iOS Shortcuts

A Very Good Overcomplicated Journal Workflow

Our journal workflow is probably more complicated than it needs to be. There’s room to optimize this workflow. It grew out of our moving away from Day One when they went to the subscription model. At the time there were some terrible limitations and we wanted none of it. Instead, we went with a semi-automated method involving iOS Shortcuts, iOS Notes, 1Writer, Homebrew (for Pandoc and LaTeX toolchain), and my favorite Swiss army knife GraphicConverter. The final archival format of each journal entry is a beautiful, open standard and searchable PDF generated by Pandoc using LaTeX (MiKTeX distribution).

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I love Shortcuts. There goes a tedious repetitive task to oblivion!!📱

Full Random Albums Playlist Shortcut (Apple Music)

I love listening to full albums. But often I’m not in the right mood to choose them. So a long time ago I created a Shortcut that creates an Apple Music playlist of a variable number of full, track list ordered albums. It allows you to unselect albums that you have a strong opinion to not listen to. The shortcut unfortunately needs at least a 1 second wait between adding albums or it’ll silently fail and the playlist won’t be complete. Note that I mostly did not modify it to iOS 13’s new Shortcut features but hey, I think it is more readable setting specific variables. It did need tweeking from iOS 12. Get Random Full Albums Playlist Shortcut.

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So the Shortcuts widget syncs the same shortcuts & order on iPad and iPhone. Too bad, as I have very different Shortcuts uses for these devices.

Oh cool. The exercise trigger for iOS 13.1.2 Shortcuts finally started working today.

Using iOS 13 shortcuts & iPad home screen widget to set audio output to my airplay capable Sonos speaker and then immediately play music are all I ever needed. Using control center to change audio output is 👎