One of the best aspects of the iPhone and iOS is the ability of different apps to work together to accomplish some fairly complex actions. This is especially true of apps that connect you to cloud-based services like Dropbox and Evernote, using their always-available nature to move data around and keep it safe until, for example, you get back to your home computer. And sometimes they work together to let you add ad-hoc services to other apps that don’t support them directly. Here’s what I mean:
On my iPhone I use the official Twitter app to keep up with my Twitter friends. Often they will post links to interesting articles and other web pages. Sometimes I want to read them right there. Other times, especially if are longer, I will save them to my account at Instapaper, a service that strips just the text you want to read from all the surrounding cruft of the web page and saves it for later reading, often with the Instapaper app for the iPhone. It’s an awesome way to clip articles that you want to read in a spare moment. Happily, the official Twitter app has a function built right in that allows you to save the web page you’re viewing to Instapaper.
But sometimes I want a more permanent record of the web page’s content that will allow me to find its content through full-text searching. That’s what Evernote does best. Unfortunately, the Twitter app does not support sending the text of the web page directly to Evernote. I can email a link, but not the text. But Instapaper can email the full text and Evernote has a great feature that gives you a unique email address that allows you to email content directly into your Evernote notebook.
So that’s what I do. In Twitter, I click the Share button and click on Read Later to send it to Instapaper. Then in Instapaper, I open the text and click on the Share button there and then on “Share…” again and then “Email full text”. I pop in my Evernote email address, click Send, and moments later there it is.
This isn’t just for Twitter, Evernote, and Instapaper either. With some creative thinking, you can use the iPhone’s email app to post to your Tumblr site or to your Posterous site, which itself can auto-post to the web sites you choose, like your regular blog or Facebook or Flickr or the like.
Or you can put files, photos, audio, or video right in your Dropbox folder for later use at your computer or to share with someone else right now. The possibilities are endless. And the best part of all is that most of these apps and services are free or very nearly so.
If the article from the American Spectator is “America’s Ruling Class” it is an excellent article. A bit lengthy but very very worth reading.
It is indeed. Good eye. I am looking forward to it. Instapaper is perfect for reading those longer articles.