Just thinking on the screen here, not fully formed yet so be gentle with comments please.
I have a group in one of my DEVONThink databases that is always with me on all devices that consists of brief quotes, humorous sayings, weird facts, cartoons or other images and other miscellany that I occasionally read. The problem is that I have to make a conscious action to go into that section, look at the titles and pick out one to read.
I’d like some sort of script or something that would randomly select an item from that section and pop it up as a notification or something so I see one every day. Most of the items are plain text, some are rich text, some are small PDFs and some are image files.
I am willing to move them all into a separate DT database if necessary.
I have not played enough with scripting or automation to even know if this is possible but it seems like it should be.
Anyone have any ideas on how to accomplish my task?
This should be pretty easy. What device were you hoping to use it on? The solution would be in Shortcuts on iOS or probably Keyboard Maestro on macOS (although there are other options in the latter case, but they are more complicated).
So far the only ones I can find are like that one, display text only and typically short. My items can be longer documents, poems, image files or PDFs so I haven’t found one that handles my set of stuff.
I don’t want to move everything out of DEVONThink because it’s easiest to manage there and saves the original file types.
In an ideal world it would be on both iOS (iPad and iPhone) and MacOS but in a pinch I could deal with it only on the iOS devices as long as it leave the DT database alone.
You give it a group UUID (instructions for getting that are in the Import Question, if you’re uncertain), and it selects a random item from that group and opens it in DT.
You could then use Shortcut Automations or Pushcut or whatever to run it when you’d like.
It doesn’t always behave nice with images. I think it was the size of the image that causes problems—keep it small.
Sorry, been dealing with lambs, picking up the steers we are raising for dinner, building some needed emergency fences and haven’t been able to give it any time yet.
It’s at the top of my list now though so that means as soon as sheep give me time to have an hour or so of high energy time I’ll tackle looking at it.
so that means as soon as sheep give me time to have an hour or so of high energy time I’ll tackle looking at it.