markjgsmith

Automation and scripting on iOS sucks

If there is one thing that could speed up my workflow right now it's having some sort of scripting / automation on iOS. I waste so much time copying and pasting templates and manually replacing text tokens every week. It's so error prone. It's so frustrating. It's so ridiculous.

One would think that, given how much time I'm wasting, that I would have figured out the Shortcuts app. Well that's how bad the Shortcuts app is in my opinion. There's no disernable philosophy to it. Each time I need to create a workflow I'm completely stumped.

I can't fugure out how to get input into the workflow. I can't figure out how to trigger the darn workflow outside of Shortcuts. The components all seem to nearly do what I want, but not quite. And so I spend 30 minutes futzing around and eventually give up. Sod it I'll just keep doing the stupid copy pasta dance of doom for another week.

I just want a fucking bash shell for christ sake, not this god darn fisher price automation bullshit. And actually maybe that's the answer. Technically with iSH I do have a bash shell. The problem though is that eventually I'll need to interface with the other apps. And the only way to do that is through Shortcuts. #

I just tried to npm install the frontmatter, ejs and uuid libraries on iSH. They all error out. I don't know if anything changed, last time I tried to install npm modules on iSH at least some of them installed.

I just need to create:

1. Markdown files with frontmatter automatically written
2. My weekly newsletter template
3. My weekly newsletter promo template

It can't be that difficult.

It's basically a basic template rendering. With Shortcuts there is no way to generate a v4 uuid, which I need in the frontmatter. Or at least there is no component for that, and as far as I can tell, no way to create custom components. #