Between Dropbox, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Evernote, email and Google Calendars, we all have more than our handful of web, social media and cloud services that never interact. IFTTT (short for If This Then That) is a new app that aims to tie your accounts together.
If this all sounds perplexing, it’s simpler in practice. As soon as you start the app, you see examples of backing up Instagram photos directly to Dropbox or sending all your new contacts a “nice to meet you” email.
But before you can get to automating your digital life, there is a lot of initial setup. After creating a new account, you should tap over to the gear icon to access your “Channels.” You’ll be spending a lot of time connecting the app to all your web, social media and cloud service accounts.
We’re not done setting up though. Now you have to create automation recipes so these accounts can start interacting with each other automatically. To get started, you’ll have to get back to the main menu to tap on the little pestle and mortar icon on the upper right and then tap on the plus icon that comes up after that.
Luckily creating recipes is as simple as routing one service to interact with another. Mac programmers and automator junkies will be right at home here.
You can set up some incredibly cool automated tasks like creating a record of completed reminders into a Google Drive spreadsheet. Add all your Foursquare check-ins to a Google calendar. Post every Facebook like as a Tweet. One of the best uses of IFTTT, however, is to automatically upload your iOS camera roll to Facebook, Dropbox or Twitter.
The number of automated combinations you can make is nearly endless. But if you’re not quite picking up the concept immediately; there’s a collection of pre-fab recipes created by other users you can get to by tapping on the glasses icon on the upper left of the recipes tab. Here you can browse through recipes other IFTTT users have made based on popularity, whatever is trending or searches for particular services you want to start automating.
The best thing about IFTTT is that once you set up your automation recipes, you never have to check back into the app. If you’re still feeling antsy about leaving the app to do everything, you can also set each recipe to drop you a notification so you’ll know if it went through. The main screen of the app will also give you a daily log of everything IFTTT has automated for the day.
IFTTT has been around for the better part of a year as a web service, but the new app on iPhone (with an Android version coming soon) gives you the power to automate your digital life on the go. It takes a lot of initial setup but once you get going, but we think the setup pays off. After all, you’ll be able to automatically share, back-up and repost everything without having to switch between your apps.
Platform: iOS
Developer: IFTTT
Price: Free
Download now: iTunes