DEV Community: LOBK

Accessing OmniFocus Link in iOS

LOBK — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 01:57:39 +0000

Kourosh Dini's "Creating Flow with OmniFocus" recommends adding OmniFocus (referred to as OF from hereon) links to the note section of actions. This helps separate projects and the actual task required to complete the project. This segregation also helps with decluttering Forecast perspectives, because you can add a due date to the task associated with the project instead of a due date on the project. This means that your Forecast perspective won't be cluttered with 15 actions (which all live inside a project) all being due at once.

This workflow was made easier due to OF3's 'Copy as OmniFocus Link' feature in the context menu. However, it is not as easy to do on iOS. While you can press the 'Share' function on any project or action and copy its OF link, any OF project or action can share up to 5 different outputs. This means there are a lot of taps required just to access its link.

In response to this, I created a shortcut that has served me well. It only has 4 actions, so I feel comfortable writing out the steps here (in the future, I may include screenshots. For now, I feel lazy).

Get OmniFocus Link:

Accepts Text and URLs
Get Item at Index 4 from Shortcut Input
Show notification Copied Text "Item from List"
Copy Item from List to clipboard

While Step 3 may be considered redundant, I feel reassured I'm getting what I want every time I invoke the shortcut. It would be awkward if the shortcut was to break one day and I didn't know what content I was yanking to my clipboard.

Sometimes, the best shortcuts are utility shortcuts. They don't do anything profound, but aid immensely with the creation of new shortcuts. I was only able to achieve Step 2 because of a meta-shortcut called 'Output Inspector'. It previews the type and content of items being shared in the share menu. I will discuss its function in another post.

Creating Anki flashcards on iOS

LOBK — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 01:42:37 +0000

Creating Anki flashcards can be a clunky process on the desktop, more so on iOS. I have created a Siri Shortcut that grabs a list of questions, asks the user to answer each question and adds both the question and answer to Anki. I modified the shortcut so that I can also have the question and answer added automatically into Anki.

The former is useful for reinforcing concepts before they are added into Anki. I've found that flashcards are more useful if I've already tried to learn the content first, rather than learning it after I've added it to Anki. However, there are times when I'm reading a textbook and creating flashcards at the same time. As a result, I prefer to have the answer saved so that I don't have to go back in the textbook to find the answer.

The callback url (forgive me, I still don't know what the correct 'terminology' is for url schemes) for Anki is anki://x-callback-url/addnote?profile=<USER>&type=Basic&deck=<DECK NAME>&fldFront=<CONTENT>&fldBack=<CONTENT>&tags=<TAGS>

<DECK NAME> and <USER> can be hardcoded into the URL because they don't change much. However, I decided to use Magic Variables instead of hardcoding them in case I want to switch decks in the future.

Hello World

LOBK — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 01:26:02 +0000

This is a temporary (or maybe permanent? who knows) blog covering automation topics. I've been interested in automation for a while now, and I think it'll be a good idea to create a trail of my thoughts and automations.