Back in episode 152 @RosemaryOrchard mentioned an app called Text Workflow. Episode 163 which was all about text automation does not mention this app at all. Is anyone using this app? Curious as to why it was mentioned very positively in that earlier episode and then not at all in the later one.
Text Workflow is a powerful app. I see it as comparative to the free Esse app. Whereas Text Workflow has a great range of workflows and the option to build your own, Esse has the option to run custom JavaScript. I have them both but I barely use them other than for a “quick tinker”.
The Why
I tend to do my text processing on i*OS in Drafts and I have lots of the sort of text processing there pre-built for my own needs. Similarly, I have access to Drafts on the Mac, though if I need to bring in the big guns on something, I reach for TextSoap as that has a similar feature set to Text Workflow, but once again, I have lots of things I’ve built in it for my own needs.
But…
In Shortcuts I tend to mainly utilise regular expressions for text manipulation, but I think this is where pushing more complex activity out into Text Workflow would be beneficial. With the built in transformations, using Text Workflow would make text processing quick and (I expect) reliable. More so than in Shortcuts. I also suspect that for larger workflows and text volumes that Text Workflow might be more performant than building equivalent processing in Shortcuts.
For me I can get Shortcuts to utilise what I already have if necessary, but I think for those who have not already invested the time to build this stuff out, there is a benefit in examining Text Workflow to see if that could be the best solution for your use cases.
Just think through where you are doing your transformational text processing, how you want to trigger it, and what tools you have or could have in those places. You may also wish to do some price checks, particularly if you are a SetApp subscriber (which I’m not).
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2024-10-22
I use Text Workflow regularly to reformat text copied from one of the AI Chatbots. It works well. The application is updated fairly frequently and it has an easy learning curve.
Thanks for the replies. I will spend some time with Text Workflow and see where I land with it.