My eight-month-old son woke up the other morning really struggling to breathe. I took him to the emergency room and it turned out he had RSV. I was forced to spend the day in the hospital.
To add insult to injury, however, my other son was going to have his birthday party that very day. Change of plans. I had previously sent an email invite to all of the parents in his first-grade class and the RSVPs had been trickling in over the previous few days. My wife was still at home with our other three munchkins, so it was up to me to let all of these parents know that he party had been cancelled ... using only my iPhone.
I had already made a text file containing the names of everyone who had RSVPd for the party in Brett Terpstra's incredible nvALT on my iMac at work. This app syncs text files through Dropbox with Byword (a great text editor) on my iPhone so I was easily able to access the file with just a couple of taps.
Working from that master list I was able to easily search for those emails in Google's Gmail iOS app. I use this app instead of the native Mail iOS app because of the clean interface, the way it handles multiple gmail accounts, and the Google search functionality.
Some parents had left cell numbers in their RSVP emails, and I wanted to be able to text them as quickly as possible and email the rest. I drafted a quick email and copied it into Pastebot - a great little app that remembers what I have copied onto my clipboard allows me to switch between different snippets of copied text. The workflow became this:
- Search for email in the Gmail app.
- If there is no cell #, reply to the email with pasted email from Pastebot.
- If there is a cell #, copy it, open Messages and paste the number into the recipient field. Then open Pastebot and switch to my previously copied email message, switch back to Messages and paste the message into the text field.
Using this method I was able to fly through my list in Byword, adding an asterisk next to the names of the kids as I notified their parents of the change of plans.
I know that this is maybe not a big deal for a lot of people, but these simple apps working together made it possible for me to quickly and with little friction get the task done, with time left over to write up this little post - also in Byword.
nvALT on Mac
Byword for iPhone
Gmail for iOS
Pastebot for iPhone