Share some automations

I love seeing, and learning from, or just being amazed at, the automations and scripts that people come up with.

Share one of yours!

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Here’s a Rube Goldberg automation on my phone. At one point I wanted to keep track of my weight, but didn’t want to keep opening the health app or pay for one of those connected scales.

I’m a text guy, so I start a lot of stuff in Drafts. I just wanted to tap in my weight, fire off the automation and be done with it.

So Drafts runs a Shortcut (this is old enough that the app was still called Workflow! But it’s the same now):

The Drafts step is super simple: a Run Shortcuts (Workflow) action that takes the entire draft contents. (Just make sure there’s an integer or floating-point number on the first line – there’s no guardrails on this at all.)

The shortcut involved is pretty simple too – I forget if I built this from scratch; if I borrowed it, apologies for not giving the originator credit!

Look! A little bit of checking … no recording negative weights. :joy:

All the real work is done, weight recorded in the Health app. Some time later I heard about Charty for Shortcuts which … charts stuff from shortcuts (very nicely too). So I added a step that sent recent weight data to Charty.

I did it by calling another Shortcut. I really hate long long Shortcuts (actually, it turns out I don’t love drag-and-drop programming at all, but so it goes).

That other Shortcut is pretty simple too – again, thanks to anyone whose work I borrowed…

Voila. (Don’t worry! The chart has a scale on the vertical access! I’m just too vain to show it.)

One improvement I should make: Have Drafts delete the weight when I’m done. I put that off while testing, and now I have some unknown number of drafts littering the app with just a decimal number in it.

(The screenshots aren’t screen-reader friendly I don’t think. I’m really sorry – please DM me if it’s a problem and I’ll figure out a way to get you something descriptive in text.)

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