For the month of May, my main public focus was publishing livestreams related to Shortcuts and my interests as a content creator.
I’ve long had a streaming setup and even covered most of iOS 13’s updates for Shortcuts in an hour-long stream last fall, but I’ve always wanted to stream more and never really did.
In these last 9 months since that stream, I’ve also seen a ton of new Shortcuts-related apps drop and for some reason I didn’t fully adopt them – I thought every one my shortcuts needed to be easily shareable, plus I was worried about depending on paid third-party apps that people would have to buy just to use my shortcuts.
But eventually, I realized I’d shot myself in the foot – these apps were necessary because of some shortcoming of Shortcuts in its current state, and by missing out on those apps I was handicapping myself in the process.
Once I started adopting the Shortcuts-related apps, my productivity skyrocketed and I realized I needed to learn these even more – enter livestreams with the developers themselves. Plus, I took the opportunity to stream with one novice user and another expert, both of which were great experiences.
Here’s the full list of videos:
Live w/ Jason Snell – charting the weather with Shortcuts! https://t.co/pCqrJzhSwr
— Matthew Cassinelli (@mattcassinelli) May 21, 2020
I’m doing these streams for one reason really – I’m creating videos I would want to see. I want to learn everything there is to know about these apps and I think there’s lots of value in communicating with the developers directly while everyone can watch along.
I’m also trying to learn from friends or experts when I don’t know enough about an area – my stream with Chris was a great test for that, and he absolutely delivered with tons of pro tips around LumaFusion.
I will still produce short and sweet videos on some of these topics for YouTube, but this is a way for me to share way more often and for us all to learn together.
But for streams, I’m in the process of testing out the best formats and styles, experimenting on which platform to use (always Twitch, mostly Twitter/Periscope, sometimes YouTube), and have been optimizing the workflow to make it easy enough for myself and any guests to stream regularly.
You can find all of my future streams through the link shortcuts.live, and I’ll be building out ways for people to passively follow my streaming schedule and always know when I’m going live.
Please submit suggestions for future topics and potential guests – I want to build this out with you all in mind too.
Thanks for watching, and be sure to say hello in the chat if you’re watching along – thank you very much for your time!
