Welcome to issue 72 of “What’s New in Shortcuts!” — this week is a quieter mid-summer period where we didn’t see any news, but there’s always new shortcuts ideas popping up on Twitter.
Plus, I published a few stories for iMore, showed off my Focus Modes on TWiT, and got deep into some design changes that I’ll be showing off in a few weeks:
Yours truly for iMore:
The Shortcuts app for Apple Watch is a small but powerful way to access the vast array of capabilities from the apps on your device, all from the convenience of a few taps on your wrist.
Some of the ways Shortcuts on Apple Watch can be most useful, however, are not immediately obvious — there’s a lot of potential in Shortcuts, but honing in on the best use cases and avoiding too much complexity is important for a good Watch-based experience.
This piece covers seven areas where you can build Shortcuts for Apple Watch that are worth exploring, have powerful actions to take advantage of, and work well when running from your favorite Apple Watch:
This Tuesday, I had the pleasure of being as a guest on iOS Today with Mikah Sargent:
Personalize your custom Focus modes in iOS 15 or iOS 16, from silencing specific notifications to switching screens based on location.
- Home Screen customization
- Lock Screen customization
- Focus activation scheduling
- Using particular colors for context
Yours truly for iMore:
Safari has gained six actions of its own so far in the betas:
1. Open View
2. Open New Tab
3. Open New Private Tab
4. Create Tab Group
5. Open Tab Group
6. Set Safari Focus Filter
[…]
Currently only available for developers and public testers (but coming to everyone this fall), these actions are aimed at interacting with different “views” in Safari, plus creating tabs and doing basic Tab Group management.
To help you take full advantage of these, here are 14 shortcuts built out with each potential option across the actions so that you don’t have to build them yourself:
Welcome to issue 71 of “What’s New in Shortcuts” — the public betas are finally here and more of you can play around with the new Shortcuts features!
That being said, I’ve definitely run into some bugs that break my very-specific workflows, so I wouldn’t recommend installing everything unless you have backup devices.
Otherwise, the betas are fairly stable, the new actions are ready to be used, and now’s the best time to dig into your Shortcuts workflows before the busy season — my summer of Shortcuts is really just getting started…
Yours truly for iMore:
If you’re installing the public beta, developer beta, or just curious about the new features for Shortcuts coming to iOS 16, you’ll be glad to know that Apple added 46 new actions that add deeper access and advanced functionality to the Shortcuts ecosystem.
The main set of actions for Shortcuts focuses on Notes, Voice Memos, and Safari, plus Shortcuts itself. Additionally, Apple added new actions for Clock, Files, and Parked Cars, plus more for features like Focus Filters, Background Removal, and Personal Hotspot, and PDFs.
Here’s the full list of what’s new (so far) in the public betas:
As a follow to my post covering the full set of actions coming in iOS 16, I wrote about the current set in the public betas — actions for Books, Mail, and Reminders aren’t working, so I’ll be publishing a follow-up on iMore when they become available in future betas.
Also of note — almost none of these work on the Mac either (yet?).
Welcome to Issue 70 of “What’s New in Shortcuts” — we are very close now to the public beta, and with that comes a new set of actions to play around with until the launch of iOS 16.
Now that we’re on the third round, the developer betas are a bit more stable and I’ve gotten past some of the high-level bugs (the kind that tend to affect users with as many shortcuts as I do). However, as I note below, a few new actions ended up breaking too…
Otherwise, this week I published a handful of fun stories, found some great ideas and apps on Twitter, and got extremely jealous at an awesome NFC workflow — here’s what’s new this week:
Editor’s note: Revue, the service I use to send this newsletter, has had email delivery issues lately, leading some readers to get the last issue sent to their Spam folder — if this happens to you, mark the email as Not Spam to help ensure future issues make it to your inbox.
Yours truly for iMore:
Apple’s Support resources are incredibly helpful when you’re running into issues, need to repair a device, or for learning more about how to use your devices.
With an entire Knowledge Base online, the Apple Support app, and their social media pages, there’s a lot of ways to access help pages, get direct support, and browse more to learn on your own — so here’s a set of shortcuts to help you do just that.
Yours truly for iMore:
As Apple continues to develop the Shortcuts app experience across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and even Apple Watch, there are even more features and functionality that’s possible on Apple’s platforms, but only through the Shortcuts app.
As features like custom speaker groups become possible to create and break apart with Shortcuts, iOS often lacks a built-in, Apple-like way to activate the same functionality without using Shortcuts.
To put it another way, Apple is adding features to their OSes that otherwise don’t fit into the platform itself, but they can get away with adding by putting it into Shortcuts.
For example, there’s no elegant way to make combinations of speaker groups besides tapping around in Control Center, so instead Apple can ship it in Shortcuts, the power users are happy, and…everyday folks just…don’t get the feature?
I already got some comments on iMore in reply to my post, and I’d really love to know my readers’ thoughts on this too — please leave yours in the comments!
Yours truly for iMore:
In iOS 15.4, Apple added new parameters to the Set Playback Destination action that updated the capabilities from being able to switch destinations to additionally being able to add and remove destinations.
With this functionality, Apple users can create and break apart speaker groups on-the-fly using Shortcuts, something that’s only otherwise been possible by manually selecting and deselecting speakers in the Control Center view.
This article covers four shortcuts that utilize the Set Playback Destination action, making it easy to change speakers, add to a group, remove from a group, and cast to multiple speakers at once:
Hello readers!
It’s been a while — I took a break from this newsletter while working on try big Shortcuts Library rerelease (more below) and continued through WWDC to focus on the updates. Now I’m back at it, just ahead of the public beta release that’s scheduled for sometime in “July.”
This issue focuses on the major headlines from the last three months, including all of Automation April from MacStories, plus a regular section of this week’s community posts at the end.
Throughout the summer, I’ll be covering tweets, articles, and ideas that I missed the last few months and integrating it into the regular newsletter content — I’ll try to get everything so nothing is missed from the break.
Thanks for being a reader! Hopefully this first link will make it clear why I needed to focus my efforts:
I interviewed three app developers about Apple’s latest improvements to the Shortcuts APIs for iMore:
Apple’s newest framework for implementing Shortcuts support in iOS, iPadOS, and Mac apps has been called “modern,” “expansive,” and “much easier,” according to app developers who’ve been testing the new framework since its release at WWDC.
I asked three developers — Alex Hay of Toolbox Pro, Seth Sandler of AffinityBlue (responsible for apps like Tunable), and Josh Holtz of ConnectKit — about the new App Intents framework, what new feature they’re looking to utilize going forward, and how things compare to what was previously available.
Here are their responses:
I made 7 Shortcuts to help you take notes on WWDC sessions for my iMore weekend piece:
With such a breadth of potential topics, sections to research, and videos to watch, it can be hard to wrap your head around what’s new.
So here’s a set of shortcuts to help you explore the conference material, get set up to take notes, and work with the transcripts in your own documentation.
The shortcuts are linked throughout, plus you’ll find the following list with iCloud links at the end:
From my iMore column “How Apple Is Trying To Fix Siri With App Shortcuts”:
With App Shortcuts, everyday folks will automatically have folders of trigger phrases to use with Siri, meaning the work that app developers put into adding Shortcuts support can pay off much easier.
[…]
In many ways, it seems that Siri Shortcuts is Apple’s solution for their Siri problem, and App Shortcuts is an encouraging start. I am looking forward to seeing how people react to the “improved” Siri experience — I’m sure we’ll hear some opinions when the time comes.
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.
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:
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: