Want to receive a text message reminding you that it's going to rain later? How about an email to notify you that a specific bike model you've been wanting just went on sale at Craigslist? You can get both now that the popular Web service If This Then That (IFTTT) has released its free iPhone app. IFTTT makes it possible to connect your iPhone apps so that if a certain condition is met in one of them, it triggers an action in another. It's part automation, part tool for showing off and making your friends ooh and ahh.
Although iPhones can't automate their tasks as efficiently as MacBooks do yet, the IFTTT for iPhone app helps in that regard, said MacWorld writer Dan Moren. IFTTT began as an online tool that supported a variety of services such as the read-it-later service Pocket, Twitter, Evernote and RSS reading clients like Feedly. It's not a cookbook, but IFTTT labels all of its collections of triggers and accompanying actions as “recipes,” and lets you create new ones by pressing an icon that looks like a mortar and pestle, observed Moren.
A sample IFTTT recipe on the Web might perform an automatic upload to Dropbox each time you add a photo to Flickr, explained writer Emily Price in a Mashable column. Whereas the Web service has numerous possible channels and apps to connect to, the iPhone version is simpler. For now, it can only access your iPhone's photos, contacts and reminders, according to MacWorld. Its current feature set would let you backup a photo to a cloud service other than iCloud, for example.
“We think the app is a great step forward in simplifying the process of connecting channels together, and making recipes and using them,” IFTTT mobile lead Devin Foley told Mashable.
Need a recipe for iPhone repair? IFTTT can't do that, so bring it to iResQ and we'll get it fixed up for you right away!