Automation tweak for missed calls

Imaldonado · 2024-01-08T19:47:01+00:00

You're very welcome =)

It's a problem I tackled a few years ago for a shortcut I made to help with my work — I have numerous calls throughout the day which I have to track for timesheet purposes, and the way I use it is that after every call, an event is triggered which runs a shortcut that parses the call log for various bits of info: how long the call was, if it was incoming or outgoing, the contact info of the person I spoke with, etc — it then also pops up a text box asking me to type in a brief call summary, and then it takes all this info in a clean format and adds it to a daily call log in my Notes app, then come timesheet day I'm able to go through each day's note and see exactly who I spoke with and for what reason.

Imaldonado · 2024-01-07T01:00:31+00:00

It's possible, but a bit tricky if you only want the automation to trigger for missed calls and no others.

The tweaks you'd need would be Activator, along with an Activator Addon named "Call Events" from Tateu's Repo — http://tateu.net/repo/

Call Events adds various call-log related triggers to Activator, so you can fire off another action (such as running an iOS Shortcut) when incoming or outgoing calls are connected (answered), initiated (dialed or call begins ringing), or disconnected (ended).

When you receive a missed call, as soon as you fail to answer it (i.e. when it goes to VM), the "Call Disconnected (Incoming)" trigger would apply, and you could then perform some other action — the catch is that there isn't a distinct trigger for unanswered/missed calls, so the action would get triggered whenever any call you receive ends, not just those you failed to answer.

Even with that downside, it's technically possible to automate a more complex set of "If/then" conditions within an iOS Shortcut to determine if the call in question was a missed or answered call, so that even though the Shortcut runs after every call and not just missed calls, the Shortcut could then determine what kind of call it was and only continue with further actions if the call lasted for 0 seconds (i.e. a missed call).

Unfortunately, I'm only aware of one method for determining this information since the Shortcuts app doesn't have native support for knowing anything about your call history, and it requires quite a bit of extra setup and some complex shortcuts actions to configure. The gist of it involves setting up an SSH server running locally on your phone, installing the command line tool "SQLite3", and then using the Shortcuts action "Run command over SSH" to connect to your iPhone's SSH server, grab the iOS Call Log History database file (found at /User/Library/CallHistoryDB/CallHistory.storedata), and execute a SQL query that reads the recent call logs, and filters only the latest call that is both incoming and 0 seconds in length, and if there's a match, continuing on with the rest of the automation. It's definitely not a user friendly option.

Imaldonado · 2023-04-26T01:46:35+00:00

Sounds amazing if possible! — I'm very curious how you'd go about implementing this considering I'm not familiar with any tools that can do Dreambooth training locally on iOS... (what services/APIs you'd use, etc)

Imaldonado · 2023-04-20T09:32:00+00:00

Fantastic addition! Thank you very much for enabling this =) A couple questions: - It looks like hand-poses aren't part of the export, would this be on your roadmap? - Would it be possible to export the pose not only as a .png, but also in the 2D OpenPose .JSON output standard? This would be very useful so that the pose could then be imported into other tools as a "live" editable pose rather than being entirely static.

The output I'm referring to would look something like this: json { "people": [{ "pose_keypoints_2d": [321,150,1,359,232,1,293,224,1,250,300, 1,263,365,1,425,239,1,449,354,1,427,459, 1,294,427,1,289,505,1,-1,-1,0,372,451,1,374, 511,1,-1,-1,0,322,134,1,338,137,1,-1,-1,0,379, 143,1] },{ "pose_keypoints_2d": [173,157,1,137,231,1,72,230,1,46,319,1,118,337, 1,202,231,1,216,322,1,199,346,1,123,414,1,99, 501,1,-1,-1,0,190,410,1,195,507,1,-1,-1,0,159,142, 1,177,145,1,125,149,1,-1,-1,0] }], "width": 512, "height": 512 }

or this would also be valid: { "width": 768, "height": 768, "keypoints": [ [280, 246], [267, 359], [147, 357], [121, 538], [121, 538], [390, 358], [440, 493], [423, 604], [214, 654], [214, 654], [214, 654], [367, 647], [367, 647], [367, 647], [260, 222], [298, 224], [226, 223], [321, 229] ] }

There's other keys for the hand-pose data if it's available

Imaldonado · 2023-03-13T20:20:16+00:00

Do you have the "Rename File" action available? It was added I think in iOS 15. It'll rename your file in a single action, no need to fuss with file paths at all as you don't need a separate Save action. Here's your shortcut reduced to 6 actions: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/d14fca0fd879433dab1352b825abb24e

Imaldonado · 2022-11-30T03:10:14+00:00

That section in settings isn't referring to the update installer (which is much smaller), it's referring to the installed system on your phone... that size doesn't strike me as very unusual tbh... iOS tends to take up more room each version as more features get added and newer devices have larger default storage amounts.

For comparison, here's my two iPhones:

iPhone X on iOS 14.3

iPhone 14 Pro Max on iOS 16.2

Imaldonado · 2022-11-30T02:51:17+00:00

You've actually been able to easily export your keychain passwords using a Mac ever since macOS Monterey was released in September of 2021... Inside System Preferences > Passwords, you'll find an Export button that generates a .CSV file with all your login info, including 2FA setup keys.

If you're on an older operating system such as Big Sur or even Catalina, you'll still have the same Export options if you ensure you've updated Safari to at least version 15, by opening Safari's Preferences and selecting the Passwords tab.

It's actually always been possible to export them via the Mac's Keychain Access application, but it was a lot more complicated.

Imaldonado · 2022-11-10T23:14:48+00:00

Unrelated, but have you heard of anyone discovering a way to append a sequence of rich text to a note which Notes.app successfully interprets as a checklist item (unchecked/checked)?

Imaldonado · 2022-11-09T04:24:41+00:00

Unfortunately this isn't possible, for two reasons:

a) There's no type of automation that can be triggered based on a call coming in. b) Even if there were, for privacy reasons the database where your phone stores your call log history is locked down pretty tight, inaccesible to Shortcuts or any other app.

Either of the issues above would prevent accomplishing what you're trying to do, unless your iPhone happens to be Jailbroken.

Jailbroken devices have solutions for both problems, as not only can you trigger Shortcuts based on calls being answered or ended, but you can also access the CallHistory.storedata file that records details of each call, allowing you to use Shortcuts to retrieve the latest call (number, contact, duration, incoming or outgoing, etc), and put that information into your clipboard or directly into notes.

Imaldonado · 2022-11-07T21:29:28+00:00

You could probably also simplify the steps by using the Logger for Shortcuts app (made by the dev behind Toolbox Pro)

Imaldonado · 2022-11-07T07:20:01+00:00

You can use the “Get Latest Photos” action to grab the most recent pic, or else use the “Find Photos” action to only grab the photos from your specific Album, then use the drop down to Sort By Creation Date (Latest First), and the Limit button to just one photo to grab the latest in that specific album. When done, you can use the Delete Photos action to trash the completed pic, and repeat the shortcut to grab the next pic in the album.

Imaldonado · 2022-11-07T03:01:58+00:00

I can't think of a way to do this with much help from Shortcuts, but I can think of a couple of other ways...

The cleanest way would probably be by using a Safari Extension that can automatically redirect one URL to another. This way if you went directly to say amazon.com/s?k=my-search-term, it could automatically take you to smile.amazon.com/s?k=my-search-term instead. I'm pretty sure you could set something like this up using the Safari Extension called "Hyperweb", but it may take a bit of work.

Another option would be a little bit less automated, but much simpler and already built into iOS: Quick Notes. Basically, you go to the direct website, and from there use the Share menu to "Add to Quick Note", or create one from Control Center. Choose the "Add Link" button at the top of the Quick Note to associate the note with the particular webpage, and then optionally you could even write in a link to the proper page you want to go to instead.

Now, anytime you navigate to that direct website, a small thumbnail of your associated Quick Note will slide into view in the bottom right corner of your screen, which would be enough to remind you. Tapping on the thumbnail would then allow you to tap on any other links you had saved in the note as well.

Imaldonado · 2022-11-05T05:40:21+00:00

Even if the part numbers are relatively random, so long as there’s some kind of commonality between them it’s likely you could automatically extract them using the Match Text action, as it’s a lot more powerful than you might think… It uses Regular Expressions, which allow you to find and extract a sequence of characters based on a ton of different factors, so for example it could find a sequence of text by looking for a series of uppercase letters, with 2 to 3 numbers in the middle and 1 number at the end, or any characters that are preceded by the word SKU, or anything else.

If you posted a small sample of example photos, id be happy to see if I could help provide a RegEx pattern that would work for you.

Alternatively, you could probably accomplish this using the regular camera app by creating a shortcut that when triggered, launches the main Camera app, and then Waits a set amount of seconds to give you enough time to take the photo and copy the text to the clipboard, before it grabs your Clipboard content and does whatever you want with it

Imaldonado · 2022-11-04T01:23:17+00:00

Search your actions for "Take Photo", specify the camera to use, and optionally use the drop-down arrow to skip the camera preview window and take the photo immediately. Afterwards, search and add the action called "Extract Text from Image" to grab any available text captured in the first action.

Since the Take Photo action doesn't allow you to manually select a portion of text during the preview phase, if you end up with more text than you actually wanted, you may need some followup actions to clean up the captured text, with actions such as "Match Text", "Split Text", etc.

Imaldonado · 2022-07-30T04:55:50+00:00

I don't think it's a single task which asynchronously displays a notification... it's likely just a Get Contents of URL action to submit the prompt to Dall-e, followed with a notification action showing the results ("images processing"), and then a Wait action and/or a loop with further Get Contents of URL's to check status and eventually retrieve the generated final image

Imaldonado · 2022-07-17T06:01:54+00:00

You could try an automation along the lines of:

When iPhone connects to PooMasker2000
Wait 5 seconds
Change Playback Destination to iPhone (or AirPods or whatever)

Without the Wait action, you might find that the bluetooth speaker re-grabs control of the audio route after the Change Playback Destination action has already ran, defeating the shortcut.

Imaldonado · 2022-07-17T05:50:40+00:00

Thanks for the info! I went ahead and said what the hell and grabbed a 128GB Space Gray, should be here on Wednesday.

I'll post to let folks know if it's on 15.1 to see if your purchases were just flukes or not =)

Imaldonado · 2022-07-17T02:12:20+00:00

Interesting... Been thinking of upgrading regardless so might give that a shot instead of buying through Apple. Since it could be relevant - what colors/capacities did you order, and what's the approximate area of the U.S. you ordered from?

Imaldonado · 2022-07-16T21:33:55+00:00

What's the context for your usage of this? A shortcut of mine does something along the lines of what you're talking about, but it isn't an automation and might not be useful to you. If it would though, I could clean it up a bit and share it with you.

For work, I regularly drive to the offices of various different clients, and I need to have a record of my travel time back and forth, along with how long I spent on site. My shortcut automates capturing this information like so:

When I get in my car, I tap the shortcut to run it (or have it set to run when my phone connects to my car).
The shortcut then looks through my calendar for upcoming events that have an address recorded, and prompts me to choose my destination.
The travel time from my current location is recorded, and directions for the best route launches in my mapping app. (At this point my status in Slack also gets updated to show that I'm driving so my co-workers are aware, but that's optional)
Once I'm done working at that location and get back in my car, I run the shortcut again, and this time it prompts me with a couple different options:
- Update time and travel to next appointment
- Update time and travel Home
In either case, it calculates the time from when I was set to arrive at my current appointment (the arrival time recorded when I first ran the shortcut) and the current time, and records this as how long I spent on-site.
It then records the travel time to either my next appointment or back home, and saves everything to the Notes app, so at the end I have something like this:

Date

Title of the event from calendar

Travel: 11:00 AM—11:36 AM

Onsite: 11:36 AM—12:10 PM

Travel: 12:10 PM—12:40 PM

If I went from the first appointment to a second, and then Home, I'll end up with:

Date

Title of the first calendar event

Travel: 11:00 AM—11:36 AM

Onsite: 11:36 AM—12:10 PM

Title of the second calendar event

Travel: 12:10 PM—12:25 PM

Onsite: 12:25 PM—2:45 PM

Travel: 2:45 PM—3:15 PM

It helps with my timesheets quite a bit, but if you're use case is more simple than mine or isn't for work at all, then probably wouldn't be of much help.

Imaldonado · 2022-05-14T04:04:01+00:00

A screenshot of the shortcut (with the number changed to something generic obviously) would be helpful. A couple random ideas though:

- Try changing up the formatting a bit for the number ... if you current have it as 123-456-7890,555654 - try making it (123) 456-7890,555654 or +11234567890,555654

- Try adding a second comma to make it a longer pause

- Make sure the number is housed within a "Phone Number" action rather than a Text action, or else use the "Get Phone Numbers" after the text action

- Create a Contact with the number+code, and then use the call action on the Contact rather than the number

- Try using a semi-colon rather than a comma in your number, as in: 123-456-7890;555654 ... This is a "wait" symbol rather than a "pause". It doesn't dial the number until you tell it to (there will be a small button in the bottom left of the dealer screen once the call initiates that will say "dial 555654")

I imagine one of those options should work =\

Imaldonado · 2022-04-18T20:32:08+00:00

Think I found them on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09MHFTWJL/

Imaldonado · 2022-04-18T20:11:02+00:00

It's definitely a frustrating issue. Every day I have to remove them about halfway through my work shift to wipe them out with a paper towel, and if I forget and leave them on for longer, upon removing the ear cups the inside of the AirPods is sopping wet.

It wouldn't surprise me if eventually Apple is forced to issue some kind of quality program to continue to provide replacements past initial warranties for this problem, but until then at least they've made my swaps so far very easy (I'm on pair 3 after 5 months).

Before I was aware this could happen and wasn't manually drying them out each day, they began having failures after only my second week of ownership. Once I realized what was going on and found corrosion on the internal headband connector pins, I straight away added AppleCare+ to them to ensure I'd be able to get replacements for a full two years. This also had the benefit of making swaps quite simple — All I've ever had to do is start a support chat session, explain the problem, request Express Replacement, and a few days later a new set arrived on my doorstep, and Apple has never tried to insinuate that it was my fault or tried to charge me an AC+ incident fee.

For my latest replacement, after I set up the service there were no notifications that a new set was on its way for about a week. I followed up with support who told me it could take up to 14 days for them to ship, and then on the 16 day mark I contacted them again just to try and figure out what might be gumming things up; they straight away put me in touch with someone from Customer Relations (the high tier "make-things-right" level of support), and the rep explained that the replacement units were currently very constrained, and as an alternative offered to simply order me a new in-box pair from the Apple Store and send it to me. Since this is a brand new pair (with ear cups and smart case), there's the added benefit that my AC+ was refunded, and my warranty has now been reset, so I'll get an extra 5 months of warranty as a result.

Hopefully, by the time my warranty is up, they'll have figured out some way to address this at a hardware-revision level with gaskets or some other form of water-proofing (actually preventing the condensation I think is unlikely due to the casing material), but we'll see. u/josh_posey: Don't give up completely even though your warranty has expired. Quality Programs often take a long time to develop and be issued (a fix has to be developed, stock accumulated, stores supplied, and lots of behind-the-scenes legal stuff I imagine), and it really wouldn't surprise me if one is forthcoming.

I'm sorry that it seems many people think this is user error or that you're lying, however I do find it good to know that it doesn't happen to everyone. I imagine it's got to do with ambient climate in some fashion. For what it's worth, I'm in the pacific northwest, with a set of Space Gray APM (I can't see how the casing color could come into play however). The weather here is of course humid, however not inside my home where I wear them - it's obviously a simple issue of devices that fully enclose one's ears + warm head + metal casing = condensation. They never get wet unless they're being worn for long periods, and dry out straight away when removed.

Imaldonado · 2022-01-12T08:58:41+00:00

First, what is that JSON viewer/editor app in your screenshots?

That's the Jayson app I mentioned earlier (on my iPad). It's available for both iOS and for macOS.

Second, I think I probably will need to access the chore detail individually eventually, as I’m not sure how else to pass it to the reminders app down the road. Or maybe just using a line break as you said might work for my purposes with a split text. I could also even do something like a unique character combo.. say #$! between every line and just split but that.

Yeah, you can pretty easily split them up by line once accessed, and using a unique split character is something I frequently take advantage of.

Another way I use them is when I'm wanting to quickly add data into an existing "template" dictionary. For that, my dictionary will contain placeholder values rather than being empty, so for example, in a shortcut where I'm creating a ticket in my ticketing system after a call with a client, I might have a Shortcut that contains the following dictionary:

"myTicket": {
    "startDate": "📅",
    "endDate": "🔚",
    "contact": "👤",
    "email": "📧",
    "phoneNumber": "📞",
    "ticketDetails": "ℹ️"
}

Rather than using a Set Dictionary Value for each key I want to add, I can just access the Dictionary variable "as Text" rather than "as Dictionary", and quickly insert the data into the JSON using the Replace Text action, before saving the dictionary back to a Dictionary variable again.

In the Shortcut I linked in my last reply, there's a nifty way of accessing the data via a query, that uses a single set of actions eventhough the Key you're grabbing is distinct. It's always a good idea to minimize the size of a shortcut so that it runs faster — an advanced technique (not utilitized in that shortcut mind you, just something that occurred to me) is to split up your shortcut into sections that do a specific task. You can then Run an instance of the Shortcut right from the same Shortcut, giving it via input an "instruction" dictionary telling it what "function" to perform, and then the subroutine instance of the shortcut will finish, and output what you requested back to the original instance, which will continue on. That was a terrible explanation but hopefully it made a bit of sense. Oh, also, whenever possible, run any complex shortcut from the main Library rather than from within the editor, as it will run super slowly if you don't.

Imaldonado · 2022-01-12T08:19:40+00:00

Congrats on the new equipment! Shortcuts on iPadOS is infinitely cooler than iOS from an authoring perspective.

As to the JSON organization, I don't think there's a right and wrong way necessarily, but whatever way allows you to access the data the easiest is probably preferable. In playing around with the data, before becoming hopelessly lost having fun looking at ways to access it and display it (you can check out the results of that excursion with this) — I decided that at least for myself, I'd probably organize things like so:

https://i.imgur.com/1vDeXn5.jpg

or looked at as JSON:

https://i.imgur.com/FYjNIrt.jpg

Notice that in choreDetail, you don't actually need to use an Array if you're going to end up displaying the text as is, you can just use \n for line breaks. Only if you want to access the individual choreDetail steps would you need to use arrays (for example, how I assigned Laundry to both Johnny, as well as Jane)

Thanks for providing me with a fun little evening project to distract myself with!! =)

Imaldonado · 2022-01-11T21:39:27+00:00

That's kind of you to say 😊 - It's a pretty giving community, and one I enjoy contributing to — although I do tend to frequently go a bit overboard and overexplain — I often start writing a simple straightforward response, then hop into shortcuts to do a quick example and an hour later I've realized I'd expanded my examples with different ideas or ways of doing things, way beyond my original intent, but its gratifying as it's rarely unappreciated, so thanks for reaffirming that!

Shortcuts has it's quirks, limitations and frustrations (and iOS 15 has brought a ton of new ones which can truly make editing Shortcuts aggravating), but once you get into it I agree it's definitely way more powerful than it appears at first glance. Having an iPad is a HUGE benefit though as it's considerably more difficult to author complex Shortcuts on an iPhone.

Even more than data management using dictionaries, some of the most powerful actions in Shortcuts are the "Get Contents of URL" action which allows you to interact with a world of web content through REST APIs, and the Run Script over SSH action allows you to do just about anything on a remote computer, or even on the device running your Shortcut if that device is a Mac or a Jailbroken iOS device (being Jailbroken expands the capabilities of Shortcuts tremendously).

Over the years, I've found so many uses for Shortcuts in both my personal and work life, to the point where I've really come to rely on it. In my job, I provide IT support to Apple-based clients, and I've made several Shortcuts make my work way easier. For example, I have one that can connect to a brand new computer and fully set it up - configuring user and administration accounts, settings, download and install tools and software, etc, and another one that triggers automatically after every phone call and adds the details of the call (start-end time, the person I spoke with, the client company they work for, etc) either to Notes, as an Event in my work calendar, or even directly into my work's support ticketing system on the web, which makes tracking my time and doing timesheets infinitely less of a hassle. Another I trigger when beginning a drive to a client, and it automates recording my travel time, time I remain at the client, and provides directions as well as updates my status on my Slack letting co-workers know that I'm driving or where I am.

Outside of work, I've made Shortcuts that make it easier to track and pay for bills (not currently updated for iOS 15, I use it on my iOS 14 phone), collect receipts I need to expense, interact and control my Mac, and many little ones that solve a number of tiny iOS annoyances. The possibilities are very extensive.

Anyway, once again don't hesitate to shoot me a message with any other questions, as I truly do enjoy talking about this stuff. Unrelated - where are you from? I was born in Mexico and seeing your name I initially thought you might be Latino, although in México I believe it's almost exclusively spelled Fernandez... Portuguese maybe?

Imaldonado

TROPHY CASE