App of the Week: IFTTT

This week’s app is pretty nifty. It communicates with other apps and devices via wifi or cellular network — all without code.

IFTTT

Don’t get me wrong, coding is very important, but for those of us who aren’t proficient (I’m still learning!) IFTTT (If This Then That) is a unicorn app sent down from the app heavens above.

The IFTTT app is available for Android and iOS devices but functionality can also be accessed online (for those of you with a Windows phone, for instance).

I use it to create backups of my photos to my Google Drive (I have an iPhone but don’t use many other Apple products…) by using the app to “tell” my phone to send my photos to my Google Drive. It also separates my screenshots from my camera roll so I can access those faster than going through all my pictures and videos. It does both of these things for me without my even having to think about it!

IFTTT can “tell” my Hue lights to turn on and off at a certain time and it also “tells” my Gmail to send my receipts to Evernote so that they’re organized and easier to find.

There are a myriad of ways IFTTT can simplify your life as it is compatible with so many devices and apps — both on your phone and around the house. It is compatible with Wemo, BMW, practically every social media app out there (I use it to save my “liked” tweets to a notebook on Evernote, for instance) as well as other smart home devices such as GE, Whirlpool or Samsung smart appliances, and iRobot.

It also sends you notifications about the weather, traffic or the news — all things you can tweak to your needs and wants (if rain is in the forecast, for instance, it will remind you to bring an umbrella…or if the NYT writes [yet another] article on Trump, it can alert you of that, too).

If you’re a Slack or Trello user (both are cool visual project collaboration tools), well, you should already know about IFTTT — but if you don’t — it’s def worth checking out. For example, f you create a new card on Trello — it can create a Google event in your Google Calendar! While I liked Trello’s reminders and calendar feature, I mainly use Google Calendar so this was an awesome feature for me.

For those of you who already use IFTTT — let me know how you use it! If you don’t have IFTTT, let me know if you think you could use it and how…

See you next week for another awesome app!