One of my businesses uses Highrise as its CRM tool to document all of its sales activities.
As Highrise is a hosted application, I want to make sure that we have access to regular backups of our data. Luckily, Highrise offers a handy export feature for this purpose. Unfortunately, those exports do take a sweet while to generate.
I generate weekly backups using this method and usually trigger their creation when I leave the office on Fridays. When the export is done, Highrise will email me with a URL to download the final export. However, I'm usually on my commute back home at that point and I'm not willing to spend my mobile data allowance on a backup file that I have no use for on a mobile device anyway.
To trigger the download on my iMac back in the office remotely, I came up with a little workflow involving Hazel on the Mac and Drafts on my iPhone (or iPad for that matter) that I'd like to share with you today.
The Ingredients
The Concept
The basic setup consists of a Dropbox folder that is watched by Hazel. This folder is then populated with text files generated on an iOS device with Drafts (usually from the clipboard), containing the URLs to download. When Hazel finds a qualifying file, an Automator workflow is kicked off to start the download into a pre-defined folder and then it removes the text file that triggered the download.
Hazel can then be setup to further process the triggered downloads as those usually follow a pretty distinct filename pattern. In this specific case, I'm sorting those backup files into their own folder with a revised filename to include the date of the backup. These follow-up rules are applied to the main Downloads folder, so they're universally applicable whether you trigger the downloads from your Mac or, in this case, remotely.
The iOS Part
As I mentioned before, the URL I want to start downloading on my Mac is usually stored on the clipboard.
My first attempt at this workflow tried to solve the initial trigger through a bookmarklet on iOS. This, however, would require me to actually visit the download URL on my iPhone, starting the download itself in most cases. Since this is hardly desirable, I abandoned this tactic.
Instead, I will visit whatever page (or email) containing the download link and copy that link to the system clipboard using a tap-and-hold gesture. This will also work nicely in third-party browsers on iOS, some of which have very poor support for bookmarklets. (Chrome, I'm looking in your direction.)
Once the URL is on the clipboard, there are a variety of ways to get that URL into a file in Dropbox. I use Drafts, since it supports a nice way of timestamping those individual files. This way, the workflows don't trip each other up by, for example, removing entries from a file while you're already appending the next URL to download to the same file.
Here's the Dropbox Action I setup in Drafts.
In essence, it uses the contents of the current buffer ([[draft]]) to create a new file in Dropbox under the /Apps/Drafts/ path and names that file with the prefix download_urls (which we will pick up in Hazel later) and a timestamp suffix. An example filename would be download_urls-2013-03-10-16-46-10.txt.
Now, you could just open Drafts, paste in the clipboard contents, and then trigger the appropriate Dropbox action by manually selecting it from the Actions menu. But with the recent surge of support for and clever tricks involving URL schemes, we can do better than that.
The recent 1.1 update of Launch Center Pro brings with it support for passing on the clipboard contents to an action of your choosing. This way, with the press of a single button in Launch Center Pro we can trigger the remainder of the workflow in Drafts without any manual intervention.
Here's my trigger in Launch Center Pro:
drafts://x-callback-url/create?text=[clipboard]&action=Download%20Desktop
Using the drafts:// URL scheme, we tell Drafts to create a new note, the contents of which are provided by Launch Center Pro with the new [clipboard] placeholder, containing the contents of the, you guessed it, system clipboard. Lastly, we tell Drafts to trigger the action "Download Desktop", which we created before. (The name of the action needs to be URL-encoded.)
With this setup, after placing the URL on the clipboard, I can invoke Launch Center Pro from my iPhone's dock, tap the "Download to Desktop" icon, and the rest is handled behind the scenes.
Since that "rest" also involves the actual download, let's continue on the Mac.
The Mac Part
The first thing we need is a folder to hold the trigger files. As I mentioned in the section creating the Drafts Dropbox action, I picked /Apps/Drafts/ within my Dropbox folder in this example, as that is the default location where Drafts puts text files created in Dropbox. This folder is then handed to Hazel for surveillance.
In Hazel itself, the following rule takes care of feeding the right files into the Automator workflow that does all the heavy lifting.
When the Automator action is done performing its magic, we tell Hazel to remove the file it just finished processing, in order to not clutter up that folder over time.
The Automator workflow itself takes the textfile and uses OS X's built-in data detectors to make sure what we're feeding to the next action are actual URLs. This is just a safety measure and shouldn't be strictly necessary given that we're the only ones feeding this workflow, but you never know.
To handle the actual download, we use Automator's built-in "Download URLs" action. You need to be aware that this uses Safari behind the scenes. So if the URL you're trying to send it for download is only accessible to logged-in users, be sure to login using Safari beforehand.
I'm sending those downloads to the regular OS X "Downloads" folder, which, in turn, is guarded by Hazel. Once those Highrise backups land there, another Hazel rule is triggered to take those backups and sort them into their own folder after renaming the zip-file to include the current date.
An Alternative for iPad
Instead of Launch Center Pro, you can also trigger the Drafts Action through Pythonista, which comes in handy if you're using this from an iPad for example. (There is no Launch Center Pro for iPad, as of yet.) Since Pythonista scripts can be saved as icons to your homescreen, you could even save a tap by storing the icon directly on the homescreen.
Here's the Pythonista script to accomplish this:
import webbrowser
import urllib
import clipboard
base_url = 'drafts://x-callback-url/create?'
url_text = clipboard.get()
params = {
'text': url_text,
'action': 'Download_Desktop',
}
webbrowser.open(base_url + urllib.urlencode(params))
Conclusion
So, there you have it. Downloads on your Mac, triggered remotely from your iOS device using Launch Center Pro (or Pythonista), Drafts, Hazel, and Automator.
Here's a video demonstrating the components working together.
Hit me up on Twitter as @patricklenz if you have additional tricks and automations up your sleeve that make the combination of Mac and iOS even more joyful.
