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Handy iPhone and iPad Shortcuts You Should Check Out
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I have a short cut for one-tap calling each of my immediate family members. The shortcuts live in a widget so I can get to them by swiping left from the home screen. Much easier than opening the phone app, selecting favs, checking to see I'm not hitting Facetime by mistake.
I also have one for dictating a text that then gets sent to my wife with no need to type the text or open the messages app. Again, much quicker. I use it a lot.
Finally, I have a useful automation set up to let a group of parents know when I have left my and their daughter's gym. It will tell them my travel time to our drop off/pickup area automatically. It's very useful.
I also have one for dictating a text that then gets sent to my wife with no need to type the text or open the messages app. Again, much quicker. I use it a lot.
Finally, I have a useful automation set up to let a group of parents know when I have left my and their daughter's gym. It will tell them my travel time to our drop off/pickup area automatically. It's very useful.
You’re right: many Shortcuts actions are already available by invoking Siri. But where Shortcuts shines is when you want to combine those actions (or others) into one easily accessible command or button push.
I frequently need to send people my free time during the day so they can schedule a meeting. Doing it manually is tedious. With the Share Availability shortcut (available in the Gallery), you activate it and then copy the output to your reply email. Saves a lot of keystrokes.
When my company used to manually compile expenses for expense reports, I would simply say “Expense it” and the Shortcut would take a picture of a receipt, ask me how much the expense was and what it was for and then it would create and send an email to my admin with that information. Again, saves me a ton of steps and was not all that hard to create.
In the Photos Tookit, the programmer doesn't know how to spell "height" and uses "hight" instead.
With the launch of iOS 13, Apple introduced Shortcuts support and the Shortcuts app, adding a whole range of new functionality to the iPhone. Shortcuts have continued to be popular since their debut, and in iOS 14, the addition of Home screen widgets made it even easier to get to your Shortcuts, so we thought we'd round up some of our most useful Shortcut options for iPhone and iPad.
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Do you have a favorite Shortcut? Let us know in the comments and we may feature it in a future video.
- Photos Toolkit - Photos ToolKit is an all-in-one shortcut that can resize images, convert images to different formats, rotate images, combine images in a collage, make GIFs, and more.
- Make PDF - As the name suggests, the Make PDF shortcut can turn documents and webpages into PDFs.
- Apple Frames - Apple Frames from from MacStories' Federico Viticci adds frames to screenshots taken with your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch and makes them look nicer. It's a favorite that we use often here at MacRumors.
- Dictate to Notes - With Dictate to Notes, you can use voice dictation to create a note in the Notes app, which is useful for jotting down quick thoughts without having to type something out.
- YouTube PiP - If you want to be able to watch YouTube in Picture in Picture mode on the iPhone, this is the app for you. With an app called Scriptable, when you run YouTube PiP through the Share Sheet, it will open a YouTube video in a floating window.
- Music Finder - To identify a song that's playing nearby you can use Shazam, but Shazam saves music to Apple Music, which is not ideal if you're a Spotify user. Music Finder identifies a song and saves it to your Spotify playlist.
- Set AirPlay - Set AirPlay makes it easier to swap between your iPhone and your other AirPlay devices, saving you a few taps if you want to switch sources quickly.
- Url Shortener - URL Shortener makes long and unsightly URLs shorter, which is useful when you need to share a naked URL. It lives in the Share Sheet, so all you have to do is select the Shorten URL option when viewing a website and it will generate a short URL. Alternatively, you can copy a link and run it from the Shortcuts app, which will shorten the last copied URL.
Article Link: Handy iPhone and iPad Shortcuts You Should Check Out
So, what. He may have made a typo. The important aspect (for me) is whether or not the app works as advertised.
A lot of this functionality is just built in. For example dictating is anywhere the keyboard is. Tap the mic icon! I’m thinking maybe switching audio from the phone to my homepods might be a use case that might save me a tap!
If is always best to check look at what each automation does line by line before installing, lest it executes a command that you don't want to occur and exposes information it shouldn't.
If you like one of the automation but are still concerned, you can create the same automation yourself and then you won't get the message you did.
I can vouch for the Notes and PDF shortcuts. I didn't see anything untoward in them. I don't know about the others.
Theoretically, lots of bad things could happen. I think you are safe with these particular shortcuts, but generally, I review shortcuts I get in “the wild” before I add them to my collection. If you see anything in there you don’t understand or think might be malicious (like“copy all iMessages and email them to xxx@xxx.com”) , don’t add the shortcut to your collection.
It's articles like this that make me wonder what Apple's endgame with shortcuts is.
Apple had to have known that Shortcuts was always going to be a relatively niche feature that only a small number of more tech-savvy people were ever going to use. Maybe they are fine with leaving it to users to automate particular niche functions which they aren't going to bother baking into iOS?
Apple had to have known that Shortcuts was always going to be a relatively niche feature that only a small number of more tech-savvy people were ever going to use. Maybe they are fine with leaving it to users to automate particular niche functions which they aren't going to bother baking into iOS?
Wow, this post is really useful! Shortcuts is an amazing app, sure, but each day I am more surprised about it.
By the way, yes, it is easy to go into unknown webpages and download shortcuts which source is unknown... But how sure is that? Have you read the code of the shortcuts you're sharing before making the video? because some shortcuts like the photos one, will access our photo library, and I'd like to know if it is sending any data somewhere... I know there can be some malicious shortcuts, that's why I ask. Better safe than sorry.
Oh, and if someone knows a safe shortcut to make a JPEG from a PDF (an option that is natively included on Preview on macOS), let me know! Sometimes I need to convert a PDF to a JPEG in order to be able to keep the signature, because after sending a signed PDF over email, the receiver usually doesn't see the signature.
By the way, yes, it is easy to go into unknown webpages and download shortcuts which source is unknown... But how sure is that? Have you read the code of the shortcuts you're sharing before making the video? because some shortcuts like the photos one, will access our photo library, and I'd like to know if it is sending any data somewhere... I know there can be some malicious shortcuts, that's why I ask. Better safe than sorry.
Oh, and if someone knows a safe shortcut to make a JPEG from a PDF (an option that is natively included on Preview on macOS), let me know! Sometimes I need to convert a PDF to a JPEG in order to be able to keep the signature, because after sending a signed PDF over email, the receiver usually doesn't see the signature.
If anyone has a Ring alarm system and wants to control it with Siri, SimpleCommands lets you log into your Ring account where it will generate API URLs for doing any operation you want to your alarm system. These URLs can then be rolled into Shortcuts and called via Siri! Works great.
Nowadays I have a Siri shortcut that can be called when I’m almost home that opens my garage door, turns on the Garage lights, and disarms the house. Super powerful (when it works, Shortcuts/Siri has issues sometimes)
Nowadays I have a Siri shortcut that can be called when I’m almost home that opens my garage door, turns on the Garage lights, and disarms the house. Super powerful (when it works, Shortcuts/Siri has issues sometimes)
When my son is gaming, in his upstairs room, with headphones on, it's usually difficult to get a message through to him (like Dinner's ready). So I use this shortcut:
-Send message to <my-sons-profilename> through Discord (the preferred message app for gamers, I also have a profile)
-Flash the smartbulb in his room on/off twice - then he knows some sent him a message.
Better than yelling really loud
-Send message to <my-sons-profilename> through Discord (the preferred message app for gamers, I also have a profile)
-Flash the smartbulb in his room on/off twice - then he knows some sent him a message.
Better than yelling really loud
The YouTube PIP shortcut is a bit cumbersome, but it’s super useful. I don’t want to pay YouTube to get PiP support (in part because that means letting YouTube build up a viewership profile on me) and I have a tendency to watch longer videos, so this works well. It doesn’t load the next video in a playlist, which is an issue (but let’s be honest, it’s probably for the better), but it definitely works. It also makes the playback control features a little more obvious (since YouTube’s mobile browser-based video player is habitually all kinds of broken, in different ways each update, no less).
Too bad the app crashes for me whenever I try to use a timer-based shortcut. Have tried multiple solutions, but nothing worked.
Well, you really have to work with it on your own to really find something that works for you. Some years back, before Apple even acquired Workflow, I set up a workflow that generated a report I had to send out weekly. It generated the report from a Markdown template using features from Drafts, TextExpander, then emailed the resulting PDF to the recipients. You get into the real power when you start automating other applications (or even websites, Shortcuts has a feature to access and post to JSON web APIs).
And you’ve hit on where Shortcuts (and other automation features) really shine: repetitive tasks. If you do something more than 2 or 3 times per day, its a candidate. Or if something you do frequently involves multiple steps, that’s also a candidate. It’s not for everyone, but when you put one together that you use a lot, it’s a great feeling.
Apple had Automator and AppleScript that was more powerful than shortcuts, AFAIK, but I don't know what happened to them. They seem to be dead.
Apple stopped truly supporting Automator when they let Sal Soghoian go a few years back. I'm not sure I would agree that Automator is more powerful than Shortcuts (it lacks variable support). AppleScript is but is also not nearly as accessible to most people. My guess is that Shortcuts appears on the Mac (natively) in the next year or so. Natural progression.
idk, Automator seemed like you could write complete software using just GUI and little programming tricks. I am willing to hear from others who are more experienced on the topic. I never heard of something like this on Windows or Linux.
Does Apple still ship Automator with Big Sur?