A little while back I configured some Shortcuts in iOS to send things to my Everdo inbox through Siri or the iOS Share Sheets and now that I have them dialed in a bit more I wanted to share them with the community. Initially I envisioned this a holdover until the email-to-inbox feature was ready but now I actually prefer this method, though there’s a caveat I’ll get to in a second.
For a quick rundown these all require that you have connectivity to a desktop Everdo instance with the API enabled. You’ll also need to have a valid certificate installed as there’s no way to trust an invalid cert in Shortcuts (more detail on that can be found here). Each Shortcut will prompt you to enter the URL for your API instance when you add it, after that it’s ready to go.
Now for the caveat: needing connectivity means that for most people this will only work when on the same LAN as the Everdo instance running the API. I would STRONGLY recommend against just opening up the API port to the world, a better solution would be to setup a remote access VPN to reach your LAN from anywhere. For the smoothest possible experience you’d want to setup an on demand VPN. If you have basic familiarity with certificates and/or networking this isn’t too difficult, and a good chance to learn.
Anyway, here’s a break down of each Shortcut:
Siri: This one will send spoken word to the Inbox via Siri and by default will:
- Prompt you for
title - Repeat
titleback to you for confirmation - Send the item to the inbox
- Prompt with a confirmation that the item was received by Everdo
If you say “add note” at the end of title it will prompt you to add note after title and will then read note back as well. If the Shortcut does not receive a valid reply from the server it will prompt you to try again. If the server times out then you will see a message that the Shortcut failed.
Siri One Take: This one is intended for spoken word through Siri as well and functions almost the same as the one above, but instead of saying “add note” to initiate a second prompt for note, it will only prompt you for title. If you say “add note” during the title prompt it will then use anything you say after “add note” as note. This lets you get away with fewer prompts but after testing I personally like the first version better.
Share Sheet: This is meant for manual interaction, like forwarding a web page or contact. It will show up on the share sheet for any item types that it is configured to handle. So if you want to forward a web page it will recognize the type of item being shared, then use the page title as title and the URL as note. If it detects a phone number it will add the number as note and prompt you for title.
If it detects a type that the Shortcut has not been configured to handle then it will set whatever input it received as title and will prompt you with both type and title before it sends. The idea here is really just to allow me to see when there’s a type that I might want to add logic to the script for. I’d welcome anyone submitting their own updated versions that are configured to handle more types of input.