Category: Tips & Tricks

Categories
Membership Tips & Tricks

Technique: Open URLs into Mac apps using Shell Scripting

In my latest addition to the Shortcuts Library, I updated my shortcuts for the TV app with expanded functionality, including many new functions, redesigned menus, and, critically, support for macOS.

I accomplished Mac support using Shell Scripting, a technique which I’m sharing for members:

Opening deep links into Mac apps

In order to open a URL into an existing application, the best method within Shortcuts is using the Run Shell Script action, which allows you to execute command-line utilities using shell scripts, similar to the Terminal.

In order to open any app using a shell script, the following command can be used – here’s an example for the TV app:

open -a TV

In order to open a URL within that app, one only needs to add the URL afterwards, like so:

open -a TV https://tv.apple.com/watch-now

In my shortcuts, I’ve used the Deep Link variable to pass in the appropriate URL for the TV app into the shell script on-demand – only if run from Mac.

This works great with my TV app shortcuts, which utilizes preset versions of the URLs from the tv.apple.com website (as well as web scraping from the Apple TV Marketing Toolbox).

On desktop, these links will activate and open the TV app for Mac – on mobile, they’ll go straight into the TV app for iPhone and iPad.

Add to Dock and Open URLs

I’ve also used this method to open links from web services like Reddit into desktop versions of the app, which I’ve created for a handful of social media apps with the “Add to Dock” feature added to macOS in recent years.

I can also see this technique being useful for native versions of web apps like Notion or Airtable – I’ll have to explore more there soon.

Check out my TV app shortcuts in the Shortcuts Library and look for more techniques coming soon to the Membership Extras section.

Categories
Custom Shortcuts Tips & Tricks

Pro-Tip: Shortcuts Has Its Own Suite of AppleScript Commands

Many people don’t know that the Shortcuts app can be automated on the Mac using its dedicated scripting dictionary.

This requires a bit of meta thinking, but that means both the application itself and all the shortcuts contained within it are available to control remotely via AppleScript and applications like Script Editor – as well as triggered via devices like the Stream Deck, which I use every day at my Mac mini.

In order to make these methodologies more accessible, I wanted to share instructions here on how to access the AppleScript dictionary for Shortcuts, plus share a copy of the commands so everything is freely available on the web.

Here’s how to access Shortcuts’ scripting dictionary:

  1. Open the Script Editor app
  2. In the Menu Bar, select File > Open Dictionary (or press Command + Shift + O)
  3. Browse through the dictionaries until you find Shortcuts’ (or type “Shortcuts” on the keyboard to navigate there directly), then open the Dictionary.
  4. There, you’ll see Standard Suite and Shortcuts Suite; under Shortcuts Suite, you’ll find the “Classes and Commands for working with Shortcuts.”

For reference, here’s what is documented in the command set:

Shortcuts Suite

Classes and Commands for working with Shortcuts


application n [see also Standard Suite]

ELEMENTS

contains shortcuts, folders.

—-
shortcut n : a shortcut in the Shortcuts application

ELEMENTS

contained by application, folders.


PROPERTIES

name (text, r/o) : the name of the shortcut

subtitle (text, r/o) : the shortcut’s subtitle

id (text, r/o) : the unique identifier of the shortcut

folder (folder) : the folder containing this shortcut

color (RGB color, r/o) : the shortcut’s color

icon (TIFF image, r/o) : the shortcut’s icon

accepts input (boolean, r/o) : indicates whether or not the shortcut accepts input data

action count (integer, r/o) : the number of actions in the shortcut


RESPONDS TO

run.

—-

folder n : a folder containing shortcuts

ELEMENTS

contains shortcuts; contained by application.

PROPERTIES

name (text) : the name of the folder

id (text, r/o) : the unique identifier of the folder

—-

run v : Run a shortcut. To run a shortcut in the background, without opening the Shortcuts app, tell ‘Shortcuts Events’ instead of ‘Shortcuts’.

run shortcut : the shortcut to run

[with input any] : the input to provide to the shortcut

→ any : the result of the shortcut

—-

To keep this post as reference material, I’ll share methods for utilizing these AppleScript commands here on my blog using my AppleScript tag.

To learn more about scripting, check out Apple’s documentation for Navigating a Script Dictionary – that’s part of the now-archived Mac Automation Scripting Guide which provides more insight into how Script Editor and AppleScript can be used across macOS.

Categories
Links Tips & Tricks

Tip: Upload High Quality Media on Threads With This Setting »

From @Threads:

Thriendly tip ✨ To upload images and videos here at the highest quality possible, head to Settings, then tap on “Account” > “Media quality” > “Upload highest quality.”

Use my shortcut Open Threads Settings to quickly access this page as needed, plus your Notification options and your Likes, plus Privacy controls.

View the post on Threads.

Continue reading “Tip: Upload High Quality Media on Threads With This Setting »”

Categories
Apps Tips & Tricks

Tip: Filter Apple Music Albums By Favorites To Hide Singles

One of the best music discoveries over the last few years is the fact that I love dance music and never really realized it before – that has led to many, many Singles being saved to my singles library from top playlists so I can keep track of all the songs and artists.

However, that’s led to an Albums view that’s hard for me to parse – often each album cover represents only one or two songs, and the sheer volume/variety compared to other genres means the list is now much busier and harder for me to parse when trying to find actual full-length albums that I’ve added.

With the update to iOS 17.2 to change Likes to Favorites, however, I discovered a new filter in the Albums view that lets you see only your Favorites.

With this, I’ve gone through and added a bunch of full-length albums as favorites—leaving out all the singles—and now I can filter the list down to my “real” library.

Further, I can still favorite the individual track within a Single to add the track itself to my Favorites list like any other song, while still being able to effectively hide the artwork when I want to filter for full albums.

Overall, I think Favorites makes sense over Likes and enables some helpful quality-of-life features to the Apple Music experience – this Favorites filter for Albums is a nice touch.

Categories
Apps Tips & Tricks

Tip: Mark Physical Copies As Finished For Your Apple Books Year In Review

From Zach Kahn, Services PR for Podcasts and Books (and Vision Pro) at Apple:

Pro tip: if you’ve read a book elsewhere, like a print copy, just tap the … button and mark the title as read in Apple Books. It will become eligible for your Year in Review

Look up the books, mark them as “Finished”, and see your stats change – very nice.

From the press release for Year in Review, the new feature in the Apple Books app:

Year in Review is available on iPhone and iPad within the Read Now tab under Top Picks to users with at least three titles marked as finished.

View the post on Mastodon and the Year in Review press release from Apple.

Categories
Links Tips & Tricks

Name This Pet Is the Best Feature of iOS 17 »

Jeremy Burge for Mobile Tech Journal:

There’s plenty of new features in iOS 17 in September, but one has barely received a mention in Apple’s promotional material. In fact, it’s not even listed.

The feature? Pets are finally join People in the Photos app. And given how much people love their pets, this is gonna be crazy popular.

The feature itself is understated. Open a photo with your pet, enter its name, and instantly every photo of Bunny, Pot Roast or Hamlet is catalogued into their own fluffy album.

Oliver agrees.

View the original.

Categories
Tips & Tricks

MacOS Sonoma Tip: Use Emoji For Custom Bookmark Favicons »

From Niléana on Mastodon:

Just noticed something neat in macOS Sonoma: as you know, #Safari now shows favicons in your bookmarks bar. But if you rename a bookmark and add an emoji, that emoji acts as a custom favicon ✨

Neat – I just updated my whole group of Favorites folders in Bookmarks.

Something to note though – the emoji works best at the end. Either way you place it, Safari appears to inherit the space as well – if you prepend it, the space goes before the emoji and just creates more space for the whole bookmark[1]; if you append it, however, the space shows before your bookmark title and it doesn’t look great.

View the original GIF on Mastodon.

1. The extra space before the emoji isn’t ideal either and Apple should automatically remove this.

Categories
Tips & Tricks

Tip: Design your own Keynote template (and create it with Shortcuts) »

Simon Støvring on Mastodon:

Finally took the time to make my own Keynote theme and it’s surprising how much joy that brings me ?

Me, in the replies:

I’m a dork for this but once you set it up, you can create a new template using the Keynote action in Shortcuts 🙂

And again:

All you need to do is use Edit > Save Theme, then use the Create Presentation action and scroll to the bottom of the Templates list to the My Themes area!

As usual, this has prompted me to make this into a shortcut, as well as properly publish my set of Keynote shortcuts that I covered last year for iMore.

See Simon’s post and get my folder of Keynote shortcuts in the Shortcuts Library.

Categories
Tips & Tricks

Mac Tip: Try Highlighting Text With A Single, Double, Or Triple Click »

From @threehourcoffee (emphasis mine):

This mouse highlighting shortcut is a game-changer for me!!!

A friend (who’s not on twitter) just told me about it.

Had to share.

Made a video to demonstrate.

Double click, then drag, to highlight words not letters. pic.twitter.com/MPa51Ek4WT

This is one of those Mac tips that people probably haven’t heard of, or have so deeply engrained into their muscle memory that they didn’t realize it was a tip to give (I’m the latter).

Either way – make sure to try triple clicking to select entire paragraphs too.

Update: Antonio Bueno mentioned this additional tip to me on Discord:

Something related I discovered God-knows-when: You can make little adjustments to one side of the selection with shift+left arrow and shift+right arrow.

The nice detail is that the side depends on the direction of the selection: Select from right to left and the keys will modify the left side. Select from left to right, and it’s the right side that can be modified.

View the video on Twitter.

Categories
Apps Tips & Tricks

Tip: Long-Press to Skip The Custom Share Sheet on Threads (and Twitter Too) »

From @mosseri on Threads:

Hidden ? if you long press the share button on a thread it’ll pull up the OS share sheet instead of the Threads one in case you want to get there quicker.

If you’re trying to use the Share Sheet to capture Threads posts, you’ll find yourself clicking the Share icon, then “Share via…” every time – instead, you can long-press on the icon and the native Share Sheet will pop up again with your shortcuts ready to go.

Fun fact: I helped get this same functionality implemented in the Twitter app back in 2020 after mentioning how important it is for Shortcuts users – shoutout to fellow Shortcuts creator Robert Peterson for emphasizing my point in the, ahem, “thread.”

View the post on Threads.

Categories
Tips & Tricks

How to add photos to a venue on Apple Maps

While at the coffee shop this weekend, I found myself taking a few pictures with the goal of slowing down, noticing the environment around me, and practicing my framing – plus I wanted to post it to Threads ?.

However, once I’d gotten the photos I wanted, I figured – if these are decent enough, why not post them on Apple Maps?

Continue reading “How to add photos to a venue on Apple Maps”
Categories
Custom Shortcuts How To Shortcuts Tips & Tricks

How to copy meeting availability across multiple calendars using Shortcuts

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:

Continue reading “How to copy meeting availability across multiple calendars using Shortcuts”
Categories
Tips & Tricks

How to fix Recents in Finder on macOS Ventura by reindexing Spotlight using the Terminal

Screenshot of a macOS desktop with the default Ventura background showing an empty Recents tab in the Finder app.

Ever since I installed the macOS Ventura beta on my MacBook Air, I’ve been having a weird issue where the Recents folder in Finder didn’t populate and showed as entirely empty — here’s how I fixed it.

Continue reading “How to fix Recents in Finder on macOS Ventura by reindexing Spotlight using the Terminal”
Categories
Gear Guest appearances Offsite Tips & Tricks

Using Apple Pencil to edit audio with Ferrite

Last Monday night, I streamed on Twitch for about a half hour on the topic of Ferrite for iPad with my friend Alec Pulianas, a computer engineer and podcast editor at AMP Creative Studios.

Watch How to edit podcasts with Apple Pencil in Ferrite (ft. Alec Pulianas) from matthewcassinelli on www.twitch.tv

We both edit podcasts and audio using Ferrite, a purpose-built audio editing app designed primarily for spoken word content (as opposed to Logic Pro or Garage Band which were built for music). It works on both iPhone and iPad, enabling a very natural touch input paradigm for editing your audio that both Alec and I prefer to use.

In our stream, we talked about the additional benefits when you edit on the iPad, including how using the Apple Pencil in this app feels like a remote control and which custom settings we use to edit.

We also covered details like Ferrite templates, the keyboard shortcuts, and a few of the downsides as well – it doesn’t have the same speed-changing capabilities as Logic, for example.

I really enjoyed talking with Alec—he’s a great guy—about this tool we both enjoy, especially because it’s changed how I edit audio and opened up where I can do my work.

Check out the clip on Twitch and follow my channel if you want to see future streams like this.1

  1. I’ve saved the entire stream as a “highlight” so it lasts past Twitch’s normal 30-days, but doing so unfortunately removes the live view count and chat comments. ↩
Categories
Podcasts Shortcuts Tips & Tricks Video

“Show me this clip” for video podcasts with this Overcast to YouTube shortcut

If you didn’t already know, my podcast Smart Tech Today comes with a video feed now – you can download a full video feed in Podcasts, or subscribe to the YouTube channel to get the episodes every week, or watch live on Twitch every Monday at 4pm PST.

While the show is designed as an audio podcast, our network This Week in Tech produces the video so anyone can watch too – I have lots of fun being on camera with Mikah.

Being a podcast that’s also “video capable,” I’ve always thought it’s a shame that it’s not easier to listen when you want to, or watch when you want to, with a way to switch between both on the fly.

If you’re on Overcast user, you’re in luck – I’ve solved the problem in one direction, taking Overcast’s “Share URL with timestamp” Siri Shortcut and combining it with YouTube’s timestamps feature to let you jump into the video feed at a moment’s notice.1

Continue reading ““Show me this clip” for video podcasts with this Overcast to YouTube shortcut”
Categories
Tips & Tricks

Automating how loud Siri replies on the HomePod

Hero image of HomePod in the author's home

I’m a huge fan of the HomePod – after bearing the investment cost, it’s improved my daily interactions with music and opened access to controlling my smart home gear, plus provides a new medium for everything I’ve built in the Shortcuts app.

But one of the nagging problems with HomePod is the way Siri, regardless of the current time of day, will respond loudly at whatever volume you’ve previously set.

Whether it’s the middle of the night or super early in the morning, it’s all too common to ask Siri something and the answer shouted backed at you, only because you listened to music loudly sometime yesterday. Hopefully nobody wakes up, you curse at how dumb your supposedly “smart” speaker can be, and frantically try to turn it down.

Thankfully, iOS 13.2 provides a route to a solution by adding HomePods and AppleTV to scenes and automations – the HomePod didn’t fix this on its own, but, with a Home Automation, you can make it “smart” enough yourself.1

Continue reading “Automating how loud Siri replies on the HomePod”
Categories
Apps Links Tips & Tricks

Audible update lets you use credits to buy books in iOS app

In the latest app update on iOS, Audible now lets users actually buy audiobooks inside the app using existing credits.

According to a tweet from Chris Fralic of First Round (originally sourced by Joshua Topolosky of The Outline), the “Add to Library” button in Audible will show the message “You can now use credits without leaving the app!”:

Continue reading “Audible update lets you use credits to buy books in iOS app”
Categories
Links Offsite Shortcuts Tips & Tricks

iPad keyboard shortcuts for the Shortcuts app

Screenshot of the Shortcuts app showing the two keyboard shortcuts from the My Shortcuts view – Command F for Find and Command N for new.

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.

Continue reading “iPad keyboard shortcuts for the Shortcuts app”
Categories
Apps Links Tips & Tricks

“Make your Mac dance” with MacSparky’s Keyboard Maestro Field Guide

Yesterday, David Sparks released the Keyboard Maestro Field Guide, the seventh paid course offered through his Learn MacSparky site1. This 4-hour block of videos covers 76 different screencasts about Keyboard Maestro, the Mac automation application that provides significantly deep capabilities and makes them available to use across your Apple desktop or laptop.

As usual, David’s course is well-paced, insightful, and makes it easy to learn complex topics like Keyboard Maestro’s slightly esoteric design language.

Continue reading ““Make your Mac dance” with MacSparky’s Keyboard Maestro Field Guide”
Categories
Tips & Tricks

How to buy Disney/Marvel/Star Wars movies to watch on Apple TV in 4K

When you’re trying to buy any of the latest 4K Disney films like Star Wars and the Marvel movies, you’ll quickly find they’re not available in iTunes. For some reason the partnership hasn’t shaken out properly, which I’m hoping changes soon, but for now if you buy one in iTunes Movies it will only be 1080p for $19.99.

You might think that Movies Anywhere would handle this, because it makes movies you’ve bought on iTunes, Prime Video, VUDU, Google Play, or Fandango Now available to watch on each of the other services. But, it’s not that easy.

All of these Disney movies are available in 1080p on iTunes for $19.99 and on VUDU the 4K version (called UHD on their site) costs $24.99. However, even if you’ve unlocked the HD version by buying it in iTunes, you can’t just split the difference and pay $5 to upgrade to 4K within VUDU.

Instead, you’re stuck buying a second version of the same movie for full price, like I had to do for The Last Jedi.

But, if you buy through VUDU first in 4K, you can watch it in full resolution using their own Apple TV app1 instead of iTunes.

Note: When you’re trying to Own the movie instead of Rent, make sure to hit the dropdown and select UHD for 4K instead of HDX for 1080p quality.

And if you want watch it on a smaller screen in HD or add it offline on one of your devices, the movie purchase will still automatically sync to your iTunes account via Movies Anywhere in the background.

I just bought Avengers: Infinity War on VUDU’s website, and when I opened it in the TV app moments later I could already hit Play and start watching.


For me, this is a pretty solid solution, because now I can watch the same thing on my TV or iPhone or iPad—in the best quality available for the device—without paying for it twice.

  1. If you get the regular app and you have automatic downloads turned on for your Apple TV, the app should just appear once you’ve “purchased” it. ↩