Don't miss a quote with Quotebook 3

We stumble upon citations and quotes all the time, it seems easier to expose our thoughts as someone else's words. It packs a respectful punch. Quotes are like gifs, whoever uses, does a lot and Quotebook is the perfect app for them. The 3.0 release is out as a free update and comes with the long-awaited iOS 7 design plus x-callback-url support.

We're going to create a quick Mr. Reader share action to quote articles as you read and bounce back so quickly you won't miss your spot in the paragraph. As a bonus, we'll also check an IFTTT action to save your tweets with hashtag as quotes with Launch Center Pro.

Before we get started, let's cover Quotebook's URL scheme. You can open sections by appending its title to the base URL, quotebook://, for example, quotes for the Quotes' tab, authors for Authors. Sources and Tags are the other two available.

Creating a new quote is when the fun begins since it accepts several parameters. You can append the following to the quotebook://x-callback-url/add scheme:

• quote is the only obligatory parameter and receives your encoded quote.
• author takes the entity who said or wrote the quote. You can use a name, a Twitter handle or even a URL.
• source is where you got the article from. Both source and author will show a nice preview from any link you add when you tap the Info button.
• rating a number from 0 to 5 as the quote's rating.

On Mr. Reader

With all that covered, open Mr. Reader, go to Preferences, then Services, choose Other App at the bottom of the menu and select Add Other App. Fill in the top fields, App Name is Quotebook, as you can expect and Protocol is quotebook:. Close attention to the double colon as Mr. Reader tests if the app is available before triggering an action using that protocol. Without the double colon it fails. In the bottom toggles, I suggest you to keep only the Text Selection Menu turned on. Now the action:

quotebook://x-callback-url/add?quote={[TEXT-SELECTED]}&author={[AUTHOR]}&source={[URL]}&x-success={mrreader:}

Open an article, select some text, tap for More Actions and choose Quotebook. And you're back to your article. Wasn't it quick? I could save you the trouble of creating the action and allowing you to download the configuration file here¹. Just open that on your iPad and Mr. Reader will install the service.

On IFTTT and Launch Center Pro

My perfect setup would be to send tweets I favorite as quotes on Quotebook, however, IFTTT doesn't serve the Text ingredient on this action and the results would be ugly without a Python intervention. So I stuck with tweets with the #qb hashtag at least until Zapier adds Launch Center Pro support².

quotebook://x-callback-url/add?quote=(({{TextNoHashtag}}))&source=(({{LinkToTweet}}))&author=%40(({{UserName}}))&x-success=twitterrific%3A%2F%2F

I shared this recipe here. It is activated only for my iPad at the moment, so I've set the x-success to Twitterrific, which is my client of choice until Tweetbot 3 comes to the iPad. If you decide to tweak the action, the %40 before the {{UserName}} is necessary because IFTTT leaves the @ out of the variable and Quotebook needs it to recognize a Twitter handle.

Again, I'm amazed by how fast Quotebook handles the callback, after tapping the Launch Center Pro notification I'm back to Twitterrific before I can notice. It is a beautiful app, certainly one of the most gorgeous designs spawned by the iOS 7 and if quotes are your thing, it was definitely worth the wait.