Playing with Cloud

In the face-off between CloudApp and Droplr, the latter is an easy winner, specially with its most recent Droplr Draw feature for PRO subscriptions. I subscribed to Cloud until november, when I'll go back to Droplr. Meanwhile, I thought it was worth checking out the one thing Cloud beats its opponent to the ground: URL schemes.

There's one app you certainly know if you want to play with Cloud and x-callback-url, which is ClouDrop for Cloudapp. The coolest trick of ClouDrop is the ability to take a picture or create a text note, upload it and send its short url to some other app, such as Drafts. ClouDrop has a really nice documentation you can check here. A nice little use is instantly taking a picture and generating a link to put inside an email, we can use Launch Center Pro to achieve that with its built in email.

cloudrop://openCamera?x-success=launchpro-email://?body=[[url]]

That's cool and everything, but if you want access to Cloud and x-callback-url, there's another choice: Cloudier. "Cloudier's URL scheme is only to open it, Phil!". I thought so as well, which only shows the disregard towards these features. The best place to find url schemes is the Launch Center Pro "installed actions" option, but if you rely exclusively on that, you'd never have heard of the dueDate on Things or everything Cloudier is capable of doing.

If you have the app, tap and hold the Settings button to open the documentation, otherwise, I'll be posting the full docs here:

Cloudier's URL Scheme

Cloudier supports URL scheme actions and follows the x-callback-url format. URLs should match the following pattern:

cloudier://x-callback-url/[action]?[parameters]

A behavior is triggered by calling an action with the specified parameters. All parameters should be URL-encoded. There are several supported actions.

add?bookmark=[value]: Pass a valid URL string as the value to add the URL to your bookmarks.

add?fileURL=[value]¹: Upload a file from a remote location by passing a valid URL string as the value for the fileURL parameter. Cloudier will download the file from the external source and upload it into your library.

add?pasteboardData=[value]²: Upload a file by using data from the shared iOS pasteboard. Suitable values for the pasteboardData parameter are image or string. This action primarily exists to help third-party apps integrate with Cloudier.

add?text=[value]: Open a new text document. By passing a string of text as the value for the text parameter, the new note will be prefilled with this data.

add?textFileData=[value]³: Create a text file to upload to your library. Choose a desired filename by passing a string as the value to an optional fileName parameter.

navigate?category=[value]: Navigate to the respective category. Valid values for the category parameter are all, images, bookmarks, text, archives, audio, video, other and trash.

urlScheme: This action has no parameters. It presents this help view.

(no action): If no action is chosen, or if the URL passed is incorrectly formed such that it cannot be parsed, the fallback behavior is to simply open Cloudier.

Quick conclusion: Cloudier offer options ClouDrop doesn't and vice-versa, so if you have both, you're always winning. First thing to notice, Cloudier doesn't retrieve the generated url, it is the bucket side of Cloud. On the other hand, besides opening on a specific section, such as bookmarks, or even the trash, Cloudier can upload an image or text from the clipboard or even from an url. Found a PDF online you'd like to share with a friend? Just play with the cloudier://x-callback-url/add?fileURL=[value] and make it happen. This is a bookmarklet you can use to upload a url straight from Safari:

javascript:window.location='cloudier://x-callback-url/add?fileURL='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)