Category: Custom Shortcuts

How to use Mastodon’s API to open your Lists with Shortcuts

Post author By Matthew Cassinelli
Post date February 18

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.

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:

This post is marked as members-only. Become a member to access the full piece.

Tags Mastodon, Mastodon Lists, Shortcuts

Custom Shortcuts

How to extract Mastodon instance & handle data using Shortcuts

Post author By Matthew Cassinelli
Post date February 16
2 Comments on How to extract Mastodon instance & handle data using Shortcuts

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:

Tags Actions, Mastodon, Shortcuts, URLs, Web

Apps Custom Shortcuts

Making a simple Menu Bar applet to replace Shortcuts’ progress meter

Post author By Matthew Cassinelli
Post date January 6
1 Comment on Making a simple Menu Bar applet to replace Shortcuts’ progress meter

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.

Tags apps, mac, Menu Bar, One Thing, Shortcuts, Sindre Sorhus

Custom Shortcuts

New in the Shortcuts Library: One Thing Menu Bar shortcuts

Post author By Matthew Cassinelli
Post date January 6

I’ve just added a new folder to the Shortcuts Library — my set of One Thing Menu Bar shortcuts:

Open One Thing:

Activates the One Thing menu bar app to display any text.

Use this shortcut to activate One Thing on your Mac and have its applet display in the menu bar.

Tapping on One Thing will display its edit window, which lets you change the text and have that show up in the Menu Bar instead.

Tags apps, mac, Menu Bar, One Thing, Shortcuts, Shortcuts Catalog, Shortcuts Library, Sindre Sorhus

Custom Shortcuts How To Shortcuts Tips & Tricks

How to copy meeting availability across multiple calendars using Shortcuts

Post author By Matthew Cassinelli
Post date January 6

Yesterday over on Six Colors, Jason Snell wrote about his difficulty helping a friend use the Calendar actions in Shortcuts to pull data from two separate calendars:

Lex wanted to use this shortcut to quickly generate a list of times where he’s available for meetings. This is a great use of automation—I wish I’d thought of it. Unfortunately, the shortcut only checks a single calendar, and Lex wanted his availability judged based on entries in two different calendars.

This thread caught my eye: both because I haven’t personally run into that issue, but also because I had actually thought of the automation.

Here’s my Copy my availability shortcut that I built all the way back when Shortcuts was Workflow, which has managed to live on in the Shortcuts Gallery today as the “Share Availability” shortcut.¹

In the piece, Jason came up with a solution after Shortcuts couldn’t get all the data in one action:

Tags Calendar, meetings, Shortcuts

Custom Shortcuts Membership

New beta shortcuts for members: Ivory for Mastodon

Post author By Matthew Cassinelli
Post date January 5

Hey members!

This morning I got access to the TestFlight for Ivory, a Mastodon client from the makers of Tweetbot, and immediately spent the whole morning putting together a set of shortcuts based on the Open Ivory action and all its possible parameters.

I’ve just added my folder of Ivory shortcuts—including the Ivorycuts bundle—in beta and will be releasing these in the free section of the Shortcuts Library (along with a review) when Ivory gets released!

Check out the shortcuts below – I wrote about 1,000 words across all the descriptions explaining how to use the shortcuts, why the features from Ivory in particular are interesting, plus how I’m using Mastodon compared to Twitter:

Tags Ivory, Mastodon, Shortcuts

Custom Shortcuts

New in the Shortcuts Library: Christmas shortcuts

Post author By Matthew Cassinelli
Post date December 19
1 Comment on New in the Shortcuts Library: Christmas shortcuts

I’ve just added a new folder to the Shortcuts Library — my set of Christmas shortcuts:

Open Apple Music Holiday

Opens the deep link to the Holiday section of Apple Music.

Use the shortcut to find Albums, playlists, and radio stations related to the Holidays on Apple Music.

This shortcut works great on iPad for finding your favorite playlists and saving them for later.

Tags Apple Music, Apple TV, Christmas, Countdown, Day One, HomeKit, Maps, Messages, Notes, Shortcuts, Shortcuts Catalog, Shortcuts Library, smart home, Weather

Custom Shortcuts

Shortcuts shows too much personal information and that needs to change

Post author By Matthew Cassinelli
Post date July 29

I am writing this post because I am frustrated with the fact that Shortcuts shows personally identifiable information about me when live-streaming about the app, when Apple could easily change the interface to show the same information without exposing me and my girlfriend to personal safety problems.

To fix this Apple needs to overwrite personally-identifiable information in Shortcuts with generic placeholders that the user can understand from context, and they need to add the ability to remove Suggestions.

Every time you go into Shortcuts and try to pick a location, it will show your Home Address in the view — please just change this to say “Home” and do not input the address into the Location field, Home is plenty.

When you first open Shortcuts to a blank shortcut, in the bottom right there are often “Suggestions” based on your recent activity. However, there is no way to remove this information, meaning that recent contacts will always show up there and your friends & family have no choice but to have their names, images, and sometimes phone numbers appear on-screen. I’ve had Apple PR contacts of mine appear in this view when producing public content, for example.

Any suggested actions in the Shortcuts app should also be able to be removed — in my Reminders suggestions, the app is currently recommending that I make a shortcut with my most-recently added reminder, which includes information I do not want on-screen and cannot remove before trying to record my screen.

I originally sent this feedback to Apple on July 24, 2019 as FB6809181. It’s now been three years and I’m basically lucky this hasn’t been a bigger issue so far.

I really hope Apple takes this post to heart and adds these small but significant changes to the Shortcuts app in iOS 16.0 — I really don’t want this to become a much larger and much more personal issue by having my family’s privacy violated because I choose to share about this cool app I like to use.

Tags Feedback, Shortcuts

Custom Shortcuts

Here are 51 new actions for Shortcuts in the iOS 16 betas (so far)

Post author By Matthew Cassinelli
Post date June 14
3 Comments on Here are 51 new actions for Shortcuts in the iOS 16 betas (so far)

In the first seed of the iOS 16 developer beta, the Shortcuts app has received 51 new actions that support interacting with Apple’s first-party apps and help take advantage of system features.

The actions provided work with Notes, Voice Memos, Mail, Safari, Shortcuts, Clock, Parked Cars, Image Backgrounds, Personal Hotspot, Files, PDFs, and Reminders, plus there’s an initial batch of bug fixes for actions and new Mac support for Safari Reader and Evernote actions.

This guide was compiled using a list provided by the Shortcuts team during Q&A sessions at WWDC, plus another post on Reddit and one of its comments, plus some of my own research using the developer betas.

I’ve sorted larger groups into sections, plus marked any actions with * do not currently work in the first developer beta.

Tags Action Directory, Actions, Shortcuts

Custom Shortcuts Membership Shortcuts Video

Member stream #7: Workflows for Shortcuts creators – Wednesday at 12pm PST

Post author By Matthew Cassinelli
Post date August 16

Hey members!

This Wednesday, August 18 at 12pm PST/7pm GMT, I’ll be hosting a members-only livestream on YouTube to cover some of the meta work involved with being a Shortcuts creator.

Hey members!

This Wednesday at 12pm/7pm GMT PST, I’ll be hosting a members-only livestream on YouTube to cover some of the meta work involved with being a Shortcuts creator.

I’ll be scraping data from a .shortcut file, plus potentially going into my Airtable logging process and how I save Action data as well.

Members can access the stream live below to get a reminder when it’s live or get back to this post at the right time using shortcuts.live:

Become a member to get access to access to the stream, plus:

New shortcuts on an ongoing basis
Extra ways to browse the catalog when you’re signed in
Prerelease notes & workflows I’m putting together

Tags livestream, Livestreaming, Livestreams, Membership

Actions Custom Shortcuts Shortcuts

All the New Cross-Platform Actions in Shortcuts for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS ?

Post author By Matthew Cassinelli
Post date June 16

With the release of iOS 15 and the associated betas across Apple’s platforms, the Shortcuts app has received 2 automation types and 22 new actions that work across iPhone, iPad, and macOS.

With the release of iOS 15 and the associated betas across Apple’s platforms, the Shortcuts app has received 2 automation types and 22 new actions that work across iPhone, iPad, and macOS as well as 21 Mac-only actions.

This piece (4,700 words, about 20 minutes average reading time) includes my write up of the cross-platform actions, reordered into custom groups I’ve created – I’ll be covering the Mac-only actions next week.

I’ll also be adding screenshots and example shortcuts in a future version, so members can read up now and I’ll post the full guide once the public betas release.

Become a member to get access to the full post, plus: