David Sparks has completely redone his Siri Shortcuts Field Guide1 for iOS 13:
The new Shortcuts Field guide was shot entirely new with the new Shortcuts for iOS 13. Apple changed a lot and it is all covered in this field guide:
- Over 6 hours of downloadable video tutorials
- New materials for both beginners and advanced users
- New Downloadable Shortcuts
- So much Automation
Jason Snell, giving an overview of Shortcuts in iOS 13 for Six Colors:
Shortcuts just got a lot more useful if you use Siri, too. You can now create interactive Shortcuts that can ask questions and accept text input, especially useful if you’re not able to look at a screen because you’re using AirPods or CarPlay. And the redesigned Share Sheet in iOS 13 means that you can prominently place specific individual Shortcuts in the Share sheet, making it easy to access them with a single tap.
Jason and Dan are covering iOS 13 feature-by-feature – this piece is a nice summary of what you can expect from Siri Shortcuts in iOS 13.
Check out the full article on Six Colors (they’re celebrating their 5-year anniversary today!).
From my piece iPad keyboard shortcuts for the Shortcuts app on iMore:
While the Shortcuts app is primarily a touch-based system—where are you drag and drop actions around to create your scripts—there are a few keyboard shortcuts for iPad users that can speed up the experience of creating and managing their Siri Shortcuts.
Whether you’re opening the Gallery to view suggested shortcuts, searching for a shortcut in your list, or quickly controlling parts of the shortcuts editor, these simple keyboard shortcuts are worth learning.
Last fall, I made a simple video for YouTube but never posted it here on my website – it’s a quick tutorial on making GIFs using Shortcuts, where I start from scratch and finish with a usable shortcut:
New shortcut File a radar for iOS 13 beta users:
Guides you through the process of filing Feedback to Apple (previously called Radar).
This explains the process in a pop-up, has you type up the problem through a series of prompts before even starting a new ticket, then guides you again on how to easily fill out the form, before finally opening into Feedback.
New shortcut Copy Checklist from Taskpaper for iOS 13 beta users:
Takes any TaskPaper-formatted text coming from the share sheet or clipboard and strips out the extra details, getting just the names of the checklist items in a rich text unordered list.
Apple released a beta version of the Shortcuts app to developers today, coming in at version 2.2.1 beta 1. This includes fixes for Get Travel Time’s transit options, a fix for Tweetbot’s native action, a bug that prevented users from deleting items in a Choose From Menu action, and a few other minor fixes not detailed by Apple.
Last week, I came across a useful shortcut for calling into meetings, tweeted out by Matt Galligan, former founder of Circa and now CEO of Interchange1:
I hate always having to open my calendar app to find the phone number of the next meeting I need to call into. So a while back I built a shortcut to streamline the whole process, and it’s saved a bunch of time.
Here it is in case you find it useful too:https://t.co/SUjxFnEPs8
— Matt Galligan (@mg) April 12, 2019
The shortcut grabs your next calendar event, extracts the phone number, and dials it for you – with a trigger phrase set up, you can just say “Dial In” to Siri and it’ll just work.
Matt also has a neat way for sharing this and his other shortcuts: using Notion.
I have a bad habit of wasting food. I will buy groceries, eat most of it, but usually end up letting one or two things go bad just because I don’t think about it.
It’s probably because I don’t cook enough, but it’s still a problem I want to avoid with longer-term items who expiration dates I rarely think about when I buy them.
This is one of those things I genuinely try to work on, but every time I think about it I can’t remember when I bought or defrosted something.
So when earlier this week, the ground beef I had taken out of the freezer was no longer good, I got fed up with myself for doing it again and decided to change something.
So, I made two Siri Shortcuts for logging and checking expirations to make the process easier on myself, more reliable, and most of all: automated (because that part’s just fun for me too).
After a meeting with someone new yesterday, I realized there was a few places where I could have used the Shortcuts app to speed up the processes around our encounter.
Before the meeting, I was headed somewhere new and needed to figure out how to get there on time.
During the meeting, I was fumbling with my phone a bit, handing it to them to type in their contact information, and didn’t have an easy way to share mine either. Plus, I dealt with everything after the meeting too – writing down notes, sharing my info, and following up later.
From all this, I noticed a few repeating patterns, that could be automated using mostly default apps – the data I need already exists or can be entered on the fly.
So, I came up with a few jobs to be done:
Julia M. on her blog Rampant Procrastination:
1. Open the information tab in Overcast of a podcast you wish to log to Airtable.
2.Select the text of the information tab from the podcast title down, grabbing as much of the episode description as you would like to be included in the notes field in Airtable. Press copy to put this text on the clipboard.
3. This shortcut is used as a sharesheet extension, so press the share button and select Shortcuts, then run the shortcut to log the podcast.”
This post is a great write-up from Julia explaining a way she’s saving podcast episodes to Airtable, plus pulling from that database to play one again at random.
She has little technique for grabbing information from Overcast on the clipboard before sharing the episode, and wrote up how she’s extracting the information from once it’s in the shortcut before sending it through Airtable’s API.
Definitely subscribe to her new blog and give her a follow.
If you have a blog post about Shortcuts, always feel free to tweet me the link. I post some of them here and in my newsletter too.
Dan Moren, writing for Six Colors:
What I really wanted was for iOS to be a bit more intelligent. For example, it could realize that when I turn off my bedside light (which is a HomeKit-compatible Philips Hue bulb) I’m going to bed. And then, when I pick up my phone in the morning it could log that I’m awake, and store the resulting information in the Health app.
Alas, that functionality doesn’t exist. So I made it myself using a pair of Shortcuts.
While I was away at Disneyland, this great set of shortcuts snuck by me.
This is the exact approach I have so often – I think “why can’t my pocket computer do this?” and then Shortcuts lets me roll my own solution.
If you’re looking to access one of your files by clicking on a URL instead of navigating through your Files app, you can copy a link to that file using the Share sheet on iOS.
For episode 19 of Supercomputer, instead of hitting the “call” button to record, we pressed “video chat” and proceed to produce our podcast. I edited out some moments, added chapter markers for the audio file, and uploaded the video to YouTube.
This last week, for episode 20, I also added visual chapters, actually used Alex’s correct audio file, and shared our second video recording to YouTube.
But podcasts are for audio, right?
Yours truly, writing for iMore:
For users who’ve updated to the latest version of Adobe Lightroom for iOS, there is a special surprise waiting – a new dedicated Lightroom action for the Shortcuts app, Apple’s newest automation tool for building custom Siri Shortcuts.
This enables users to batch import photos to Lightroom, apply the built-in Presets, and otherwise act on your photos in the process of custom shortcuts in the Shortcuts app, opening up mobile photography to deeper automation potential.
Lightroom is the first native action from a third-party app added to Shortcuts since the days of Workflow, so hopefully this is a sign of more actions to come.
Some things to note:
I’m super excited, because this was a big sticking point in The Verge’s review, and it’s hopefully the first of many Shortcuts actions.
Head over to my friend Shawn Blanc’s site for a good example shortcut – he selects photos and uses the Shortcuts action extension to add them, but what he doesn’t mention is this works great with drag & drop on iPad too.
One of my long-favorite shortcuts that I use all the time is the one that I’ve built to open the Twitter app and into my lists that I’ve curated over the years.
When I run the shortcut, I can choose from the titles of my lists, and then Shortcuts builds the deep link into Twitter, then opens into that List for me.
If you were a visitor to my site in November, you might’ve noticed a lack of posts on the blog. While I’ve been producing videos and podcasts the whole time, I had a mental block on creating the short posts here on my website for each and just didn’t bother to write them up.
As we’re approaching the end of the year, I decided to get my act together and automate more of blog posts for my work, starting with podcast episodes.
That way I’d have no excuse not to do them, I could spread the news for my podcast more easily, and along the way put together a handy shortcut that I repurpose for my YouTube videos, articles on other sites, and eventually embedded shortcuts here on my blog.
To accomplish this, I built a Post Podcast shortcut that I can run each Friday when we release a new episode of Supercomputer.
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:
Stu Maschowitz of Prolost has put a fantastic piece out on the Shortcuts app:
“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.
Get the shortcut here if you want to make your own.
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.