Today, alongside the announcement for WWDC’24, Apple revealed their Apple Developer channel on YouTube where they’re now publicly hosting developer videos, starting with everything released from WWDC’23.
Previously, videos were only available Apple’s own website or Developer apps, limiting the potential reach to folks who’d already heard of it – now YouTube users can freely discover and watch Apple developer videos to learn about building for their platforms.
As of writing, there are 40 videos uploaded – so it’s not the complete set from WWDC’23 (yet?) and as such I unfortunately can’t find any Shortcuts-related videos. Once more are uploaded, and folks tune in after WWDC’24, it’ll be super interesting to see view counts and comments on these videos – we’ll be able to see what’s more popular/interesting to folks, as well as check on common questions in the comments.
Plus, for the intrepid Shortcuts user, all of YouTube’s RSS or URL functionality is now available for Apple Developer videos – I’ll be able to scrape the title, thumbnail, and descriptions to make quick embeds on my website, for example ?.
Living in a house, or even an apartment or condo, as an adult, requires periodic maintenance tasks, like cleaning the bathroom, changing your sheets, replacing the furnace filter, etc. A lot of these tasks should ideally be done on a regular schedule, like changing your sheets every two weeks, or your furnace filter every 3 months for example.
I’m sure a lot of people just kind of mentally keep track of this kind of stuff, but I’ve never really trusted my own memory on it. And I don’t like the idea of a room being dirty serving as my reminder to clean it. I’d ideally like to clean it before it gets too dirty.
So to keep up-to-date on my household tasks, I need a way to help me with of the following:
How many days has it been since I did that task?
A reminder to do that task if it’s past the time it needs to be done.
Tom basically made the perfect solution I’ve been looking for using Reminders, Chronicling, and two custom shortcuts – well done.
Performing repeatable tasks is something everyone does on their Apple devices, whether you’re accessing relevant information, sharing from a set of common links, or taking the same actions over-and-over – OneTap, an alternate keyboard app, makes it easy to find and share all that from any app using quick keyboard shortcuts.
Distinct from Apple’s Shortcuts, OneTap allows you to set up a series of shortcuts that you can switch to from the default keyboard, quickly navigate to find, and tap once to activate.
Your shortcuts in OneTap can be organized into convenient groups, letting you put similar shortcuts together under a unique name, icon, and color so they’re easily identifiable. These groups show up when accessing the alternate keyboard, letting you tap through and find individual shortcuts.
OneTap also adds a single-tap AI options for passing selected text to GPT-4 and returning generative text, letting you essentially integrate Chat GPT into any application with this one app.
OneTap is available on iPhone and iPad as an alternate keyboard, plus on Mac the app makes it functionality available via Apple’s Shortcuts app by providing a shortcut that you can trigger using the wide variety of ways you can use Shortcuts for Mac, like via the Menu Bar applet.
Plus, OneTap comes with actions for Apple’s Shortcuts app, letting you manage your groups and add, move, or edit your items in an automated fashion – or take advantage of the ability to generate a OneTap AI response.
Even though I can see these mounting points on my Prompter as I type this, I have never thought how to actually use them.
Might try mounting my shotgun mic here instead of on a boom arm and get rid of the last few stands left in my studio – another way this Elgato gear can simplify my setup.
Add to my grocery list: Presents a dialog to input a title for a new reminder, then adds it silently.
Dictate groceries: Dictates text, then splits it by new lines and adds them to Reminders in your groceries list.
Mark off items from my list: Asks you to pick from incomplete grocery reminders, then marks them as complete.
Get travel time to the grocery store: Asks you to pick from pre-programmed grocery store locations, then estimates travel time, distance, route, and arrival time before presenting the option to get directions.
Add from past trips: Asks you to pick items from previous grocery orders, adds new copies to the list, and clears the old ones.
Clear my grocery list: Asks you to pick from completed grocery reminders and removes them.
Dive into the latest iOS 17.4 update with NEW Shortcuts actions for iPhone. Learn how to leverage new orientation and physical activity actions for enhanced device control and automation.
Peaks is a unique app for iPhone that, when I discovered it, caused me to exclaim “How I have not heard of this before?” This circadian rhythm app visualizes the daily rise and fall of your energy levels based on your internal clock, taking into account things like your sleep patterns and routines to create a guide for how to approach your day.
Peaks offers a set of routines that you can toggle on or off, plus get notified for, like when it’s time to Avoid Caffeine in the afternoon or Wind Down at night. Routines like Creativity, Exercise, Energize, Focus, and Decisions are helpful as well – these fall into time periods throughout your day that you may understand inherently, but are helpful to remember and even actively be notified it’s the optimal time for.
Certain routines also offer unique options, like tracking your streak for avoiding late meals or fitting tasks in your optimal working times.
As your day progresses, Peaks’ visualization also zooms in to let you see peaks and valleys, plus marks off previous routines in the timeline. Tapping the Share button in the top right corner lets you share the graph of your biorhythm with someone else.
The Insights tab also shows visualizations of your sleep patterns, showing time asleep and sleep quality data, your consistency over the last two weeks, and heart rate data from Apple Watch or a third-party sleep app. Plus, you can see your Energy Score, letting you estimate today’s potential based on a summary of your other metrics.
Peaks works best when combined with its great widgets for the Home Screen, Lock Screen, and StandBy mode for iPhone, letting you ambiently see your progress throughout your day.
Plus an Apple Watch app complete with complications and Smart Stack widgets makes it easy to check in with your body, right from your wrist.
You can also set up control of the always-on display in the Shortcuts app – which offers Siri support:
Open the Shortcuts app
Tap the + in the top right corner
Choose Add Action
Use the search bar to find “Set Always On Display”
Tap the blue Turn or On buttons to customize what will happen when you run the Shortcut
Tap Done in the top right corner to add your new Shortcut
The article mentions using Focus modes to change the setting as well – you can also use Automations in Shortcuts combined with the action mentioned above.
Updated on March 13, 2024, Apple has added release notes for Shortcuts for Shortcuts in the iOS 17.4 cycle, including new actions for the Action button on iPhone, restored actions for Apple Vision Pro users, and fixes for Shortcuts for Mac.
Here’s the full release notes:
This update includes new actions and enhancements to the Shortcuts app on macOS.
New actions
Get Orientation provides the current device orientation (such as portrait or landscape) on iOS and iPadOS
Get Activity determines your current activity (walking, running, cycling, or in a car) on iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS
Shut Down, Copy to Clipboard, Recognize Music, and Show Definition are now available on visionOS
Shortcuts app on macOS
Keyboard navigation is now supported in menus when running shortcuts
Shortcuts can now be dragged from the library while in list view to folders in the sidebar
Opened windows are now restored when the app relaunches
Improved performance and reliability
Get Orientation and Get Activity are great options for making your Action button shortcuts more dynamic, changing their behavior if the phone is face-down, for example.
Bringing the Clipboard actions to visionOS is perhaps the most important update for Apple Vision Pro users, whose Clipboard shortcuts weren’t functional in vision OS 1.0 – Shut Down, Recognize Music, and Show Definition are also welcome fixes (I actually use the Restart function of Shut Down often when running betas).
On the Mac, we got a few quality of life changes, plus performance improvements – I hope to see more actions on Mac soon, especially Safari Tabs actions that came to iOS years ago.
If you’re a Stream Deck Pedal user, you are likely familiar with the Action Bar, the floating window that hovers over your desktop and shows you which actions are currently available on your pedal – after all, how else would you know what will occur when you tap a pedal?
While this is convenient when you actively want to use the pedal, you might find yourself hiding the Action Bar when you don’t want to see it – and each time I do that, I completely forget how to turn it back on. So, for my own sake, I’m publishing a how-to so I can find it again.
On Windows, right-clicking on the app tray will show the option to Show Action Bar. On macOS, however, the app doesn’t actually stay open in the Dock (since it doesn’t run as a typical application), meaning that option isn’t available behind the right-click.
Instead, the option to “Show Action Bar” is located in the Menu Bar plugin for the Stream Deck, in the sub-menu underneath the Stream Deck Pedal device (I tend to miss this location since I have my Menu Bar apps hidden with Bartender).
Click it, and your Action Bar will appear again.
Once the Action Bar is visible, this option also switches to “Hide Action Bar,” should you want to hide the actions from the screen temporarily again.
Today, developer Paweł Dudek has brought their beautiful Markdown slide-creation app Deckset from Mac to mobile with an iOS and iPadOS version, now available on the App Store as a separate free purchase with in-app subscription.
If you’re not familiar, Deckset is a wonderful app that makes building presentations easy by taking Markdown-formatted text and letting you quickly building colorful, impactful slides immediately.
By using importing normal markup from a Markdown document, Deckset can read any separators (---) as a slide separator, automatically creating new slides for each block of text and styling it using your formatting markup.
Deckset users can pick from a wide variety of colorful and thoughtfully-designed themes, or create their own and change the style of their presentation on the fly.
Slides can also include videos, GIFs, tables, TeX formulas, making it much more feasible and frankly fairly easy to create high-quality decks right from your iPhone or iPad, while also avoiding the complex UI of dedicated presentation software.
You can present the entire slide deck from either iPhone or iPad, but you can take advantage of a special presenter mode on iPad, showing the slides via AirPlay on an Apple TV or an external display.
Your presentations from Mac can also work, but they need to be converted to TextBundle, the format used by their iOS app – I’m familiar with this format through apps like Ulysses, which use it to store Markdown + images in a single container.
This is the one limitation compared to the Mac app, where Markdown documents can be saved anywhere in the filesystem – however, there, you must manage all your file and video references, whereas Deckset for iOS imports those files directly into the TextBundle format (unless you’re using a direct image URL as your reference link).
Deckset has long been available for Mac (their Twitter shows they joined in December 2013) for a one-time payment of $35 – I’ve been a happy customer of that product for a long time.
That being said, 35 bucks clearly doesn’t far stretch across a literal decade, and I’m sure investing in building Deckset for iOS has been hard while funded from the single up-front payment of the Mac app – that’s why I’m glad Deckset for iOS and iPadOS has moved to a subscription model.
Now, Deckset for iOS and iPadOS is $2.99 per month or $19.99/year, making it easy to purchase a subscription for just a few months if you have a big presentation coming up, or investing in the app for the long-term to save 44% annually. Plus, the Mac app is still a one-time payment if that’s all you need – and you can subscribe freely on mobile when you need it.
I’m very glad to see Deckset come to iPhone and iPad, rounding out the capability for all Apple users to easily create and present Markdown slides – Deckset makes your decks look very good with minimal effort (and a minimal design). Plus, I hope the subscription pricing enables sustainable, long-term development – I’d love to see Shortcuts support, for example ?.
I’m happy to follow up on my Elgato Partner announcement and offer a 5% discount code for my community by using my partner link and entering in code ZZ-CASSINELLI at checkout.
The discount is available on all Elgato products through Elgato.com. To see the discount in action, feel free to use my link, add items to your cart, enter the code, and see the update total before checking out.
Note: the discount does not apply to accessories, replacement parts, or things like Stream Deck faceplates, and is also not stackable with other discounts or bundles.
Thanks again to Elgato for the Stream Deck bundle and I look forward to creating more throughout the year!
Check out Elgato products and use my code ZZ-CASSINELLI for 5% off at checkout.
Indie App Sales is back again for Spring 2024, offering discounts on a wide range of apps from independent developers for Tuesday—Wednesday of this week (March 12 & 13).
This period, there are over 250 apps participating, each offering their own discounts and sales as part of the program on up-front prices and in-app purchases.
Each entry comes with the app name, icon, developer, description, category, and relevant links to the App Store, website, or social media.
The site shows all the apps in a large table, and you can use the custom filters on the database to find the apps relevant to you – or use Command + F to search by keyword.
Check out IndieAppSales.com, and use #IndieAppSales if you’re sharing about a great app you found – and don’t forget to rate your new apps on the App Store!
We’re upgrading iA Writer’s integration with Apple Shortcuts today. With 18 built-in actions and 22 ready-made shortcuts, iA Writer 7.1 makes it easy to automate common tasks.
Open Star Wars on Disney Plus: Shows the Star Wars category of content in Disney+ like the three trilogies, TV shows, or animated series.
Open Pixar on Disney Plus: Opens the Pixar brand category in the Disney+ app to show content like Toy Story and Monster’s Inc.
Open Disney on Disney Plus: Opens the special Disney category in Disney+ to show their own-branded material like movies from Walt Disney Animation Studios.
Open Nat Geo on Disney Plus: Opens the National Geographic category in Disney+ to show content on topics like animals, space, and world history.
Edit Disney Plus profiles: Opens the “Edit Profiles” page which lets you select between your profiles and change the details.
Apple TV+ has launched a limited time collection of movies to stream for free as part of your Apple TV+ subscription. The company has done this occasionally in the past to coincide with the themed release of new originals, but this is by far the biggest drop.
and:
The move is perhaps a sign that Apple continues to experiment and ponder whether it should expand beyond its ‘all originals’ strategy for its streaming service.
Here’s the full list in the new “Great Movies on Apple TV+” collection:
I’d love to this into a shortcut for my TV app folder, but the URL currently doesn’t redirect on iOS or iPadOS – I’ve filed it as Feedback to Apple as FB13668679.
In celebration of going to the movies and seeing films like Dune 2 in theaters, I’ve made a set of shortcuts for the Fandango service.
This set of 8 shortcuts can be added to Siri or in a Home Screen widget to help you quickly find movies or theaters nearby, get to the theater on time and show them your ticket, and quickly access the rest of Fandango when needed – here’s how they work:
Getting A Ticket
When you’re in the movie-going spirit, the first thing to do is check what’s available in theaters now – you’ll find films you may know about already, plus some that snuck under-the-radar or came out in re-release.
When using Fandango, you’ll find this under the “Movies” banner at the URL https://www.fandango.com/movies-in-theaters. When run with the Open URL action in Shortcuts, this URL redirects into the app to the Movies tab – get my shortcut “Show movies in theaters” to do just that at any moment.
Similarly, the Theaters banner and tab of Fandango can be opened using the URL pattern https://www.fandango.com/[ZIP code]_movietimes, where the [ZIP code] portion automatically gets replaced by your local ZIP code once Fandango detects from the web browser or asks permission for your location.
Using Shortcuts, we can automatically detect your ZIP code and replace it in the URL using two methods – using the Get Current Location action, and a faster trick using Get Current Weather that provides an approximate location slightly quicker than making a full GPS call.
My shortcut “Show theaters nearby” uses the Weather technique, grabs the ZIP code using Get Details of Location, and then places it into the Fandango link – this works great on both Mac and mobile devices.
Getting Into The Theater
Once you’ve decide on a movie and location, you’ll want to purchase your ticket directly through Fandango – they should then email you a confirmation, which, if you use Apple Mail, is then detected by Siri automatically and added to your calendar (hence why I didn’t build a shortcut for this step).
Once you have the automatic calendar event set up, I have another shortcut for estimating the time it takes to get to theater and getting directions there – my “Leave for theater” shortcut.
This shortcut asks you to pick the upcoming calendar event (I decided to confirm which one rather than simply picking the next event, in case you check earlier in the day), then that chosen event’s location is used in the next few steps. From there, the event name and driving time to that location are extracted, to be used in the next prompt.
In the final prompt, “Leave for theater” delivers a message full of information about the trip, showing total travel time, the quickest route, and the arrival time – that way you know for sure when to get there to park, get food and drinks, and get seated before the show starts.
Once you’re at the theater, Fandango actually provides a native shortcut for “Find my ticket,” which opens the Fandango app and displays the upcoming ticket, so the ticket-taker can scan you in.
You can also see details about the which theater your movie in being shown in at this location, which I find helpful – knowing where to go once you’re inside can save time if you’re running late.
Admittedly, your ticket might already show on your device if you’ve added it as a pass in Apple Wallet, but I wanted to include Fandango’s only native Shortcuts action – perhaps they’ll take these URL-based shortcuts and turn them into native actions in the future?
Quick access to Fandango
While the previous four shortcuts are my favorite of the group, and the main ones I use on iPhone to manage my ticket-buying experience, the following I designed to round out the experience and are still helpful occasionally in my iPad widgets and via search on Mac.
First, is “Browse Fandango,” which simply acts as a redirect to the main page of the Fandango website and app – here they curate categories like Coming Soon, Watch At Home, and Features that are nice to check out.
“Search Fandango” takes advantage of Shortcuts scripting to prompt you to enter a search term, uses Replace Text to swap out spaces for the + symbol, and includes that all in the URL pattern for their search results – run this, type your search, and see results on Fandango’s website.
Fandango also produces their own news content, including custom features, trailers, upcoming ticket sales, and more – my “Show movie news” shortcut takes you to the web page for it all at https://www.fandango.com/movie-news.
And finally, “Show purchase history” is the only shortcut that requires you to sign in to Fandango, after which you’ll be able to see your full list of movies you’ve been to – a fun experience to reflect on (and something that definitely prompted me to go to the movies more last summer once I realized I hadn’t been since Rise of Skywalker!).
See You At The Theaters
As someone who very much fell off of seeing movies in theaters the last couple years, I’ve enjoyed going back and watching a few new films on the big screen again – there’s something undeniable about the movie-going experience, from the massive visuals, blow-away sound, and just getting a bucket of popcorn & drinks to enjoy.
Since I usually buy my tickets from Fandango anyway, these shortcuts make the experience just a little bit smoother – and having the Shortcuts widget on my Home Screen next to the Fandango icon acts a nice reminder to check out what’s available and head to a theater nearby; something that’s just plain good for the soul.
