The One That Got Away
There are many thoughts I've been having since WWDC. I'm mainly lamenting the choice I made by buying an iPad Pro 9.7", 3 months before the new 10.5" was announced.1 But somewhere in the mix of all of my feelings and re-watching some of the keynote, I had some really awesome thoughts about some amazing productivity ideas. One of the biggest improvements for iPad productivity is drag/drop when incorporated with Split Screen. For simplicity, I'm going to denote the apps side-by-side by writing app | app for each scenario below. The main part of this centers around Workflow. It's an app that I've had a love affair with for a long time now. It's so useful, but I can't help think of the amazing things I'll be able to do. Imagine these simple possibilities:
Quick Memes
Workflow | Safari
I do a search in Safari, searching for the perfect image for a meme idea.2 Now, imagine if you could drag that image over to a specific workflow in Workflow, one that makes quick memes. The image automatically gets added as a variable into the workflow, you type the joke, and you can share it wherever you'd like.
Tasks
Workflow | Drafts
Let's say you're taking meeting notes in Drafts. Now you have a list of actions there, and you need to move them over to something like OmniFocus. You could simply drag/drop them over to your Inbox within things. But what if you want to add dates/times/contexts/etc. for them? Well, now imagine if you could drag that list of text over to a specific workflow that would parse each task and allow you to add those elements, then send them to OmniFocus?
Combining Screenshots
Workflow | Photos
You have several screenshots that you want to put side-by-side to show a point. Using the multi-touch gestures with drag and drop, you can tap and hold one image to initiate drag/drop. Then you use a different finger to add another screenshot. And another. And another. Now, imaging dragging them over to the combine images workflow you've created to put them side-by-side, complete with spacing. All of this is done as soon as you drop the images on the workflow to run it.
Pretty sweet, right?
Now, here's the thing to remember: none of this will happen with Workflow because the app isn't being developed with new features. Yeah, it's kind of a gut punch for me too. This is an example of an opportunity that will be missed.
But maybe, just maybe, someone at Apple will read this, see the merit, and push to update Workflow for iOS 11 while Apple figures out how to best integrate what Workflow brings into iOS. If it doesn't happen, this is going to feel like the one productivity feature that got away…