It is a well-known secret that connecting to public Wifi is a huge security risk. Every connection your device makes via a HTTP other users in the same network can read. Connections via HTTPS (green highlighting in the address bar) is fine though. To improve security you should use a VPN provider. But if you are new to the game, you might be lost by the numerous offers in the AppStore. We provide an overview and give you a recommendation on which providers to use.

VPN providers in iOS

A year ago with iOS 9 Apple introduced new APIs for apps so they could offer VPN access at system level. This means you can install an app and it will install a profile that lets you connect to their servers via the System Settings. All device traffic is then tunneled through their servers.

1. F-Secure Freedome VPN

The first in the list is F-Secure Freedome VPN. F-Secure is a well know manufacturer of security software and has a great stance in the industry. The app itself is free but the service starts at 5,99€ a month after a 5 days long trial. If you are required to use a VPN to get your work done in public places paying means more security, more engineers that work on it and a better connection.

2. Opera Free VPN

The next one in the list is Opera VPN from the makers of the Opera web browser. As the name suggests it is completely free to use and has no In-App Purchases. The main goal of the application is to block ads and trackers but it also helps to encrypt your connection. I would not use it to do security sensitive things but it is good for casual browsing.

3. Tunnelbear

I am a big fan of Tunnelbear since I discovered it a year ago. The service exists for some time now and is well trusted in the community. They provide their own servers in twenty countries around the world. Setup is easy and you get 500MB a month for free. Plans start at 7.99€ a month for unlimited data. The application itself is very nicely done and you see exactly what is happening in the interface. The bears help a lot, too.

Conclusion

I picked these three VPN providers as they offer a bit of everything. F-Secure is very good for security intensive work, Opera is free and good enough for private use and casual browsing and Tunnelbear is a jack of all trades and my recommendation to you. You can start with the free plan to try it out.

3 VPN Providers that work well with iOS was originally published in MobileOnly.Tools on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Seven articles into this blog journey I think it is time to talk about our setup. Most of you might not realize that everything on this blog was done on iOS devices, yes also on iPhone.

My main goal for this blog was to encourage you to see the great value in iOS as a next generation mobile operating system and show ways on how to do things differently. This means laying the groundwork to get you up to speed using iOS more often. I knew this idea is very ambitious and would go out of scope of what I could blog on Git2Go.com.

The blogging engine

Choosing what Content Management System (CMS) powers your blog or website is a key decision, as it is harder to switch later on. I went with Jekyll for my blogging and host it on GitHub Pages, this is a sophisticated setup but once you are familiar with it it means you have no servers or databases to maintain. If I were not a developer, I would have probably gone with Wordpress or Medium. Both enjoy great support throughout iOS apps and are easy to maintain. The way you publish depends on the CMS you use. For me it means using Git2Go and GitHub to publish articles. If you chose Wordpress or Medium you can use the Wordpress or Medium app.

Coming up with topics

Before we write a new article, we have to brainstorm on articles and let them settle. To organize my ideas I use Trello. They have a great iOS app with offline support and optimized for every iOS device. I have 3 columns: Articles, This Week, Done. Future headlines go into Articles. They get prioritized in the list and I drag them into the This Week column when I do my planning Monday morning. After they are published they go into Done which I clean up every once in a while.

This approach enables me to add topics wherever I am, whichever device I am using. All cards and comments get synced with my other devices and I can attach links, lists, images, videos, etc.

Writing

My goal is to write every single day of the week. Being able to do this mobile is not only the topic of this blog, but crucial to fulfill my writing goal. I am not only able to write mobile but also able to publish from mobile. I write all my articles in Ulysses on my iPad Pro in full-screen with typewriter mode enabled. This gives me the great focus I love on iOS. Although the same is possible on their macOS app, I somehow get into the crunch mode when I use iOS. I think it is because apps always were full screen whereas macOS apps where always single windows, sometimes multiple on top of each other and I would rarely move into full screen mode. Somehow I feel like missing out on something when using it on the desktop.

Publishing

Once I finished writing today’s article I use a Workflow to send it to my Git app Git2Go. From there I put the images into their folder and format the article with metadata so Jekyll knows who wrote it and can sort the articles.

My girlfriend always proof reads my articles in form of Pull Requests and once she finishes, I merge it into the master branch and GitHub will build the static site you are currently looking at.

Conclusion

This process might sound complicated if you hear it for the first time but as all the parts are already at your disposal, it is easy to get started with it and publish more articles in less time using iOS. It took me around two to three days to get the site kup and running but you can use something like Medium or Wordpress to get up to speed faster. The only thing that matters about writing is the writing, not your blogging engine.

How we write this blog solely on iOS was originally published in MobileOnly.Tools on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Share and action extensions are invaluable when working on iOS and you may not even know that you have used them. We will go over the basic concepts of extensions and highlight a few great ones in this article.

There are two types of extensions present in iOS apps: share and action extensions. Both are valuable in your daily workflows and developers created unique ways to interact with them. Use share extensions are to share text, images or videos to social networks or other apps. Think of it as leaving the current app and continuing in another. Use action extensions to modify content in place without leaving the app. Examples of share extensions are:

• Share to (Facebook, Twitter, Reminders, Notes etc.)
• Import with (Dropbox, Mailchimp, PDF Expert etc.)

While these examples look straight forward, everything that does not fit into the above list should be an action extension:

• Print
• Copy
• Run Workflow
• Save Image

They can be application specific. A developer can decide if his action extension is only available in their app only or in any other. The only way to get it out of their apps is to talk to them and ask them to make it available.

Share Extensions

Any action in a share extension will take the selected content and send it to another app by either leaving the current app or by displaying a share sheet:

Developers can provide custom UI, like Notes, or use the standard look and feel, like Twitter.

There is a third kind of share extensions that gets automatically added when a developer supports certain types of files. These follow the naming scheme Copy to… (before iOS 10) and Import with… (iOS 10). They take the selected file and copy them into the selected app. This is similar to document providers discussed in our Introduction to Document Providers article.

Action Extensions

Share extensions follow some kind of order but with action extensions, it feels like the wild west. Developers can add application specific action extensions, some action extensions should have been share extensions, some leave the app, some stay within the app. But with great chaos come great possibilities.

Examples of application wide action extensions are Print by Apple and Run Workflow by Workflow, let us see what they can do for us.

Print

Apple introduced AirPrint in iOS 4.2 along with the iPad. Users coming from macOS will miss a function called “Print as PDF” known from the print dialogue. Until iOS 10 developers had to build it themselves, but now Apple integrated it into the standard AirPrint action extension.

You can try it out yourself by going to notes and select the share icon (Square box with an upwards facing arrow) and tapping Print this will give you the print dialogue and you could select a network printer. Now pinch on the preview of the page and it will open a QuickLook window where you select the share icon again and you can export or email a PDF from iOS.

Run Workflow

Workflow is an app that lets you build small apps yourself and use them anywhere in iOS by running as an action extension. We showed you 7 Workflows we cannot live without in a previous article.

A workflow I use when writing this blog is the Screenshot Builder Action which takes a screenshot and posts the device frame around it so it looks beautiful.

Action extensions not only work on files, but on urls and text as well. An interesting workflow is to tweet the currently selected text in a Safari Webpage.

Conclusion

As you see, share and action extensions are great ways to take advantage of system functionality or even extend them using Workflow. One important thing to note is that action extensions provided by other apps are not displayed automatically. Tap on the more Icon in the list and enable them. Once you enabled them you will see them all around iOS and it will help you accomplish your daily tasks even faster.

Introduction to Share and Action Extensions was originally published in MobileOnly.Tools on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Many people believe iOS has no file system like a Mac or PC. But as always it is just different than what you are used to. Join me on a small journey into the files and folders of iOS. After that you will be delighted how great iOS is at handling files.

Files are essential to your daily work and entertainment. It is important for a modern operating system to handle all file types well and let users interact them in all ways possible. Of course iOS is no different here. Files were on the first iPhone and the latest iPad pro. What is missing from iOS is a central app that lets you browse all files on your storage. macOS has the Finder, Windows the Explorer and iOS? Document Providers.

Overview

The way iOS handles files is revolutionizing and different from what you are used to. Until iOS 8 you could barely exchange files between apps but thankfully that changed.

Document Providers where introduced in 2014 to help apps like Dropbox and Google Drive bring the file you have in the cloud to your local device and your apps. Document Providers support four different modes of interaction: Import, Export, Open and Move. This may be hard to grasp, but I will give you an example for each of them:

• Import: Import a photo you stored in Dropbox into Pixelmator
• Export: Export a photo from Pixelmator to Google Drive
• Open: Open a markdown file from Documents in Ulysses and edit the contents in place
• Move: Move a text file from Ulysses to Documents (this will delete the file in Ulysses)

As you can see, you can do any operation you want using document providers. Unfortunately they aren’t unified and it depends on the app you are using which operations they support and how they are implemented. Lets dive into the examples.

For most of our articles I need to take screenshots, alter them in different ways and import them into Ulysses. To do so, I use iCloud Drive, Workflow and Pixelmator.

Export Pictures to iCloud Drive

For this article I made screenshots to show you the different actions. I took the screenshots, framed them using Workflow and put them into a folder in Photos. After I annotated them, I exported them into iCloud Drive and organized them into my folder structure.

Edit in Pixelmator

Now that all my photos framed and named, I can edit them in Pixelmator to blur off parts of the screenshot. To do that, I import them from iCloud Drive using the Add icon in the upper left corner and choose iCloud Drive. After I have done my edits, I choose the Share icon in the navigation bar and choose Send to iCloud Drive to export the image as JPEG file to iCloud Drive.

Conclusion

This is a small introduction on working with Document Providers. I am sure you will notice them from now on if you haven’t already. One hint: they are often labeled as iCloud Drive even if other apps offer the same Document Provider features. You can switch between them using the Locations button in the navigation bar.

iOS has no file system? Introduction to Document Providers was originally published in MobileOnly.Tools on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let me introduce Documents 5 to you. Documents 5 is an app developed by Readdle, a company mostly know for PDF Expert. It is a file manager unlike any other, which understands many file formats from JPEG and PNG to DOCX and Numbers. It connects to your FTP, WebDAV, Dropbox, Box and even Office 365 account.

It truly is a one-app-fits-all file manager. You can transfer files between storage providers, import them into other apps, organize everything in folders and add favorites. It can even play mp3 files in a playlist, a feature Apple still has not added to the stock music app, and play many video formats.

But back to our initial problem of the archive someone sends to you. For this test I downloaded the Ulysses Press Kit from their website. It is a 206 MB ZIP archive full of beautiful images of people writing books in different locations. To download bigger files, I like to use iCab Mobile which excels when it comes to downloading files (This also works with files downloaded in Safari).

Choose to download the archive and it will add it to the integrated download manager and until the download is finished you can continue browsing.

Once the download is finished I can tap on the archive, where I can choose to extract the file directly in iCab Mobile. But as I want to save the contents in Documents 5 for later use, I choose to select Open in another app which will show a share sheet. I had to scroll to the very end of the first section to find Documents 5. You can reorder the apps using the More option at the end of first section.

Depending on the size of the file this can take a while to switch to Documents. It will automatically add the file to my documents directory and I can organize it into my desired folder later. I choose to extract the file by tapping on it once. I am greeted with a Processing activity indicator that extracts the archive contents into the current directory.

I had to hurry making a screenshot as the app is lightning fast extracting the archive. It will highlight the extracted files or folder for a few moments and I am free to do whatever you want with the results.

Conclusion

Documents does a very good job at extracting archives. I tried the same scenario with different file types and it could always extract the files without any problems.

Even if you do not plan to use Documents as your main document provider it still proves to be very helpful with the sheer amount of file types it accepts.

How to extract ZIP or RAR archives on your iOS device for was originally published in MobileOnly.Tools on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Siri got released 4 years ago on October 4, 2011 and is available for iOS, watchOS, tvOS and since Sierra also for macOS. It got physical when the fourth generation Apple TV got introduced with a Siri Remote. It is the only personal assistant that speaks twenty languages, including Chinese, Danish, Japanese, Korean and Malay. Many of us use it daily for ordinary tasks, but I would love to show you my five favorite commands I didn’t know existed.

1. Currency conversion

You know the drill, you are in a country where you aren’t familiar with the local currency and you need to convert it into your own. Or you are shopping for new things online and want to know if you save or lose money ordering it abroad. Siri, with the help of Yahoo, can easily help you with that.

Hey Siri, what’s $200 in euros

The current conversion rate gets pulled from the Internet and Siri converts everything for you. It is definitely faster and easier than googling for the conversion rate, especially when you want to focus on your current task.

2. Date calculation

Are your kids begging you to think of their Christmas gifts already? Maybe you are on a deadline and want to know how many days you have left to calm your nerves?

Siri can easily be of good value here. You can ask her to tell you the days until a certain event, the weekday of a date and ask other complex queries that would else take you quite some time to figure out.

Sample Queries:

Hey Siri, what day was 72 days ago?

Hey Siri, how many days until Christmas?

3. Time

Of course you can look at the clock to find out the time, but sometimes you have to set a meeting in a different country on a different continent in a different time zone and we all know how this might end. To help you, Siri can do the same queries as with Dates. Ask what time it is at home or how late it is in Singapore. Simple and safe.

Hey Siri, what time is it in Singapore?

4. Messaging

Many people love dictating messages on their phone. New in iOS 10 are Messenger extensions for Siri. Why not take it to the next level and compose the whole message and send it with your favorite messaging app? This lets you keep your hands on the wheel or in the dough and still text with your friends or coworkers using WhatsApp, Telegram or iMessage.

Hey Siri, text Julia von Kallenberg I’m in a meeting

To use WhatsApp with this feature I had to go to the Siri Settings and enable WhatsApp in “App Support”. After that using it is super convenient and I suspect other messengers, like Facebook Messenger or Threema to take advantage of that feature in the short term, too.

Hey Siri, send a text message using WhatsApp

Just dictate your text and send it off. It will repeat the message again to avoid any awkward moments or typos and you can focus on your work again.

5. Photos

Also introduced with iOS 10 is a new feature which lets Photos index your photos using a complicated machine learning algorithm. This will let you search for pictures that contain certain objects like boats, mountains or even sports cars.

This can be handy if you are putting a presentation together or want to remember that day in the mountains.

Hey Siri, show me photos of sports cars

This will open photos with the selected query. You have to unlock your phone to do that but once you do, it does a very good job.

Conclusion

Now that we have seen which five useful things Siri can do for us, we can go on and explore the nearly endless possibilities of Apples personal assistant that speaks your language. If you want to explore more, the folks over at Hey-Siri.io got you covered. They are currently working on a new version of the website, which takes the brand new Siri extensions of iOS 10 into account. Their website currently supports English and German as well as iOS and macOS Sierra.

Siri can not only help you on your iOS devices but also in your car. If your car supports CarPlay, you can use your integrated Infotainment system to interact with iOS apps using Siri. Helping you to keep focused on traffic.

5 useful things you wouldn’t think Siri can do for you was originally published in MobileOnly.Tools on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When switching from your PC or Mac to living on the iPad, and in the iOS ecosystem, you are going to miss some things for sure. One of the things I missed recently was having a great and customizable tool to convert videos. On your Mac or PC you would use an app like Handbrake but sadly this is not available on iOS.

There are a couple of online services, who specialize in converting videos, audio and photos into various formats, but they all have several flaws. One of the biggest ones is that you have to upload the video to the service in order to convert it. Why not take advantage of the great A9X chipset that is built into your device? Why not convert it without leaving the device? Offline.

Meet iConv

The name of your solution is iConv, an app available for all iOS devices from iOS 8.0 and above. It has support for iOS split screen and multitasking and works beautifully on the iPad Pro. I personally used this app for a month now. You can import videos in all ways possible:

• Import from a Document Provider
• Copy via iTunes on your computer
• via “Copy to iConv” action from other apps
• Import from Camera Roll

How I use iConv

One day, I had to convert a video on my iPad and was looking for an app which can convert videos into native iOS formats and supports document providers. Sadly there was no such thing in the App Store on that date but I bought iConv nevertheless. The app looked the most promising throughout the competition and the pricing seemed right. A couple of days later the app got an update with support for document providers.

My use case was simple: I wanted to make some tweaks to a video a coworker shared with me on Dropbox. To import the video into Pinnacle Studio Pro or iMove. Sadly both apps can only handle MP4 files and the video I wanted to use was a QuickTime movie file (mov). Today I can just open iConv on my iPad, import the video from Dropbox and convert it to MP4.

The app has support for over ten different video formats including: MP4, QuickTime Movie (mov), Matroska Multimedia Container (mkv) and Windows Movie Video (wmv) to name a few. The same goes with the audio formats: ac3, aac and m4a are only three of the eleven the app supports.

The conversion itself is fast and the 2.19 GHz processor in the iPad Pro is doing a great job. For my sample Matroska video file of 28 minutes in length and 227 MB took roughly 13 minutes to convert into MP4. The resulting video file was 868 MB big.

For comparison I dusted my retina 13-inch MacBook Pro and did the same conversion there using Handbrake and it took about 6:30 minutes to complete but the resulting file size was only 165 MB.

My guess on why the file size differs that much is that Handbrake is applying a much better compression. In other comparisons I saw that Handbrakes compression was better than iMovie (on the Mac) and was only beaten by Final Cut Pro.

Once the conversion finishes you can play the file directly in iConv or use the “Open in …” functionality and copy it to other apps like Dropbox, Google Drive or VLC.

Conclusion

If you are making the switch to iOS and are searching fo a way to convert video on your iOS device, without the need to upload them, iConv is a great option. The app is free and comes with a $4.99 In-App Purchase to remove the ads and unlock additional features.

The app is definitely quite niche right now but a great addition to any productivity setup. You know, when a Windows friend sends you a WMV file.

How to convert videos right on your iOS device was originally published in MobileOnly.Tools on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Workflow is an app, which connects apps and actions to automate your daily iOS tasks. You can alter text, links, images or videos and perform various actions on them. Take an amount of money to figure out on how to split bills. Browse a website in Safari and send it as PDF. Take a photo of your kid and automatically post it to different social media platforms.

We discovered Workflow in 2015 but until you find a good stream of workflows to work with, it can be cumbersome to create your own. At times it is overwhelming to even come up with ideas as the possibilities are endless. A couple of months ago we discovered a website called workflow.directory, which has an extensive list of ready-to-go workflows. The in-app gallery contains a growing list of options, too. To help you get started, we curated a list of our seven favourite workflows.

1. File Downloader

Downloading files from the Internet can be a challenge using standard iOS tools like Safari. If you want to download files from other apps like Tweetbot or a message a friend sent you, the chances are high you could make use of this workflow. It accepts any URL and offers to save it to another app. You can also add multiple other steps to modify the downloaded file afterwards, e.g. download a Zip file, unzip them and save them to Dropbox. Things impossible with the onboard tools.

Get the workflow

2. Make PDF

Sometimes it can be handy to save an article you read on the Internet as PDF. Imagine you wrote a note using the built-in Notes app and want to send it to a friend as a PDF. Things again impossible until Apple adds export as PDF to AirPrint. But Workflow has you covered here with the make PDF action. This action accepts Rich Text, Text and URLs. It can be triggered from the standard iOS share action. You can save the resulting PDF or send it off directly via Mail or Messages.

Get the workflow

3. Days Between

Ever wondered how many days are between two dates? There is a workflow for that. I personally used this a fair bit to see how many nights we have to book a Hotel for or to see how many days are left this month. This workflow can be triggered from the Today Widget or from your Apple Watch. Very handy in conversations and quick interactions. You can change this workflow to always use the current date as the start instead of asking for it every time.

Get the workflow

4. Delete latest screenshots

Is your iCloud storage running low on space again or is your photo stream full of screenshots and you would like to clean up a bit? Sure, you could go through the Screenshots photo album and select every screenshot to be deleted. You can also let your iOS device do the hard work for you and carry on with your day. This workflow asks you for the number of screenshots you want to delete and goes through your screenshots with you. It lets you skip multiple photos, if you want to keep some of the precious screenshots. All options can also be disabled making sure you get rid of your photos fast and easy.

Get the workflow

5. Get current price of an app in the App Store

If you are as excited about productivity apps as we are, chances are you want to tell someone else about them. The first question that usually comes up is how much the app costs. But since you already own the app, the App Store is hiding the price from you. Once again a workflow to the rescue. Trigger this workflow directly from the apps App Store page and it will tell you the current price in a blink of an eye.

Get the workflow

6. Direct Dropbox Link

There are times in a life of a human being where it is necessary to get directly to something. Sharing files in Dropbox is one of them. The Dropbox app and website only give you links that result on a website which has the file embedded. Worry no more. This workflow gets straight to it. Trigger it right from the Dropbox app and it will copy a direct link to your clipboard. Perfect for embedding an image in a website or to use it in the file downloader action from the beginning of this article.

Get the workflow

7. Cross-Post

If you are like me and you have different groups of friends on different social media channels it is time consuming to cross post a photo on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Luckily we now have Workflow, which comes with a cross-post workflow. It lets you choose a photo or a video and provide a catchy caption and off you go. This one can also be easily altered to accept links you see on Safari as well.

Get the workflow

Conclusion

We think there are endless possibilities in the Workflow app. More people could take advantage of this app and use it on a regular basis. It is updated regularly updated to better integrate with other apps and services like Ulysses or iTranslate. The provided Today Widget, Action Extension and Apple Watch app enable you to have a workflow for everything.

Workflows are what we knew as apps in 2008 when the App Store launched. Making it possible to create your own small apps without the need to know how to code.

Workflow is available in the AppStore and costs $ 3.99. An absolute bargain if you ask me.

7 Workflows we cannot live without was originally published in MobileOnly.Tools on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.