✱ Groceries with Due, Silo and Drafts

August 20th, 2013 • tagged: drafts, apps

It’s no secret that I forget virtually everything. I’ve been using the excellent Due (iTunes) more and more lately, and I also stumbled upon Silo (iTunes). Silo is a list app, much like the popular Clear, but for some reason, I dig this one more1. I have to thank Sean Korzdorfer for his insights here in respect to both of these apps.2 Using URL schemes, you can make some pretty fantastic workflows using these two relatively simple tools, and Sean has some killer stuff he’s made note of. I shamelessly used a bunch of his stuff and tweaked it to fit my needs. And what would a workflow be without Drafts? Crap, that’s what. So here’s a simple hack that has been super useful for me. Nothing insane, just tying a notification to a grocery list.

So, I need to go food shopping (which is constant with two growing boys). Sending things from Drafts to Due is easy enough, but I only use Due for time-based tasks, not lists. Silo is a much more natural fit. Problem is I forget everything. On a million occasions, I’ve made extensive lists in a number of apps only to totally forget about them. Plus, certain days are better for me to get to the store than others. So what to do…

Like I mentioned previously, using some of what Sean has done as inspiration, I made a simple action for passing an embedded Silo URL from Drafts to Due. Then I just set the time I want to be reminded to go to the store, and when the alert fires, completing the task in Due will prompt me to pass the URL on to Silo. Then I choose an existing list — in this case, groceries — and boom. List is set, and off I go. Here’s the raw scheme and some screenshots so you can see what’s going on:

due://x-callback-url/add?title={{LIST ☲ silo://x-callback-url/note/add?text=[[draft]]&x-success=drafts://}}

Just make sure you’re creating a comma-separated list in Drafts, and you’re set. You can install the Drafts action directly, by clicking here.

Like I said, this isn’t revolutionary, but it’s handy for a scatterbrain.3

  1. Here’s the documentation on Silo’s x-callback parameters. ↩

  2. I even stole his use of divination symbols. I mean, there’s only so long you can read his tweets and not want to use these characters. ↩