If you’re one of the 100 million people who got on Threads since launch, you might want to customize your Threads experience on your iPhone and iPad using Shortcuts’ “Add to Home Screen” feature.
I’ve found eight alternate icons you might want to use (so far), plus I’ll share how to set up the icons using Shortcuts and Add to Home Screen:
Check out my updated folder in the Shortcuts Library — my set of Threads shortcuts.
I’ve updated my scraping tool, figured out how to make post embeds, and built out a set of shortcuts to send Threads to various apps based on feedback from the community:
Check out the folder of Threads shortcuts on the Shortcuts Library.
In Federico Viticci’s post on Threader, a shortcut to open Threads profiles from Mastodon and Twitter directly in the Threads app, he mentioned in a footnote that Threads’ URL scheme uses the unique pattern barcelona:// – which immediately got my attention.
In the post, his excellent shortcut uses OCR to look at the device’s screen and extract the username, before passing that into barcelona://user?username={Username}.
In my attempts to recreate my Twitter follow graph on Threads, I used Viticci’s shortcut to capture as many links to Threads profiles that I come across – many, many people were posting theirs on launch day, so I ran his shortcut a lot initially.
However, lots of people were (and still are) simply mentioning their profile or posting screenshots of the handle, like my friend Crim – so, I wanted to make another Shortcuts solution that let me type out any username and redirect into their profile.
My “Open username in Threads” shortcut will prompt you to enter in a username, then fills out a URL like barcelona://user?username=MatthewCassinelli – then, the Open URLs action activates the deep link and redirects you into the profile inside the Threads app, so you can follow the person.
Going further with the URL scheme, Viticci also followed up on Threads with yet another discovery – using barcelona://user redirects the app to account tab, making it easy to check your profile from Shortcuts – so I made that into a shortcut too.
Get these in my Threads folder of shortcuts – and make sure to check out my story on how to make Threads work well on iPad with Stage Manager.
I’ve just added a new folder to the Shortcuts Library — my set of Camera app shortcuts – built off the Open Camera action new in iOS 17 developer beta 4 which lets users select a specific camera mode to open each time.
Use these with Siri, the Shortcuts widget, Spotlight, or the app to quickly access the mode you need – they work particularly well in new Lock Screen widget too:
Check out the folder of Camera app shortcuts in the Shortcuts Library.
From @whatqm:
Just made a discord bot using Apple Shortcuts lol pic.twitter.com/mKSuaZzZkC
While searching Twitter for Shortcuts keywords, I came across this video that demonstrates using Shortcuts to post to a Discord channel as a bot – I’ve been wanting to build my own shortcut to do the same, so I added the sample shortcut linked in the reply and will be testing it out in my own Discord community.
Apple has released their public beta of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, macOS Sonoma, and watchOS 10 today, making their Beta Software Program available to freely download and install – at your own discretion, as this is pre-release software where you may experience bugs.
As part of the beta experience, you will find yourself updating your devices often—especially if you have multiple devices on the betas—plus you’ll want to see what’s new in each update, check on what’s upcoming in the OS overall, and see the release notes once the full updates are published.
Since I’m all aboard the beta train—and a Shortcuts power user—I built out a set of shortcuts to make each of these jobs-to-be-done a little bit easier:
For a few years now, I’ve used a two-step shortcut to quickly access the Software Update page in the Settings app on iOS and iPadOS. In my shortcut, there is a deep link defined from Apple’s URL scheme for Settings that opens to prefs:root=General&path=SOFTWARE_UPDATE_LINK.
Recently, I updated the shortcut to work on macOS as well, opening the Preference Pane file that macOS has long been used to redirect the previously-named System Preferences app to each panel – even now, with the newly-named System Settings app, these files still work.
After installing each update—or perhaps before—it’s useful to check on the release notes for each platform to understand ahead of time any bugs or issues you might run into.
Apple has dedicated pages for each platform, so I combined them all into a Menu shortcut that uses Choose From Menu, the corresponding URL for each page, and Open URLs to quickly access your platform of choice.
As the beta periods continue, one can also find themselves forgetting exactly what’s new – you’ll often get very used to new features quickly, and after a few rounds of updates it can be helpful to look back over the updates.
On the sign-up page for the Beta Software Program, Apple has included links out to their various OS pages, each with sections dedicated to the upcoming releases – my Learn about Apple betas shortcut opens directly to this page so you can quickly access those links. Plus, the shortcut doubles as a way to sign up for the public beta program, if you haven’t signed up yet.
Finally, for the detail-oriented group, it can be helpful to actually read the full release notes for Apple’s updates once they’re released in full after the beta periods end – Apple will often detail minor features, bug fixes, or otherwise unmentioned changes to their apps.
For Shortcuts in particular, the release notes pages provide valuable line-by-line changes to the app that are otherwise undetectable, and serve as a marker for when bug fixes are officially implemented (and can be referred to if things go awry later-on).
I have covered the release notes for the Shortcuts app since they’ve been published, using the same search on Apple.com to check for the latest update (and previous updates) – my shortcut lets you check for yourself as well.
Overall, beta life has both its ups and downs – it’s fun to test Apple software ahead of time, but you’ll certainly experience bugs, worse battery life, and what feels like endless software updates.
I find these shortcuts most helpful when run from the Shortcuts widget – I keep one instance of the Medium widget in the sidebar off to the left of my main Home Screen. That way, every other Tuesday when new betas are out, I can easily access the folder and update my devices. Plus, the Software Update shortcut works well in the Menu Bar on Mac as well.
Get the folder of Software Update shortcuts in my Shortcuts Library.
I’ve just added a new folder to the Shortcuts Library — my set of Threads shortcuts:
Check out the folder of Threads shortcuts on the Shortcuts Library.
I just finished rewatching Foundation this week ahead of its second season coming soon, and in the process found myself wanting a shortcut back to the show.
While the TV app donates actions to “Resume” any show you’re currently watching, I wanted to find a permanent way to open into any show from the set of Apple TV+ Originals.
Thankfully, in the TV app, there’s a Share sheet option that allowed me to use Copy Link and pull out URLs for each show.
I went through my favorite 10 shows that Apple has made so far and made shortcuts for the whole set (ordered by primary color, not rank):
I don’t know what compels me to do this sometimes, but one weekend in May I felt the need to create shortcuts to access all the tabs I could in the TV app for iPhone and iPad.
Generally, I really like having deep access into various parts of my apps – if I already know where I want to go, why navigate around manually when I can just use a shortcut?
Plus, I usually just want to get to my Up Next queue, but sometimes I’m browsing for movies and TV shows, or otherwise I’m often going into my Library to watch a movie I own – so I set out to make my own TV App shortcuts.
@Esther on Mastodon:
Finally figured out how to play an alarm only through headphones on an #iPhone and NOT through speakers (for example when sleeping on a train and you don’t want to miss your stop but also not annoy others):
Open #iOS #Shortcuts, create an automation with a timer and have it play a music track that’ll wake you up. Turn off “ask before running” and “notify when run”.
Connect your headphones, set a good volume, and have a nap.
(Just don’t forget to disable it or else it’ll go off the next day too)
This is a great idea – to add onto it, you could also use the Alarm automation, set it to an “Existing” alarm, then choose one of your own Alarms and set the Sound to “None.”
That way, you can still snooze, toggle the alarm on/off regularly as needed, and avoid needing to disable the Automation each time – it’ll play Music from your Personal Automation instead of any alarm tone, headphones or not.
Otherwise, you could normally just have picked a Song in the Alarm menu – but this Automation also lets you choose playlists, radio stations, podcasts, or anything else you can think of!
@Zenitizer on Mastodon:
Dear Fediverse 👋 Zenitizer launched on the App Store today 🚀🥳
🧘 Clean & Simple Meditation Timer
🎵 Soothing Sounds
❤️ Apple Health Support
🪄 Siri & Shortcuts Support
⭐️ Goals and Streaks
👀 Glanceable Widgets and Apple Watch Complications1️⃣ Download: zenitizer.app/install
Congrats to developer Manuel Kehl on his launch last Thursday. 👏
Earlier this week, I was putting together my “offsite” blog post for the YouTube stream I recorded while editing in Final Cut Pro for iPad and wanted to make a linked list of all the chapter markers that I added to the livestream.
Each chapter on YouTube must be formatted as a timecode, but making YouTube links to specific timestamps requires a “total seconds” value at the end of the URL, like &t=3600 – something I wasn’t about to do manually for all 90 chapters.
In order to convert everything to the right format quickly and generate URLs to each chapter, I built two shortcuts:
Stephen Robles of AppleInsider shared a shortcut for redirecting YouTube links into the app:
Or, long press the YT link, run this Shortcut, you’re watching in the app: https://t.co/oFQBvwkkf7
— Stephen Robles (@stephenrobles) April 27, 2023
The shortcut works by replacing the https with youtube – using Stephen’s own YouTube channel URL as an example, it’d appear like youtube://www.youtube.com/@beardfm.
Time to add this to my YouTube collection 🙂
Get the Watch In YouTube shortcut from Stephen’s tweet.
As someone who’s a big fan of Lists for managing a larger following on Mastodon, I want as many ways as possible to quickly access my Lists and see what people are saying in each section.
Ivory for Mastodon has a great Lists feature, which you can access via one of the dedicated Tabs in the app (if you give it one of the slots).
Alternatively, you can also swap the main Timeline to show a specific List instead – this works great for saving a Tab slot, plus filtering the whole timeline by default and making your Home feed calmer by default.
Plus, Ivory has Shortcuts support for opening the Lists tab, meaning it’s easy to call a shortcut from any of the many methods and pick from a list to view.
Unfortunately, there isn’t currently a Shortcuts action for opening into a specific list though. That being said, they *do* have a URL scheme. And that means, with some List data from Mastodon and the URL action in Shortcuts, we can open deep links into a List in Ivory — a little Shortcuts ingenuity for the win!
Plus, since there are a few ways to approach this problem, I’ve written up four methods for working with these Ivory deep links – from simplest to most complex. Here’s how each shortcut works:
When I originally asked about List support on Mastodon, the Tapbots team mentioned they didn’t have official support yet. However, Joseph Duffy saw my message and replied mentioning the existing URL scheme from Tweetbot actually does work if you swap out the app name:
The pattern—built off Tweetbot’s URL scheme—goes like this: ivory://@{handle}@{instance}/list/{list_id}.
To create your own URL, place your username as the {handle}, your Mastodon instance URL as the {instance}, and the corresponding values at the end of the URL for your List as the {list_id} (like 49309 from the link for my Favorites list: https://mastodon.social/lists/49309).
Putting it all together, the Ivory deep link for my Favorites list would be ivory://@[email protected]/list/49309.
[…]
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When working with the fediverse and Mastodon links, one is regularly dealing with accounts from a variety of instances, each with its own set of URLs for every account.
That means, when using the Mastodon API, it’s especially important to identify each user by their unique ID rather than dealing with different handles and instance URLs, which would otherwise get very messy very quickly.
To solve this problem, Mastodon has implemented a Lookup account functionality, a public endpoint that allows anyone with a Mastodon link to send a web request and return the ID for that user.
To take advantage of this in Shortcuts, I built Look up Mastodon account ID, one of my shortcuts that accepts any fediverse link as input (or gets one that’s been copied to your clipboard) and returns the account ID value – here’s how it works:
As you’re building out your Lists experience on Mastodon, being diligent in adding new accounts or going through your following can make the process much easier.
The only downside is, when working with Mastodon posts and accounts across various interfaces on the web and in client apps, there is often an inconsistent experience in the ability to quickly add whoever you’re look at to a List.
On the Mastodon web interface, for example, when looking at a your timeline or even a post, you can’t add the person to a List at all…
…when looking at their profile view, however, the option shows up – the only spot this option appears on Mastodon’s main web interface.
*Also of note: you must be following someone to add them to your list. So if you’re not seeing the menu option on a profile page, it’s likely because you’re not actually following the account yet.*
In order to make the process of adding someone to Lists easier from *any* fediverse link, I turned to Mastodon’s API and Shortcuts, of course – here’s what I built:
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Lists on Mastodon are an important tool for controlling your experience, allowing you to split up your timeline as you choose and catch up on smaller feeds of posts rather than the full firehose.
Especially without an algorithm, it’s easy to feel like you need to read your whole Mastodon timeline just to keep up – Lists help a *lot* with that.
As someone who’s already spending significant time saving Mastodon accounts I’m following to Lists using Shortcuts, it’s easy enough to quickly access a few lists directly from the web browser.
I already have a shortcut that takes me to the Lists page, but after using it these last two months, I find often I’m going back-and-forth to the Lists page to find each one. And I didn’t want to bookmark every single page, or make individual shortcuts for each one just to open it.
Plus, while I’m intrigued by Mastodon’s Advanced Interface—which lets you view all your Lists in Tweetdeck-style columns—it turns out that enabling that feature actually overrides the ability to view individual lists on the web at all – when enabled, List URLs redirect to your full deck view each time.
So, instead, I was left in search of a way to quickly pick from my Lists and open one on the web – enter Shortcuts.
With a new shortcut that could let me pick from my Lists using Shortcuts’ menus, I could quickly find and access each one. On iPhone and iPad, this could live in a widget or be called up with Siri at any time, and on the Mac, I could use a keyboard shortcut or keep it in the Menu Bar and then use my arrow keys to quickly select a List to open.
I also wanted to retrieve my List data to open as deep links into Ivory, so I decided to look into the Mastodon documentation and see what I could find — here’s what I ended up making:
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One of the many benefits of the fediverse is the variety of instances that users can create across different domains, giving inherent independence to the network as it’s spread across many nodes instead of one centralized entity.
However, in terms of linking across the fediverse, that means every URL can potentially have a different host — not all Mastodon links are on mastodon.social, even if your account is located there.
That means, if you’re working with those URLs, you need to prepare for links coming from any specific instance, not just your own – expecting mastodon.social doesn’t cut it.
Plus, when clicking on a link separate from your own instance, the URL is formed with your own instance as the base, but the handle/other instance at the end — an odd behavior to work with at first.
Thankfully, the solution can be amid the components found Mastodon’s URL pattern – and you can use Shortcuts to extract those individual details as needed. Here’s how:
I’ve just added a new bundle shortcut to the Shortcuts Library — it’s called Mastocuts Lists — and the set of Mastodon Lists shortcuts that it contains:
Yesterday on Six Colors, Jason Snell wrote a post called Create visual feedback for running Shortcuts about a method he’s using to check his progress in a long-running shortcut using a Menu Bar utility.
His post was born out of frustration with the Shortcuts menu bar applet, which we discussed on Mastodon as being somewhat unobvious as a signal for progression:
Earlier today, I was complaining to Shortcuts expert Matthew Cassinelli about how there’s no really good way to view progress of a running Shortcut on macOS. Yes, the Shortcuts menu item in the menu bar sort of tries to display progress, but… it doesn’t provide any information I find particularly valuable.
I’m frustrated because I do have some Shortcuts that take time to run, yet unless I have them beep or display a notification when they reach a certain point in the process, I have no idea what they’re doing or if they’re even working.
If you didn’t know, the Shortcuts menu bar icon changes while a shortcut is running to indicate progression.