Thank you for the swift reply, @tobias , and for the welcome! =D
You’re right and I do appreciate that having a single source of truth is important and useful to Supernote’s goals. But are we super sure that supporting iOS Shortcuts like that necessitates all those downsides you mentioned?
Please accept my apologies if I’m being naive - I wouldn’t know how Supernotes works and I’ve perhaps a bit rudely made some guesses. But my first impression would be that since we currently have the ability to make changes offline then sync them up, whichever sync strategy/algorithm is being applied potentially could be used similarly for any programmatically made changes? e.g. if manually editing a note offline would result in some transaction log entry/CRDT change, then could an identical data structure be produced in the case of a programmatic update from an iOS Shortcut action?
If so, do we worry that would be more prone to bugs? If anything I wonder if it could be more reliable - since at the moment the kinds of bugs that exist are like not being able to correctly attach parents to notes (when said parent is being created inline), as those seem more likely to be a UI-based issue that probably don’t occur when using the API (or a mechanism like an iOS shortcut action that would operate at a similar level of abstraction).
Regarding my use cases: actually, something like iOS Shortcut actions are so useful and versatile they tend to cut across just lots of various workflow stuff. I’ll show one example, which is using Things (or OmniFocus, or some other To Do system that has a lot of useful features that allow one to project-manage certain types of endeavours more easily than one could using Supernotes checkboxes alone - no offence to Supernotes checkboxes and the Tasks page which are truly lovely and would fill their own separate but important use case for my workflow), having fresh tasks in it, and pressing the Action Button on my iPhone to immediately create a new Supernotes note, putting a link back in the To Do item so whenever I’m working on the task I can always immediately jump to the right note, and then continue editing that note or create a new child from that note. (For the purposes of this demo I’m using Drafts since it supports iOS Shortcuts)
To Do ↔ Note workflow
But this is only representative of the kind of thing I would do with that particular action - I might e.g. get the button to create a link to a Note whose title is contained in the To Do item, or give a dialog with a menu for me to choose, etc.
And yeah as you suggested I will often do this offline because getting stuff done on the train, in a car in an area when signal is spotty, or waiting around in a building that is constructed like a faraday cage are really good opportunities to try and catch up on a few things.
Shortcut actions don’t necessarily have to result in the app appearing in the foreground, either - as shown in the above example that uses a Drafts Shortcuts action to create new notes which doesn’t bring Drafts to the foreground. Which means you can do things like having your phone silently and reliably create or modify notes for any of your automations - arriving at locations, opening/closing apps, making transactions, starting workouts, changing focus modes, etc. Here’s an example of a shortcut that appends an entry to a Drafts note whenever Supernotes is opened or closed, note that Drafts doesn’t open until I open it myself at the end to show you the result (this use case is contrived for the purpose of providing a demo).
Action used in Shortcut Automation
Regarding the title: perhaps I can clarify the request to be more specific? Maybe something like “Support for iOS shortcuts for Supernotes, the app” (usable offline and facilitating a lot of friction-free use cases) rather than “Support for iOS shortcuts for Supernotes, the service/concept” (achievable by using the API) as might have currently been inferred.
Thank you for your attention, and for crafting a wonderful and delightful app ^^
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