Flic: HTTP Requests to Beeminder API

[phi]

I’m probably late to the party (*1), but I discovered this neatness in the flic.io app:

So, if someone doesn’t want to use IFTTT for hooking up a flic button with Beeminder, they can just use the Beeminder API directly.
This action is also available for the flic widgets, so you can play around with this even without a physical button (*2).

*1) I just got my flic buttons today!
*2) Also using the REST API on iOS you can poke Beeminder via shortcuts already: iOS is open source again, request for feature/bugfix requests and iOS Shortcut for Adding Beeminder Data

[dreev]

Ooh, does this mean it should be easy for us to have a direct Flic integration?

[phi]

Oh, good thinking! I would indeed be surprised if it was hard to do.
I suppose there aren’t any people from flic here to comment on that? Maybe if they are bribed with Surströmming?

[phi]

It works!

makes this:

[phi]

Now what I really want to do is call the Beeminder app directly or as the second best thing this Shortcut:

iOS is open source again, request for feature/bugfix requests

In lieu of a URL scheme for the Beeminder app, I was able to create an iOS Shortcut to call the Beeminder API directly: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/b03d66193a89440da7af6d22133695f3 It’s less convenient than delegating the API call to the iOS app would be, but this has made it easy for me to make a whole bunch of other shortcuts for quick entry of my manual data points. This shortcut is intended to be called with the “Run Shortcut” action rather than run on its own. I’ve been building goa…

And while flickr integrates with a whole bunch of other services, they do not yet have a Shortcuts integration (let alone one for Beeminder of course). So I went ahead and bugged their support about it. They said to submit this as an idea on their ideas.flic.io page and so I did. Only to later discover that this was already suggested last year:

flic to activate ios12 shortcuts

Now I just need people to vote on this

[phi]

I tried the workaround suggested on the flic page and it is working but when you use it with a button (and only then (!)) it requires you to tap on to the notification that flic is presenting to you. This being said it is a nice URL scheme example.

Here is what I did:

I got the iOS Shortcut that @dehowell prepared, put my auth token etc. in there, then made another Shortcut called “Log Water”:

…which then gets run by flic on a double click:

I could have skipped this step and passed the parameters directly into the URL as &input=… but this way I can have Apple Health integration, too!

Now when I run this directly from within the flic app by tapping on the double click action it kicks Shortcuts and I have my data point together with a nicely formatted time stamp in Beeminder and I even got it noted down in Apple Health.

If I use the actual flic button however I get this:

Which does the same thing but only after tapping it.

[phi]

I have since turned the necessity of tapping onto the notification into a feature by adding a little bit of interactivity.

Now the shortcut presents me with the choice between a 200ml, 250ml or 300ml glas.
The selected amount gets added into Apple Health and once that is done I divide it by 250 (which is 8oz), format the number as text, then replace “,” with “.” because sadly the “Format Number” action does not allow to specify the locale and then I pass it to Beeminder.
Lastly Shortcuts opens the Beeminder app so I’m back on my stopwatch screen.