An Obsidian Homescreen for iPhone and iPad

Just sharing a guide I wrote up for doing some fancy Obsidian things in Shortcuts. The result is a nice homescreen with a bunch of features.

Enjoy!

9 Likes

Excellent! I had planned to start exploring exactly how to things like this. Your post will provide welcome shortcuts in that exploration. :slight_smile:

1 Like

Hello Ryan

Thanks again for these wonderful shortcuts that truly makes a difference.

A quick question, I canā€™t seem to get Widgetpack working with the Todayā€™s plan widget. As I understand it, I need to run your shortcut and then it should be available in Widgetpack as a widget. But I run the shortcut and give Widgetpack all the permissions it needs but still no widget available. If anyone knows what I am doing wrong, please say. :smile:

Youā€™re welcome!

To be clear: once youā€™ve run the shortcut, you add a Widgetpack widget to your homescreen of the desired size, and then you hold-tap the added widget, select Edit Widget, and select the newly created widget from that menu.

Is the Todayā€™s Plan widget not showing on that last step?

Indeed, not showing in that last step.

Interesting. Try this variant?

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/fbe50229e66141a5a94a3d34a96092ec

I did some more refactoring, fixed some
bugs. Perhaps this fixed whatever it was!

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/65901745c4824f059ee1d2687eff1f7b

After a bit more debugging: believe it or not, you might simply have to reboot your device.

I couldnā€™t get the last link I posted to work on my iPad. So, I rebooted, and lo, there was the updated widget.

It kind of works. The widget is working now but it is not showing any of the tasks from my daily note. I attach some pictures here. (And in case you are wondering, why the mix of languages, itā€™s because we Danes are notoriously famous for mixing a lot of English in our language)


iOS widgets are updated kinda sporadically. If those tests are not showing by now, though, mind pasting the content of that note in here with ``` code fencing?

---
tags: Daily-note
---

## Dagens plan
- [ ] Test
- [ ] Test
- [ ]


## Dagens foto


## Journal



## Review


## Fleeting

Aha, got it. I forgot a key setup question: it needs to know how you format your daily note filename.

Try this one:
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/98705f3ab8c94c0482e519baabcb54c0

Love the work your sharing here, thank you @ryanjamurphy, and for making the video w @nickmilo

Iā€™m not using Obsidian on iOS, (nor eager to upgrade to macOS monterey), so Iā€™m not using Shortcuts app. Iā€™m curious: are using a non-Shortcuts approach to get similar results on a Mac?

My vault is project-focused like yours, but Iā€™m relying entirely on tags + dataview to slice and dice. It felt like a more robust solution to me than the ā€˜GUIā€™ Kanban plugin, though Iā€™m missing drag and drop, and the horizontal space.

Howā€™d you decide on Kanban (over tags, for example)? Are you having to navigate to the ā€œproject indexā€ page to update the projects status?

I havenā€™t set up much automation around my tag-based system yet, but assumed the tag-approach would make automation easier. Just curious to hear any of your thought process / experience with that. :v:

When Iā€™m on a Mac Iā€™m pretty keyboard-driven, so I donā€™t mind using keyboard shortcuts and the Command Palette/Quick Switcher to jump around there. It wouldnā€™t be hard to emulate Shortcuts via e.g., Keyboard Maestro, though.

Actually, Iā€™m hoping to build out a plugin that automatically updates a projectā€™s status whenever it is moved on the Kanbanā€”but Iā€™ve also been told that MetaEdit can help with that? I havenā€™t tried playing around yet.

In general I try not to spend too much time doing ā€œjanitorial workā€ on what project is whereā€”thatā€™s one of the reasons I like the Kanban. Itā€™s pretty easy to mess around with it without getting lost in metadata.

On that note, this is a neat dataview snippet that finds projects that are not yet tracked in the kanban:

LIST FROM !outgoing([[ā«æā«æā«æ Projects Kanban]]) WHERE contains(file.name, "ā–³")

ā«æā«æā«æ Projects Kanban is the kanban note, and WHERE contains(file.name, "ā–³") is how I find projects. Switch the latter with however your projects are designated; e.g., a FROM #project.

Hi Ryan, great work on this shortcut. Iā€™m having trouble getting the Todayā€˜s Plan shortcut to work. When it asks for the file path for the daily notes, how do I work this out? Is it from the vault level, obsidian folder or within the daily notes folder?

It should be the path from the vault root. No leading slashes. My daily notes are in the top-level Calendar folder, so the path is Calendar/.

What error is it giving you, if any?

PNG image

Iā€™m struggling to understand what the ā€˜Mainframe
ā€˜ variable represents?

Ah, shoot, my bad! I missed a setup variable. Thatā€™s supposed to be the root folder of your vault.

This shortcut link has the missing setup question. Iā€™ll update the link on the blog post too. Thanks for the report!

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/b7095ede5b4e425c9f1a02bb0a0801f8

1 Like

Yay, the shortcut runs now. However I am having a similar problem to @Kullenej where it shows the widget with the current date at the top but not the tasks. If you tap the widget it launches into a new blank note in a folder a level up with a file name yyyy-mm-dd (filename format I set was yyyymmdd) rather than my current daily note file.

I have tried rerunning the shortcut but I am now getting a new error!

Huh. Did you add weather features? I did not.

Iā€™ll look into the daily note thingā€¦ maybe thereā€™s another variable missing a setup question.