I use Omnifocus, rather than Things, but hopefully can help with a few of these anyway, or provide some ideas.
Weather
You can get the high or low by tapping on the âforecastâ variable and selecting âHighâ or âLowâ (or whatever other option you want) from the menu that appears. (I think youâve found that already, based on your note in the shortcut itself.) There is also a âCalculate Statisticsâ option which you could use to find the overall maximum and minimum.
The built-in Weather action wonât allow you to specify the dates for the forecast but you can use âGet Item From Listâ after the forecast action to get the temperatures for particular days. However, this is still limited to the 7-day forecast (from the current day). For example if you want the forecast for the first day, you use index 1, and so on. (You could work out which days you needed with some of the Date actions.)
You would probably need to use an API (such as Dark Sky) to get forecasts further out than 7 days if neededâhowever, I had a (very) brief look and couldnât see anything that extended out past 14 days. Perhaps there is something that can give you historical weather data as a guide. Of course, the other option is to only generate your packing list a few days before you leave and then this might not be an issue! (This is the kind of thing where I would set up a task on the date as part of a larger travel workflow with a link in the notes to the Shortcut that is used to generate the packing list.)
Packing List Input
Iâm afraid Iâm not familiar enough with the Things URL scheme to speak to multiple headings. But Iâm sure someone else here can! (Can Things accept Taskpaper as an input via its URL scheme? If so then this would be relatively easy, but I didnât see anything in a quick search.)
There are some really good examples of packing list shortcuts that other people have built in this thread: Automators 17: Live at PodCon which do things similar to what you have mentioned.
You definitely should be able to create a packing list in Apple Notes (or a text file, like some of the examples above) and then have the shortcut pull from there. You will just need to use the âFind Notesâ action with a specific criteria that will match the correct note. (Rose, I believe, has a Shortcut, or suggested one in one of the episodes (probably the one about changes to Shortcuts when the new notes actions were released), that checks if there is more than one note returned and then prompts you to select from a list if so.) The note will pass its contents into the next action so you could just use this in place of the âTextâ action you currently have.
Work/Personal
Either of these options would work. It depends on what you need. The only thing I would note is that if you want work items mixed in with your personal items, itâs possibly easier to have two seperate shortcuts, because otherwise the logic can start to get complicated trying to join everything up in the right places.
On a kind of related note, I actually use Drafts for this and because of this I am currently in the process of re-working my template shortcuts to use a Taskpaper template that is able to be stored in Drafts and then be generated by using a dictionary as input to a generic shortcut that conditionally inserts lines, or inserts repeating blocks. I am meaning to write that up somewhere properly once I have finished with it, because I think it makes things easier to work with. That explanation was terribleâbut basically if I had a packing list template it could look something like:
- [[people]]'s passport
- [[people]]'s international driving licence
[[[/PEOPLE]]]
- beanie (?COLD)
- swimmers (?HOT)
And then I would have a dictionary which contained:
- the Drafts UUID
- a âPEOPLEâ value with a list of the people going on the trip
- a âcoldâ value which was true/false
- a âhotâ value which was true/false
And that would get passed into the Get Taskpaper from Template shortcut, return Taskpaper text, and be added to Omnifocus using the âAdd TaskPaper to Omnifocusâ. It would include the âPEOPLEâ section once for every person in the list, with their name included, and only include the last two options if the respective conditions were true.
Itâs not super readable but so far Iâve found itâs better than trying to build complicated templates directly in Shortcuts. Probably if I were better at scripting it might be easier to write a Drafts action, but I started in Shortcuts and so itâs stayed there.
Happy travelling!