Your article is good but the callouts are barely readable on my iPad which is in dark mode and fairly dim because I’m reading in a dark room. A little more contrast would help a lot.
At the end you mention the lack of timer based triggers. You can do this with Shortcut personal automations. For example, I have a WFH focus mode. I run an automation at 8am on weekdays that checks if I’m at home and if I am, it turns on WFH mode until late afternoon.
My problem with your setup is that it doesn’t update the events when I modify or complete the reminders.
Thanks for pointing out the dark mode issue. Hope to address it soon.
Regarding trigger i meant there is no standard scheduled system like a cronjob.
The article is meant to inspire others. It solves a very specific problem i have. It’s far from perfect but does the job.
Will take a look at your WFH mode suggestion. Timer/alarm based triggers require manual run confirmation. Allowing non-interactive run is a must in my case to avoid distractions.
> Regarding trigger i meant there is no standard scheduled system like a cronjob
Do you have a Mac? If so maybe you could run your shortcut periodically from cron on the Mac.
I just tested and shortcuts can be run from cron (once you get cron working...[1]). For example I have a bunch of shortcuts that do things to my Denon A/V receiver, and added a crontab entry to run the one that mutes the receiver, and it worked. You can invoke shortcuts with the "shortcuts" command. E.g., here was my mute test's crontab line:
*/1 * * * * shortcuts "Denon Mute On"
That doesn't involve interacting with any GUI apps (it just uses the "Run script over SSH" shortcut action to run a script that is on my RPi that does the actual work of dealing with the Denon receiver's network API). To check that dealing with GUI apps was OK from cron I tried another shortcut I have, "SaveInnerHTML" that saves document.documentElement.innerHTML from the active Safari tab into a file. That worked too.
[1] Apparently sometime around Catalina, when they were beefing up the permissions system and privacy protection cron stopped working unless you gave it permissions. You apparently now have to go into the "Privacy & Security" settings and /usr/sbin/cron full disk access.
Personal automations are pretty close. I use them to run shortcuts at specific times.
If you wanted to run a Shortcut hourly from, say, 7 am to 7 pm, you could manually create those 13 automations or maybe you could use Jellycuts to create one and then cut-and-paste it to make the other 12.
Edit: I just searched for it and here’s an article that talks about a cron-like Shortcut:
At the end you mention the lack of timer based triggers. You can do this with Shortcut personal automations. For example, I have a WFH focus mode. I run an automation at 8am on weekdays that checks if I’m at home and if I am, it turns on WFH mode until late afternoon.
My problem with your setup is that it doesn’t update the events when I modify or complete the reminders.