dev_2014

I use Launch Center Pro all the time, mostly because I have more apps on my phone than is good for me and because LCP makes it so easy to perform specific actions in many of them from one central location.

The awesomeness of Drafts

Quite a few of the actions I have set up are to send text to Drafts, another app I use approximately a bajillion times every day.

I could just use the default 'New Post to Drafts with text' option within Launch Center Pro and then action the text from within the Drafts app. And I certainly wouldn't be short of choices for ways to use, manipulate or save that text. I could even use one of the additional options from the Drafts Action Directory.

But because Drafts is made completely of win, and has its own extensive URL scheme, I can create an action in Launch Center Pro which will send the text to Drafts with a pre-defined action to be triggered and then have Drafts return me to Launch Center Pro.

It looks a little something like this:

drafts://x-callback-url/create?text=[prompt]&action=Buffer&x-success=launchpro%3A

[Federico Viticci over at MacStories has several examples of how you can chain actions with Drafts.]

My specified action, Buffer, uses an email action to send the text to my Buffer account to be posted as a Tweet later in the day. The benefit of the email approach, rather than the built-in 'Post to Buffer' action in Drafts, is that the text gets sent in the background without needing to open a third app (ie Buffer).

Setting up Email to Buffer

This bit is easy. All you need is your super-secret Buffer email address. Buffer has an excellent guide to using email and the various short codes they offer.

In Drafts, you choose new email action.

Name: Buffer (or something awesome and personal to you)

To: Your super-secret Buffer email address

Subject: Select 'First Line'

Send in Background: On

To email to Buffer, you put the text of your post in the Subject of your email and the first link found in the body of your email gets appended to your Tweet/FB post.

While typing in Drafts itself, this is not a problem. You simply type two separate lines:

> This is the first line of my Draft, which will be the main text of my tweet. > http://2ndline.link/

This is all fine and well in Drafts, which has a full typing keyboard. There is, however, no 'return' button on the LCP keyboard view; it's replaced by 'Go' (see pic).

Enter TextExpander Touch

Here, I use a tiny hack which relies on the fact that Launch Center Pro has full TextExpander Touch integration.

For this, the link you wish to append must be in your clipboard.

Simply set up a snippet in TextExpander Touch—I use /lk—which expands to:

> ↩ > %clipboard

Where ↩ is a blank line in which you've only typed a carriage return.

Bringing it all together

With your link already in your clipboard, fire up the Launch Center Pro action in the window above and type the text of your Tweet, followed by your TextExpander snippet.

So, I would type:

> This is the first line of my Draft, which will be the main text of my tweet./lk

which expands to:

> This is the first line of my Draft, which will be the main text of my tweet. > http://2ndline.link/

Launch Center Pro sends this to Drafts, which then sends it to Buffer in the background, and then returns me to Launch Center Pro.

Simples!

Why not just open Buffer and add a Tweet there, without all this malarkey?