The most magical configurables I've ever created for iOS by a long way.

Though I don't believe I've ever discussed it, here, the continuance of the fandom for Houston music legend, DJ Screw, on into the 21st century is an issue I remain very invested in. I doubt you want to hear much about it, but the issue of actually obtaining audio files from the Screw collection is a worthwhile one to engage for context's sake. I was first introduced to the ~343-chapter collection by my high school best friend, who'd acquired it via an ancient Pirate Bay torrent some hero set up in the early 2000s[^1]. It was complete – probably – and more or less correctly organized by chapter, but that's about it as far as reliable metadata was concerned. The results one would find elsewhere on the web, from sites like DatPiff, were hardly any better – many, in fact, were obviously sourced from that same torrent.

In the interim, a lot has changed about music consumption. You know this, but – as you might've already imagined – none of the mainstream services you fuckers partake in have managed to do Robert Earl Davis III justice in the modern era. Apple Music and Spotify, both, will send you in neatly identical spirals pretty much regardless which of their pet vectors you choose to populate with His Name. As much as I've vouched for the former, it's perhaps the worst of them all in this context – departing the marque entirely into the (respectable but... incorrect) world of non-Davis SLOWED 'n” THOWED[^2] almost immediately.

Perhaps one day, I'll find it within myself to tackle this issue – DJ Screw in the Щ́̇͋ͯ̋̅Σ̾̒͋ͯͭ ̊ᄂ̋̈͐İͬV̏̆̊͛̍̌Σ̆ͣͣͭ͐ͫ̆̊ ͪͬ̿̈́̑ͤ̚IͫП̎̿͑ͦ͆̚ ͣͫ͌ͨ̈Λ̃͛̓ͦͪ͒̑̽ ͛̑ͤ͊ͭƬ̒I̅͌̊̑ͧͪM̈́̓Σ̋̏͂͐͊͆ͣ, generally – but I actually have extremely wonderful, urgent news. You see, dearest archive.org was actually provided the entire, impeccably tagged Discography by actual Culture Heroes some years ago. All of it, accessible in multiple file formats, embeddable, superbly shareable! This is the most important truth I have to impart to you today, really, but – for iPhone, iPad, and Mac users, there's even more...

Automation

As of right now, just two Siri Shortcuts – Download Random Screw Tape and DJ Screw Discography[^3]. The first is perhaps the most delightful – if all goes well, running it right out of the box should result in a random tape from the library downloaded in a folder of your specification (at install,) as well actual playback, in correct order, within the shortcut, itself.

This is magic, yes, but the second is true power. After picking folders at installation for 1) downloaded archive.org-sourced .zip files to live in temporarily before they are extracted and deleted and 2) your complete, correctly metatagged DJ Screw Tape library could – in theory, anyway – magically appear in a single, undoubtedly several hours-long run. I have yet to actually test the full bit myself, technically, but I can advise you to set Auto-Lock (Settings ⇨ Display & Brightness ⇨ Auto-Lock) to Never, make sure you leave the Shortcut open within the Shortcuts App, itself, and give it a shot, if possible.

Discuss...

#software #automation #music

[1] I attempted to find this torrent for the sake of this post and well... The Pirate Bay looks a lot different than I remembered. [2] This is not criticism. If it was, it would be ridiculously hypocritical. [3] If RoutineHub is struggling/you find it untrustworthy, the direct iCloud Share links are here and here. Please contact me if you encounter any issues.

During the course of my iPhone Keyboarding project, I managed to discover “a command line tool to document and describe keyboard shortcuts in a standardized and properly formatted way” called ksc. It's a Python utility that translates natural-language-formatted keyboard commands “command control q” into symbolized and standardized form: ⌃+⌘+Q. Though it's not of particular use to me at this point, with my now well-established Text Replacements and TextExpander Snippets, I realized – being a Python thing – that ksc might work with the iOS/iPadOS shell emulator, a-Shell, and therefore, that a Siri Shortcut for converting plain language input to formatted key commands might be a cinch, and it was!

Requirements

1. a-Shell for iOS/iPadOS (Free)
2. Actions for iOS/iPadOS (Also free)
3. ksc installed in a-Shell (Which should be as easy as pip install ksc)

Using an Ask For Input action, my shortcut will prompt you to enter a natural language keyboard command. For the fullest explanation of supported inputs, see ksc's documentation. Your inputted command will be “transformed” via Actions' action into “dash-case” and placed within a command in the following format:

ksc -ms -p command(Pre-Transformation Text) > Transformed Text.txt

By default, the arguments -ms and -p are included, but these are entirely optional. From said docs:

There are several command line options to modify the output. The -ms or --modifier-symbols options output the modifers as unicode symbols:

$ ksc -ms shift command u ⇧⌘U

Apple says you should include a plus sign between symbols, but I think that it looks ugly, so that's not the default. If you want it, add the -p or --plus-sign when using -ms:

$ ksc -ms -p shift command u ⇧+⌘+U

Creating a text file for each command within a-Shell may not be Best Practices, per se, but it's the simplest method I've found of reliably retrieving text back from the app within Siri Shortcuts. That said, the above command creates a text file containing the formatted output. A Get File a-Shell action paired with a Get Text From Input native action then retrieves the file contents, which is first cleaned up via another Actions action (trimming leading and trailing whitespace) before being copied to the system clipboard.

Download my Key Command Formatting shortcut on RoutineHub.

Discuss...

#software #automation

A modified shortcut to query live program information from your NPR station.

This past month, MacStories hosted a community Siri Shortcuts contest called Automation April. One of its winners – a shortcut called “What's on KUTX?” credited to Jack Wellborn – caught my eye as a lifelong dependent upon National Public Radio. Via John Voorhees' comment:

The solution Wellborn came up with is ingenious. It turns out that KUTX uses a web API that can return information about the currently playing track. The API is used to drive an ‘On Now’ widget on the station’s website, but Wellborn discovered that they could query the API and get the track information back as JSON. So, they built a shortcut that queries the API when run, returning the info about the currently-playing song.

I began playing around with the NPR API Jack used and discovered quite accidentally that their shortcut could be modified to display current program information for those NPR stations that are not music-oriented, like mine. For the vast majority of the 24-hour cycle, KBIA – “Mid-Missouri's NPR station” – plays news programs, mostly from NPR, itself, supplanted by BBC news late at night.

hey locals! I made a Siri Shortcut that displays live program information for @KBIA. https://t.co/QVsr0jb85y

— ⓓⓐⓥⓘⓓ ⓑⓛⓤⓔ (@NeoYokel) June 5, 2022

After some trimming and the addition of the URL for KBIA's Apple Music Stream, I came up with What's on KBIA?, which displays upon run the current program's title as well as a hyperlink to open its distinct webpage. By way of a simple Choose from Menu action, it then prompts one with three options:

1. Open the program's webpage (again.)
2. Open KBIA's stream in Apple Music.
3. Open KOPN's stream in Apple Music. (KOPN is Columbia's community radio station.)

Creating a Shortcut for Your NPR Station

All I really needed to customize Jack Wellborn's original shortcut was my NPR station's “UCSID,“which, for reference, is 5387648fe1c8335046a1d4b4. Upon installation of my What's on NPR? shortcut, you'll be prompted to specify this. Unfortunately, retrieving it via NPR's API requires special authorization, for some reason, but – since we're retrieving data from an NPR station's playback widget already configured to use the API – it's actually as easy as opening your browser's “Dev Tools” or showing on your given station's homepage. If you're unfamiliar, here's a handy guide to doing so on some popular desktop web browsers.

Honestly, though, if you're already on your iOS/iPadOS device and you're willing to install a single, free Safari Extension, I believe you'll find Web Inspector to be the single, simplest method of retrieving your station's UCSID.

Finding your station's UCSID with Web Inspector

1. Navigate to your station's homepage (ex. kbia.org.)
2. Start playback of the live stream you'd like to query (may or may not be necessary, depending.)
3. Open Web Inspector via the Safari Extensions Menu.
4. In the DOM tab, use the search icon to filter for ucsid.
5. Your station's UCSID is the value for the data-stream-ucsid field.

Depending on how modern your station's website is (I think – I'm supposing, here,) you may or may not find this field. For reference, here is the HTML source of KBIA's webpage from which I drew in its entirety. If you're having trouble, please feel free to contact me however you wish, ideally with your preferred station's identifier/web url.

“Integration” with the Broadcasts app

Broadcasts is a very popular and highly-praised universal Apple application for internet radio streaming. By default, my What's on NPR? shortcut includes an action to begin streaming a station in Broadcasts, but it requires further configuration.

In all likelihood, a search of the Broadcasts Directory for your station's four-letter identifier should yield results. Once you've added your station to your library in Broadcasts, hold its icon (or ^ Tap) to present the context menu (shown in the screenshots embedded above) and select Edit. The exact value for the Name field in configuration menu that results must be supplied as the answer to the second configuration step of my What's on NPR? shortcut. If you do not wish to use Broadcasts, you need only delete or replace its single action in the shortcut's default configuration.

If you've followed along this far, you now have both values you're prompted for at installation of said shortcut, by default: your station's ucsid and its name in the Broadcasts app. You need only continue if you'd prefer to add options for Apple Music and/or VLC.

“Integration” with Apple Music

If you'd like to have a menu option to begin streaming your NPR station in Apple Music, begin by searching within the app for your station's identifier (as shown in the screenshot embedded above.) Use the triple-dot menu's Share Station option to copy its Apple Music URL. (WBEZ's, for example, is https://music.apple.com/us/station/npr-news-wbez-chicago/ra.872998937.) Replace or append to the Broadcasts option with a menu option pointing to an Open URLs action containing the resulting URL. (Refer to my What's on KBIA? shortcut to see this implemented.)

“Integration” with VLC media player

The VLC media player iOS app does not yet have its own Siri Shortcuts actions, but it does have a handy URL scheme which allows one to stream or download the contents of any raw media URL. Using Web Inspector as described above, I was able to find the raw stream URL for KBIA (https://playerservices.streamtheworld.com/api/livestream-redirect/KBIAFM.mp3) quite quickly in the Resources tab whilst streaming live.

To add an option to my shortcut to open the stream in VLC, I would add the following value in an Open URLs action:

vlc-x-callback://x-callback-url/stream?url=https://playerservices.streamtheworld.com/api/livestream-redirect/KBIAFM.mp3

Once again, if you have any trouble configuring What's on NPR? – whether that be with finding your station's UCSID and/or “integrating” playback with another app, please do reach out.

Links

• What's on NPR? on RoutineHub
• What's on NPR?'s Issue on my iOS-specific GitHub Repository
• Source-HTML
• Source-JSON
• Source-PLIST

Discuss...

#automation #configuration #local

As I wrote in my app store review of Terminology (which is not shown publicly, I’ve since learned,) I prefer it over popular dictionary apps like LookUp (which I also have and use regularly) because it allows me to add new terms that don’t show up in search results. Somehow, the idea that one might store words that don’t necessarily appear in any dictionary seems a foreign one to the creators of LookUp, which I’ve since found out to be the cause of its Siri Shortcuts actions failing on me.

@lookup_ios it'd be so amazing if this worked. or is there another way of batch importing a list of terms to a collection? pic.twitter.com/QBASeQzyXO

— ⓓⓐⓥⓘⓓ ⓑⓛⓤⓔ (@NeoYokel) January 1, 2022

Terminology does support adding “custom” terms, if unintentionally, through its “notes” function. Because it’s related to Drafts (they’re from the same creator,) it was quite easy to “integrate” the two in order to form the workflow you see demonstrated in the video below.

First, I use the Lookup in Terminology action paired with a keyboard shortcut (^⇧D) in Drafts to search a selected word in Terminology. There, I “like” the word and – if needed – add a definition via the notes button (immediately to the left of the heart in the upper right corner.) I’ve configured a custom button – “Drafts-definition” – (which you should be able to import with that hyperlink) that sends the term including its notes back to Drafts with the following configuration:

drafts://create?text=[[definitions]]%0A[[note]]

That button results in a new Draft in a specific format, demonstrated by this example:

I then manually add the “Vocabulary” tag to the Draft, completing the process and placing it within the parameters defined by my Vocabulary workspace, which shows only drafts with that tag, sorted alphabetically.

Publication

For the past few weeks, I’ve been wreaking havoc on NeoCities’ global activity feed using the action group I created on the /drafts directory of davidblue dot wtf. Specifically, the action that uploads HTML files to that directory named by the UUID of the draft. (Here’s the corresponding link for this post, for example.) With consequent draftopenurls left in the footer of each as per my current, more or less universal HTML template, I’m able to immediately open the appropriate draft locally.

In order to maintain an updated index of the whole list, I’ve created a Siri Shortcut which transforms the UUIDs of the drafts in the vocabulary workspace into markdown-formatted hyperlinks of their web-dwelling counterparts.

Even if you’ve no intention of publishing your personal vocabulary – or integrating it with Drafts – Terminology is still the dictionary app I’d recommend over any others.

Discuss...

#configuration #software #automation

Imagine running shortcuts from anywhere you can place a link.

There seemed to be a bit of confusion regarding a shortcut I posted on RoutineHub a few days ago entitled “Generate Shortcuts Run Links List,” so I thought I’d attempt to overview how I’ve come to use Shortcuts’ URL scheme as my primary method of calling shortcuts across both iOS and macOS.

The basis of the whole shit is shortcuts://run-shortcut?name= and shortcuts://x-callback-url/run-shortcut?name=. Using these along with URL-encoded shortcuts titles (for those containing a space,) we can create links that will run shortcuts from anywhere on iOS or macOS as hyperlinks. These days, this is how I run most of my even semi-regular-use shortcuts, largely from my first Dot in Iconfactory’s Tot.

With a few exceptions, all the links you see in the above screenshot above “Drafts Instrument Panel” are shortcuts run links of the same type. Most of these, I typed out by hand with a TextExpander snippet. Here’s what the mess looks like underneath:

I had a bit of an issue creating the shortcut, itself. Though Shortcuts includes a native URL Encode action, I couldn’t seem to get it to reliably generate URL-encoded shortcuts names, which is why I inserted the Text Case action, instead.

Discuss...

#automation #software #configuration

My new Twitter Jail Siri Shortcut marks a milestone in Social Foolery.

I graduated high school in 2012. Back then, TweetDeck was still a standalone desktop client[^1] that allowed one to post with just the ENTER or return key. I'd made it part of the Drywall Prime Directive to generally keep @ihadtopee in Twitter Jail as much as possible, which meant pounding my way into it ASAP, daily. This was often my very first task upon returning home from school. All memories – much less computing memories – are quite obscured from that era, but I wouldn't be surprised if I was spending a cumulative 45 minutes every school day punishing the fuck out of my first flat generation w/keypad Apple Keyboard to TweetDeck in Windows 7.

Who's up grinding?

— T W I T T E R JAIL (@TWlTTER_JAIL) June 24, 2016

It's not that automating Tweets wasn't possible in that era – I'd been posting WHEN IM COMIN DINE IN MY FOREIGN AND IM ROLLIN ONE DEEP THAT SHOULD TELL YA BOUT ME across all my social accounts every morning at 0610 since Freshman year via IFTT (now IFTTT) – but doing so at any sustained rate required actual knowledge.

Today, even an rube like myself can whip up a Siri Shortcut capable of jailing a user account in less than four minutes from nill – what appears to be a statically-set rate limit of 310 Tweets in that time. Mind you, we're talking about entirely on-device processing here, and – in case you weren't aware – the device I'm referring to is my fucking cellular phone.

Twitter Jail technically requires three apps – two of which are ridiculously small, 100% Apple cross-platform, and entirely free – and the third represents simply the most refined and delightful means anyone has ever interacted with The Bird Site.

Requirements

• Actions – Free across all platforms and just 3.3mb to download!
• Tweetbot (You might also try Aviary if you absolutely cannot bring yourself to pay a subscription fee, ever.)
• Data Jar (More or less optional.)

Upon installation, you'll be asked 1.) to set the default number of repeats (Tweets) per run. Obviously, I'd recommend ~310 to optimize your jailing. 2.) To specify which Tweetbot-authenticated user account you'd like to get jailed, and 3.) which “key path” (jar) you'd like to store the URLs of said Tweets in. The third is almost certainly useless and entirely optional (just delete the Data Jar action,) but... you never know when... you might need... those URLs.

Depending on your device (to some extent, I'd imagine,) proceeding to run the shortcut shouldn't take long. It randomly generates 91 characters text from a string (which you should also feel empowered to customize/add to,) Tweets them from your specified account, and stores the URLs of those Tweets in the jar you may or may not have specified.

You might expect me to express envy of any youths reading, but I absolutely feel none. All I can do is encourage you to fucking try Mastodon for God's sake and your own.

Update: macOS Version Published

I’ve created a macOS version of Twitter Jail which also requires the Actions app but substitutes Aviary for Tweetbot given the former’s native Siri Shortcuts action does not require the app to open for each Tweet.

[1] It's actually still available from various sources – including the Mac App Store – but has fallen way, way out of support.

#automation #software #configuration

A Drafts Action Group for interacting with WebDAV-enabled sites.

Thanks to recent learning, I have managed to manifest one of my alltime fantasy integrations: I have tied Drafts and NeoCities together directly via my NeoCities Action Group, which uses Drafts' native WebDAV support to (technically) interact with any website based on the protocol. I created it largely to interact with NeoCities over iOS, but frankly I was already doing so more effectively than the Action Group will ever offer with the iOS app Koder. It’s odd and a bit out of support, but incredibly useful and supported all the way back to iOS 9. Unfortunately, many of its functions – like deleting remote files, for instance – will result in a crash on modern devices. Also unfortunate – I’m afraid my Action Group doesn’t offer solutions to these problems. On iOS, it’s limited in function to pushing files to your WebDAV server and then opening them in a web browser.

It wasn't as simple as HTML encoding the [draft] content with percentage signs, either. In order to produce satisfactory results, I had to wrap every output in a very custom HTML template which I would very much encourage you to personalize before using (considering especially that it includes my personalized footer links and colors.) You can view that template in full here. To be honest, I can’t quite recall where I found the original, but it was probably either included with a native Drafts action or found among Stephen Millard’s TAD library.

The most reliable means of identifying, pushing, and retrieving a draft from a WebDAV site (that I found, anyway,) is by using its Universally unique identifier (UUID) in its pathname. An apt example: the draft I’m currently whittling on, enumerated 7247282E-340B-4890-A2F7-0481AF31321E. The action above – Draft to /drafts as UUID.html – will push the contents of your current draft to /drafts/the Draft’s UUID.html. (That's how I created the example.)

I've done my best to color code the actions based on the potential “severity” of their result, but the way they display will depend almost entirely on which particular Drafts theme you're using at the moment. Nevertheless, blue/green indicate the “safest” actions – like the ones that simply open a link to a draft you've already pushed – and yellow/orange/red actions involve pushing/manipulating files at the root of your site.

Below is the full documentation of each of the actions (and the separators, even,) including individual install links, though I would very much recommend you install the whole bit. You'll need to edit each action and replace davidblue.wtf with your own URL(s) unless you'd like to try and attempt my absolutely gargantuan NeoCities password.

NeoCities Action Group

Root

Type: Separator Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon:
Colour: none
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 0
Unique ID: 69B625EC-D9E2-41B7-9767-3532666E7C97
Description:

Push Draft to Root as HTML

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: 383-keyhole
Colour: orange
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 81C89DC8-F26E-4644-87D7-BF454B345C24
Description:
Push the current draft to the /drafts directory as an HTML file by the draft’s safe_title.

Draft to Root as UUID.html

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: binary
Colour: yellow
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: ABAA6A02-806F-4B45-BEA6-E9D5F8D32236
Description:
Push the current draft to the root directory as an HTML file titled by its UUID.

Draft to Root as Text Timestamp

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: alarm
Colour: orange
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: EFF08ADA-81B6-49C3-B132-5DB477A95685
Description:
Push the current draft to the root directory as a .txt file titled by timestamp.

Draft to /{title} as index.html

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: indent
Colour: red
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 15401CFC-114E-429C-B747-054E19C46911
Description:
Push the current draft to /NeoCities as index.html

Open /{title}

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: idea
Colour: green
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 34630C90-6180-4394-A296-C2A5018DFEFB
Description:
Open /drafts/[Current Draft UUID].html.

/path

Type: Separator Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon:
Colour: none
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 0
Unique ID: 6F0BE49F-3B6F-49AF-ABA7-04BA7F437C1A
Description:

Push Draft to /drafts as HTML

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: 383-keyhole
Colour: orange
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 34A59A1C-95A8-42A9-9C23-677E9731EFC8
Description:
Push the current draft to the /drafts directory as an HTML file by the draft’s safe_title.

Draft to /drafts as UUID.html

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: binary
Colour: none
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 9C9FCDA8-687C-475A-8213-A8185CEFEE4D
Description:
Push the current draft to the /drafts directory as an HTML file titled by its UUID.

Open pushed /drafts file by UUID.

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: idea
Colour: green
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: BADE45C1-AEC4-46A6-B4BE-7B88B2357C04
Description:
Open /drafts/[Current Draft UUID].html.

Draft to /drafts/{title} as index.html

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: indent
Colour: violet
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 5555699A-B3A6-432D-9A20-ECA78F6A5D88
Description:
Push the current draft to drafts/NeoCities as index.html

Open /drafts/{title}

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: idea
Colour: green
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 1E5CB9D6-B8FE-4934-8AEC-E795A651C45A
Description:
Open /drafts/{title}

Draft to Specified Path as index.html

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: signs-alt
Colour: orange
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 2
Unique ID: A7D5BE00-36D3-4E08-9058-7923571189AA
Description:
Push Draft to specified directory as index.html.

/[input]/index.html

Misc

Type: Separator Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon:
Colour: none
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 0
Unique ID: 06296787-B9EE-4759-9B9C-5F994CAA894A
Description:

Push clipboard .txt to clipboard/timestamp

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: clipboard-content
Colour: blue
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 98AF9E4B-1D48-4F95-8D2D-C879FE16BE40
Description:
Push contents of the clipboard to the /clipboard directory as a .txt file.

Open NeoCities Workspace

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut: ⇧⌃N
Icon: cat-face
Colour: gray
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 4B8E95CE-F6A3-4F53-88CB-B01C8398A990
Description:
Open workspace entitled “NeoCities.”

NeoCities list / (macOS-Only)

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: directions-merge
Colour: gray
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 2
Unique ID: 898038F4-E5E4-4BDA-B15A-D2ED2D388D82
Description:
Calls a shortcut entitled “NeoCitiesRoot” with a Run Shell Script action containing the following:

neocities list /

Can only be run on macOS and requires the NeoCities CLI.

Discuss...

#software #configuration #automation

A setup for posting to Write.as blogs directly using Siri Shortcuts, the Write.as CLI, and (optionally) Drafts for Mac.

Though there is currently a Write.as desktop application in the works for macOS and the web editor is certainly no slouch, I thought I'd attempt to take advantage of my newfound knowledge of the Write.as CLI, Drafts Actions, and Siri Shortcuts on macOS to manifest one of my all-time dream integrations: publishing directly to write.as with Drafts.

To start – assuming you already have the CLI installed – lets run writeas help post in our shell:

For my own use, I really needed to consider just two arguments, here: which blog I'm posting to and in which format. Since my blog's CSS overwrites all but monospace, I always publish in --sans. Keeping this in mind, I allotted for these two options in my Siri Shortcut as customizations set on install.

Now, whenever it's run, my shortcut will be running this command: write-as post -c chaff --font sans plus whatever input I've given it. By default, it will grab from the clipboard, but I'm going to use a custom Drafts action to send input, instead.

Very simply, this action simply calls a shortcut entitled “Post to Write.as Blog (macOS)” sending the [[safe_title]] of the Draft as the markdown title followed by a space and then the draft's [[body]].

Discuss...

#software #automation #configuration

Shortcuts, bots, and some other methodologies discovered since my Big Telegram Post.

Since I published “I Trust Telegram,” the messenging service has been in the news. Their launch of Sponsored Messages predated its publication, but I omitted any mention of them because I’d yet to see any meaningful effects on my own use of the service. All I’ll say now: nearly four months of daily use later, this is still the case. I’ve published a few Siri Shortcuts and a Drafts action in the interim, though, and thought these few additional discoveries worth another Post.

Siri Shortcuts

Seek Telegram Message by ID

As I noted in the Big Telegram Post, navigating to/referencing specific messages in Telegram is ridiculously easy due to its URL format: https://t.me/[Channel@]/[Chronological Message ID] My Seek Messages by ID shortcut will prompt you to set defaults for both Channel @ and message number upon installation. This could be useful for channel/group administrators who need to reference/update a message containing community rules, but specifying them is entirely optional. Otherwise, the shortcut will prompt you to enter a channel or group’s @ (minus the symbol itself,) followed by the numeric ID of the message you’re looking for. It will then copy the complete URL to the clipboard and open it in Telegram Messenger for iOS. I’ve found it handy when joining a new channnel/group to quickly indulge my curiosity about its first few messages.

URL List ⇨ Telegram

Effectively, this shortcut allows you to send links to a set of Safari 15 tabs to a contact of your choice in Telegram. It’s the singular one of the shortcuts shared in this Post that makes use of Telegram Messenger for iOS’ native Siri Shortcuts actions, and is therefore the most finnicky. In the first take of my video demo, it timed out trying to send 200+ links to my Saved Messages channel, but was successful in the second (the take I published) in sending just four links. Upon each run, the shortcut will prompt you to select a contact. The selection must be a phone number, ideally in International Format.[^1] It will then parse a list of URLs in your clipboard and send them one at a time via Telegram’s native action without opening the app.

Clipboard ⇨ Telegram Message

This one makes use of Telegram Messenger for iOS’ URL scheme, which isn’t really documented properly anywhere.

tg://msg?text=[Content]&to=[TargetPhone#]

Upon installation, the shortcut will prompt you to specify a target phone number in International Format. In the following runs, the shortcut will open Telegram to the conversation with the phone number you’ve specified (use your own phone number to set it to your personal Saved Messages channel) with the contents of your clipboard in the text entry field. You’ll need to hit Enter or tap the Send Message button to actually send the content.

Other Integrations

Drafts

Users of Agile Tortoise’s Drafts for iOS can use my Send Draft to Telegram Saved Messages action to do exactly that.

a widdle demo. pic.twitter.com/z2S2pu2LNc

— David Blue ※ (ɥ̶͇͖͉̠̰̟͔̒́̆ͧ͋̀̀ ????) (@NeoYokel) February 1, 2022

Like the last Siri Shortcut above, the action utilizes Telegram’s URL scheme to send the contents of your current draft to a Telegram conversation with a phone number of your choosing. (Remember to change the action’s placeholder!)

If you’d like to specify a different conversation, this action published to the Action Directory by user maique omits the phone number bit of the URL scheme – tg://msg?=[DraftContent].

TextExpander

Group and/or channel administrators, especially, might find my public Telegram-specific TextExpander snippet group to contain some useful inspiration. .tid, for example, will help you construct a Telegram message link by ID just as the first Shortcut in this Post will, while .scheme will replicate the app’s URL scheme.

Tot

If you happen to have Tot Pocket on your iOS device already, I’ve found it a particularly ideal place to compose Telegram messages with formatting and hyperlinks considering its similar format limitations. Drafts users can use my Append to 7th Tot Dot action to send draft content to the last Dot directly. Some markdown formatting will need to be altered – #-headings aren’t supported by either Tot or Telegram, for instance – but formatting can be directly carried over to Telegram in Rich Text format by selecting all in Tot and copying, as displayed in the screenshots embedded above.

Bots

Raindrop.io Bot

As far as I’m concerned, @OlegWock’s Raindrop Telegram Bot is an absolute must for any users of the Raindrop.io bookmarking service. Not only does it allow one to send Raindrop bookmarks directly to a chat when in inline mode (as demonstrated in the above screenshots) – it is also the quickest method of saving images, videos, and documents to one’s Unsorted Bookmarks list on an iOS-running device. As I mentioned in the Big Post, Telegram’s sharesheet integration remains by far the least discriminate of any such integration on iOS.

Rose

I’ve gone through the standard gauntlet of freemium administration bots for my experimental local Telegram group. The one I think I’ve settled on, though, is by far the best documented and most inuitive I’ve come across. Miss Rose comes conservatively-configured of the box in a sense that one will experience better results than its “competitors” in moderating a small group like mine just be leaving the defaults in place. My personal favorite functions are /notes – which allows one to save group documents that can be recalled with /or # – and /export, which exports the entirety of one’s options (including those notes) as a .txt file. (See the rightmost screenshot embedded above.)

Other Insights

Telegram as Task Manager

I had absolutely no idea that Reminders existed in Telegram until a few weeks ago. When sending to one’s Saved Messages channel, holding down on the Send Message button will display the option to Set a Reminder. Anything that can be sent can be added as a reminder, including – in my case – .exe files of programs I’d like to install on my PC later. Frankly, I can’t think of any other task management/reminders application that offers this ability – paid or otherwise.

The macOS App

A recent update to the Telegram for macOS app has rendered it by far the most beautiful way to use the service.

Themes

I’ve spent quite a bit of time archiving third-party Telegram themes, lately. Below is a list of installation links to some of my favorites which I’ll do my best to keep updated. Otherwise, refer to this Telegraph post or type #themes in Extratone’s group chat. 1. 𝘞𝘐𝘕𝘋𝘖𝘞𝘚 𝘌𝘛𝘌𝘙𝘕𝘈𝘓 2. Allo4Life 3. Fresh Mint – Tweetbot 6 4. Greyhound 5. Space Piss 6. Vampire Reference 7. Signals 8. Futuretab 9. Slander Crimson 10. Academia 11. Hermitage 12. Divorced Empress Navier 13. Roro Jump 14. Dark, Post-Academia 15. UOrange 16. Vaporfucked 18. Dark Shell 19. Honey Highlight 20. Mirage on Kimberly 21. Lynch on Rhino 22. Mars Orange 23. Sepia Blues 24. Strawberry Night 25. Tapbots 26. Green Dark 27. Puaro 28. DarkQD 29. Mineshaft Gold 30. Jellygram 31. Japan Serenity

[1] Ex: +1 (573) 823-4380

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Federico Viticci's Apple Frames shortcut, optimized for super fast single-shot iPhone mockups.

The single element that's allowed me to go from publishing regular ole' iPhone screenshots to photorealistic mockups like you see embedded below is an absolutely ingenious, hugely powerful Siri shortcut by MacStories founder Federico Viticci called Apple Frames. Out of all the shortcuts and workflows I've discovered, fiddled with, hoarded, and discarded since iOS 12 beta, I think I can definitively say that it remains the most impressive use of iOS automation, ever, for reasons you're likely not all that interested in.

As it comes by default, Apple Frames 2.0 includes support for a whole bunch of languages and a broad spectrum of devices. Literally every single step is annotated with explanatory documentation, which represents hugely noble effort in and of itself. Its GUI selection menus, alone, allow for configuration of input and output targets and layout options (for multiple screenshots – horizontal, vertical, or in a grid.)

However, this versatility means there is a wait involved. Emphasizing said wait (about 90 seconds from trigger to result for single-screen mockups on my 12 Pro Max) feels absolutely ridiculous considering how much longer it would take any other mockup generation method known to man to produce the same result, but a user like me – who's use of the shortcut is more often than not to generate mockups of a single screenshot I've probably just taken – might find themselves wishing they could set defaults for its menu selections and circumvent iOS' image picker and/or share sheet entirely.

And so... I did! With the new ability to edit shortcuts on macOS, it required far less time/trial-and-error grief for me to perform the modifications listed below without breaking the whole shortcut than I expected, certainly.

Modifications

1. I deleted all of the annotations in Comment form. They’re a testament to Federico’s diligence and huge contribution to personal automation with iOS… but they’re also just extra text.
2. I replaced the Find Photos Where action with Get Latest Photos with the Include Screenshots toggle ON and the retrieval limit set to just one.
3. I deleted the entire export preferences menu and replaced it with actions that save the result both to a specific iCloud Photos folder for frames and a corresponding iCloud Drive folder.

The resulting shortcut generates a mocked up version of the last screenshot taken on the host device and saves the image to a specified iCloud Photos album and iCloud Drive folder. (You will be asked to specify these upon installation.) In my experience so far, this process requires an average of ~5-7 seconds from trigger to result[^1] (vs 90+ seconds in Apple Frames 2.0's default configuration) and works fairly reliably so long as one runs it immediately after taking the subject screenshot. Note the incorrectly-oriented results in the screenshot of my own dedicated Frames album, above. I'm sure it doesn't actually have anything to do with the duration between capture and running the shortcut, but I'm not technically adept enough (nor particularly compelled) to determine the real cause.

Tapping Back

(You need only continue if you're interested in triggering the shortcut with Back Tap.)

I must acknowledge that what I'm about to describe is blatantly hypocritical given how much bitching about consumer tech's excess I've been purveying, but – for the past few weeks of living with my Speedy Frames shortcut – I have committed 100% to mocking up all shared screenshots – even those sent to friends and family. Obviously, a native automation trigger fired by screen capture would be particularly handy, here, but if we're using Back Tap as a trigger, we could theoretically achieve the same end by inserting a Take Screenshot action at the beginning of the shortcut except... It doesn't work. I've no idea why, but such a setup exclusively produces incorrectly-oriented results.[^2] Anywho, mocking up every single screenshot you've taken is just that much more excessive than those you actually intend to share, in my mind.

For those like me who've found Back Tap physically confounding, I created the video embedded above to demonstrate the actual mechanical action required to trigger it.

hey y’all I had to share this with you… by far the quickest setup for creating iPhone screen mockups *I’ve* ever come up with, certainly. @viticci’s Apple Frames 2 Shortcuts but set to grab the last screenshot (no selection,) and triggered by a double Back Tap.
(contact noise) pic.twitter.com/Qw6DkBd3mH

— David Blue ※ (? ? ? ? ????) (@NeoYokel) December 17, 2021

I've left it set to Double Tap for the majority of the time and have found it suitable. If you find yourself really enjoying the sensation of tapping the back of your phone, you might even set Triple Tap to Screenshot so that you can create a mockup with just a series of 5 taps.

Technically, there is much optimization to be done beyond this point – if you're using an older device or find even five seconds too long a wait for your mockups, you might try trimming Speedy Frames further by removing unneeded device and language components. As always, if I can be of assistance or if ya just want to chat, please do contact me.

Links

• RoutineHub Page
• iCloud Share Link
• GitHub Issue
• Source Files (GitHub)
• Showcuts
• ShareShortcuts
• “Apple Frames 2.0: Faster, Lighter, and Featuring Support for iPhone 13, iPad mini, iPad 10.2”, iMac 24”, MacBook Air, and Multiple Languages” | MacStories

1.1 Update

2-01-2022 I added a Delete Photos action that deletes the pre-mockup screenshot to reduce clutter.

[1] My methods of timing and actual volume of data (read: repetitions) is far from scientific, just so you know. [2] As of iOS 15.3 Beta 1, anyway.

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