News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Apple has acquired Workflow, an automation tool for iPad ... by rcarmo on Thursday March 23, 2017 @04:46AM (#13938203)
And Pocket. Two of my daily workflows ruined already.
Re:Apple has acquired Workflow, an automation tool for iPad ... by intoverflow2 on Thursday March 23, 2017 @08:19AM (#13939102)
It's almost like building up professional tools and work patterns on top of the iOS platform is a terrible idea or something.
Re:Apple has acquired Workflow, an automation tool for iPad ... by zepto on Thursday March 23, 2017 @09:59AM (#13939747)
Explain your logic?
Re:Apple has acquired Workflow, an automation tool for iPad ... by intoverflow2 on Thursday March 23, 2017 @10:52AM (#13940207)
Apple's attitude to third party devs aside the system is broken for professional work from the get go. It's entirely locked down and siloed.

I recently had to fix some issues with my parents iPad and it was a hell of a eye opener into why it's a terrible idea to rely on these devices at all.

So my mother does painting as a hobby and recently has got into using Brushes (2010 Apple Award Winner), at some point her iPad decided to update itself to iOS 10 (note you cannot disable updates anymore, only postpone them) and was a bit surprised she could no longer open any of the paintings she'd made in the app over the last 3 years. I tried to update the app, it's the latest version

I tried to open them > crash, tried to email them to myself > crash, set up a dropbox account to sync them off the device > crash.

I look online and find this app despite having won awards and being used by famous artist David Hockney is no longer updated, but good news it's open source so someone else has taken up the job of updating it to run on """modern""" iOS, so I install Brushes Redux, it works but none of her paintings are in it. So 3 years of work is on the device, we have a version of the app that should be able to open that work, but we can't because all files are siloed within app.

Long story short after 5 hours of trying to sort this out I finally used a very dodgy looking app to pull the hidden files out of the old brushes app and into the new one. Let's just hope Hockney manages to figure this out too or millions of pounds worth of artwork might be lost for good.

I use software in my day to day work way older than this brushes app but this scenario will never be a problem in my work because my OS isn't locked down, siloed and can disable updates.

Re:Apple has acquired Workflow, an automation tool for iPad ... by zepto on Thursday March 23, 2017 @07:03PM (#13945138)
Thanks - this is an unusually coherent and detailed reply on this subject.
Re:Apple has acquired Workflow, an automation tool for iPad ... by justusthane on Thursday March 23, 2017 @10:32AM (#13940038)
He was making a sarcastic comment regarding Apple's apparent animosity towards third-party developers.
Re:Apple has acquired Workflow, an automation tool for iPad ... by simonh on Thursday March 23, 2017 @10:12AM (#13939873)
There's a shoe here that hasn't dropped. Clearly the ability to automate into features of third party apps is a key benefit of Workflow, which does still hook into plenty of non-Apple services. The question is, what is the blocking issue in these cases?

Is Apple asking for concessions from companies in order to put hooks into them in Workflow, or are these companies asking for concessions from Apple in return for hooking into their services?

Re:Apple has acquired Workflow, an automation tool for iPad ... by cjCamel on Thursday March 23, 2017 @08:21AM (#13939118)
Out of curiosity what was your Pocket workflow?