One thing I like to do with my family is watch movies. But not just any movies, Comic Book movies. We’ve seen both Thor and Thor: The Dark World, Iron Man and Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s not a lot, but we’re working on it.
I’ve mapped out the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies for us to watch, and it’s OK, but there wasn’t a easy way to link into the iTunes store from the list.
I decided that I could probably use Workflow to do this, but I hadn’t really worked with it to do it, but today I had a bit of time and figured, “what they heck … why not?”
My initial attempt was clunky. It required to workflows to accomplish what I needed. This was because I had to split the work of Workflow into 2 workflows:
- Get the Name
- Get the Link
Turns out there’s a much easier way, so I’ll post the link to that workflow, and not the workflows that are much harder to use!
The workflow Add Movie to Watch accepts iTunes products
. The workflow then does the following:
- It saves the
iTunes products
URL as a variable callediTunes
- It then gets the
iTunes
variable to retrieve theName
and sets the value to a variable calledMovie
- Next it asks ‘Who is the movie being added by?’ This is important for my family as we want a common list, but it’s also good to know who added the movie!
- This value is saved to a variable called
User
- Finally, I want to know when the movie was added so I get the current date.
We take all of the items and construct a bit of text
that looks like this:
[{Movie}]({iTunes}) - Added on {Input} by {User}
Where each of the words above surrounded by the {} are the variable names previously mentioned ({Input} is from the get current date and doesn’t need to be saved to a variable).
In my last step I take this text and append it to a file in Dropbox called Movies to Watch.md
.
It took way longer than I would have liked to finish this up, but at the end of the day, I’m glad that I was able to get it done.