I'm a big user of the macos utility app Alfred - its an amazing replacement for spotlight - but so much more too (go check it out if you don't know what it offers). Amongst other things, I have a good collection of URLs to animated gifs - handy for posting into chat conversations at suitable moments. This is fantastic when I'm in front of a Mac at home or work - but often I wish I had quick access to my Alfred snippets on my iPhone or iPad. Now Alfred allows syncing its settings (which include the snippets) via syncing services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive, etc - and I already synced mine via dropbox to maintain a common configuration at home and work. So I was dismayed that there was nothing out there that could access this.

As a professional mobile developer, there was no excuse, so I figured I'd take some weekend time and write myself a nice iOS app to access the snippets from anywhere. Hooray! A nice side project! Then I mentioned it to my colleague and friend Tom Wilson, who reckoned that I could probably do it all in Workflow.

What's Workflow you ask?. Its an automation utility for iOS - and whilst I've always thought it was damn impressive, I had never thought of a great use for it, beyond as a glorified bookmark tool. But I set out to see if it was up to the challenge.... and it was!

The only downside, is that it doesn't work all that great as a fully contained today widget workflow - due to a limitation with widgets and being unable to scroll a list. The work-around to that, is forcing it to run in the workflow app itself.

I've submitted the workflow to their Gallery, in the meantime you can download it with the link below.

Download on an iOS device: - Alfred Dropbox Snippets Workflow