I won’t jailbreak my device just to try ActivityAction, but I think it’s a great idea for the current state of iOS. Reader, ActivityAction is another take on the old concept of a Services menu for iOS it obviously requires a manual setup from the user, but I bet most jailbreak users wouldn’t have a problem with that. Reader’s new sharing menu, made possible by the modifications to iOS a jailbreak can do. URL schemes allow me to get work done faster on the iPad every day, and I can’t deny that.ĪctivityAction is like a system-wide, better-looking version of Mr. You can create bookmarklets to send text from the browser to other apps, or set up Drafts actions that chain multiple apps together. URL schemes aren’t the way of the future, but they work today. This is probably the most user-friendly solution for Apple: imagine being able to remain within Drafts when sending text to other apps, rather than being taken around a multitasking merry-go-round as it currently happens. With this solution, the user isn’t yanked out of the current app but is still shown part of another native app, including its interface and features. As developers discovered after the release of iOS 6, Apple is already using XPC for the Mail sharing panel: apps that have a “Send via Mail” feature can show an embedded Mail.app window that is actually a separate process handled by iOS itself. The second point – betting on XPC as a system to improve upon how apps can communicate with each other – is only speculation on my side. And, who knows, perhaps in a future version of iOS “switching” between apps won’t even be required anymore, as “parts” of other apps will be linked to each other using something like XPC. Looking ahead, I can only imagine new possibilities of iOS automation based on URL schemes that, however, abstract the need of manually building URLs from the end user’s workflow – using a more Automator-like interface to visually represent actions. However, that doesn’t mean people can’t get real work done with URL schemes and apps today. URL schemes are certainly a stopgap solution to a problem – better inter-app communication on iOS – that I wish Apple will tackle in the near future. I’ve argued, of course, that URL schemes aren’t the most solid foundation for the future of iOS inter-app communication: In the demo, Jeff shows how to select text and send it to Fantastical through a native sharing menu enabled by ActivityAction. If you don’t use the optional variable, then ActivityAction will automatically append the selected text to the end of the URL, as demonstrated in the video example above. This selected text is the text that you highlight when invoking ActivityAction using Action Menu. ActivityAction also requires a URL (the scheme), and you can use an optional variable, which will replace the selected text in your URL. This can be easily found with iFile, or with a jailbreak app called AppInfo. As Jeff describes the tweak:Īs you saw, ActivityAction requires the bundleIdentifier for the app that you wish to create an action for. ActivityAction adds a button that lets you set up UIActivity-like actions based on app’s bundle identifier and its URL scheme.Īs MacStories readers know, URL schemes are a topic of great interest to me as they’re one of the few ways to make working with iOS devices a faster, more efficient process. ActionMenu extends Apple’s Copy & Paste popup menu with additional actions and services to deal with selected text or an app’s content area. I don’t normally cover jailbreak tweaks here at MacStories, but I’m intrigued by ActivityAction after reading Jeff Benjamin’s preview over at iDownloadBlog.ĪctivityAction is a an extension of Ryan Petrich’s Action Menu – one of my favorite tweaks when I had a jailbroken device.
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