Make It Easy to Access Telltail on Your iPhone
While you can open the Telltail website and copy from and paste text into it, it would be convenient if we could do it from anywhere. We'll do that in here using Shortcuts, an app that Apple provides.
It's okay if you don't know much about Shortcuts; all of our setup would be automated anyway. If you're curious, Shortcuts app lets you create your own little apps, which can run anytime when we ask them to. Each of this little app is called a shortcut.
Before You Start
You need to install Shortcuts app. Tap here to do that.
Once Shortcuts app is installed, you need to install this shortcut first. (Remember that a shortcut is its own little app?) We need it because our other shortcuts we use will depend on it.
If you haven't installed and configured Tailscale yet, you should do it. Also keep the tailnet name at hand.
Install Shortcuts
We provide three shortcuts: one to retrieve the text that we have in Telltail into phone's clipboard, another to send the text we've already copied in our phone and one more to send the text via Share Sheet. You can install them by tapping on each of the following links:
Let's configure them for easy access:
Switch to List View
Once you would open Shortcuts app, you would notice that the shortcuts are displayed in a grid fashion. To edit them, we need to be precisely tapping on those three dots at the top right of each shortcut, otherwise we'll execute it. To avoid that, we can switch to List view by tapping on the icon that looks like four boxes at the top right of the page.
Get From Telltail
In Shortcuts app, tap Get from Telltail. Tap on 🛈 at the bottom, and then tap on Add to Home Screen.
This lets you to quickly jump to home screen, tap on the shortcut and jump back to the app you were in and paste the text that you had in Telltail.
Send Clipboard to Telltail
Open Settings and search for "back tap". A result for Touch will appear. Tap on that. Scroll to the bottom to find Back Tap and press it and then press on Double Tap. Now scroll to the bottom to find a section on Shortcuts. Press on Send Clipboard to Telltail to select the option.
With this you can double tap at the back of your phone to send off the text you copied on your phone to Telltail.
If you're finding that it is being mis-triggered a lot, you could try Triple Tap option instead.
Send to Telltail
Open any page on Safari so that the share button gets enabled. Tap on the button, scroll to the bottom to find "Edit Actions...". Upon pressing that a sheet will pop up, and in the Other Actions you'd find Send to Telltail. Press on the green plus button to move that option to the top.
With this, you can directly share text and links to Telltail.
Start Using
With Center and Sync already configured in your laptop/desktop, and now Telltail configured in your phone as well, you can start copying and pasting from one another.
Do note that because of privacy notifications, you would initially encounter popups in your iPhone. Either use Allow or Always Allow if the option is available. The number of popups that appear would reduce to one for each combination of app opened × shortcut used, and none will appear on successive use. All in all, the more times you'd use Telltail, the lesser popups would appear.
Conserving Battery
People on Reddit and GitHub have reported that they are noticing a significant battery drain if they keep Tailscale VPN on. Few others have replied that it is not the case for them. In case the drain affects your phone, you can use Shortcuts app to create an automation: disconnect from Tailscale at a specific time of the day. Automation is available as a separate tab in Shortcuts.
Here's an example of how it could look like:
You can set two: one for 6 AM and another for 6 PM.
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