Release 2024.1 (macOS & iOS)

Actions For Obsidian
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I’m happy to announce the release of Actions for Obsidian 2024.1 for both platforms. Get it on the App Store!

Before trying out the new stuff, please update the companion plugin Actions URI in Obsidian to 1.5.0+ since AFO relies on that version.


New & Exciting

Support for working with files

Actions For Obsidian now allows you to directly save non-text files to your vaults. While you could do this manually before, now it’s baked-in. This brings several new actions:

Clearer vault handling

As always, vaults can be linked with AFO in the main app, but they can no longer be added ad-hoc while configuring Shortcuts actions. (See “Changes” below for more.)

A note by another name …

Get Note now lets you specify a note’s title to retrieve it. Useful when you don’t have the note’s file path at hand, or when you know there’s only one note named “Inbox” somewhere in that vault.

Get Obsidian’s focus

The new Get Active Note action returns the currently focussed note in Obsidian, while Get Active File will return the path of the currently focussed anything.


Changes

:warning: Vault handling had to be overhauled to make file support possible. While all your existing vaults are still known to AFO, they’ll need to be re-linked! The app has marked the vaults in question for you with a wee alert icon.

When picking a folder during onboarding (“Linking your vault”), the app will now check if the folder is a valid Obsidian vault. If it isn’t, it will let you know.

The categories in the Shortcuts editor have been prefixed with “Obsidian”, e.g. from “Notes” to “Obsidian Notes” etc.

All actions titled “Get List Of All …” have been renamed to “List All …” for brevity. (Also, they’re now easier to find in the list of actions.)

List All Files and List All Non-Markdown Files have been moved from the “Obsidian Vaults” category in Shortcuts editor to the new “Obsidian Files” category.

Appending below headline: Now inserts the text above any trailing new lines in a section instead of below them.

The app now uses Sentry for tracking internal errors and reporting them to me. There’s no personal data involved, just technical details about what went wrong. This will help me to find and fix issues faster and more accurately. See the Privacy Policy for more.


Breaking Changes

String-based vault names have been removed

AFO 1.0 launched with actions which accepted strings as their Vault parameters. Since September 2023, in v1.3.0, these string-based parameters were deprecated, and could not be accessed anymore in any actions that were added to workflows.

They have now been removed entirely to make the new vault handling possible. If you have unchanged workflows from before v1.3, please update their actions’ Vault parameters to prevent running into trouble.


No Longer Broken

For some customers, Shortcuts would sometimes substitute characters in their file paths etc. with their nicer typographic counterparts, effectively changing the entered file paths into something unusable. No longer!


That’s all for today!

I hope you’ll enjoy the update! If you have questions or suggestions, feel free to post them here in the forum or hit me up on Mastodon @actionsdotwork@pkm.social.

Peace，
Carlo

:star::star::star::star::star: Finally: If you’re enjoying Actions for Obsidian, it would really help me out if you could give it an honest rating or review on the App Store!

3 Likes
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When I run the Save File example on macOS, it adds a photo (of me from my iMac) as well as the note. However, the embed link doesn’t work as generated; it just shows a message that it can’t find it. But if I edit the file name by removing the “.jpeg” extension, then I can select the file and it displays correctly. I’m not sure why it works this way, since it seems to be okay.

When I tried it on iOS, it took minutes (very painful!) waiting to initialize Obsidian configuration files from iCloud since I had been using iCloud to sync my vault. Eventually, it then indexed my entire vault (several thousand files) and synced the render database. I think it saved the image, but I didn’t see the note that references it.

This convinced me to move my vault from iCloud to my Mac and use Obsidian Sync instead. Hopefully, that will work much better, and maybe I will even be able to use Obsidian on my iPhone.

3

When I run the Save File example on macOS, it adds a photo (of me from my iMac) as well as the note. However, the embed link doesn’t work as generated; it just shows a message that it can’t find it. But if I edit the file name by removing the “.jpeg” extension, then I can select the file and it displays correctly. I’m not sure why it works this way, since it seems to be okay.

Wild. I made a note to look into that!

iCloud

Obsidian and iCloud is not a good mix, absolutely not. I had nothing but issues, and moved to Obsidian Sync after a while. Smooth sailing, all told. (Of course, it doesn’t fix Obsidian basically just halting when it loses focus on iOS – but the sync process is so. much. better.)

4

Yes, I switched my vault over to Obsidian Sync and it’s definitely way better than using iCloud Drive. I just started with the defaults, and it’s really fast now.

However, the default settings do not sync ANY configuration files or plugins (which used to take forever with iCloud). So I noticed that I can’t create a new note and insert a template since it doesn’t have the Templater plugin. So I’m trying to figure out just what I should enable to be included in sync. I guess I could try turning everything on, and see what happens. At least, it’s not just a shared iCloud Drive folder now, so perhaps it will only sync when changes occur and it won’t be an issue. Any suggestions based on your experience.

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Personally, I went with using the bare minimum in terms of plugins on iOS, i.e. only what I really need on mobile, to keep the iOS client as uncluttered and speedy as possible.

(I love my iPhone 13 mini but it has a relatively small screen, which at times turns using vanilla Obsidian into an adventure, and adding plugins into the mix is not always helpful.)

At least, it’s not just a shared iCloud Drive folder now, so perhaps it will only sync when changes occur and it won’t be an issue.

That, and the sync happens when Obsidian says the sync should happen. iCloud Drive has its own decision-making algorithm which has its own ideas about when a sync is actually necessary.

6

Good point. That probably makes sense. I will try to minimize what I choose to sync on iOS. At least, it’s usable now, but I will probably need to add some plugins like Templater.

When using Actions for Obsidian on iOS, do I need Templater installed locally to Create Note or Periodic Note using a template. What other dependencies does AFO have that must be synced so they work on my iPhone?

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Dataview, Omnisearch, Templater – but only if you use the functionality. AFO will only try to work with them if you use its respective actions.