Today’s new shortcut is How far did I walk today? is designed for CES attendees but is also good for anyone really:
Looks at the Health app for total steps and distance for today, then formats the information to display in an alert or be spoken back from Siri.
Uses only the Apple Watch as the main source of data so no information is duplicated from the phone.
New shortcut “Which CES shuttle should I take?“ for CES attendees:
Pulls from a dictionary of CES hotel names and their associated shuttle #s, lets you choose from the names, then tells you which shuttle to take.
Also opens your final destination in Maps so you can follow along.
This afternoon, @kcjokes asked for a shortcut that can play a podcast based on the time of day:
Here’s a Personal Automation for Apple Watch that I’m running automatically at the start of my Walking workouts – Log UV index:
Gets the current weather at the current location and logs the UV index for the hour into the Health app, then displays it or speaks it back when run via Siri.
Includes “Get Device Name” and an “If” action to account for being run on the iPad, which does not have the Health app and would otherwise fail.
New shortcut Singalong for Apple Music users:
Turns on the Apple TV, asks if you want to Hand Off music to the TV from the current device, then opens the Music app and shows the Remote on the current device.
Sometimes you just have to make a meme into a shortcut:
Takes the “2020” meme with a line of text in the middle and uses a find & replace to swap out your own text, then copies it and opens Twitter. Your new input must be less than 30 characters to fit.
Self-search is a handy shortcut I built for Twitter users:
Using a Twitter username inputted on import and a keyword entered when the shortcut is run, this shortcut takes the info, URL-encodes it into a Twitter link, and opens into the app to show the results.
If you love The Office and want to have a random episode picked for you, this shortcut is for you:
Using a dictionary filled out with the season numbers and corresponding episode counts for each, this picks a random season, then episode, then displays it in an alert as Netflix opens on the Apple TV.
Works aloud when run from Siri; good for HomePod.
Just created this new shortcut Move from Ulysses to iA Writer:
Gets sheets from a group in Ulysses, asks which one to use, then adds it into iA Writer via their URL scheme. Only accepts text, so you’ll have to move over any images.
Federico Viticci, doing his usual excellent work on MacStories:
For the past several months, I’ve been working on a shortcut designed to be the ultimate assistant for Apple Music.
Called MusicBot, the shortcut encompasses dozens of different features and aims to be an all-in-one assistant that helps you listen to music more quickly, generate intelligent mixes based on your tastes, rediscover music from your library, control playback on AirPlay 2 speakers, and much more.
I poured hundreds of hours of work into MusicBot, which has gained a permanent spot on my Home screen. Best of all, MusicBot is available to everyone for free.
MusicBot is yet another one of Federico’s shortcuts that turns a vast number of functions into a single Siri Shortcut for you to use. Plus, look at that custom icon!
I quite literally have over 50 music-based shortcuts that this will be replacing.
On episode 11 of Smart Tech Today, Mikah and I covered a K-Pop rapper’s AirPods problem, Samuel L. Jackson on your Echo, and Sling TV on your Google Nest Hub:
After adding a few videos from YouTube to my Watch Later playlist this afternoon, I looked in the Apps section of the Shortcuts app for some Siri Shortcuts from the YouTube app.
I’ve found actions that open the Search and Subscriptions section of the app before, but I wanted to quickly jump into the Watch Later bit which is buried in the Library tab – alas, there was no shortcut.
However, I then realized that YouTube.com links often redirect into the app, and I might be able to use that deep link instead.
The day after iOS 13 launched, I was a guest on the iMore show to talk all about the updates to Siri Shortcuts (and a bit about the new iPhone):
Shortcuts expert Matthew Cassinelli is here with a wealth of information for making life better with iOS 13! He guides Lory Gil and Georgia Dow through the basics of shortcut creation and shares some of his own creations from matthewcassinelli.com.
I had a really great time talking to Lory Gil and Georgia Dow – Lory is the editor at iMore and corrects the mistakes in my freelance articles, and Georgia does a wonderful job as Senior Editor there too.
We also recorded this as a livestream, so here’s the video if you want to follow along – I even turned on my main camera with a top-down shot for part of it:
In iOS 13.1, the Shortcuts app added Automations, a feature that lets you use contextual triggers to show notifications for shortcuts you want to run or, for a subset of the option, run a shortcut entirely in the background. I’ll be covering those updates in the future, but I wanted to share links to NFC tags that I’ve bought and tested.
See, one of the Automation triggers lets you use “Near-Field Communication” tags that look like little wires printed onto stickers or stashed in cards like your credit cards, transit cards, or even in the Apple Watch or payment terminals for things like Apple Pay.
Thankfully, the new NFC tag automation trigger is one of the Automations that lets shortcut run “without asking” – they can fire off immediately when the trigger is detected, performing its operations in the background instead of requiring you to confirm via a notification first.
In iOS 13.1, this lets you run almost any shortcut just by tapping your iPhone to a small tag you’ve set up with Shortcuts, bringing the power of your apps and smartphone into the physical world with simple, cheap NFC tags.
So naturally, I bought a bunch, stuck them all over my house, and started testing them:
On Thursday, a few hours after the release of my Shortcuts Library, I covered the entire iOS 13 update for Siri Shortcuts in a YouTube livestream.
After a bug in the macOS Catalina beta last week prevented Final Cut Pro from staying open at all, the work on my in-progress video was frozen1. I couldn’t re-do it in time while I was also publishing over 150 shortcuts for people to use.
So I did it live:
Looking for the updated collection? Check out my Shortcuts Catalog, the announcement post, and my new membership.
Now that Apple has officially released iOS 13 to the public, I am excited to share my personal library of 150+ custom Siri Shortcuts for everyone to add and use.
I’ve worked countless hours this summer building up a database of my shortcuts, giving each shortcut a description and explanation of how I use it. These are saved inside each shortcut in Comment actions as well, so you can still reference the intended use after adding it to your Shortcuts app.
You can find my Shortcuts Library at the bottom of this post and here on my website at matthewcassinelli.com/siri-shortcuts. But first, I wanted to contextualize my collection.
David Sparks has completely redone his Siri Shortcuts Field Guide1 for iOS 13:
The new Shortcuts Field guide was shot entirely new with the new Shortcuts for iOS 13. Apple changed a lot and it is all covered in this field guide:
- Over 6 hours of downloadable video tutorials
- New materials for both beginners and advanced users
- New Downloadable Shortcuts
- So much Automation
Jason Snell, giving an overview of Shortcuts in iOS 13 for Six Colors:
Shortcuts just got a lot more useful if you use Siri, too. You can now create interactive Shortcuts that can ask questions and accept text input, especially useful if you’re not able to look at a screen because you’re using AirPods or CarPlay. And the redesigned Share Sheet in iOS 13 means that you can prominently place specific individual Shortcuts in the Share sheet, making it easy to access them with a single tap.
Jason and Dan are covering iOS 13 feature-by-feature – this piece is a nice summary of what you can expect from Siri Shortcuts in iOS 13.
Check out the full article on Six Colors (they’re celebrating their 5-year anniversary today!).
From my piece iPad keyboard shortcuts for the Shortcuts app on iMore:
While the Shortcuts app is primarily a touch-based system—where are you drag and drop actions around to create your scripts—there are a few keyboard shortcuts for iPad users that can speed up the experience of creating and managing their Siri Shortcuts.
Whether you’re opening the Gallery to view suggested shortcuts, searching for a shortcut in your list, or quickly controlling parts of the shortcuts editor, these simple keyboard shortcuts are worth learning.
Last fall, I made a simple video for YouTube but never posted it here on my website – it’s a quick tutorial on making GIFs using Shortcuts, where I start from scratch and finish with a usable shortcut: