Hi there,
First post here in this forum, but very long time user of Nextcloud (since the fork 
), from a Yunohost instance on a personal VPS.
I’m a big user of the great Deck app for Nextcloud, and own a few iOS devices.
Like a lot of iOS + Deck users, I have been seeking for an Nextcloud Deck app for a very long time…
Looks like it won’t arrive anytime soon… Even worse, using the web version of Nextcloud Deck on a phone, especially on a screen as small as my mightly iPhone 5SE, is a real nightmare.
I’m not a developer by any mean, and don’t have the time nor the knowledge to start one on my own.
However, I’ve discovered this morning that Deck features a REST API, and I wondered whether it was doable or not to use the iOS app Shortcuts to leverage that API. After a few hours playing with Shortcuts, it showed to be surprisingly easy and I managed to come up with a proof of concept which works quite well.
From my iPhone and with a fairly usable interface, I can now :
- Chose a stack on which to create a new card
- Chose a title, description for my card
- If I want, chose a due date for my card
- If I want, chose one or more labels to assign to my card
The board on which all this happens is currently “hardcoded” but would be very easy to add another loop before to chose the board. I prefer to have one shortcut per board.
We could also do things like
- Chose a card, then change its stack or any other property
- View the list of cards in a stack (already tried it, it’s very slow because it needs one API call per card in the stack if you want to retrieve the labels associated)
I’m very happy with my current solution, because it’s not from i phone that I want to move or manage cards anyway. However, being able to create a new card quickly on the fly from my iPhone was very critical to me.
For those who would be interest in my POC, you’ll find it here
How to use it ?
- First click on the link from an iOS device. It will redirect you automatically to the Shortcut app and propose you to download it. You may need to go to your settings to accept “unsafe” shortcuts. You may need first to run at least one shortcut to do so (just download the first shortcut you find in the gallery and run it)
- Secondly, you’ll have to change some parameters so that the shortcut works. Enter the shortcut edit mode by clicking on the three dots on the top right of its icon. Scroll down to change the parameters as explained below. All parameters are in the very first lines.
- Change
https://mynextcloudserver.comto your real Nextcloud url - Change
BoardNumberto the board id you want to use. It should be a number. You can just navigate to one of your boards, which URL will be something likehttps://mynextcloudserver.com/apps/deck/#/board/10. In that case, you’ll enter10 - Change
Usernameto your real username - Change
Passwordto your real password - You should be good to go ! You can place the shortcut within your apps if you want
- Just click it to launch the POC
Outro
- This is just a POC, I share it because I think some of you may be interested.
- It’s not an iOS Deck app by any mean
- It has a lot of limitations but also a lot of possibilities, would be interested to see how some of you will tweak it to adjust it to their needs
- I made this POC in quick and dirty mode, the goal was just to demonstrate that the Deck REST API and the iOS Shortcut app can help smoothing a little bit the Nextcloud Deck usage on iOS
- I’m sure my POC could be optimized, made quicker and cleaner…