Integration Between 3rd Party iPhone Apps – Huge Potential?
I just posted a short while ago about a new integration between the AP Mobile and Evernote iPhone apps, which lets you easily and directly clip news articles from AP straight over to Evernote.
Up to now, I ‘d not heard much about 3rd party app to 3rd party app integration in the iPhone OS 3.0. I know we can copy & paste between all apps, and that we now have in-app email being adopted by a number of apps “ but this level of collaboration between 3rd party apps feels much more exciting to me.
When you make use of the clip to Evernote feature in AP Mobile, it not only does the clipping, but it takes you straight to Evernote and the newly clipped-in article. To me, this is getting awfully close to ‘background apps ‘ territory, and that ‘s a very, very good thing!
Of course, I know this is not true background apps “ but it feels more in the neighborhood, and more useful to me, than push notifications do in most cases.
I am already starting to think of more app-to-app action (and interaction) I ‘d like to see. The one I would most like to see come along is some ‘Add to Things ‘ action. I ‘d love to be able to just quickly throw a Twitter message, or email, or other items into Things “ my favorite to-do application, as a new task.
One thing that would make this even neater and even closer to background apps is if there was a ‘Return to App A ‘ sort of button, if (for example in the AP Mobile to Evernote example) AP is App A and Evernote is App B.
Anyway, I am very keen to see more of these inter-app integrations and interactions.
What do you all think of the potential in this capability in OS 3.0? What would be some of your favorite apps / implementations of it?
I like this idea as well. I think they could further this multi-tasking illusion by implementing a global 4 finger swipe down gesture like the one used on the MacBooks. This would trigger expose, as expected, but because only one app runs at a time, it should, instead, show a screen-capped image w/ its respective icon for a couple of the last used apps for the user to swipe through and switch to. Also, it should always show the first party Apps like Mail, Safari, etc. This would preserve and better the illusion while not compromising battery life with actual multitasking and maintain consistency with the rest of the Mac laptop lines.
Nice idea. I'll take some of that please.
This would be very nice. In a somewhat similar fashion, I've heard rumors that BigBoss is making the SBSettings process list allow you to switch between currently running processes. Paired with Backgrounder, that's pretty much real multitasking in an easy to use interface. On the 3G, I had apps crashing due to lack of memory, but Backgrounded apps have caused me absolutely zero issues on the 3GS. I can't imagine Apple is going to keep dodging this for too much longer.
Hope you're right about Apple. SB Settings has always been such a great app, and that addition would be excellent.
Very promising… and certainly lots of potential!
Glad you feel that too. Hope we start to see lots more of this soon. I'm honestly more keen to see more of this than I am more of push executions.
My application, NearCinema, searches for available Twitter clients to integrate with Twitter. This is a feature provided by OS 3.0, you can query for available URL handlers (applications) and enable (or disable) features depending on the results.
I may be misunderstanding what your app does, but don't most Twitter apps already have a 'Nearby' type feature to show other Twitter users within X miles and so forth?
Hello! Actually, my application has nothing to do with Twitter directly, it only integrates with Twitter by using available Twitter clients on your device. This is why I mentioned the application here
I like this design of using existing clients to provide another feature, like Twitter functionality… I would like to have other apps using that (integrating with other apps).
My bad – silly question in my previous comment. Now I've got it, and I like hearing that you're using this intra-app integration.