From yours truly on YouTube:
Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) is underway for 2024 and one of the big announcements out of their keynote is Apple Intelligence, their big artificial intelligence play.
Check out the recap of the announcement and all the capabilities coming – and stay tuned for follow-up videos where I cover each feature in-depth.
From Christopher Lawley on YouTube:
Let’s talk about my Shortcuts automations and what’s on my iPad.
Shortcuts:
This Monday morning, I published a short concept video on YouTube built using Shortcuts and Apple Vision Pro:
This video demonstrates my concept for how Shortcuts can be used with Apple Vision Pro in visionOS 1.1 and beyond
In visionOS 1.0, Shortcuts can only open apps one-at-a-time. In the beta for 1.1, however, Open App can be used multiple times to open a set of apps.
Then, with Shortcuts, you can set up a folder for different contexts in your home. For this video, I’ve done just that – here are the apps I used in the video:
To film the video, I first opened all the apps, placed them in position, and then use Hide All Other Apps to close them all.
What you see in the video is me running each shortcut and opening the already-running apps one-by-one.
Beyond visionOS 1.1, Apple needs to add a way to pin apps to specific locations – I propose the Find Windows, Move Windows, and Resize Windows from macOS get added to visionOS. Perhaps there’s also a tie-in with the Rooms from the Home app?
Check out the video on YouTube and get the folder of shortcuts.
Hey members! I have a special new video for you – my unboxing experience with the Apple Vision Pro, available now privately through YouTube.
Coming in at a little under an hour, I tried to capture a simple walkthrough and first-run experience with the device – complete with small observations, initial confusions, and the inevitable screen recording issues.
I’ve included chapter markers so you can jump through and watch the most interesting bits, and will clip out my favorite moments as well – for example, the first good screen recording starts at 35:22 in.
Admittedly, this may not be a thriller to watch from start to finish; but, I am experimenting with deeper access videos like this, as well as testing different filming techniques or editing processes – this is shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio, for example. Plus, since I don’t have to optimize for a massive audience or “the algorithm,” I can be a little more relaxed and natural, like the way I settle into things during livestreams.
I loved this initial test of a members-only video, and I hope you enjoy it too – let me know if you’d like to see other videos like this in the future!
Become a member to get access to access to the video, plus:
Join me this Sunday, March 20 at 9am Pacific/12pm Eastern/4pm UTC for a stream as we talk about iOS 15.4 and the new Shortcuts features included in the update.
We’ll cover the new sets of actions that are available, how Automations can run without notifying you every time, and lots of little details that are new in Shortcuts & iOS – I want to get you up-to-speed and moving with everything new!
I’ll be covering shortcuts available publicly in my Shortcuts Catalog and some members-only shortcuts as well.
Check out my stream with special guests Jason Snell and Dan Moren of SixColors.com recorded, February 1st, about their “Podcast Notes” shortcut.
Jason and Dan, who are both professional writers and podcasters, published a series of stories on Six Colors covering a shortcut designed to take note of any issues while recording a podcast and make it easy to identify those moments to edit out in post-production – you can find the articles here:
Plus, few issues ago in my Shortcuts newsletter, I also wrote about a similar shortcut I’d created on a stream last year.
On this stream, I talked to Jason and Dan about the differences between our shortcuts, how they’ve changed their shortcut over time, and came up with a few ways to push the idea even further.
Catch the full stream here – make sure to leave comments/questions in the chat replay and I will follow up too!
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:
Apple’s new AirTags are their cheapest standalone product, yet I think they’re one of the most interesting released in a while.
And that’s because of the U1 chip inside – now the fourth Apple product besides iPhone, Apple Watch, and HomePod mini to include one.
This ultra-wideband technology has super-precise tracking technology, which I think could enable a whole new wave of automation capabilities for Apple devices.
I made a video that explains my thoughts on what I’m calling “Spatial Awareness for Siri” – you can watch the whole thing on YouTube in under 3 minutes:
On Thursday March 25, I streamed with my designer friend Joey Banks and walked him through some of the oddities of the Home app, working on scenes, grouping devices, and HomeKit automations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie5DZ_p_6F4
Catch the replay on YouTube – and add my livestream calendar to tune into future streams.
This morning I published my new channel trailer for YouTube – “How To Get Started With Apple’s Shortcuts App”:
Make sure to visit the description for links to everything I mention, plus check out my updated Shortcuts Catalog.
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
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:
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:
For episode 19 of Supercomputer, instead of hitting the “call” button to record, we pressed “video chat” and proceed to produce our podcast. I edited out some moments, added chapter markers for the audio file, and uploaded the video to YouTube.
This last week, for episode 20, I also added visual chapters, actually used Alex’s correct audio file, and shared our second video recording to YouTube.
But podcasts are for audio, right?
Today I released my fifth YouTube video, focusing on building an agenda for the day and walking people through the process of building it.
This is a full-Siri shortcut, meaning it’ll work on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, and CarPlay, with Siri speaking out the results to you:
On Friday, I published a shorter video demonstrating how to build a custom shortcut in the Shortcuts app in just under 3 minutes:
For the topic, I picked “how to make a GIF” because it’s not that easy on iOS, and everyone has a library full of bursts and Live Photos that are stuck in the camera roll.
With just a few actions, you can put together an animated loop of your bursts, Live Photos, or sets of photos, and easily share it with people.
Get the shortcut here if you want to make your own.
I could have made some improvements to the shortcut. Since I filmed this without a script, I didn’t add in Save to Photo Album at the end so that every GIF you made would be saved automatically – this is important because most people run shortcuts from the main library view, but you can only see the GIF in my version if you open the shortcut editor.1
I’m working on some new shorter videos, along with a longer main video each week – working out the process now, but I should be able to ramp up to get more videos out for all of you.
In the meantime, let me know if there’s anything particular you’d like to see from my channel2.
And, as always, linking to the video or retweeting it goes a long way – thank you to everyone who’s been supporting me so far.