Today I released my fifth YouTube video, focusing on building an agenda for the day and walking people through the process of building it.
This is a full-Siri shortcut, meaning it’ll work on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, and CarPlay, with Siri speaking out the results to you:
“To me, whether Jobs intended it this way or not, the “bicycle for the mind” is the tool that empowers you to repurpose it for your specific needs, not just to consume things with it, or use it in the same way as everyone else.”
On Friday, I published a shorter video demonstrating how to build a custom shortcut in the Shortcuts app in just under 3 minutes:
For the topic, I picked “how to make a GIF” because it’s not that easy on iOS, and everyone has a library full of bursts and Live Photos that are stuck in the camera roll.
With just a few actions, you can put together an animated loop of your bursts, Live Photos, or sets of photos, and easily share it with people.
I could have made some improvements to the shortcut. Since I filmed this without a script, I didn’t add in Save to Photo Album at the end so that every GIF you made would be saved automatically – this is important because most people run shortcuts from the main library view, but you can only see the GIF in my version if you open the shortcut editor.1
I’m working on some new shorter videos, along with a longer main video each week – working out the process now, but I should be able to ramp up to get more videos out for all of you.
In the meantime, let me know if there’s anything particular you’d like to see from my channel2.
And, as always, linking to the video or retweeting it goes a long way – thank you to everyone who’s been supporting me so far.
It also could have all been built using Find Photos to give you more control; getting into that level of detail, however, definitely takes more than 3 minutes, so I’ll have to work sharing the best examples with the least compromises. ↩
People left more comments that I’m still a robot who doesn’t blink – even though I totally did once! It’s apparently difficult for me to blink naturally with a bright light in my face while trying to communicate the intricacies of this app on the fly. ↩
On Thursday, Alex and I released our 9th episode of Supercomputer into the world. Titled “The Allegory of Dark Mode”, this episode follows up from our show two weeks ago on task managers.
After a short one-week break, we broke back into how we use our devices to get things done, plus went off a bit on how I use Twitter.
Near the end things got weirdly philosophical, which I’m totally okay with.
We talked about and shared a good number of shortcuts we use in the show notes, so if you’re not already subscribe to the show and add them as you listen along.
I also started a submission form for Shortcuts questions, so feel free to submit any places you’re getting stuck or shortcuts problems in the Airtable form any time!
Next week we’ll be talking about the home – HomePod, Apple TV, HomeKit, and more – looking forward to episode 10!
Last week, I published my third YouTube video. This one covered 10 great shortcuts that I’ve built over the years, with quick descriptions and demonstrations for each:1