For many, striving for success in academics is a challenge in and of itself. But for those with physical disabilities, access to a complete education can be an even greater challenge.
We were moved to learn the story of Logan, an example of great perseverance. Here’s how Logan has been regaining his independence with a little help from accessibility technologies including Workflow and Apple’s Switch Control.
Growing up on a farm in rural Alabama, Logan Prickett wasn’t afraid of much. He loved extreme sports – motocross, BMX, and skateboarding, to name a few. “I would pretty much try anything dangerous at least once,“ Logan said in a recent presentation.
In the 8th grade, Logan went for an MRI to determine why he wasn’t growing as he should. The contrast dye used in the MRI caused a fatal allergic reaction, and Logan’s heart stopped beating for 45 minutes. When Logan awoke, he was blind, physically impaired, and speech impaired due to lack of oxygen.
Nevertheless, he pressed on through rounds of physical therapy and found new ways to enjoy doing what he loves, including skiing, horseback riding, and even skydiving.
Fully cognitively capable and gifted, Logan’s gone on to further his education, studying psychology in this third year at Auburn University in Montgomery. Logan uses assistive technology like Switch Control to augment his abilities, helping him to adapt to daily life and thrive academically.
One of the greatest challenges for someone who’s visually impaired is learning math. Often, students use Nemeth Braille to feel and respond to math problems, but Logan’s condition prevents him from being able to sense the code. That didn’t stop him however. Logan’s determination caught the attention of AUM staff, inspiring a new program named The Logan Project.
The Logan Project researches new ways of teaching college math to low-vision students. The program helps students fulfill their core requirements and ultimately work towards completing a degree. Currently, team members use a carefully constructed method of audio communication to teach students one-on-one. In the future, they hope to create software that automates the process, making the method available to many.
Logan is the heart of the program, inspiring the team with his incredible motivation. Logan not only wants to give people with visual and motor difficulties a fighting chance at college math, but also is passionate about creating accessible environments in everyday life. Logan himself uses accessibility technology for activities like hunting and fishing.
One major undertaking of The Logan Project has been to give Logan the ability to communicate independently. The low volume of Logan’s voice means that he can’t use Siri to accomplish his tasks. Project member Dr. Luis Perez recently introduced Logan to Workflow, and it’s played an important role in improving his connection with the world.
On his devices, Logan uses Switch Control, an accessibility feature built-in to iOS, to navigate apps and have the screen read aloud to him. With both features supported in Workflow, the team at AUM created workflows that Logan now uses for everything from sending messages to reading his calendar, listening to articles, playing music, and more.
The team then added the workflows to Logan’s Home Screen and organized them into folders. He navigates the workflows with a connected switch and easily picks one to run. Without the ability to see or directly manipulate a screen, these gains in efficiency become substantial for interacting with the world.
The impact that Workflow and Switch Control have for Logan has been incredible. Ann Gulley recounted:
Prior to November 2015, Logan had no independent access to any technology. He had no ability to communicate independently. [Workflow] changed Logan’s life.
Recently, Logan had the opportunity to tell his personal story to an audience at the National Science Foundation. Speaking for over 20 minutes about his experiences, Logan used a series of custom workflows that provided him with audio cues on what to say next. Since then, he’s given presentations at the likes of the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference, where he continues to share the potential of process-driven math with everyone.
We built Workflow to empower everyone to be more productive and efficient, but we couldn’t have predicted the role it would play in Logan’s life.
Visit the Accessibility page on Apple’s website to learn about the options available to iOS users. And if you’re an app developer, we strongly encourage you to make your app accessible. You might be surprised at the impact you’ll have.
Learn more about The Logan Project on AUM’s website. Learn more about automating accessibility in Dr. Luis Perez’s article.
We’re excited to tell you about something really cool today: Workflow 1.5.1 introduces IFTTT integration, allowing you to trigger IFTTT recipes in your workflows. With this addition, your workflows can take advantage of IFTTT’s hundreds of supported services and devices, from Nest to Google Docs to Logitech Harmony. The possibilities are endless!
We created a few examples to get you going:
Also, check out Federico Viticci’s excellent piece on MacStories to learn more.
Ready to build your own? Here’s a quick tour of how to build your own Workflow IFTTT Recipe. In this example, let’s create a Recipe that adds a row to a Google Spreadsheet.
First, open the Workflow app and create a new workflow.
In this simple example, we’ll make a workflow that asks you for a person’s name and age and adds it to the spreadsheet. Slide to the actions pane, find the “Ask for Input” action, and drag it into your workflow. Then, find and add a “Set Variable” action to your workflow to store this result for later. Fill out the “Question” and “Variable” fields - you might want to call them both “Name”.
Repeat this process, adding an “Ask for Input” and “Set Variable” action to prompt for the person’s age. Now, add a “Get Variable” action to your workflow, and choose the “Name” variable to retrieve the name you set earlier.
Finally, add a “Trigger IFTTT Recipe” action - this is the important part! You’ll need to be signed into a Workflow Sync account in order for it to work; if you haven’t set up Sync yet, you’ll be prompted to do so now. Set a trigger name (it can be anything you want), and add an extra Ingredient so that we can pass the age. “Ingredients” are bits of text that can be used in IFTTT recipes.
Now your workflow is all set up, so it’s time to set up the IFTTT side of things! Make sure you have the IF app installed, then tap “Create Recipe” to get started. Then, tap “Create a Recipe” in IF.
Tap the “+” button to choose a Trigger. Find and select the Workflow Channel. If you haven’t yet used Workflow with IFTTT, you’ll be redirected to Safari to log in to your Workflow Sync account.
Once your Channel is set up, choose the “A workflow is run” Trigger. Then, from the list, select the Trigger name you set earlier.
Tap the orange “+” button to choose the Action to add to your Recipe. Find the Google Drive Channel and choose the “Add row to spreadsheet” Action.
Set a name for your spreadsheet and remove the unnecessary Ingredients from the Action’s fields. In this simple example, you should end up with what you see here:
Tap “Next” and finish creating your Recipe. You probably don’t want the “Receive notifications when this Recipe runs” option, since you’ll be triggering the Recipe yourself!
Give the closest person a high-five. You did it! Head back to Workflow and tap the Run button to give your new Recipe a try.
WWDC 2016 is just around the corner, and we’re all very excited at Workflow HQ about all of the new things that will be announced, and even more so about having many friends and developers from the community here in San Francisco.
To share our excitement, we put together a collection of workflows that we think would be useful for attendees during the hectic but super fun week of WWDC festivities. These workflows are particularly useful when run from the Workflow Today Widget. We hope you like them!
Good Monday morning! You probably haven’t slept much (or at all), but it’s time to queue for the keynote or visit your keynote viewing party of choice.
Get Me Directions to the Conference 🚗
This year, Apple’s signature keynote is being held at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium instead of Moscone West. But fear not, there’s a workflow for getting you to the right place! The WWDC Directions workflow will get you directions to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium or Moscone West with just a couple of taps, just what you need when you’re barely awake to use your phone.
While You Wait in Line…
You know you’re going to be waiting in many lines during WWDC. Yes yes, please do talk to the people around you, but if you do find yourself with some idle time, why not download some of these extra workflows that’ll help you prepare for the week ahead?
How was the keynote? Did we get a new MacBook? Is there a Siri API? Is it gorgeous? Whatever happens, one thing’s for sure: We all could use some food.
Get Lunch 🍞
If you don’t want to queue up for the lunch provided at WWDC or just want to explore the San Francisco food scene while you’re in town, we have a workflow for finding you some of our favorite lunch spots in the area.
Get Third-wave Coffee ☕️
Speaking of food, did you know that San Francisco is kind of obsessed with coffee? We have heritage breed, woodland-raised coffee that’s been fed a diet of sheep’s milk, soy, and hazelnuts. And yes, we have a workflow for finding you just that. It’ll conveniently tell you in emoji what type of stuff is on their menu in addition to coffee.
How was the Platforms State of the Union? How were the Apple Design Awards? Did you discover any new beautiful apps? Were you inspired to build awesome things?
Or maybe you’re just hungry. It’s 5:30pm and that’s basically almost SF dinner time. You might also be jet-lagged and ready for what you’d otherwise consider a very early dinner.
Find Me Dinner Places 🍴
We’ve assembled a list of some of the our favorite dinner places in San Francisco and a workflow to get you there. They are all conveniently located in SoMa, so you can walk straight over to a nearby party afterward.
Meet New Friends to Have Dinner With
We’re in town with over 5000 attendees at WWDC, so why not meet someone new over dinner? We don’t even have to worry about awkward silences because at the very least we can talk about iOS 10 and how revolutionary it is. Anyway, we made a workflow that’ll help us find and start dinner groups over Twitter. Happy socializing!
Find Me Parties 🍻
Wanna find out what all the events happening tonight are? Can’t remember when or where that party that you RSVP’d for a month ago is? We have a workflow for that! This workflow will show you all of the parties that are happening that day, and show you options to get direction or the official event details.
In some cities, it’s pizza. In others, it’s ramen. In San Francisco, it’s burritos.
Find Me A Burrito 🌯
Need we say more? Make sure to grab the 🌯 workflow for the highest quality late night grubs!
We really want to meet other iOS devs and Workflow users during WWDC, so we made a workflow that requests a Workflow sticker from one of us on the team! How does it work? Run it to find out.
Get it here: WWDC Workflow Sticker
Anyway, that’s it. We hope that you enjoy these workflows, and see you around at WWDC!
Among the new features we released in Workflow 1.5 last week are new actions for Ulysses, an excellent writing app for iOS (and Mac). We like Ulysses, and it turns out they’re fans of Workflow too! So what better way to celebrate Workflow 1.5 and these new actions than with App Store giveaways? We’re giving away three copies of Ulysses for iOS, and they’re giving away five copies of Workflow!
Ulysses helps you focus on writing and organizes all your work in one place across all your devices. Whether you’re writing blog posts, school papers, or entire novels, Ulysses can handle the entire process, including your notes, attachments, and keywords, meeting word counts per page or per project, and much more. Plus, if you’re a Markdown slinger, it has one of the best shortcut systems we’ve seen.
In Workflow 1.5, we added our first-ever actions for Ulysses, so you can do things like:
It’s powerful stuff that can make Workflow + Ulysses an integral part of your writing.
For a chance to win a free copy of Ulysses for iOS, you simply need to sign up for our newsletter, filled with some great workflows, community tips, and other fun stuff. We’ll announce the winners in our next issue!
The window for a chance at Ulysses ends next week Wednesday at 11:59pm EST, so tell all your friends who’ve always wanted a copy. Heck, maybe even mention it to that person next to you at the coffee shop. You might make a new friend!
And that’s what it’s all about: bringing Workflow, Ulysses, and people together. Be sure to check out our new Ulysses actions to see how you can do some great things for your writing workflow.
We spent the past year making Workflow into an indispensable tool for doing more with iOS, adding everything from the Today Widget, Apple Watch app, and Workflow Sync, to countless useful new integrations. Workflow now has over 280 actions for bending apps and services to your will.
Today we’re back with Workflow 1.5, including a brand-new Workflow Composer that’s faster and far more robust, 22 new actions to integrate with services like the App Store and Apple Music, and lots of little improvements we know you’ll love.
For 1.5, Workflow’s signature drag-and-drop interface just got even better: we rebuilt the Workflow Composer from the ground up using ComponentKit for dramatically improved performance and reliability. Now your workflows open instantly no matter how long they are. More importantly, these efficiency gains mean your workflows run considerably faster than ever before!
We’ve also spent some time improving the experience of dragging actions in your workflows. Large blocks of actions – If, Repeat, Choose from Menu, and the like – can now be easily picked up and rearranged. On iPad, you can now drag actions from your workflow back into the actions pane to remove them.
The new Workflow Composer also includes six handy keyboard shortcuts for editing workflows:
We couldn’t possibly release a major new update without new integrations. We’ve built 22 new actions spanning five new apps and services: App Store, Apple Music, iTunes Store, Trello, and Ulysses. Now your workflows can create and modify Apple Music playlists, search the App Store and iTunes Store, create sheets in Ulysses, add cards to Trello, and much more.
You can check out the full list of new actions, and we’ve put together a few workflows to get your gears turning:
For those of you who find yourself frequently scrolling through a long list of workflows, we bring you search! You’ll find it at the top of the “My Workflows” section as well as in the Action Extension.
There’s even more to love about Workflow 1.5. The new Show Web Page action shows a URL in a Safari View Controller. And there are some more advanced bits, like regex capture groups and getting a range of items from a list.
The free update for iPhone and iPad is available now in the App Store! Check it out and let us know what you think! We’d love to hear your thoughts and questions on Twitter, Reddit, and via e-mail at support@workflow.is. And as always, there’s much more to come.
Hey there! Welcome to our new blog.
We’ve been seriously blown away and delighted by all of your enthusiasm and support over the past few weeks. It’s incredibly humbling to see what you all have built using this tool, and we’ve never been more excited about the future of Workflow.
Yesterday, we announced that the next update to Workflow is available to download from the App Store, and it’s pretty massive. We’ve addressed many of the most highly requested features and fixed a variety of issues thanks to your feedback. Here’s a glimpse at what’s new:
We’ve created a What’s New page with the comprehensive list of changes – check it out here!
Workflow would not be where it is today without the fantastic community that creates and shares workflows. If you’re looking to find new examples of what Workflow can do or want to share what you’ve automated, here’s a couple great options:
Make sure to check out the updated Workflow Gallery in the app, featuring workflows that demonstrate the new features in 1.1!
We also wanted to mention that the ability to back up and sync workflows between devices is a huge priority for us. Stay tuned; we want to make sure we do it right!
Thank you for using Workflow! Be sure to download the 1.1 update now in the App Store. As always, feel free to reach out to us with your comments, questions, or just to say “hi!” via support@workflow.is.
