Post by zepherusbane on Jun 24, 2015 22:01:08 GMT -5
I have a couple of versatile apps I wanted to share that have nearly endless potential for different use cases:
IFTTT:
I thought I would mention an app I like that is great for all kinds of personal automation.
In the philatelic context I thought it would be useful for getting alerts about criteria that you determine to be important (it's not locked in to one type of alert). If you can search for it, you can set up a "recipe" to send you an email, text, or even call yourself.
The app is called "IF", formerly it was called "IFTTT" for "if this then that". It's an app that lets you tie together many of the other social media you use, email, features on your phone, any site that has an rss feed, web searches, etc.
For example, using the rss connector, you could set up a recipe to listen to this forum and send you a text message anytime a word or phrase appeared in a new post. I've used it to send myself a notice a search on bing found a phrase (bing searches can be turned into rss by just adding "&format=rss" to the end of a bing search. Here is a link where I searched for "philatelic" and added the format part to the resulting URL:
www.bing.com/search?q=philatelic&go=Submit&qs=n&form=QBLH&pq=philatelic&sc=8-10&sp=-1&sk=&cvid=42bfff6f57b8479b995458966e3b03cd&format=rss
If you add that you'll get back an rss version of your search that can be used with an IFTTT recipe.
Check out their website at ifttt.com to see more examples.
I use this tool to do lots of stuff, some examples:
Check out the wiki page for a more detailed explanation of what IFTTT is all about. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFTTT
Pushbullet:
I mentioned sending a notice to this from IFTTT, what's great about Pushbullet is that it makes everything on all your devices easily shareable. You can set it up to show you a notice on any machine that you have the pushbullet add on installed. One of the most useful features is having text messages show up in a pop up on my work laptop and being able to type a response to that text on the pc without even having to take my fingers off the keyboard to take my phone out my pocket.
More info on their site: www.pushbullet.com/
I've used it on a macbook pro, a windows 7 pc, an iphone, and an android phone. It worked exactly the same regardless of the os.
I hope others will find these as useful as I did.
IFTTT:
I thought I would mention an app I like that is great for all kinds of personal automation.
In the philatelic context I thought it would be useful for getting alerts about criteria that you determine to be important (it's not locked in to one type of alert). If you can search for it, you can set up a "recipe" to send you an email, text, or even call yourself.
The app is called "IF", formerly it was called "IFTTT" for "if this then that". It's an app that lets you tie together many of the other social media you use, email, features on your phone, any site that has an rss feed, web searches, etc.
For example, using the rss connector, you could set up a recipe to listen to this forum and send you a text message anytime a word or phrase appeared in a new post. I've used it to send myself a notice a search on bing found a phrase (bing searches can be turned into rss by just adding "&format=rss" to the end of a bing search. Here is a link where I searched for "philatelic" and added the format part to the resulting URL:
www.bing.com/search?q=philatelic&go=Submit&qs=n&form=QBLH&pq=philatelic&sc=8-10&sp=-1&sk=&cvid=42bfff6f57b8479b995458966e3b03cd&format=rss
If you add that you'll get back an rss version of your search that can be used with an IFTTT recipe.
Check out their website at ifttt.com to see more examples.
I use this tool to do lots of stuff, some examples:
- Log every text I receive to a Google Drive spreadsheet.
- Log the user info of everyone who follows my twitter account
- Send me a notice on pushbullet any time something gets posted to my blog
- Create a blog post with the picture and text of my pins from pinterest as I add them
- Create a blog post when certain search criteria are met from various rss feeds from sites and boards.
- Create a blog post of every tweet I send
- Backup all my contacts from my phone to a Google spreadsheet.
Check out the wiki page for a more detailed explanation of what IFTTT is all about. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFTTT
Pushbullet:
I mentioned sending a notice to this from IFTTT, what's great about Pushbullet is that it makes everything on all your devices easily shareable. You can set it up to show you a notice on any machine that you have the pushbullet add on installed. One of the most useful features is having text messages show up in a pop up on my work laptop and being able to type a response to that text on the pc without even having to take my fingers off the keyboard to take my phone out my pocket.
More info on their site: www.pushbullet.com/
I've used it on a macbook pro, a windows 7 pc, an iphone, and an android phone. It worked exactly the same regardless of the os.
I hope others will find these as useful as I did.
