Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
I’m feeling a need to do something impressive and in order to do something impressive, I’m
going to share with you some new tools, the Do Tools, the Do Button, the Do Camera and
Do Note that come to us from the folks at IFTTT, from If This Then That.
So if you want to learn to do more with your smartphone, you’re going to want to stick
around today on DottoTech.
The app IFTTT is one that’s long been a favorite of mine.
We’ve done demos on it in the past showing you basically how it works but it’s almost
like a junior programming tool that allows us to take the results or things that happened
in one application and cause an action to happen on another application.
Very cool concept and really it’s kind of a coming of age of this app society that we
live in.
In the past, we used to build these big monolithic suites of tools like Microsoft Office where
Excel and there’s Word and your email are all combined under one roof.
But now we’ve taken and we’ve parceled out every little task and we’ve made it
an app of its own.
But sometimes those apps need to talk to each other so we need a tool like IFTTT to create
those linkages and as I’ve mentioned we’ve shown that in a video in the past.
But now, the folks of IFTTT have taken it one step further and they’ve given us some
tools to create those little macros, to create those little recipes on our smartphones.
This is available on IOS and Android and it is really eye-opening.
Let me see if I can walk you through it.
So there are three different applets.
I’m going to call them applets.
It’s probably not the proper term but they are.
They’re tiny little apps called the Do Button, the Do Camera and Do Note.
The Do Button is kind of the catch-all.
It’ll do almost anything.
The Do Camera is obviously related to photography and using your camera on your smartphone and
then sending that picture or doing something with that picture.
And Do Note covers more than just notes.
It covers calendars.
It covers kind of word processing type stuff.
It definitely covers EverNote, and your task and to-do list manager.
So it interfaces with those.
Be patient because I’ll walk you through each one of these little tools as we go along
and try to kind of peel away the layers of what these Do Apps do, what they do and then
I’ll also show you what it looks like in our web browser because it all interfaces
back to our IFTTT account and you need to set up an IFTTT account to do this.
Fortunately, it’s free.
So let’s begin with the Do Button which is probably where you’ll start.
When you first install it and run it and log into the IFTTT, it will give you, it says
look, I’ve already built this one little recipe for you and this is what it’s called.
It’s called “Email a random GIF to yourself.
That’s the top one.
It just kind of shows you the process.
What happens is you choose that recipe and a button appears.
That button is your magic button.
All of these Do-More apps have the magic button.
When you’re ready to do whatever it is that they’re telling you they’re going to do,
you hit that button and it then does whatever it says it was going to do.
In this case here, it just sent an email to my account with a random GIF.
I’ll show you the results of that in a minute.
It’s not that exciting but it gives you an idea of what you can do with it because
we go back to Recipes, you can do other things.
For example, I can add a recipe.
Let’s add a recipe.
Let’s show you how that happens.
There they have suggested ones here, a whole bunch of things, for families, for fun, for
work and ones that they call essentials.
We just go into Do Essentials and here you can see that you can do things like you can
talk to your thermostat.
It can talk to any internet- enabled device.
So if you’ve got a WeMo or if you’ve got a Nest thermostat, it will do that.
It will turn on and off your lights if you have different types of electronic lighting.
I love this one.
It will get yourself out of an awkward situation.
If you’re in the continental US, what you do is you tap on that.
You enable it, it becomes a button that you hit and it sends a phone call to you so you
can get out of that bad date if you have to.
So you get an idea.
They all just really single-purpose things.
It will do one thing but it does it quickly, it does it efficiently, and it does it without
us having to open the individual app to do it ourselves.
Does that make sense?
I hope it does.
So those are the beginning of the collections.
You aren’t limited to just the suggestions that they have here.
There’s a fairly straightforward way of creating your own recipes and even sharing
those recipes with others, which I’ll show you in just a moment.
That’s the Do More.
I believe it’s called Do More.
Let me just check.
It’s the Do Button.
Next in a similar vein is the Do Camera.
Now this will allow you to do things like if we tap on the plus, that takes us into
the Essentials, the same basic families.
But the Essentials for cameras include To email a photo to yourself, awesome; To quickly
resize one to 500 pixels, great for people that do Instagram-type stuff; To automatically
upload a photo to Flickr; or To send a photo to yourself by email.
So this will then do those different tasks.
You might be thinking well, it’s no big deal.
When I take a picture, I can email it to myself but that’s usually a multi-step process.
This is one step.
If I say I want to email myself this photo, I tap on the button, I add the recipe because
I haven’t yet installed this button.
This is the process that you go through.
Now it’s choosing the photo, here I am, hit the button and now it’s emailed it to
myself.
It’s asked me if I want to save it.
I’m going to save it to my camera roll and there we go.
So now we should head back over to my email because there’ll be a couple of emails.
There it is.
It’s coming in right now.
I think they’re all in updates.
So there’s the first one that I sent which is that trending GIF to myself and for some
reason it appears on my Updates folder.
But there’s the GIF that I sent to myself which is just a silly little animated GIF.
Oh joy, it’s a dragonfly of some sort.
But if we go back, I’ve got the photo that I just took that I emailed to myself.
So this can be something that’s frivolous as sending a photo to yourself like this but
it can also be as useful as sending yourself a note, sending an email or a reminder to
yourself, if that’s how you like to do things.
So you’ve got lots of different options.
But you see how easy it is.
So now, next time that I launch—let me just back out of this—the Do Camera, you see
that that email of this photo of yourself is available to me as one of the options.
Actually, I put it in twice.
So there it is and it’s available to me instantly.
So it’s that easy to add these pre-baked recipes.
Once you get the app, I’m not going to spend a lot of time now going through it but once
you get the app, you’ll see how many different ideas.
You’ll get ideas for ways of doing things that you never thought of before by using
this.
The last is Do Note that I’m going to show you.
Obviously because I am an Evernote fan, I really like what’s in Do Note.
So they’ve got a couple of different recipes here.
The first one that they’ve got pre-baked is to email yourself a note.
So all you do is you tap on that and you can quickly add a note to yourself, comma, and
then email it to yourself.
A lot of people like to use that as their main way of giving themselves reminders.
It’s not my preferred method of doing reminders.
When you go in and you take a look at some of the different things that they do, you
can add stuff to spreadsheets, you can tweet and post stuff to your blog or to WordPress.
As we work our way, look, you can even log your weight in to FitBit.
I’ve got a FitBit.
I’m not sure I want to log my weight in yet.
But we see integration to all of these other apps.
And of course, as far as we’re concerned on this channel since we do so much on EverNote,
being able to add a note to EverNote is something that we’ll be definitely interested in.
I added that and let’s take a look at how that actually resolves.
I tap on Add a note to Evernote and I’m able to quickly add a note.
In this case, I am dictating the note but once I’ve done this I should be able to
save it and it will save it to the designated notebook in Evernote.
There we go.
Now I hit the little elephant icon to say send and I see that the check mark tells me
that it’s sent.
Now it will take a few seconds to resolve and to get through into my Evernote account.
While it’s doing that, let’s jump into the IFTTT web interface.
So this is my account that I’ve already signed into.
In the past, I’ve already showed you how to create these standard recipes.
Now these are just basic recipes.
I’ve got things set up for like Craigslist.
If a Heil PR-40 microphone, I’m always on the look for new mics, comes for sale on Craigslist
then send me a Gmail.
So it’s got those kind of recipes and I showed you that in the previous video.
But now it’s there is this new tab here which is the Do Tab.
If we go into that, it’s got all of the recipes that I have enabled in my account
available to me here.
I can also go here and I can browse through other recipes to see what other people are
doing with the Do Button in order to make themselves more efficient.
As I said, browsing through this is a real experience and you’ll get lots of great
ideas from what other people are doing.
For example, there is a really nice one tracking.
It says every time you have a cup of coffee, click on this.
You tap on it so you can actually count how many cups of coffee you have a day as long
as you remember to tap on it.
So you’ve got lots of different options of how you’re going to be able to utilize
a tool like these little Do-Tools.
I’m going to call them the Do-Tools.
Okay, I think that we’ve waited long enough.
Let’s go over into EverNote and let’s see if it’s had time to sync across.
Yes, indeed it has.
I wanted to show you the actual recipe in Evernote.
So I’m going to go back to My Recipes here in my Do Recipes and I wanted to show you
the Evernote recipe because this is the process that you go through in creating these recipes.
Now it’s a point and click interphase primarily for creating them.
You might get a little intimidated by the body, which is the actual kind of programming
language in the script that they’ve written here but often that’s just a point and click
thing where it’s a do this and it kind of mimics the action and mirrors it.
So for example, when I wanted to create that Craigslist post where I would copy where I
would look for something that was for sale in Craigslist and then send myself an email,
they just ask me to do the search in Craigslist and copy the string, the URL string that was
created by Craigslist and paste into the field.
It’s very often a very easy thing to do and you don’t actually have to learn programming.
You just have to just kind of create the scenario once and then it records that scenario.
But you can see here that it’s going to give the note this title, “Thoughts and
Ideas” so you might give this Mobile Musings or you might give it a different title so
that you can recognize those notes in Evernote as soon as they come in.
For this particular recipe, you can’t create a new title for every note.
They’re all going to go in the same title.
But you can choose which notebook it’s going to go into and you can choose which tags are
going to be attached in Evernote.
So now that I’ve shown you the recipe, let’s go and take a look.
There is the note that we just created and indeed it’s called Thoughts and Ideas as
we said.
You could see both the tags, the Do and the IFTTT tag to tell me where it came from and
because of the way it’s set up, it includes a map, a location, of where I was when I made
that note, which can be a useful feature.
Of course, you can turn that on or off.
So there you have an idea of these new Do Tools from IFTTT, the Do Button, the Do Camera
and the Do Note.
I think that they are really going to open up lots of different opportunities for using
our mobile phones for Android and iOS.
If you found this video useful.
Please comment down below.
Tell us if you’ve come up great recipes.
Share them with the community in the Comments area here on YouTube as well.
I’d certainly appreciate that.
And that is all the time that we have for today.
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That’s it for today.
Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.