Day 1 attempting automation. I cannot for the life of me workout how to run a Shortcut in the share sheet! Shortcuts is powerful but it’s painful. Maybe I just don’t understand how to use the new iOS 13 share sheet! Oh hang on now they have appeared… 🤔

@adamprocter Since you’re accustomed to writing code to do things, Shortcuts feel wrong in so many ways. However, if you’re a power user of the OS they can feel like the provide you with super powers. Perspective. 😀

@adamprocter I need to add Shortcut support to Arrgly so you can shrink a link without the UI getting in the way.

@fahrni yes I hear what your saying. I was planning to build a JavaScript shortcut to save URLs to a couchdb, well it’s on my todo. 😂

@adamprocter You're automating stuff with Shortcuts?

@hjertnes I was just trying to build a share sheet to save URLs to couchdb via JavaScript. I do however want more automation in my life.

@adamprocter Cool. Most of my automation are done on the Mac because as a developer I think it’s much easier than Shortcuts.

@hjertnes yes indeed. I also want to build some custom automation for building this site thelast7.com and as they are all RSS feeds it should be simple once I get my head down to it. I want to build the automation as a Vue app which I half started but I can’t recall if I hit a CORS issue with getting stuff from MB again.

@adamprocter if it is just a matter of reading some rss feeds and then saving some stuff into somewhere else or running some API calls I would probably just have made some simple command line stuff for it.

And if Micro.blog have some issues where you can't use the API's from the browser then some @manton should fix it

@hjertnes @manton knows about the CORS stuff 🤪

@adamprocter he should change CORS and fix it 🤪

@hjertnes @adamprocter I went to quite a lot of trouble to file a detailed issue describing the problem and possible fixes. I've been a little disappointed that in more than a month there's been no response at all.

@pyrmont yes you did and thank you, I know @Manton is well aware and we had a longish conversation on Slack a while back (9months ago now) when it cropped up. The issue as I understand it is that fixing CORS for Manton opens up a security issue he has to fix first (as per chat start of Dec). Also I understand why its low on the priority, book release and also this will open up a lot more issues I suspect as we all start building web apps and I suspect there is other core functionality that is higher priority, for me its annoying as I will have forgotten all the Vue and Cors stuff I had learnt, when I had some time to try and build my microcard project / app

@pyrmont Sorry there was never a reply on GitHub. What @adamprocter said is correct... I need to make a change to how authentication works before I can open up CORS everywhere.

@adamprocter Oh, I feel like maybe my comment came across as an attack on everyone else in that thread. I'm sorry, that wasn't my intent at all.

I realise with everything going on for Manton, December was the worst time to have raised it; my frustration was more with the complete lack of acknowledgement (which I'd note has now been rectified; Manton has replied separately in this thread). It's never as simple as it seems—and maybe I am completely wrong about this—but it also appeared that the fix is actually relatively straightforward. Leave the current authentication path basically as-is; just add the ability to send the token through a custom header.

The experience also adds to my frustration with Slack. I can see where real-time(esque) communication to talk through issues is really beneficial but the almost complete opacity of discussions that occur there sucks major balls. This thread is of course publicly accessible but I'll update my issue with a summary of it anyway (including Manton's acknowledgement) so that others have better visibility of the state of affairs.

@manton Thanks for the reply. Look forward to the change!

@pyrmont and the other thing is I can’t even recall the main issue we hit in the end which is buried behind slack paywall now. We had thrashed out some chat around it too. Another vote up for using github issues or a discourse forum

@adamprocter I've had similar thoughts about the support channels thing but when I actually sit down and work through which ones I'd remove, things quickly stall out.

For example, it seems a bit silly if you can't contact Manton on MB so I don't think removing that's a goer. E-mail seems essential for private communication. GitHub has the least mainstream appeal but it's where developers are, it exposes discussions publicly and has pretty good tools for notifications, conversation status, indicating support, etc.

So that leaves… Slack? I'd personally drop it but I can understand that when you're like Manton and starting from a standing start, you want to foster community in any way that you can.

This exercise always brings me back to the same conclusion: it's not so much that Manton is managing support incorrectly, it's that he needs a bigger development team. That's easy to say from my arm chair and it's (I'd guess) something that's impossible given MB's current revenue but it really seems like he's taken on a truly Herculean task.

Again, easy for me to say but I do wonder if the main service shouldn't be open sourced. I think people would still pay (given the convenience) and it would at least let those of us who might be able to help contribute more.

@pyrmont all good points indeed. I’m going to try and be more helpful reporting via github/ email I think. Managing an open source project is also mega. Something I am working on / thinking about. So I am not sure that would help without a lot of thought and work, many catch 22s. Of course @brentsimmons would also have some words of wisdom in that regard mind.

@adamprocter Yeah—I maintain a single Ruby library that's relatively popular and it's quite a lot of work. I can only imagine the effort that would go into something of the scope of MB. Poor Manton!