Apple Shortcuts are cool

I love Shortcuts. While a bit obtuse to navigate, I find it very rewarding to explore all the options Shortcuts has to offer. Here’s a little list of kind of wild things Shortcuts can do:

• OCR/image text extraction
• Open pages in safari, execute custom javascript, read content from the page
• Control literally any part of any apple app or service
• Live on iOS Home Screen with a custom app icon
• Live on MacOS toolbar, right click menu, etc
• “Import Questions” (ex. api key)

In the past, I’ve been a fan of hammerspoon for automating things on MacOS. I feel that Shortcuts is now essentially a viable replacement. Here’s a few projects I’ve now built with Shortcuts (warning - links will open in Shortcuts):

• Setlist.fm to Apple Music creator
• Create an Apple Music playlist from a Spotify Playlist ID (including the worst oauth implementation of all time)
• Read current UV index and start a timer for the amount of time you can be outside before skin damage (tanning timer)
• Convert an Apple Note to a markdown Jekyll post including front matter (tags not working)
• Forward iMessage to ChatGPT and auto reply 😏

Additionally, if you use Apple HomeKit, automations can trigger a shortcut. I have used this for example to toggle a power switch on and off after a duration from a single button press.

Learning Shortcuts is essentially a matter of just diving in. Some documentation is available from Apple but I have not found any central source that has an easy to navigate explanation of every action. There is also extremely limited documentation built in to the Shortcuts app itself. The reddit community at /r/shortcuts has some decent specific use case examples which are super helpful as a starting place. I usually search for “{thing I want to do} shortcuts”.

#programming #apple #ios #macos #shortcuts #chatgpt #homekit