Aday on mas.to on the new “Fast” option for Haptic Touch:
By far my favorite #iOS17 feature.
Apple describes changing the Haptic Touch duration as letting you “[a]djust the time it takes to reveal content previews, actions, and contextual menus.”
Find the option in Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Haptic Touch – or use my Open Touch Preferences shortcut in the Accessibility folder.
This weekend, the customizable Action button on the iPhone 15 Pro has driven Apple fans to the web to share their best Shortcuts ideas, from more advanced workflows to some that are perhaps more juvenile. Regardless, if you’ve got an iPhone 15 Pro, you’re probably looking for shortcuts to use with it.
To help folks with their decision, I asked across Threads, Twitter, and Mastodon for everyone’s best ideas, promising to collect them in a post – this is that post!
Check out the list of 30+ ideas below – plus, stay tuned for my extra-special Action button idea coming very soon (and subscribe to my newsletter to get that delivered straight to your inbox).
As @mkbhd suggested – Google Assistant
Shazam!
[My reply: There are cool Shazam actions in Shortcuts, so you could have it jump straight to a music video for the current song!]
Since publishing my review, I’ve tweaked my Action button shortcut to work this way:
— If the device orientation is face down or portrait upside-down, toggle Silent mode. (And when turning Silent mode from off to on, vibrate the phone.)
— Otherwise launch Camera.Screenshot of the main shortcut, and the helper that toggles Silent mode with vibration for turning it on:
Currently have it set to create a new item in Things !
Post by @parkerortolaniView on Threads
Oh neat!!!! I would have that mapped to Fantastical 👀 Damn it, now I’m wanting to upgrade
Occurs to me it might be good to have a time-sensitive or location-sensitive Shortcut
Show my train times in the morning, launch my todo list at work, launch my Journal app at home in the evening
If connected to home WiFi:
& Before noon
→ open bedroom blinds
Else if after noon
→ open TV remote
Else if not connected to WiFi:
If Shopping focus mode (Location based)
→ open Shopping list
Else
→ Open Camera
Launch Drafts
I made a shortcut that checks the current focus mode and adapts the action to the current focus (Sleep – Flashlight, Travel – Flighty, Work – Add Reminder, etc.)
ChatGPT with my api key to use v4. Never use Siri for questions again. zdnet.com/googl…
One-touch FaceTime call to my long-distance gf!
(Scrub to 1:08) youtu.be/f9GI…
The “girlfriend button”. Hit it and it FaceTimes your partner
Action button as a note taking shortcut is dope
Post by @parkerortolaniView on Threads
I’m probably going to have it open the Books app much like the action button on the watch is mapped to the workout app
I’ll be running this Shortcut with the Action Button! Most of the time I’m not in a focus mode, so it will display a menu of options.
When in a Focus Mode, it defaults to opening the camera. May try to change based on specific Focus Mode later.
icloud.com
Trigger it to ask ChatGPT to create a list of the best Action Button shortcut ideas
Lock/Unlock Tesla
Simple
Gave “Change Text Size” a go for a bit. Went back to Camera. Analysis paralysis!
Dude I just realized we have a “Where we droppin?” button for the iPhone now lol
But does your phone have a tweet button?
Setting my action button to nothing.
This will be my iPhone action button:
Screenshot -> Manual Crop (Toolbox Pro) -> Extract text -> New Draft (Drafts)
Gives me full control of selection area and post-processing steps for on-screen text content regardless of what app I’m in
Okay this is actually super sweet … [Video: Using the iPhone 15 Pro “Action Button” as a key to my front door]
Mine is starting Shazam → detecting the current song (while watching the fantastic new animation in iOS 17) → search and open it in the music app of your choice*.(* Shazam, Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon Music, YouTube, YouTube Music or Deezer)
To display the “speak screen” control panel.I want there to be a widget for this.
Start a shopping live activity, head out for your errands, and your Lock Screen will update automatically with which card to use.
Opening the garage door with the action button feels like a super power. [Video]
This is it, the best use case for the Action Button (sound on) [Video]
You can even press it with your phone still in your pocket. Your dad jokes will never be the same “badum tss” [Video]
Oooh that’s clever! [Video]
Made a shortcut that opens the Never Gonna Give You Up music video
Save web articles and YouTube videos for later
List of items to purchase later with running total of overall costs of all items in the list
Move screenshots of your favorite apps into its own album based off that apps name
Dynamic app launcher that displays your apps as one single list or you can select a app from a list of app categories
Dynamic app launcher stemmed from my myApps – A Dynamic App Launcher but allows you to select from a specified list of apps based on the current focus mode your device is in
I have a Shortcut that I’ve been running for years. First as an icon, then as Triple-Back-Tap, and now I’ll move it to the Action Button.
It’s a bunch of Choose-From-Menus that launch other shortcuts. I can’t include it here, because it’s really about 30 Shortcuts. But here’s how it works:
First, is an IF block. If I’m on my watch, it shows one menu. If I’m on my phone, another (much larger) menu. From there, it’s a LOT… But It so nice.
If you want more Shortcuts ideas, check out my expansive Shortcuts Library – and sign up for my Shortcuts newsletter if you haven’t already.
I’ve just added a new folder to the Shortcuts Library — my set of Keynote shortcuts:
Check out the folder of Keynote shortcuts on the Shortcuts Library.
I’ve just updated a folder in the Shortcuts Library — my set of Apple Music shortcuts:
Check out the folder of Apple Music shortcuts on the Shortcuts Library.
If you’re one of the 100 million people who got on Threads since launch, you might want to customize your Threads experience on your iPhone and iPad using Shortcuts’ “Add to Home Screen” feature.
I’ve found eight alternate icons you might want to use (so far), plus I’ll share how to set up the icons using Shortcuts and Add to Home Screen:
Check out my updated folder in the Shortcuts Library — my set of Threads shortcuts.
I’ve updated my scraping tool, figured out how to make post embeds, and built out a set of shortcuts to send Threads to various apps based on feedback from the community:
Check out the folder of Threads shortcuts on the Shortcuts Library.
In Federico Viticci’s post on Threader, a shortcut to open Threads profiles from Mastodon and Twitter directly in the Threads app, he mentioned in a footnote that Threads’ URL scheme uses the unique pattern barcelona:// – which immediately got my attention.
In the post, his excellent shortcut uses OCR to look at the device’s screen and extract the username, before passing that into barcelona://user?username={Username}.
In my attempts to recreate my Twitter follow graph on Threads, I used Viticci’s shortcut to capture as many links to Threads profiles that I come across – many, many people were posting theirs on launch day, so I ran his shortcut a lot initially.
However, lots of people were (and still are) simply mentioning their profile or posting screenshots of the handle, like my friend Crim – so, I wanted to make another Shortcuts solution that let me type out any username and redirect into their profile.
My “Open username in Threads” shortcut will prompt you to enter in a username, then fills out a URL like barcelona://user?username=MatthewCassinelli – then, the Open URLs action activates the deep link and redirects you into the profile inside the Threads app, so you can follow the person.
Going further with the URL scheme, Viticci also followed up on Threads with yet another discovery – using barcelona://user redirects the app to account tab, making it easy to check your profile from Shortcuts – so I made that into a shortcut too.
Get these in my Threads folder of shortcuts – and make sure to check out my story on how to make Threads work well on iPad with Stage Manager.
I’ve just added a new folder to the Shortcuts Library — my set of Camera app shortcuts – built off the Open Camera action new in iOS 17 developer beta 4 which lets users select a specific camera mode to open each time.
Use these with Siri, the Shortcuts widget, Spotlight, or the app to quickly access the mode you need – they work particularly well in new Lock Screen widget too:
Check out the folder of Camera app shortcuts in the Shortcuts Library.
From @whatqm:
Just made a discord bot using Apple Shortcuts lol pic.twitter.com/mKSuaZzZkC
While searching Twitter for Shortcuts keywords, I came across this video that demonstrates using Shortcuts to post to a Discord channel as a bot – I’ve been wanting to build my own shortcut to do the same, so I added the sample shortcut linked in the reply and will be testing it out in my own Discord community.
Apple has released their public beta of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, macOS Sonoma, and watchOS 10 today, making their Beta Software Program available to freely download and install – at your own discretion, as this is pre-release software where you may experience bugs.
As part of the beta experience, you will find yourself updating your devices often—especially if you have multiple devices on the betas—plus you’ll want to see what’s new in each update, check on what’s upcoming in the OS overall, and see the release notes once the full updates are published.
Since I’m all aboard the beta train—and a Shortcuts power user—I built out a set of shortcuts to make each of these jobs-to-be-done a little bit easier:
For a few years now, I’ve used a two-step shortcut to quickly access the Software Update page in the Settings app on iOS and iPadOS. In my shortcut, there is a deep link defined from Apple’s URL scheme for Settings that opens to prefs:root=General&path=SOFTWARE_UPDATE_LINK.
Recently, I updated the shortcut to work on macOS as well, opening the Preference Pane file that macOS has long been used to redirect the previously-named System Preferences app to each panel – even now, with the newly-named System Settings app, these files still work.
After installing each update—or perhaps before—it’s useful to check on the release notes for each platform to understand ahead of time any bugs or issues you might run into.
Apple has dedicated pages for each platform, so I combined them all into a Menu shortcut that uses Choose From Menu, the corresponding URL for each page, and Open URLs to quickly access your platform of choice.
As the beta periods continue, one can also find themselves forgetting exactly what’s new – you’ll often get very used to new features quickly, and after a few rounds of updates it can be helpful to look back over the updates.
On the sign-up page for the Beta Software Program, Apple has included links out to their various OS pages, each with sections dedicated to the upcoming releases – my Learn about Apple betas shortcut opens directly to this page so you can quickly access those links. Plus, the shortcut doubles as a way to sign up for the public beta program, if you haven’t signed up yet.
Finally, for the detail-oriented group, it can be helpful to actually read the full release notes for Apple’s updates once they’re released in full after the beta periods end – Apple will often detail minor features, bug fixes, or otherwise unmentioned changes to their apps.
For Shortcuts in particular, the release notes pages provide valuable line-by-line changes to the app that are otherwise undetectable, and serve as a marker for when bug fixes are officially implemented (and can be referred to if things go awry later-on).
I have covered the release notes for the Shortcuts app since they’ve been published, using the same search on Apple.com to check for the latest update (and previous updates) – my shortcut lets you check for yourself as well.
Overall, beta life has both its ups and downs – it’s fun to test Apple software ahead of time, but you’ll certainly experience bugs, worse battery life, and what feels like endless software updates.
I find these shortcuts most helpful when run from the Shortcuts widget – I keep one instance of the Medium widget in the sidebar off to the left of my main Home Screen. That way, every other Tuesday when new betas are out, I can easily access the folder and update my devices. Plus, the Software Update shortcut works well in the Menu Bar on Mac as well.
Get the folder of Software Update shortcuts in my Shortcuts Library.
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.
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:
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.
@Esther on Mastodon:
Finally figured out how to play an alarm only through headphones on an #iPhone and NOT through speakers (for example when sleeping on a train and you don’t want to miss your stop but also not annoy others):
Open #iOS #Shortcuts, create an automation with a timer and have it play a music track that’ll wake you up. Turn off “ask before running” and “notify when run”.
Connect your headphones, set a good volume, and have a nap.
(Just don’t forget to disable it or else it’ll go off the next day too)
This is a great idea – to add onto it, you could also use the Alarm automation, set it to an “Existing” alarm, then choose one of your own Alarms and set the Sound to “None.”
That way, you can still snooze, toggle the alarm on/off regularly as needed, and avoid needing to disable the Automation each time – it’ll play Music from your Personal Automation instead of any alarm tone, headphones or not.
Otherwise, you could normally just have picked a Song in the Alarm menu – but this Automation also lets you choose playlists, radio stations, podcasts, or anything else you can think of!
@Zenitizer on Mastodon:
Dear Fediverse 👋 Zenitizer launched on the App Store today 🚀🥳
🧘 Clean & Simple Meditation Timer
🎵 Soothing Sounds
❤️ Apple Health Support
🪄 Siri & Shortcuts Support
⭐️ Goals and Streaks
👀 Glanceable Widgets and Apple Watch Complications1️⃣ Download: zenitizer.app/install
Congrats to developer Manuel Kehl on his launch last Thursday. 👏
Earlier this week, I was putting together my “offsite” blog post for the YouTube stream I recorded while editing in Final Cut Pro for iPad and wanted to make a linked list of all the chapter markers that I added to the livestream.
Each chapter on YouTube must be formatted as a timecode, but making YouTube links to specific timestamps requires a “total seconds” value at the end of the URL, like &t=3600 – something I wasn’t about to do manually for all 90 chapters.
In order to convert everything to the right format quickly and generate URLs to each chapter, I built two shortcuts:
Stephen Robles of AppleInsider shared a shortcut for redirecting YouTube links into the app:
Or, long press the YT link, run this Shortcut, you’re watching in the app: https://t.co/oFQBvwkkf7
— Stephen Robles (@stephenrobles) April 27, 2023
The shortcut works by replacing the https with youtube – using Stephen’s own YouTube channel URL as an example, it’d appear like youtube://www.youtube.com/@beardfm.
Time to add this to my YouTube collection 🙂
Get the Watch In YouTube shortcut from Stephen’s tweet.
Ivory for Mastodon has a great Lists feature, which you can access via one of the dedicated Tabs in the app (if you give it one of the slots).
Alternatively, you can also swap the main Timeline to show a specific List instead – this works great for saving a Tab slot, plus filtering the whole timeline by default and making your Home feed calmer by default.
Plus, Ivory has Shortcuts support for opening the Lists tab, meaning it’s easy to call a shortcut from any of the many methods and pick from a list to view.
Unfortunately, there isn’t currently a Shortcuts action for opening into a specific list though. That being said, they *do* have a URL scheme. And that means, with some List data from Mastodon and the URL action in Shortcuts, we can open deep links into a List in Ivory — a little Shortcuts ingenuity for the win!
Plus, since there are a few ways to approach this problem, I’ve written up four methods for working with these Ivory deep links – from simplest to most complex. Here’s how each shortcut works:
When I originally asked about List support on Mastodon, the Tapbots team mentioned they didn’t have official support yet. However, Joseph Duffy saw my message and replied mentioning the existing URL scheme from Tweetbot actually does work if you swap out the app name:
The pattern—built off Tweetbot’s URL scheme—goes like this: ivory://@{handle}@{instance}/list/{list_id}.
To create your own URL, place your username as the {handle}, your Mastodon instance URL as the {instance}, and the corresponding values at the end of the URL for your List as the {list_id} (like 49309 from the link for my Favorites list: https://mastodon.social/lists/49309).
Putting it all together, the Ivory deep link for my Favorites list would be ivory://@[email protected]/list/49309.
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When working with the fediverse and Mastodon links, one is regularly dealing with accounts from a variety of instances, each with its own set of URLs for every account.
That means, when using the Mastodon API, it’s especially important to identify each user by their unique ID rather than dealing with different handles and instance URLs, which would otherwise get very messy very quickly.
To solve this problem, Mastodon has implemented a Lookup account functionality, a public endpoint that allows anyone with a Mastodon link to send a web request and return the ID for that user.
To take advantage of this in Shortcuts, I built Look up Mastodon account ID, one of my shortcuts that accepts any fediverse link as input (or gets one that’s been copied to your clipboard) and returns the account ID value – here’s how it works:
