Question: I’ve seen that there are separate Workflow actions for play and pause. Can a single workflow button be made that will “play” music if nothing is currently playing, and “pause” if something is? (Jim Krenz, @Lecter) [[federico]] Workflow can’t see whether audio is currently playing or if it’s been paused by the user, and...

[[federico]] In what should be considered a regular mini series of the Workflow Corner at this point, I recently came up with a system to make my Toggl time tracking workflows (previously: MacStories and Issue 63 of MacStories Weekly) even more flexible while reducing their footprint in the Workflow widget (where most of my interactions...

Question: I use regex a lot to build workflows, and in doing so I’ve come to realize that it’s critical to be able to see invisible characters. On my Mac, I use TextWrangler’s ‘Show Invisibles’ feature to do this. But I haven’t found a text editor on iOS that has similar functionality. Are you aware...

[[federico]] I was recently talking to a friend who’s an Airmail and Workflow user, and he told me how he’s gotten into the habit of replying to people over email using “audio mails” – brief voice memos embedded as attachments to a message that allow him to talk freely without spending too much time typing....

[[federico]] I’ve been going back and forth between Twitterrific and Tweetbot lately and, this past week, I primarily interacted with my timeline using Tapbots’ app. Coming from Twitterrific, I immediately noticed how slow Tweetbot was in letting me create new mute filters. In Twitterrific, you can create new “muffles” directly from the timeline with a...

[[federico]] In the first installment of my new iPad Diaries series on MacStories, I detailed how I’ve been using DEVONthink’s advanced file management features to organize my research material. One of the power-user options I mentioned is the ability to generate links to individual files and groups, which allow you to reopen a document or...

[[federico]] ) I’ve been keeping an eye on Songlink, a web service to share a song across multiple music streaming services, for the past couple of months since I was first told about it on Twitter. Songlink’s premise is similar to SoundShare: given a song from one of the major streaming services, the app returns...

Question: I’m trying to time-track my oversleep time as CGP Grey does. I want to get Zapier to automatically start a timer at a specific time every morning. And then I want to run a workflow on my iPhone to stop the timer. Is this possible? (Jakob Sundell, @jakobsundell) [[federico]] There are two parts to...

[[federico]] This is a quick tip for Soulver, the excellent free-form calculator for Mac and iOS. I recently remembered this feature was supported by the app, and it came in handy this week as I had to reconcile multiple transactions from different currencies into a total amount in EUR. Soulver allows you to write a...