What’s New in Shortcuts – Issue #077

Welcome to Issue 77 of “What’s New in Shortcuts” — we’re just a few days away from the iPhone event and likely only a few more until iOS 16 after that.

That means a whole new season of Shortcuts is almost upon us, with new opportunities for native actions, third-party apps, and deeper integrations all around.

I’m getting super excited to release my iPhone shortcuts first, then iPad and Mac once those OS updates come out in October — and some long-awaited member projects ?

If you’re in the U.S., I hope you’re enjoying your long Labor Day weekend — here’s what’s new in Shortcuts to finish off the summer:

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? Links of the Week

The folks at Relay FM have started their annual fundraising campaign for St. Jude’s, a research hospital that provides free treatment for children’s cancer.

This year, they’ve expanded their campaign to allow other folks to create their own fundraiser to join the cause — and I’ve done just that. I’ll be hosting livestreams starting at the end of this week (time and date TBD) to raise money towards my $1,000 goal.

Please join me in contributing — I’ll raise the goal each time we hit it as well:

Relay FM for St. Jude – Matthew Cassinelli Relay FM for St. Jude – Matthew Cassinelli — tiltify.com

I’m fundraising for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as part of Relay FM’s annual campaign! Please join me in supporting this wonderful podcast community in raising money to fund childhood cancer research and treatment. Learn more at stjude.org/relay

On Wednesday, my weekly piece for iMore explained the various ways to use the Shortcuts and Siri Suggestions widgets — I’m very deep on Shortcuts stacks, but I also love the App Suggestions on my main Home Screen:

How the Shortcuts widget makes the Home Screen much more powerful – Matthew Cassinelli How the Shortcuts widget makes the Home Screen much more powerful – Matthew Cassinelli — matthewcassinelli.com

From Shortcuts stacks to entire screens of App Suggestions — here’s how to make your Home Screen smarter.

On Saturday, my last iOS 16 teaser piece for iMore went out — this time covering Personal Hotspot and the ways folks use it. I got responses from Twitter earlier this summer and built out Personal Automations for each of them:

16 ways to use Personal Hotspot with Shortcuts in iOS 16 – Matthew Cassinelli 16 ways to use Personal Hotspot with Shortcuts in iOS 16 – Matthew Cassinelli — matthewcassinelli.com

I asked the Twitter community about Personal Hotspot — and made different Personal Automations for their responses.

My buddy Scotty Jackson has followed up on his Agenda and OmniFocus process that integrates the two via Shortcuts — definitely check it out and see what he’s built from scratch:

HeyScottyJ’s Day Automation Shortcuts – HeyScottyJ HeyScottyJ’s Day Automation Shortcuts – HeyScottyJ — heyscottyj.com

I love having a structured day, and using my favourite apps, OmniFocus and Agenda, coupled with Shortcuts, I have been able to establish that structure in a way that I’m excited to share. The…

? Apps of the Week

This week I wanted to quickly link to five tweets from app developers teasing their iOS 16 releases — SnipNotes, Bluebird, AirScrobble, Focused Work, and Acrylic:

? Tweets of the week

I saw this post from Geoff Hackworth mentioning his custom app he built just to help him take out the trash — I actually love this idea, especially because it supports Shortcuts ($1.99):

If you’re a Twitterific user, this shortcut from developer Sean Heber opens tweets into their Twitter app — get it in the second link here:

This shortcut from Meddlin looks great for folks with Elgato’s lights, adding in the additional actions to make it work:

I’ve always been a fan of creating GIFs using Shortcuts, but I do tend to start out with photos — this shortcut from Paul Veugen reminds me to convert videos more often as well:

This is a great thread explaining how a very specific Shortcuts setup can do wonders, especially for folks with Accessibility needs — definitely open this full thread and see her explanation:

Drafts developer Greg Pierce shared this great idea for Shortcuts automations — auto-replying to bot accounts with their pre-programmed messages.

This is somewhat possible now, because you can set up Messages automations that look for specific phrases — however, Apple has severely limited its capability by disallowing the Run Without Asking feature, so it will notify you but you have to manually run the shortcut at that point:

I also appreciated this thread from Dan Seifert talking about the reliability of Samsung’s routines and how they rarely fail to execute — it’s harsh about Shortcuts, but generally fair in my experience because Personal Automations do tend to fail randomly even after a few years since the feature released:

I also loved this idea from Joshua Davis — if you want to use Focus Modes but it doesn’t work well with an Android friend, you can actually use Shortcuts automations to prep an auto-reply to them.

However, given the same limitation above, you’ll have to confirm the message — this is another example where Messages automations being truly automatic would be very beneficial:

? Shortcuts corner

Before we go this week, I also want to share this fun bit of joy in folks playing around with their Shortcuts titles — you can truly use any phrase you want to Siri as your shortcuts triggers:

This second tweet is from the co-creator of the Big Bang Theory show, who very much got into the idea as well — you love to see it:

That’s all for this week! See you on Twitter on Wednesday ?

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