![]() It’s not seamless and it’s not as effective as it could be. There are also a ton of apps that allow you to connect to your phone through a web browser to transfer files, but those require the app to be running on your phone, and for the app to be in a specific mode to receive the files. For email I have to select all the images from my Camera Roll and either mail them five-at-a-time from the photos app, or copy them, switch to Mail, paste them into a message (which somehow bypasses the absurd five-image limit on in-line sharing in the Photos app) and then address the message to myself and wait for it to send, then wait for it to arrive on my computer. Using a Photo Stream requires me to open iPhoto on my Mac, which means it will probably take forever just to grab a few images. In the past I have used Photo Streams or email to get the images from my phone to my Mac, but both of those are a little more annoying than they need to be. This is especially true with things like screenshots for reviews. Jack Wallen introduces you to an app that adds serious automation power to the Android platform.From time to time, I find myself needing to send some files from my Mac to my iPhone, or from my phone to my computer. We may be compensated by vendors who appear on this page through methods such as affiliate links or sponsored partnerships. This may influence how and where their products appear on our site, but vendors cannot pay to influence the content of our reviews. ![]() For more info, visit our Terms of Use page. If you’ve used the likes of IFTTT, you know that it’s an incredibly powerful tool that makes adding certain types of automation to the Android platform fairly simple. However, IFTTT can be somewhat limiting in that it can only generate one trigger per action. There might be times when you need to set multiple actions with a single trigger or loop action. That’s where a tool called Automate comes in. With Automate you can create flows that do more than you might imagine. But Automate isn’t nearly as simple as IFTTT. In fact, with Automate, you’re going to spend a good amount of time on the front-end figuring out just how the flows work. And these flows can get really complicated.Īutomate uses a user-friendly drag-and-drop method with flowcharts to create automations that can work with over 300 building blocks (from Account sync to Zip). The interface is incredibly simple to use. The tool, however, is a bit challenging to master. I’m going to walk you through the process of installing Automate and then create a simple flow, so you can understand how the tool works. Once you’ve mastered creating a simple flow, you can then download any number of pre-built flows to understand how to make use of the highly flexible system. Once you have a solid understanding of how flows work, the sky’s the limit to what you can automate on your Android device. The app is free and includes access to a large number of shared flows (from other users). Open Google Play Store on your Android device.The installation of Automate is very easy. Locate and tap the Automate entry, by LlamaLab. Once the installation is complete, you’ll find an icon for Automate on your home screen or your App Drawer. Swipe through the welcome screen to wind up on the Automate main window ( Figure A). I’m going to walk you through creating a very basic automation. We’re going to go with the tried and true “Hello World” example. We’ll create an automation that will popup a message saying, “Hello, TechRepublic!” To create this flow, click the + button on the main window. The screen will change to the flowchart window ( Figure B), where you’ll see a single block, called Flow beginning. Tap the menu button in the top left corner and scroll down until you see Interface. Tap that entry to expand the contents and select Toast show. You should now see two blocks in the flowchart ( Figure C). Tap the Toast show block, and in the resulting window type Hello TechRepublic in the Message space ( Figure D). Set the duration to Long and then tap the DONE button. Now we must drag the flow beginning OK connector to the Toast show IN connector. Do that by tapping OK and dragging down to IN. These two blocks will now be connected ( Figure E). To save our flow, tap the check at the top of the screen. To try out the flow, tap the Start button. The Hello, TechRepublic message will appear at the bottom of the screen ( Figure F). You could expand that by adding another block. Tap the pencil icon and then tap Flowchart. Tap the top left menu button, scroll to and tap Interface. Add another Toast show block and configure it to say “How are you?” Once you’ve created that block, connect the OK connector of the original block to the IN connector of the new block ( Figure G).
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