Today, Apple released two WWDC sessions around Shortcuts — Dive into App Intents and Implement App Shortcuts with App Intents.
I’ll be covering the material and what it means soon, but for now I’ve taken extensive notes & screenshots on the available sessions and have made them available for members.
(These notes are members-only – you’ll need a membership to access it.)
As part of Club MacStories, Federico Viticci published an Automation Academy guide on Tips for Optimizing Your Shortcuts for macOS Monterey.
In the post, Federico explains some tips he’s developed over the last six months working on the Mac that are super useful for Shortcuts users, especially if you’re coming from the iPad — things like changes with variables, how to use actions native to Mac from the Automator experience, and innovative ways to utilize AppleScript (that I’m definitely going to adopt myself and integrate into my own shortcuts).
Here’s the list of techniques:
Federico’s annual pre-WWDC piece is out and you should read all 8,000 or so words of it, particularly this section about Shortcuts:
While the Shortcuts app shouldn’t have been released in those precarious conditions last year (it should have been labeled a beta), my usage of the app has increased alongside Apple’s work on improving its performance and stability;
[…]
[T]oday, I consider Shortcuts for Mac an essential tool in my workflow and, in some ways, the most important change Apple could have brought to allow people like me to try macOS again.
I agree with the overall conclusion of the piece, but this summary of Shortcuts on iPad vs. the Mac struck a chord with me as well:
Yours truly for iMore:
Apple’s Shortcuts can be an overwhelming app, with so many actions, apps, and features to take advantage of that it can take time to set up and get using everything in a way that works for you.
With the upcoming beta releases that ship after WWDC and longer days (in the Northern hemisphere) throughout the summer, the next few months are the best time to get into Apple’s Shortcuts app.
Now that the apps are more stable, there are more actions from the App Store, and no time like the present, here’s why the Shortcuts app is worth digging into:
Yours truly for iMore:
On Tuesday, Apple previewed new accessibility features coming to their platforms this year, including new navigation, health, and communication tools alongside Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD).
Among these announcements was the expansion of their Accessibility Assistant shortcut to Mac and Apple Watch to “help recommend accessibility features based on user preferences”.
The new shortcuts have now been released in the “Shortcuts for Accessibility” category in the Gallery for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, along with the 26 Accessibility shortcuts that users can add right away in their Shortcuts app.
Yours truly for iMore:
From Apple’s side, bringing Shortcuts support to one of their actions forces cross-platform parity, highlights the features of the app and makes them more accessible, and pushes them to be even better for the next set of expected actions.
For developers, Apple adopting Shortcuts gives them a template for how to build their own actions, gives greater emphasis on the ecosystem to encourage adoption, and also gives them hooks into the everyday default apps that people are using to tie together with their own third-party apps.
And for users, they are now able to take greater advantage of what’s possible, rediscover and utilize the features that are there, and can start to fully rely on Shortcuts as a true part of the iOS and macOS platforms.
Yours truly for iMore:
In iOS 15.4 and macOS 12.3, Apple updated their iWork suite of Pages, Keynote, and the Numbers app to include improved actions for the Shortcuts app across all three applications, bringing the feature to macOS for the first time, and improving on the previous iOS-only set of actions for the suite.
Each app has Open and Create actions to let users open files and generate templates, plus Apple included specialized actions to interact with their Keynote presentations and insert values directly into tables in Numbers.
I am incredibly excited to announce the relaunch of my Shortcuts Library in its expanded form, including over 600 custom shortcuts!
The Shortcuts Library is updated from last year’s release, in which I consolidated my original larger library into 50+ shortcuts that each covered large areas of what’s possible with Shortcuts.
With the new release, I’m distributing 600 single shortcuts in the main library across 100 folder groups, plus I’ve developed a method to compile each folder into 150 bundle shortcuts made out of all the single shortcuts in that folder.
Today, Apple released updates to their iWork suite of apps that adds actions in Shortcuts for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote on macOS, bringing powerful first-party actions that Mac users can take advantage to automate their work:
The iWork apps for Mac just got support for Shortcuts. Most notably the Numbers app got an action to append a row to a table ??
— Simon B. Støvring (@simonbs) April 7, 2022
Across all three iWork apps, there are now actions for “Open” and “Create” – plus Numbers has added “Add Row to Top or Bottom of Table” and Keynote has added “Open in Rehearsal Mode” and “Open in Show Mode.”
The Create actions all also include the templates/themes available in the iWork apps, which makes it quick to generate 40+ samples from Pages, Numbers, and Keynote each for a total of over 120+ templates.
Here’s the full list of actions:
I am super happy to announce that I’m a judge for the new Shortcuts contest hosted by MacStories as part of their new “Automation April” campaign – the contest is live now!
As part of the Shortcuts contest, anyone can submit two shortcuts to be judged by a panel of Shortcuts users, including myself, for Best Shortcut in five categories:
On Wednesday, Apple published an update in the Apple Support knowledge base detailing new features and issues fixed in Shortcuts in the latest iOS and macOS releases.
In the post, Apple lists all of the new features added to the Shortcuts app, from Automation changes, new actions, and lots of smaller details.
The second half also lists the fixes that were made for existing issues – general improvements to the editor, tweaks for broken actions or performance problems, and fixes for scripting both in the app & using Shortcuts’ command-line utility.
The post itself has significance as well, as it marks Apple providing direct communication for the Shortcuts app about new features and problems.
Join me this Sunday, March 20 at 9am Pacific/12pm Eastern/4pm UTC for a stream as we talk about iOS 15.4 and the new Shortcuts features included in the update.
We’ll cover the new sets of actions that are available, how Automations can run without notifying you every time, and lots of little details that are new in Shortcuts & iOS – I want to get you up-to-speed and moving with everything new!
I’ll be covering shortcuts available publicly in my Shortcuts Catalog and some members-only shortcuts as well.
Join me today, Monday, March 7 at 4pm Pacific/ 7pm Eastern with special guest Chris Lawley as we talk about his latest videos and the iPad versus Mac debate.
We’ll talk about Chris’ latest videos, the upcoming Apple event, and how we’ve been using the Mac (and what that means for iPad) since the M1 transition last year.
Come join us in the chat!
Follow Chris online:
New issue of my Shortcuts newsletter is out:
Welcome to Issue 32 of “What’s New in Shortcuts” – what a week for Shortcuts tweets!
Florian Bürger shared his Fjorden automation (say that five times fast), an important SOS shortcut is making the rounds on TikTok, there’s a handful of new apps with great Shortcuts support, and an impressive list of ideas straight from the community.
Plus, stay for the end as I guide you through my super-intelligent choice to delete my entire Shortcuts database on the Mac – and learn how I barely made it through the other side with my library (partially) intact:
Welcome to Issue 68 of “What’s New in Shortcuts” – what a week for Shortcuts tweets!
Florian Bürger shared his Fjorden automation (say that five times fast), an important SOS shortcut is making the rounds on TikTok, there’s a handful of new apps with great Shortcuts support, and an impressive list of ideas straight from the community.
Plus, stay for the end as I guide you through my super-intelligent choice to delete my entire Shortcuts database on the Mac – and learn how I barely made it through the other side with my library (partially) intact:
Check out my stream with special guest Matthew Bischoff, cofounder of development studio Lickability, from Friday, February 11th where we talked about their experience getting into Shortcuts for Mac:
We discussed Matt’s recent deep dive into Shortcuts, Stream Deck, Bunch, and more to build the automations they’ve always wanted for their personal and work life but never had the time to create…until now.
Feel free to leave comments in the chat replay and I’ll make sure to answer them. ?
New issue of my Shortcuts newsletter is out:
Welcome to Issue 31 of “What’s New in Shortcuts” – this week is full of feedback reports, beta testing, and, as always, great ideas from the Shortcuts community.
I was up to no good with Jason & Dan on the stream, Federico followed up an impressive week with another impressive shortcut, the Albums app & Ochi caught my eye, and and Stephen Robles & Chris Lawley shared their expertise on YouTube.
Plus, I’ve got a stream with Lickability cofounder Matthew Bischoff coming this Friday, as well as some new posts dropping throughout the week – enjoy:
Welcome to Issue 67 of “What’s New in Shortcuts” – this week is full of feedback reports, beta testing, and, as always, great ideas from the Shortcuts community.
I was up to no good with Jason & Dan on the stream, Federico followed up an impressive week with another impressive shortcut, the Albums app & Ochi caught my eye, and Stephen Robles & Chris Lawley shared their expertise on YouTube.
Plus, I’ve got a stream with Lickability cofounder Matthew Bischoff coming this Friday, as well as some new posts dropping throughout the week – enjoy:
Check out my stream with special guests Jason Snell and Dan Moren of SixColors.com recorded, February 1st, about their “Podcast Notes” shortcut.
Jason and Dan, who are both professional writers and podcasters, published a series of stories on Six Colors covering a shortcut designed to take note of any issues while recording a podcast and make it easy to identify those moments to edit out in post-production – you can find the articles here:
Plus, few issues ago in my Shortcuts newsletter, I also wrote about a similar shortcut I’d created on a stream last year.
On this stream, I talked to Jason and Dan about the differences between our shortcuts, how they’ve changed their shortcut over time, and came up with a few ways to push the idea even further.
Catch the full stream here – make sure to leave comments/questions in the chat replay and I will follow up too!
Welcome to Issue 66 of “What’s New in Shortcuts” – this week we saw the release of iOS 15.3 with a slew of bug fixes, the beta for iOS 15.4 and the long-anticipated drop of Universal Control, and we’re now on the tail end of iOS 15’s remaining features before Apple switches gears to iOS 16 this summer.
Shortcuts is now much more stable than it was previously in the fall and it seems like Apple has managed to process all of the Feedback we’ve been submitting – I’m very grateful for the bug fixes this week, as is much of the community who’ve been awaiting these changes.
I spent much of the week flying through new shortcuts for GTD (still a work-in-progress), put together a good technique in the Discord community that I’ll be sharing for members soon, and started unleashing a series of Shortcuts stories I’ve been working on (linked below).
Next week, I’ll be streaming with the Six Colors crew, and covering some new apps dropping throughout the week.
Until then, here’s what was new in Shortcuts – the Twitter community shared good ideas as always, MacStories had another banner Shortcuts week, and Jarrod Blundy took off in a rocketship: