Update March 17, 2025: minor improvement thanks to Workflow’s recrntly-added action to resolve a shortened URL, allowing the workflow to better find mp3s behind URL shortened.
Workflow is a hot iOS app. (Obligatory Viticci link!) I love what people are doing with it. While I have some tinkery workflows that I experiment with, my favorite daily-use workflow is one I made for Huffduffer, Jeremy Keith’s wonderful podcast collector service.
(What’s Huffduffer? Briefly, it’s a way to grab one-off episodes of podcasts that you’re not subscribed to, watch others' podcast feeds, and find interesting things related to what you’re listening to. It’s really fantastic, and you should go try it.)
Huffduffer provides a bookmarklet that works very well when you’re already in your browser, but most of the podcasts I want to add to my Huffduffer feed come to my attention via Twitter (currently, Twitterific). There isn’t a full-featured API that could replace this bookmarklet, so I used Workflow to do something sipmle but so valuable to me:
- Grab a URL as input
- Send URL to the HFDF bookmarklet
- Pop the output into Safari (where I’m already authenticated to HFDF)
- This comes back as a browser window where the bookmarklet has done its work to identify episode download URL and metadata
- I hit go and complete the addition of the episode to my HFDF feed.
The thing that sets this capability into the “whoa” category for me, is that the whole workflow is set up to work as an action extension, so all I have to do to invoke it is long-press a podcast URL in Twitterific to bring up the share menu, then tap “run workflow” and pick HFDF. It’s not quite as clean as it could be if there were a full API and app (in the style of Pinboard and Pushpin), but it feels far native than opening the link in Safari and then locating and running the bookmarklet. It’s one of my favorite things.
Another of my favorite uses (that I forgot to note when I published this the first time) is from within Overcast (and other podcast apps that enable the share extensions), where long-pressing on an episode link in show notes of one podcast can bring up the run workflow share action and then the Huffudffer bookmarklet for that link. It’s really slick, and a super-quick way to grab other shows that are mentioned within one show (assuming the creators post good show notes, of course). The same goes for sharing the now-playing episode to Huffduffer, which adds it to your feed for your HFDF followers to pick up.
You can download and try out my HFDF workflow for yourself. Enjoy!