On Workflow and IFTTT

What a flawless patch and how awfully late I got to the party, as I waited for the WWDC confetti to settle! Workflow now works as a trigger for IFTTT recipes and you can connect it to more than 300 channels, although one third of them are for home appliances and gadgets. Still, there are still plenty of services to play with and here are some of the recipes and workflows I made.

You can find several examples in the announcement post, such posting a link to Reddit or adding a playlist to Spotify, and the review by Federico Viticci, who shows how to schedule posts using Buffer, send an Apple Music playlist to Spotify or export iOS contacts to Google Contacts.

What you need to know is that everything comes in pairs, you need a workflow to act as trigger for a recipe, when you use the Trigger IFTTT Recipe action, it will request you to link it to a recipe and will give the option to create the action on the spot. The aforementioned blog announcement has a step-by-step guide to create your first workflow using IFTTT. You can manually link a workflow, if it exists, you'll see a Your recipe is set up! message below its name.

You'll realize that, unless you have some supported gadgets, there's not much to do on IFTTT that wasn't covered yet by native actions¹ or one of the posts I referenced. I do have 2 actions for you though – let's start with the simplest to mark the song you're hearing as a favorite on Musixmatch to learn the lyrics later.:

Favorite on Musixmatch

Add current song as favorite on Musixmatch

Get Workflow

Here's the IFTTT recipe it works with.

Now let's publish something on Medium from Drafts using Workflow as middleware. You can get the IFTTT recipe and configure as you please, for more information on how to tweak your settings, read the API documentation or how we implemented this with 1Writer. Here's the workflow that will split your draft in title and body to submit to Medium.

Drafts To Medium

Publish post to Medium, ideally from Drafts.

Get Workflow

It is straightforward to use this action from Drafts with a Run Workflow action step, still for convenience, you can download it here:

Publish on Medium

Send draft to Workflow where it will become a Medium post using IFTTT.

Get Action

Workflow integration to IFTTT is simple and effective, the possibility to add up to 11 custom ingredients will please even the more demanding tasks. Workflow is a powerhouse on iOS and this update opens a new field for the app to integrate with smart gadgets and appliances. On the shortcomings, I miss the integration as output, like the rich notifications from Launch Center Pro, but there's still a lot of ground to cover.