In this issue: Duet Display,iOS Travel Apps, Vol. 1, Graham and John’s Notification Center widgets, plus the usualWorkflow Corner, Weekly Q&A, Tip, Links, and recap of MacStories articles.

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EDITOR’S NOTE

As you can see in this week’s issue, we are changing how Club members can submit questions for the Workflow Corner and Weekly Q&A sections.

Starting today, instead of sending us an email, you’ll have to fill out a Google Form. On your end, the process is fast, simple, and it retains the same format of the old email messages we asked you to send before. You can decide to include your name and Twitter username, stay anonymous if you prefer, and write anything you want in the message body.

The reason we’re doing this is efficiency. Due to the high number of requests we receive every week, we realized that forwarding every message to a Slack channel wasn’t going to cut it anymore. We need to be able to view each message on a board, discuss it, and assign it to each other. That was difficult to achieve in Slack, as it’s not a project management tool. Ultimately, we were wasting time trying to retrieve member questions and remember who’s covering what instead of doing what matters – answering those questions.

With the new system, we were able to come up with a fantastic Zapier workflow that looks at each question submitted to Google Forms and saves it in a list in Trello. I’ll write about my Zapier workflows eventually (is it something you’d like to see in a Monthly Log?), but the basic idea is: given a new member submission, the workflow sees if the user wants to stay anonymous or not, it extracts the request, and it creates a new card in Trello with Markdown text in the description field as a well as a button to launch Workflow.

On iOS, Workflow reformats the question for MailChimp using regular expressions and it sends it to our text editor of choice. It’s kind of magic, and it’s going to save us a lot of time.

There are also some nice perks on your end. First, you can write your requests in Markdown and our workflow will take care of it. And, for the Weekly Q&A form, you can choose to ask a question to one of us specifically or to the entire team. In Trello, our workflow will automatically label the question with a different color depending on the recipient. It’s really nice.

It took me a few days (most of this week, actually) to build out this system, but I think it’s a better foundation for us going forward. As usual, feel free to submit your workflow requests and questions, and we’ll try our best to respond to each one of them. You can find the Workflow Corner and Weekly Q&A forms here and here, respectively; the old email addresses to submit requests will be taken down later today.

Now, onto the rest of this issue.

– Federico
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