URL Actions
Many iOS apps have a custom URL scheme that allow you to launch them from other apps and pass small bits of information.
In its most basic form, Upshot's URL scheme is simply
upshot://If you type that URL into Mobile Safari, it will launch Upshot.
By adding various parameters to that URL, you can control Upshot and pass information back and forth between it and other apps.
The rest of this page describes what's possible with Upshot and URL Actions. At the bottom, there are links for quickly installing Upshot actions into other apps like Drafts.
You can launch Upshot and have it immediately take a specific action by using URL the actions below:
upshot://x-callback-url/photo
upshot://x-callback-url/video
upshot://x-callback-url/library
upshot://x-callback-url/audio
upshot://x-callback-url/text
Each of those URLs will launch Upshot and immediately launch the respective capture mode - camera, video camera, camera roll picker, audio recording, or text entry.
Those URLs also support a special parameter called x-success.
x-success allows you to specify a URL that Upshot will launch after successfully capturing your chosen media type. This allows you to launch Upshot, capture something, and then immediately switch back to the calling app. For example, the following URL will open Drafts after capture is complete:
upshot://x-callback-url/photo?x-success=drafts://x-callback-url/create
After capture, Upshot will automatically generate a shortened Dropbox share URL. When you specify an x-success callback URL, Upshot will call that URL and pass along a text parameter containing the shortened URL. The calling app can then use that short URL as it wishes. For example, when using the following URL, Upshot will pass the shortened URL back to Drafts as a new note.
upshot://x-callback-url/photo?x-success=drafts://x-callback-url/create
If the calling app does not suppor the text param, you can instead tell Upshot to copy the shortened link to the clipboard. To do this, append a © parameter to your URL action as shown below.
upshot://x-callback-url/photo?x-success=launch://©
In addition to the x-success parameter, Upshot also looks for a text parameter. When used, this text will be passed back to the calling app in its text parameter along with the shortened URL appended to it. Example:
upshot://x-callback-url/photo?text=Here%27s%20the%20link%20you%20wanted%3A%0A%0A&x-success=drafts://x-callback-url/create
To be honest, this text appending feature is really just a hack to be able to fetch a shortened link from Upshot and insert it into the current draft in Drafts.app, but other apps may find it useful as well.
Upshot can also be used to import any file available at a URL into Dropbox. To do this, just prepend upshot:// to the front of any URL in Mobile Safari. This will launch Upshot, which will download the file and then upload it into Dropbox. For example,
upshot://http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1e/Baseball_(crop).jpg
Note: This feature isn't yet available. We plan to launch it with the Upshot 1.2 update the week of August 18, 2014.
You can tap on the URLs below to import Upshot actions into Drafts.app.
If you have any questions about Upshot's URL actions or would like to suggest a feature, feel free to get in touch.