Hands on: IFTTT for iOS automates your online life
With all the advances and conveniences that iOS offers, there’s one place that OS X continues to trump Apple’s mobile platform: automation. But with the appearance of IFTTT for iPhone, that gap is perhaps narrower than it once was.
If you’re not familiar with its Web service, IFTTT stands for If This Then That. Even those not intimately familiar with programming should get the basic idea here: If a pre-determined condition is met, then an action is taken. On the Web, IFTTT integrates with a number of popular services (which it dubs “channels”), including Twitter, RSS, Google Talk, Evernote, Pocket, and more.
IFTTT's home screen is a running activity stream of recipes you've created and other actions.
IFTTT’s app is, unsurprisingly, more limited than its Web service, but it does bring access to new channels by integrating with three services available on your iPhone: your contacts, your reminders, and your device’s photos. That way you can, for example, set up a recipe that automatically uploads your iPhone’s pictures to Flickr. While the integration with your phone’s own data is somewhat limited, the other services that IFTTT offers on the iPhone are extensive—I counted several dozen.
Each channel has a variety of options assigned to it, depending on whether it’s the trigger or the action. You can create workflows, or “recipes” in IFTTT parlance, which can then be shared with others. Generally, you need to activate channels, either by entering your credentials for that service, or—on with phone-specific data—by allowing access to that particular information.
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