versions of Launch Center Pro with new sections, actions, videos, and more. Released in December of 2011, Launch Center (the predecessor to Launch Center Pro)

It used to be that, to do nerd stuff, you had to get a Mac or PC. As iOS progressed over the years, however, developers saw that users were spending a lot of time trying to do work on their iPhones and iPads, and started building utilities that packed powerful functionalities in what looked like

Send Multiple Tasks To OmniFocus Mail Drop At Once With Drafts and Pythonista Nice workflow by Nathan Henrie to send multiple tasks to OmniFocus at once using Mail Drop, Drafts, and Pythonista: I’ve also recently started playing with Pythonista, and I came across a Python script written by the dev himself that creates a little

I’m a big fan of Flipboard’s magazine feature, which was introduced earlier this year with version 2.0 of the app. By leveraging Flipboard’s existing presentation style – capable of re-formatting web articles, videos, and photos with a beautiful print-like layout – magazines allow anyone to put together a collection of interesting links that others can

Back in October 2010, I posted a tutorial on how to add new tasks to OmniFocus or Things using Dropbox, AppleScript, and PlainText by Hog Bay Software. In June 2011, I wrote about more ways to add tasks to OmniFocus (my GTD app of choice), and noted how I had only “scratched the surface of what’s

I don’t use WhatsApp much[1], but when I saw the app’s documentation last night with a mention of the URL scheme, I thought I could play around with it a little bit. The WhatsApp URL scheme is extremely basic and there’s one part that I can’t get to work. The scheme itself is, unsurprisingly, whatsapp://

Drafts 4, which we reviewed in October, offered a handy Notification Center widget to open the app in draft creation mode. The widget could launch Draft to a new empty draft or, even better, create a new draft based on the contents of the clipboard. Today, after a few weeks of back and forth with

Drafts, Agile Tortoise’s note-taking app for iOS with support for customizable actions and workflows, has been updated to version 3.6 today, adding Google Drive integration, new clipboard actions, and a handy option to automatically back up a user’s action library to Dropbox every few days. Google Drive joins Drafts’ existing Dropbox and Evernote actions as

In just a little more than a year, Agile Tortoise’s Drafts has gone from being a quick notepad for small bits of text to a full-featured solution for launching apps, using web services, and chaining multiple apps together – always with a focus on text. With version 2.5, released in January, developer Greg Pierce expanded

Drafts is one of my all-time favorite apps on iOS, not only for its amazing utility, but also because it was the app that got me started writing about technology, so it has a special place in my heart. However, surveying what the app has looked like since its last big update over a year

The latest update to Drafts – a “quick note capturing” app that I’ve covered several times on MacStories – adds a series of features aimed at increasing the possibilities of workflows automation on iOS devices. Obviously, this is something I’m interested in. It seems like enabling users to save time while using apps has been

Documentation for Drafts app, a quick-capture note taking app for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch.

“hilarious that my number one Pro Tip to make your mobile network more consistent in the 5G era is: just turn 5G off. (5G on vs LTE-only)”

Neocities is the new Geocities. Create your own free home page, and do whatever you want with it.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

WebArchive Folderizer extracts the contents of Safari Web Archives.

In our ongoing series of interviews with developers and creators in the Apple community, I had the chance to talk with Greg Pierce, founder of Agile Tortoise. Greg makes some of our favorite iOS apps here at MacStories, namely Drafts and Terminology. Greg is also the man behind x-callback-url, an inter-app communication spec that I’ve