Author: Matthew Cassinelli

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iMore Offsite

Apple isn’t doing enough for new Shortcuts users — here’s how they can fix it

Yours truly for iMore:

When it comes Apple’s Shortcuts app, many new users are caught off guard. They hear about the potential, but the app is very complicated. When presented with a blank slate, many often don’t go further figuring it out.

For such an important app in Apple‘s ecosystem, the company needs to do a lot more to onboard first time Shortcuts users and get them familiar with the app and how to build in it. Here are three areas the company could improve on and why those matter for newbies:

Sometimes you need to call it like it is — I’ve written about some of these before, but I want to see a lot more so new users can get further quicker.

Read the full story on iMore.

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Newsletter

What’s New in Shortcuts – Issue #072

Welcome to issue 72 of “What’s New in Shortcuts!” — this week is a quieter mid-summer period where we didn’t see any news, but there’s always new shortcuts ideas popping up on Twitter.

Plus, I published a few stories for iMore, showed off my Focus Modes on TWiT, and got deep into some design changes that I’ll be showing off in a few weeks:

Continue reading “What’s New in Shortcuts – Issue #072”
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iMore Offsite

Here are 7 ways to get started with Shortcuts for Apple Watch

Yours truly for iMore:

The Shortcuts app for Apple Watch is a small but powerful way to access the vast array of capabilities from the apps on your device, all from the convenience of a few taps on your wrist.

Some of the ways Shortcuts on Apple Watch can be most useful, however, are not immediately obvious — there’s a lot of potential in Shortcuts, but honing in on the best use cases and avoiding too much complexity is important for a good Watch-based experience.

This piece covers seven areas where you can build Shortcuts for Apple Watch that are worth exploring, have powerful actions to take advantage of, and work well when running from your favorite Apple Watch:

Read the full story on iMore.

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Guest appearances Offsite Podcasts

iOS Today #611: Setting up Focus Modes on your iPhone

This Tuesday, I had the pleasure of being as a guest on iOS Today with Mikah Sargent:

Personalize your custom Focus modes in iOS 15 or iOS 16, from silencing specific notifications to switching screens based on location.

  • Home Screen customization
  • Lock Screen customization
  • Focus activation scheduling
  • Using particular colors for context

Watch the full episode on TWiT or  on Apple Podcasts.

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iMore Offsite

14 Shortcuts for Safari Views, Tab Groups, and Focus Filters to use with iOS 16

Yours truly for iMore:

Safari has gained six actions of its own so far in the betas:

1. Open View
2. Open New Tab
3. Open New Private Tab
4. Create Tab Group
5. Open Tab Group
6. Set Safari Focus Filter

[…]

Currently only available for developers and public testers (but coming to everyone this fall), these actions are aimed at interacting with different “views” in Safari, plus creating tabs and doing basic Tab Group management.

 

To help you take full advantage of these, here are 14 shortcuts built out with each potential option across the actions so that you don’t have to build them yourself:

Read the full story on iMore.

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Newsletter

What’s New in Shortcuts – Issue #071

Welcome to issue 71 of “What’s New in Shortcuts” — the public betas are finally here and more of you can play around with the new Shortcuts features!

That being said, I’ve definitely run into some bugs that break my very-specific workflows, so I wouldn’t recommend installing everything unless you have backup devices.

Otherwise, the betas are fairly stable, the new actions are ready to be used, and now’s the best time to dig into your Shortcuts workflows before the busy season — my summer of Shortcuts is really just getting started…

Continue reading “What’s New in Shortcuts – Issue #071”
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iMore Offsite

iOS 16 public beta adds 46 new Shortcuts actions for Focus Filters, Background Removal, Parked Cars

Yours truly for iMore:

If you’re installing the public beta, developer beta, or just curious about the new features for Shortcuts coming to iOS 16, you’ll be glad to know that Apple added 46 new actions that add deeper access and advanced functionality to the Shortcuts ecosystem.

The main set of actions for Shortcuts focuses on Notes, Voice Memos, and Safari, plus Shortcuts itself. Additionally, Apple added new actions for Clock, Files, and Parked Cars, plus more for features like Focus Filters, Background Removal, and Personal Hotspot, and PDFs.

Here’s the full list of what’s new (so far) in the public betas:

As a follow to my post covering the full set of actions coming in iOS 16, I wrote about the current set in the public betas — actions for Books, Mail, and Reminders aren’t working, so I’ll be publishing a follow-up on iMore when they become available in future betas.

Also of note — almost none of these work on the Mac either (yet?).

Read the full story on iMore.

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Newsletter

What’s New in Shortcuts – Issue #070

Welcome to Issue 70 of “What’s New in Shortcuts” — we are very close now to the public beta, and with that comes a new set of actions to play around with until the launch of iOS 16.

Now that we’re on the third round, the developer betas are a bit more stable and I’ve gotten past some of the high-level bugs (the kind that tend to affect users with as many shortcuts as I do). However, as I note below, a few new actions ended up breaking too…

Otherwise, this week I published a handful of fun stories, found some great ideas and apps on Twitter, and got extremely jealous at an awesome NFC workflow — here’s what’s new this week:

Editor’s note: Revue, the service I use to send this newsletter, has had email delivery issues lately, leading some readers to get the last issue sent to their Spam folder — if this happens to you, mark the email as Not Spam to help ensure future issues make it to your inbox.

Continue reading “What’s New in Shortcuts – Issue #070”
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iMore Offsite

8 ways to get help from Apple Support using Shortcuts

Yours truly for iMore:

Apple’s Support resources are incredibly helpful when you’re running into issues, need to repair a device, or for learning more about how to use your devices.

With an entire Knowledge Base online, the Apple Support app, and their social media pages, there’s a lot of ways to access help pages, get direct support, and browse more to learn on your own — so here’s a set of shortcuts to help you do just that.

Read the full story on iMore.

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iMore Offsite

Apple is releasing tons of “hidden” features in Shortcuts — what about everyday users?

Yours truly for iMore:

As Apple continues to develop the Shortcuts app experience across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and even Apple Watch, there are even more features and functionality that’s possible on Apple’s platforms, but only through the Shortcuts app.

As features like custom speaker groups become possible to create and break apart with Shortcuts, iOS often lacks a built-in, Apple-like way to activate the same functionality without using Shortcuts.

To put it another way, Apple is adding features to their OSes that otherwise don’t fit into the platform itself, but they can get away with adding by putting it into Shortcuts.

For example, there’s no elegant way to make combinations of speaker groups besides tapping around in Control Center, so instead Apple can ship it in Shortcuts, the power users are happy, and…everyday folks just…don’t get the feature?

I already got some comments on iMore in reply to my post, and I’d really love to know my readers’ thoughts on this too — please leave yours in the comments!

Read the full story on iMore.

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Links

How Shortcuts changed one Redditor’s life

Today while working on this week’s upcoming newsletter, I came across a tweet sharing this story from r/shortcuts from last month where u/AngriBuddhist shared how “Shortcuts has literally changed my life”:

Prior to being a Workflow/Shortcuts user, the closest thing to automation/scripting that I’d done is make some pretty in-depth spreadsheets. For the last 5 years, though, I’ve been using Shortcuts to create daily reports for work. Manually, these would take more than 24 hours a day. I do them in 10-20 minutes. I’ve created other weekly reports that would also take more than 24 hours to create manually. With Shortcuts, it takes about 5 minutes.

No one has tried to create these types of things in my company because of the complexity and time investment. Without Shortcuts, I wouldn’t have imagined these projects in the first place.

These reports have had a huge impact on manager productivity, financial results and my visibility within the company.

Today, because of those results and visibility, I was offered and accepted a new role in the company, moving from 4 days a week of manual labor to 3 days of admin work from home, making the same salary[…].

I love seeing posts like this and I’m super glad this Shortcuts had such a big impact on this Redditor — what a great testimonial for the real-world impact that automation can have on one’s life.

See the post on r/shortcuts.

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iMore Offsite

How to create speaker groups for HomePod using Shortcuts

Yours truly for iMore:

In iOS 15.4, Apple added new parameters to the Set Playback Destination action that updated the capabilities from being able to switch destinations to additionally being able to add and remove destinations.

With this functionality, Apple users can create and break apart speaker groups on-the-fly using Shortcuts, something that’s only otherwise been possible by manually selecting and deselecting speakers in the Control Center view.

This article covers four shortcuts that utilize the Set Playback Destination action, making it easy to change speakers, add to a group, remove from a group, and cast to multiple speakers at once:

Read the full story on iMore.

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Newsletter

What’s New in Shortcuts – Issue #069

Hello readers!

It’s been a while — I took a break from this newsletter while working on try big Shortcuts Library rerelease (more below) and continued through WWDC to focus on the updates. Now I’m back at it, just ahead of the public beta release that’s scheduled for sometime in “July.”

This issue focuses on the major headlines from the last three months, including all of Automation April from MacStories, plus a regular section of this week’s community posts at the end.

Throughout the summer, I’ll be covering tweets, articles, and ideas that I missed the last few months and integrating it into the regular newsletter content — I’ll try to get everything so nothing is missed from the break.

Thanks for being a reader! Hopefully this first link will make it clear why I needed to focus my efforts:

Continue reading “What’s New in Shortcuts – Issue #069”
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iMore Offsite

Apple’s developer APIs for Shortcuts are way better this year

I interviewed three app developers about Apple’s latest improvements to the Shortcuts APIs for iMore:

Apple’s newest framework for implementing Shortcuts support in iOS, iPadOS, and Mac apps has been called “modern,” “expansive,” and “much easier,” according to app developers who’ve been testing the new framework since its release at WWDC.

I asked three developers — Alex Hay of Toolbox Pro, Seth Sandler of AffinityBlue (responsible for apps like Tunable), and Josh Holtz of ConnectKit — about the new App Intents framework, what new feature they’re looking to utilize going forward, and how things compare to what was previously available.

Here are their responses:

Read the full story on iMore.

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Links

Don’t call it HomeKit, it’s Apple Home now

Developer Aaron Pearce on Twitter:

Apple is now recommending developers use the term “Works with Apple Home” instead of “Works with Apple HomeKit”.

Continue reading “Don’t call it HomeKit, it’s Apple Home now”
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Guest appearances Links Podcasts

Guest Spot — Clockwise #454: Wednesday Is the Leaf

Last Friday, for episode 435 of the Clockwise podcast, I got the chance to join Dan Moren and Mikah Sargent again along with Rosemary Orchard to talk about:

Our excitement and trepidation regarding Passkeys, our thoughts on auto-generated Siri App Shortcuts, the most exciting features announced at WWDC, and our inevitable (?) USB-C future.

Check out Clockwise on Relay.FM, subscribe in Apple Podcasts, and listen to the episode below:

Continue reading “Guest Spot — Clockwise #454: Wednesday Is the Leaf”
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Shortcuts

Here are 51 new actions for Shortcuts in the iOS 16 betas (so far)

In the first seed of the iOS 16 developer beta, the Shortcuts app has received 51 new actions that support interacting with Apple’s first-party apps and help take advantage of system features.

The actions provided work with Notes, Voice Memos, Mail, Safari, Shortcuts, Clock, Parked Cars, Image Backgrounds, Personal Hotspot, Files, PDFs, and Reminders, plus there’s an initial batch of bug fixes for actions and new Mac support for Safari Reader and Evernote actions.

This guide was compiled using a list provided by the Shortcuts team during Q&A sessions at WWDC, plus another post on Reddit and one of its comments, plus some of my own research using the developer betas.

I’ve sorted larger groups into sections, plus marked any actions with * do not currently work in the first developer beta.

Continue reading “Here are 51 new actions for Shortcuts in the iOS 16 betas (so far)”
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iMore Offsite

Simple shortcuts to help you take notes on WWDC sessions

I made 7 Shortcuts to help you take notes on WWDC sessions for my iMore weekend piece:

With such a breadth of potential topics, sections to research, and videos to watch, it can be hard to wrap your head around what’s new.

So here’s a set of shortcuts to help you explore the conference material, get set up to take notes, and work with the transcripts in your own documentation.

The shortcuts are linked throughout, plus you’ll find the following list with iCloud links at the end:

  • Open WWDC sessions
  • Search WWDC sessions
  • Browse WWDC sessions
  • Open the Developer app
  • Developer TV
  • Full-screen session
  • Process transcript

Read the full story on iMore.

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Offsite Siri Shortcuts

How Apple Is Trying To Fix Siri With App Shortcuts

From my iMore column “How Apple Is Trying To Fix Siri With App Shortcuts”:

With App Shortcuts, everyday folks will automatically have folders of trigger phrases to use with Siri, meaning the work that app developers put into adding Shortcuts support can pay off much easier.
[…]
In many ways, it seems that Siri Shortcuts is Apple’s solution for their Siri problem, and App Shortcuts is an encouraging start. I am looking forward to seeing how people react to the “improved” Siri experience — I’m sure we’ll hear some opinions when the time comes.

Read the full story on iMore.com.

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News Siri Shortcuts

Learn about App Shortcuts from Apple’s WWDC’22 developer sessions

At Apple’s worldwide developer conference during their State of the Union address1, Apple launched App Shortcuts and the AppIntents API, features designed for “zero setup” of shortcuts from third-party apps for use with Siri.

If you’re a developer looking to implement Shortcuts support in your app, Apple has now released all four sessions at WWDC ’22 covering what’s new in these Shortcuts APIs — here are the links:

  1. Dive into App Intents
  2. Implement App Shortcuts with App Intents
  3. Design App Shortcuts
  4. Meet Focus Filters
    Continue reading “Learn about App Shortcuts from Apple’s WWDC’22 developer sessions”