Writing

My blog posts are written and stored within Obsidian and synced to Obsidian Mobile using Working Copy and Github, which I document in my article Obsidian Git on iOS.

iOS Shortcuts

I use a handful of iOS Shortcuts to make editing and posting my content more convenient.

Bonus points for these shortcuts also working on my Mac device, as well as being easily shareable.

Image to Imgur

Link to shortcut: Image to Imgur

Imgur provides an easy-to-use API that has allowed me to make an iOS shortcut that I can use directly from my phone's share sheet.

This means, from my photo, I can share it to my action and it will upload it to Imgur and return the a link to the image.

Here's a gif showcasing what this looks like:

Link to Markdown Link

99% of the time, I simply want the Imgur link so I can add it into my markdown file that I am writing my blog post into.

With the Imgur link copied from the previous shortcut, I am able to run the string through an additional shortcut that convert's the string into markdown format ![alt text](imgur link here).

Link to shortcut: Image Link to Markdown

Image to Imgur to Markdown

I combine the two shortcuts into a Image to Imgur to Markdown shortcut. This is a simple combination of the two.

The shortcut returns the string in markdown format, so I can simply copy and paste the returned value into my markdown file.

Link to shortcut: Image to Imgur to Markdown

Screen Recording

I use the default iOS screen recording feature. I do have it setup as a quick menu option so that when I pull down on my screen, it's one click away.

Maybe if I had a newer iPhone (15/16) with the physical quick action button I would set it to screen recording

Occasionally I record my phone screen from my Mac using the iPhone Mirroring application.

Video Editing

I often do screen recordings on my phone to showcase the features I am using on my phone (like shown above). The default video editing software that comes on iPhones is severely lacking.

I use Capcut to edit these videos. Capcut provides a surprising number of features for video editing. The main (only) feature I use is cutting out sections of the video and speeding up sections.

Capcut also provides a few features I'm interested in but haven't used yet.

1. Cloud storage with easy-to-share features.
2. Video-to-gif generation (premium)

Current pain points

There are some pain points I think can be alleviated in my process that I will document here and update as I solve them.

Alt text generation using AI

There is still a bit of manual action required for the image insertion. Images need an alt tag. I'm never confident in my ability to describe an image in a way that is beneficial to people that need it.

I figure this may be a good use of AI.

With iOS shortcuts allowing HTTP requests and image encoding/decoding, it shouldn't be too difficult to feed

Video to Gif

iOS Shortcut's provide a default shortcut action to convert a video into a gif, but the quality is lacking.

Capcut has an export-to-gif option, but it's a premium feature requiring subscription.

My current solution is airdropping the video to my laptop, converting it into a gif using the open-source solution Gifski and then running the Image to Imgur to Markdown shortcut on my laptop. This works well enough... but is not ideal.