A few months ago, I did my usual thing of making a full set of shortcuts to completely “automate” access to a website of choice – this time, with Amazon.com.
Available now in my Shortcuts Library, my folder of Amazon shortcuts contains deep links to all the sections of Amazon’s website that I felt were useful enough as shortcuts – 24 distinct pages found within their navigation menu.1
Since my original coverage of how to use the Stream Deck with Shortcuts, other methods have popped up – most notably, the Shortcuts plugin for Stream Deck from developer Sentinelite.
With Shortcuts for Stream Deck, users can select from their shortcuts folders, set a specific shortcut using a dropdown menu, and run their shortcut with a tap of a button.
Bear 2, the minimalist note-taking app from developers Shiny Frog, has launched today after years in development – and with it, a handful of nice-to-have actions in Shortcuts to Export Notes and Backup (for macOS users only).
The Export Note action in particular is notable because it allows users to make a shortcut that, given a note from a previous action like “Search Notes,” can export the note into the following formats:
For today July 11 and tomorrow July 12, folks who buy apps on Apple’s platforms can enjoy discounts on over 100 apps made by independent app developers for Indie Dev Sales, an alternate event put on during Amazon’s Prime Day that’s organized by Signals for HomeKit developer Matt Corey.
I love the idea of Indie Dev Sales because it celebrates the hard-working independent app developers who put time, love, and care into their apps in ways that we often don’t see from apps built by larger corporations.
This event helps raise the profile of indie apps, provides helpful discounts for users, and serves as inspiration for other would-be app developers – a great way to consider spending your money on a day like today.
Here’s the full list of 113 apps (as of writing) – make sure to check out the Indie Dev Sales page to see the app links and categories, prices and discounts, plus links back to the indie developers that you can follow online:
Majd Taby, founder of photo-editing app Darkroom, shared an excellent photoset on Threads today of his visit to the Grand Canyon – in the image carousel, each shot is perfectly split, letting you swipe between photos without any break, creating a seamless split across the whole set.
In his caption, Majd mentions @seriesphotosapp, the account for Series, an app for customizable layouts from the developer Recentralized.
Series, which works on iOS and iPadOS, looks to be similar to many collage-style apps that have existed over the years for formatting photosets into nice-looking collages.
However, as demonstrated in their demo video on Threads, the app can be used to split photos perfectly – here’s how:
While at the coffee shop this weekend, I found myself taking a few pictures with the goal of slowing down, noticing the environment around me, and practicing my framing – plus I wanted to post it to Threads 😇.
However, once I’d gotten the photos I wanted, I figured – if these are decent enough, why not post them on Apple Maps?
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.
Federico Viticci of MacStories:
Instagram just rolled out Threads, the company’s new text-based social network that’s been advertised over the past few weeks as an alternative to Twitter. I’m trying out Threads (you can find my account at threads.net/@viticci) and in the process of setting up the list of people I want to follow, I immediately run into an annoying issue that I fixed with a shortcut.
[…]
However, when I click on profile URLs from the popular app Ivory, I get an error because the app thinks I clicked on a Mastodon profile URL:
[…]
It’s not any better on the Twitter website: after logging in with my account and clicking on some profile URLs, I was presented with Threads webpages that do not have a Follow button at all:
Federico solves the problem with OCR and, of all things, Back Tap – and it works really well.
If you’re trying out the new Threads app from Instagram (you can follow me here if you’re on it), you might be wondering if you can use the app on the iPad.
By default, the experience isn’t great – Apple has a compatibility mode that allows you to install iPhone apps on iPad, so it technically works…
Thankfully, compared to the old mode that was entirely locked in portrait orientation (as if an iPad docked on a Magic Keyboard was an iPhone laying on its side), this compatibility mode at least lets you use Threads in a small vertical window, albeit surrounded in a large black box. However, we can do better than that.
With the introduction of Stage Manager, Apple has enabled these iPhone-style apps that are otherwise locked in a portrait orientation to instead float alongside your other iPad apps, letting you place them in whatever arrangement you so desire.
Here’s how to set it all up – and a series of shortcuts to make the experience even smoother:
Michael Gorbach, engineering manager on the Shortcuts team:
For those that have adopted App Intents in their apps, or are considering it: What are the main frustrations / limitations you have hit? FB numbers are great, but in this case not required!
Now’s the perfect time after 2 developer betas and the public beta on the horizon – if you have something to voice to Apple about App Shortcuts, now is the time!
Antoine Van Der Lee on his blog SwiftLee:
App Intents have been new since iOS 16 and offer a programmatic way to service your app’s content and functionality to Siri and the Shortcuts app. New in iOS 17 is the option to surface App Shortcuts integrated into Spotlight, making your app’s functionality even more discoverable.
App Intents are the engine behind many features like Widgets and Live Activities. By using them smartly, you’ll create a reusable framework for your app’s functionality. For example, the App Intent we’re creating for Spotlight Shortcuts could be reused for interactive widgets
What a great walkthrough – here’s the sections:
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.
After 10 days of App Store rejections I’m so excited to say, Short Circuit is finally in the App Store! 28 days ago I started built a prototype of Siri powered by ChatGPT, and was immediately drawn to the idea of a premium-feeling iOS, iPad, and Mac app for ChatGPT. This amazing technology deserves a good user experience, and we gave it one.
Partnering with @Soroush to make that happen has been a dream, and I’m so excited to share Short Circuit with you.
Make sure to check out features like the Side Chats, the multiple Personality profiles you can add, and custom level of Creativity in your responses.
Read the full thread on Mastodon and get Short Circuit on the App Store.
Flexibits just released Fantastical 3.7.9, which adds a bunch of new Shortcuts actions, including the ability to filter events from a given Calendar Set in a given date range, and the ability to generate a simple schedule for a given day.
Read the post on Six Colors and get the Fantastical update (via Zsolt Benke on Mastodon).
From the LaunchBar release notes for v6.17 back in April:
Improved Shortcuts Support
* If a shortcut accepts files as an input, it’s now possible to send those files to the shortcut via Send-to (select a file in LaunchBar, press Tab, select the shortcut, hit Return).
* Shortcuts are now displayed with the icon that has been defined in Shortcuts.app
John Voorhees for MacStories (line breaks added for emphasis):
The sources above are the component parts of what Detail calls Scenes, which can use one or more sources to create a single-view Scene or a Combo Scene that comes in five different layouts.
That allows you to mix and match camera sources with screen-sharing sources and even other scenes into one composite video.
The result is a flexible system that can be easily adapted for video interviews, tutorials and help documentation, video conferencing apps like Zoom, and more.
Moreover, you can set up multiple scenes in advance and switch among them using keyboard shortcuts or Apple’s Shortcuts app.
I’ve had my eye on Detail for Mac for some time, and their latest Detail Duo for iPhone/iPad is intriguing too. Over on Mastodon, John and I had this back-and-forth about the update:
Ivan Mehta writing for TechCrunch:
Productivity-enhancing app Portal has launched a Mac app. The company helps users regain focus and become more productive with immersive backgrounds and natural sounds.[…] Portal for Mac has more than 80 environments to choose from, which include high-quality looping videos captured by the company’s own team.
Further on:
Users can control the sound and motion or change the background through the menu bar icon too. Given that Portal is a native Mac app, it integrates with Siri Shortcuts as well.
I’m a huge fan of apps like Endel for its generative audio soundscapes – Portal looks like an interesting visual version of the same concept.
Apple uses a default naming scheme for all kinds of image files, including screenshots, on the iPhone. But for many of us, this isn’t ideal.
Thankfully, there’s a trick to get around this and use custom file names for your screenshots on the iPhone. It involves setting up a shortcut in the Shortcuts app.
David Pierce for The Verge (line breaks added for emphasis):
If you squint a little, you can see the larger vision here. Apple imagines an app ecosystem in which data flows freely between devices: you take a picture here, edit it there, share it over there, save it in that place, all with a few drags and drops.
It wants to make apps work between and across your devices.
You should be able to access your apps and the data inside them from just about anywhere on your device.
In Apple’s wildest dreams, apps aren’t each their own universe; they’re like stars in a solar system, each one part of a larger coherent thing.