Automation of everyday tasks can prove to be especially productive, allowing you to spend greater time doing crucial stuff, and leaving the rest for your devices. Phones nowadays are known as “smartphones” for a reason, and iOS devices are one of the smartest gadgets accessible. You may use the various capabilities of your iPhone and iPad to automate tasks which might be “now not as thrilling”, or are distinctly repetitive. In this article on IFTTT Apps, I can let you know precisely how to use the apps offered by IFTTT for to automate obligations on iPhone, so you get the most from your iOS gadgets and get more time for stuff that topics greater.

 IFTTT

IFTTT stands for “If This Then That“, which is exactly how the app works. You set up an “if” condition, and a “then” response to that condition. The response gets executed whenever the “if” condition is fulfilled. These sets of “if and then” are called recipes.

The reason why IFTTT is such a benifical app, is that once you have set up the formulae you want, in the manner you want them, you don’t need to worry about it anymore. IFTTT works in the background, automatically checking for fulfilled conditions and executing formulae accordingly, on its own. Now that you know what IFTTT is, here’s why you should automate tasks on iPhone:

Why Automate iPhone Tasks?

Various obligations can be time consuming, and sincerely, they can be an excessive amount of a fuss to be carried out frequently. Think about it this way: You take a variety of snap shots to your phone and add them to Dropbox, so that you can properly delete them out of your smartphone, thereby saving bodily garage space on your tool. Wouldn’t it’s extremely good if all you did turned into take a image and it automatically sponsored up to Dropbox? IFTTT apps can do that.

Let’s take some other instance, just to force the idea home. Assume you want to shop your receipts in a digital form, so that you take images of them after which, you don’t want to worry about keeping the physical copy secure, so that you compile the images in Evernote. Isn’t it higher if all you probably did changed into take a photograph of a receipt and it routinely curated itself into a notebook in Evernote? Once more, IFTTT apps can permit you to do that.

Now that I have you convinced about the usefulness of automated tasks, let’s discuss the IFTTT apps that can help you automate almost everything you do on your iOS device.

Apps Offered By IFTTT

IFTTT was originally just one single app, called IFTTT. It allowed people to create simple “if this, then that” type workflows on their devices. Then, in February 2015, IFTTT rebranded their app to “IF”, and also released a new suite of apps, called “Do”.

The apps now offered by IFTTT are:

1. IF (Android) (iOS)
   The original IFTTT app.

2. Do Button  (iOS)
   An app that allows users to use a button to carry out different, user customisable functions.
3. Do Camera (iOS)
   An app that allows users to use a button to carry out camera specific, customisable functions.

How to Create Recipes

Creating recipes on any of the apps offered by way of IFTTT isn’t too hard, and there are quite a few published recipes that you could discuss with, in case you want to figure out how to perform a particular assignment. Probabilities are, the tasks you need to automate have already been published by using a person else, so that you can clearly use their recipes, or make modifications to their recipe and tailor it to fit your wishes.

You can head on to the IFTTT Recipes page to check them out.

I’ll walk you through creating recipes for each of the apps mentioned in this article. I’m assuming you have already signed up on IFTTT and downloaded the IF, Do Button, and Do Camera apps.

1.Creating Recipes on IF

Here’s a step-by-step explanation of how you can go about creating a recipe on IF that automatically saves new pictures you take into Dropbox.

• Launch the IF appand tap on the “Recipe” icon. It’s on the top-right of the screen. You’ll see a sidebar, titled “My Recipes”, expand onto the screen. If you have created recipes before, they will be displayed here. Tap on the “+” icon on the top right to add a new recipe.

• On the next screen, tap the button titled “Create a Recipe”on the bottom of the screen. This will take you to a screen titled “Create a Recipe”. On this screen, you’ll see “if + then +”, tap on the “+” next to “if”.

• You will now be shown a grid of services that work with “IF”. You have to select a “trigger service” from this grid.
  “Trigger” services are services that contain “triggers”, that, when executed, tell “IF” to carry out the corresponding “Action”.
• Since I want to upload images to Dropbox when I capture an image, our trigger service will be “Photos”.
  Select “iOS Photos”from the grid of available services. Now, you’ll be shown a list of applicable triggers, related to “iOS Photos”. Select “Any new photo”.

• You’ll be taken back to the screen titled “Create a Recipe”. This time, tap on the “+” next to “then”.

• You will now be shown a grid of“action services”.
  “Action” services are services that contain “actions” that get carried out when the corresponding “trigger” is executed.
  The action I want to take every time I click a new picture, is to upload it to Dropbox. Therefore, our action service will be Dropbox.
  Select Dropbox from the grid of available services.
  Now, you’ll be shown a list of applicable actions, related to Dropbox. Select “Add file from URL”.

• You can leave the options on the next screen, or play around with them if you want. They are pretty self-explanatory.

Note: Leave the File URL as PrivatePhotoURL only.

• On the next screen, you can turn notifications on/off for this recipe. Once you are done, tap Finish. That’s all there is to it. You can go and take a picture from your camera, and you’ll see that IF uploads it to your Dropbox.

2.Creating Recipes on Do Button

“Do Button” allows you to create single tap, customisable actions that are executed whenever you tap the button in the app.

Suppose you need to send an immediate message to someone on twitter, pronouncing that you’re about to reach domestic. Commonly you’ll ought to open the Twitter app, search for that individual, tap on the “direct message” alternative, type the message, after which press send. Doing this as soon as, or perhaps even twice won’t pose that massive an trouble, however if you have to do a undertaking along with this repeatedly, it’s simply better to automate this.

Although, creating recipes on Do Button is a very simple task, I am still presenting a step-by-step approach to automating the Twitter DM task.

• Launch the Do Buttonapp, and tap the “Recipe” icon; its on the bottom-right corner of the app screen. Tap the “+” button on the top of the screen to create a new recipe.

• Navigate to the “Channels”tab, and tap on Twitter. This will present a screen showing published recipes for Twitter, as well as an option to create a new recipe. Tap on the option that says “Create a New Recipe”

• I want to post a direct message (or “DM”, in short) to a person. There’s an obvious issue here: the “Actions” available for
  Twitter do not have any option for sending a DM to someone. There is an option to DM yourself, but that’s not going to work for us. However, there’s a simple workaround to this problem.
  Tap the option that says “Post a tweet”
  If you begin a tweet with DM @username, the text you type afterwards is sent as a DM to the person mentioned in the tweet. We’ll be using this method to send a DM.

• In the text box that reads “Tweet text”, type “DM @username “, followed by whatever text you want to send to that person. I need to tell them that I’m about to reach home. So I’ll use DM @username I’m about to reach home.
  Obviously, replace “username” with the username of the personyou want to send the DM to.
  Tap the button that says “Add”.

That’s all, folks! You should now see a button with the Twitter icon on the home screen of “Do Button”.

Note: If you have more than one recipe, you can swipe left-to-right, or the other way around to switch between various recipes that you have.

3.Creating Recipes on Do Camera

Remember the use case I mentioned earlier? About how some people like to store their receipts in digital form? I’m one of those people. It’s just easier to store receipts digitally; plus I can sort them by date/name if I want to. Do Camera makes it incredibly easy to add images of receipts to my “Receipts” notebook in Evernote. Plus, there is a plethora of applications to improve Evernote’s functionality.

You may find other uses for Do Camera, including the one that we used “IF” for: automatically saving images to Dropbox, but I’m presenting a step-by-step walkthrough of how I set up Do Camera to make my life easier.

• Launch the Do Camera app, and tap on the “Recipe”Tap the “+” button on the top of the screen to add a new recipe.

• Navigate to the “Channels”tab, and select “Evernote” from the available channels. Tap on “Create a New Recipe”

• Select the option that says “Create image note from URL”. Fill the details in the text boxes as you like.

That’s all you need to do. Whenever you take a picture from “Do Camera” now, the image will get saved to the “Receipts” notebook in Evernote.

Note: On my first install of “Do Camera”, the Recipe icon on the bottom-right was not visible and did not respond to taps. If you encounter a similar issue, simply uninstall the app, and reinstall it.

Some Great Recipes

Here are some great published recipes that you might find useful. Check them out if they look interesting. Either way, you can use published recipes to learn how people use these IFTTT apps to create great automated workflows.

Note: You can click on the images to go to the recipe pages.

IF Recipes:

• Document Your Daily Fit bit Activity in a Google Spreadsheet

• Automatically Keep your Facebook and Twitter Profile Pictures in Sync

Do Button Recipes:

• Track your work hours in a spreadsheet:

• Get yourself out of an awkward situation:

Do Camera Recipes:

• Save Receipts To Evernote

• Save a Photo to Dropbox

Automate iPhone Tasks with IFTTT Apps

By means of now you ought to have realised the blessings of automating obligations. I encourage you to go to the IFTTT siteand explore the to be had channels, and the published recipes. Published recipes may be used without delay, or you may tailor them for your own wishes with the aid of editing the various parameters that they use, to custom in shape them to the way you want them to. You may also use the posted recipes as a start line to discover ways to create IFTTT recipes and to build upon and create even better recipes. So, create recipes according to your needs and proportion your favorite ones with us.