I’ve been going through love/hate relationships with journaling apps: I like the principle of journaling, but I find the apps are often glorified text editors sold at a premium for a very specific use case and not always have good security. Additionally, I’m increasingly finding that siloing my nascent thoughts in a specific app keeps them separate from my main notes, where they could be leveraged to benefit my ideas more.
So I’ve been thinking: what makes a journaling app? At the core, to me, it’s about
- Ironclad security (end-to-end encryption)
- The ability to add some media, especially images
- Knowing where I wrote something (I live in two vastly different places)
- Having the weather would be fun to have, but not mandatory
Obsidian ticks all these boxes, apart from the last two pieces. On iOS, it’s trivial to insert that data using Shortcuts, on a Mac it’s harder, and I’ve been thinking, since I mostly use my Mac, could I get all that functionality with nice scripts and maybe Keyboard Maestro?
After doing lots of exploration on various forums, cobbling together half a dozen of scripts, digging blindly into JSON files (and studying especially the DEVONthink journaling template), turns out that you can, here’s how.
Of course, if anything here blows up your computer or your wallet, I take no responsibility whatsoever, use at your own risk, yadda yadda.
Get the tools ready
You need a few helper apps:
- JSON Helper, free on the Mac App Store. Grant Location access to the app in System Preferences.
- Location Helper, free on the Mac App Store. Grant Location access to the app in System Preferences.
- Optional, but oh so handy and amazing: Keyboard Maestro ($36)
Then you need to open two free developer accounts.
Both services listed below are free for a limited usage, and if you don’t hammer the servers with constant requests, you should remain well within the limits of free account for a personal use.
For the weather data:
- Go to https://openweathermap.org/, open an account, confirm your email.
- Go to Account → My API keys, request an API key, name it however you like. Keep it handy.
- Go to the API page, subscribe to “Current Weather Data”.
Beware that Open Weather Map takes up to two hours to activate API keys. If your scripts fail, maybe it’s because your API key is not valid yet. Wait a little.
For the location data:
You can very readily get latitude and longitude with Location Helper, but I wanted a human-readable addresses. For that, we will use Google Maps.
- Create a Developer account with Google on https://developers.google.com/ (you can use your regular Google account).
- Follow this tutorial to generate your Google Maps API Key. Keep it handy.
The scripts
They can be activated through anything that can execute scripts, but for the convenience of activating them, either inside other macros or via a string sequence, I keep mine in Keyboard Maestro. Don’t forget to paste your API keys where indicated (keep the quotes!).
Insert weather data (with emojis)
property weatherAPI : "<insert your OpenWeather Map API here>"
tell application "JSON Helper"
try
(* Get my latitude and longitude*)
tell application "Location Helper"
set listCoords to get location coordinates
set _lat to item 1 of listCoords as text
set _lon to item 2 of listCoords as text
end tell
set Weather_Display to ""
(* Get current weather from OpenWeather *)
set getWeathersource to fetch JSON from ("https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?lat=" & _lat & "&lon=" & _lon & "&exclude=minutely,hourly&units=metric&appid=" & weatherAPI)
set getWeather to "High: " & temp_max of main of getWeathersource & return & return & "Low: " & temp_min of main of getWeathersource & return & return & "Current: " & temp of main of getWeathersource & return & return & "Humidity: " & humidity of main of getWeathersource & return & return & "Conditions: " & description of item 1 of weather of getWeathersource
set Current_Temp to (round (temp of main of getWeathersource)) & "°"
set Daily_Temp to "Min " & (round (temp_min of main of getWeathersource)) & "° " & "to a " & "Max " & (round (temp_max of main of getWeathersource)) & "°"
set Weather_Display to "## Weather" & return & return & getWeather & return & return
end try
end tell
if Weather_Display contains "clear" then
set WeatherIcon to "☀️ Ensoleillé,"
else if Weather_Display contains "thunderstorm" then
set WeatherIcon to "🌧⚡️ Orages,"
else if Weather_Display contains "drizzle" then
set WeatherIcon to "🌦 Bruine,"
else if Weather_Display contains "rain" then
set WeatherIcon to "🌧 Pluie,"
else if Weather_Display contains "snow" then
set WeatherIcon to "❄️ Neige,"
else if Weather_Display contains "sleet" then
set WeatherIcon to "❄️ Neige fondue,"
else if Weather_Display contains "mist" then
set WeatherIcon to "🌫 Brume,"
else if Weather_Display contains "fog" then
set WeatherIcon to "🌁 Brouillard,"
else if Weather_Display contains "squalls" then
set WeatherIcon to "💨 Bourrasques,"
else if Weather_Display contains "smoke" then
set WeatherIcon to "🔥 Fumée,"
else if Weather_Display contains "haze" then
set WeatherIcon to "🌫 Voilé,"
else if Weather_Display contains "clouds" then
set WeatherIcon to "⛅️ Nuages,"
else
set WeatherIcon to "🌡"
end if
set theForecast to ""
set theForecast to WeatherIcon & " " & Current_Temp
return theForecast
Of course, translate the weather to your own language if you don’t want to use French. But why wouldn’t you, you monster?
Insert geolocation data
This script returns your location as a human-readable address instead of raw latitude and longitude.
tell application "JSON Helper"
tell application "Location Helper"
set listCoords to get location coordinates
set _lat to item 1 of listCoords as text
set _lon to item 2 of listCoords as text
set getLocation to reverse geocode location with API key "<Insert your Google Maps API key here>"
set location to formatted_address of item 1 of results of getLocation
end tell
end tell
return location
Make it Markdown
Now we want something pretty. Since we have macros that return plain text, it’s easy to add some Markdown formatting, and build for instance clickable links for our location data that take us to a visual map on the Internet. But since I’m a contrarian son of a killer whale, I was not happy with having my outbound links going to Google Maps. I’m happy using it as service, but I wanted my links to go to Apple Maps. (Yeah, I know, Google will still have my data, but… it was fun to do.)
If you want your location to be formatted as a Markdown link going to Apple Maps, use this script instead if the previous one (once again, don’t forget to add you API key).
on findAndReplaceInText(theText, theSearchString, theReplacementString)
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to theSearchString
set theTextItems to every text item of theText
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to theReplacementString
set theText to theTextItems as string
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
return theText
end findAndReplaceInText
tell application "JSON Helper"
tell application "Location Helper"
set listCoords to get location coordinates
set _lat to item 1 of listCoords as text
set _lon to item 2 of listCoords as text
set getLocation to reverse geocode location with API key "<Insert Google Maps API key here>"
set location to formatted_address of item 1 of results of getLocation
end tell
end tell
set _lat to findAndReplaceInText(_lat, ",", ".")
set _lon to findAndReplaceInText(_lon, ",", ".")
set markdownLocation to "[" & location & "]" & "(https://maps.apple.com/?ll=" & _lat & "," & _lon & ")"
return markdownLocation
Combine everything… and add it automatically to your Obsidian daily notes
Now we have two macros, one for weather and one for location in a humanly readable format. Since Obsidian uses plain Markdown files on your disk, it’s very easy to have Keyboard Maestro watch the folders where you want your new files to have your weather and location data automatically inserted. In my case, I’m watching my Daily notes folder, where I journal, for new files. The trigger is: “This folder” (insert your folder path) “adds an item”.
I simply have a macro built of the two scripts, which inserts geolocation and weather, in the middle (Insérer emplacement et météo). Anytime I create a daily note, I have a nicely formatted journal template with my location and weather at the bottom and an entry ready to be typed with a h1 title!
One last tip: if you want to avoid the macro the fire when you manipulate files in your vault, put it into a Keyboard Maestro group that’s only enabled when Obsidian is active. That way, the data will only be inserted when you create notes from within Obsidian.
Have fun!
+9°C 
→30km/h