Federico Viticci has an overview and examples for the latest Workflow for iOS release, which adds more advanced features for calling into web APIs. It looks great:
For those who are only partially familiar with the terminology, this means that Workflow can communicate with the majority of modern services that come with a web API. If you've never worked with web APIs before, it'll take you a few hours of reading and experiments with dictionaries, token authentications, form requests, and file uploads to get the gist of how it works. But, the Workflow team has managed to make what tends to be a visually unintuitive programming task – assembling dictionaries and structuring JSON – as simple and attractive as possible, abstracting many of the complexities that web developers have to deal with in desktop IDEs and command-line tools.
Here’s another nice example of automatically creating GitHub Gists, from Jordan Merrick:
This is a workflow I’ve always wanted to create, and the new API support makes it possible. Gists are great to share small pieces of text information, such as code snippets or scripts. This action extension workflow accepts files of any type (though they must be text-based) and creates a gist using the GitHub API.
Workflow can now take over many web tasks that previously required either writing scripts or depending on hosted solutions like IFTTT and Zapier. Like my workflow for posting photos to my blog, it’s a natural tool for web publishing and microblogging.
I’d also love to see a Mac version of Workflow one day. I do some limited automation on my Mac, but AppleScript and Automator aren’t as easy to use or as well-maintained as Workflow.
