006: Shortcuts

New features in Eyeball.

Happy new year!

Shortcuts. By request, we’ve added Shortcuts support for iOS. This functionality is currently in beta so there will probably be some annoying things in there. (We are working on background saving.)

Shortcuts is an automations tool on your phone that allows you to create multi-step actions on your device that you can manage via the Shortcuts app and widgets. For example, you could save a link to Eyeball as part of saving that link to multiple other apps. Or you could also save to Eyeball when taking a screenshot.

If you do use Shortcuts, what does Eyeball fit into your routines? Please let us know. I’m very curious.

While we’re at it, I want to share an essay by someone who I admire, an indie builder in Japan called Takuya Matsuyama. He created InkDrop, a notes app for developers. It makes it easy to save things in markdown, a format for saving style alongside the text.

Takuya wrote a lovely blog post last week about what he called linear apps, like his. His app is not trying to think for you or to tell you how to think, in the way that some of his notes-app competitors are trying to do by building a second brain or mind maps or neural networks. Takuya leaves it up to you to figure out what it is that you want to do with notes that you save. He says:

My conclusion is simple: You don’t need an app to connect your notes for you. That is your brain’s job.

I really liked that. Eyeball is also a linear app.