Shortcuts is the opposite of "enough rope to hang yourself with": not enough rope to even tie a knot.
This is an exaggeration, though. I managed to use Shortcuts even while writing this text, so it definitely is useful.
But why is Apple so goddamn afraid that if I get to do what I want, something terrible will happen? Why can't my shortcut paste, keystroke, or use SMS as triggers? I understand there could be unintended consequences, but to me at least, the limitations of Shortcuts as it is now are obviously not technical but philosophical/political from Apple. Give me keystroke shortcuts and proper triggers! I promise I won't abuse it, and I also promise to not run with scissors!
Well, yeah. It’s borderline usable in iOS, and almost pointless in macOS because we still have Automator and much more useful AppleScript integrations—which are being eroded by time and little maintenance from Apple.
Then there’s JavaScript for Automation, PyObjC, and many other technologies that Apple never really invested in because they just don’t get automation.
Somehow, Shortcuts survived being acquired, but in the process they actually killed stupefyingly useful functionality like being able to run some automations directly from the Apple Watch (I used it to send automated SMS messages to query bus schedules based on my location, and it was awesome).
I’m more positive about shortcuts and looking for ways to integrate it with my home automation.
I think it’s pretty cool that I can make a shortcut connect to a host on my home network via ssh and execute a command. To just trigger that using my voice and Siri when my phone is nearby.
I live in a country with stupidly expensive electricity, so have my home media center connected to a smart switch, which I switch off last thing at night. I am thinking of moving my Pi mini NAS setup with it’s various drives into that media center setup, so last thing at night I can get a shortcut to SSH to that host, do a clean shutdown, wait a short while, and then use the Hue connector in Shortcuts to cut the power. I couldn’t do all that with either Amazon Echo or the Hue app.
All I want is an automation to turn my hotspot on when I get in my car. You can do this, it’s easy. What’s not easy is being able to rely on it. It fails with a notification about half the time. Which is another thing, can I please have a setting to surprise the automation run notification? I know it’s there for safety but if it’s an explicit option… just let me do what I want to do Dangit.
Shortcuts is the most useful and frustrating app on my phone.
I have tons of Shortcuts. They're excellent when they work. It's extremely frustrating when they don't.
Maybe your Shortcut uses an action that is no longer available in the version of iOS you updated to (and wasn't marked as deprecated in the changelog). Maybe the app that the action relies on send an unusual response, which Shortcuts won't tell you because it's way of error handling is "leave the user more confused than they started with". Maybe Shortcuts decided to just keep itself running in the background forever for no reason (which is even more frustrating given that apps like Music will get killed by the memory manager _WHILE THEY'RE PLAYING MUSIC_, something that should never happen on the latest iPhone).
Despite it's shortcomings, it's still better and a hell of a lot easier to use than Tasker, it's third-party equivalent on Android (because it, surprisingly, doesn't have an automation tool built-in).
Shortcut is one of the main selling point for an iphone vs an Android. There is just nothing comparable.
Yet even then, I know I have particular need, I'm not the average apple customer. Most people never heard about shortcut and wouldn't care if it disappeared.
Working on shortcut must be quite time consuming and benefit something like 1% of apple customer, so I get that it's never really going to be a priority.
They would rather focus on artificial intelligence that the average Joe can use.
I made one to connect to VPN when I leave my place (disconnect from my home wifi), and disconnect from VPN when I’m back. The only thing I don’t like is that it generates a notification on the lock screen whenever it runs, and there’s no way to disable that.
I only have configured a task in Shortcuts that I find useful. I'm a freelance, and sometimes I have to use my personal car to do some work. So, I did a task that I voice activate on CarPlay in order to record the current mileage into a Notes note, storing the current date and the voice transcribed mileage.
I could not find another use for Shortcuts because there aren't enough integrated apps.
The most useful Shortcut I've written on macOS is a simple 'toggle dark mode'. It's very simple and works as a good 'first task' if you've never used the app before. I wrote up the process here: https://medium.com/@bobbyjack/how-to-toggle-macos-dark-mode-...
Overall, Shortcuts feels like a nice polished app, but it's definitely severely lacking compared to Automator.
I’ve been struggling to make a simple “door left open too long” alarm. The first problem I ran into was weird inconsistencies between personal shortcuts that run on your device vs home shortcuts that run on HomePod. For example, there is no Speak Text action on HomePod, so I can’t have the alarm say “front door open” unless it runs on my phone, which means it won’t work when I’m not home. Oh well, a generic alarm sound will have to do. Oh wait, it doesn’t have that, either. The alarm sound has to come from Apple Music. That means this alarm relies on the internet! Oh well. At least there are plenty of sound effects albums on there. Hey, why isn’t the alarm working today? Oh, that album was taken down, probably due to a copyright dispute. That’s annoying, but at least there are plenty more to choose from. WTF, it’s not working again, only a month later, same thing. Fine, more whack—a-mole…
Next problem: I had to set the alarm sound to play at high volume since the effect itself is relatively quiet. Woah! That volume is permanent and now after an alarm, everything plays loud. Ok, no problem. I’ll just have the shortcut get the current volume and save it to a variable at the beginning and then change the volume to that variable at the end. Oh, there’s no way to set the volume to the value of a variable? WTF? The HomePod has actions for resizing and rotating images, even though it doesn’t have a display, but it can’t do what I need it to as a speaker?! Alright, hardcoded 50% volume will have to do.
Final problem: My shortcut repeatedly waits a few seconds and then checks the state of a door sensor in a loop. It would be nice if I could have a condition to exit the loop early but keep running the rest of the shortcut. Oh, Apple made a whole scripting system for shortcuts but didn’t include a `break` keyword. Lovely.
I officially have a love/hate relationship with shortcuts, which leans towards hate most of the time.
I recently learnt that you can use Shortcuts to enable power-saving mode on unplugging from the charger. It's amazing. Now I no longer regularly go around turning on power-save on all my family's devices to avoid them hogging all the chargers right before a trip.
Even though they are a bit limited I still find Shortcuts very useful. I have one that adds a global share option that triggers the download of any X video. I also have a few that run a Python script via a-Shell mini.
Shortcuts should have been in "Vibe coding" style. I find it frustrating to use because unlike with straight coding the UI is verbose and its abilities are cryptic.
Instead of this cumbersome UI they should have provided a UI where you just normal Swift and ability to generate that Swift from prompting.
This post uses the term “automation gap”, in quotes, in its title and then never uses it in the body. About to go Google what it means but that’s mildly annoying and/or bad writing.
Despite being a "power user" of macOS (and having had been for close to 25 years now), I only tried Shortcuts for the first time last week, to try to automate opening any of the live TV streaming apps (YouTube TV, Fubo etc) to a specified channel in one button click. Unfortunately none of the TV apps on the platform have bothered to expose such basic functionality, so I ended up cancelling my subscription to each one I tried.
If anyone knows of an app that gives access to live TV and actually cares about the basic functionality of the platform they run on, I'd love to hear about it and they can have my money.
Shortcuts is the opposite of "enough rope to hang yourself with": not enough rope to even tie a knot.
This is an exaggeration, though. I managed to use Shortcuts even while writing this text, so it definitely is useful.
But why is Apple so goddamn afraid that if I get to do what I want, something terrible will happen? Why can't my shortcut paste, keystroke, or use SMS as triggers? I understand there could be unintended consequences, but to me at least, the limitations of Shortcuts as it is now are obviously not technical but philosophical/political from Apple. Give me keystroke shortcuts and proper triggers! I promise I won't abuse it, and I also promise to not run with scissors!
Well, yeah. It’s borderline usable in iOS, and almost pointless in macOS because we still have Automator and much more useful AppleScript integrations—which are being eroded by time and little maintenance from Apple.
Then there’s JavaScript for Automation, PyObjC, and many other technologies that Apple never really invested in because they just don’t get automation.
Somehow, Shortcuts survived being acquired, but in the process they actually killed stupefyingly useful functionality like being able to run some automations directly from the Apple Watch (I used it to send automated SMS messages to query bus schedules based on my location, and it was awesome).
iOS 18 shortcuts can be added to control center, https://support.apple.com/en-us/121131
They can run external tasks via SSH scripts or API endpoints, e.g. send audio to LLM, https://www.innoq.com/en/blog/2023/03/openai-gpt-on-macos-io...
For local actions, app-specific URL schemes can be driven from shortcuts, https://www.macstories.net/tutorials/guide-url-scheme-ios-dr...
In iOS18 on iPhone Pro with lidar, a shortcut can trigger Magnifier to provide audio description of live camera image.
NFC stickers or expired transit cards can trigger shortcuts by physical proximity.
I’m more positive about shortcuts and looking for ways to integrate it with my home automation.
I think it’s pretty cool that I can make a shortcut connect to a host on my home network via ssh and execute a command. To just trigger that using my voice and Siri when my phone is nearby.
I live in a country with stupidly expensive electricity, so have my home media center connected to a smart switch, which I switch off last thing at night. I am thinking of moving my Pi mini NAS setup with it’s various drives into that media center setup, so last thing at night I can get a shortcut to SSH to that host, do a clean shutdown, wait a short while, and then use the Hue connector in Shortcuts to cut the power. I couldn’t do all that with either Amazon Echo or the Hue app.
All I want is an automation to turn my hotspot on when I get in my car. You can do this, it’s easy. What’s not easy is being able to rely on it. It fails with a notification about half the time. Which is another thing, can I please have a setting to surprise the automation run notification? I know it’s there for safety but if it’s an explicit option… just let me do what I want to do Dangit.
Shortcuts fails for programmer and for non-programmers. This is the result where you don’t know your audience
Shortcuts is the most useful and frustrating app on my phone.
I have tons of Shortcuts. They're excellent when they work. It's extremely frustrating when they don't.
Maybe your Shortcut uses an action that is no longer available in the version of iOS you updated to (and wasn't marked as deprecated in the changelog). Maybe the app that the action relies on send an unusual response, which Shortcuts won't tell you because it's way of error handling is "leave the user more confused than they started with". Maybe Shortcuts decided to just keep itself running in the background forever for no reason (which is even more frustrating given that apps like Music will get killed by the memory manager _WHILE THEY'RE PLAYING MUSIC_, something that should never happen on the latest iPhone).
Despite it's shortcomings, it's still better and a hell of a lot easier to use than Tasker, it's third-party equivalent on Android (because it, surprisingly, doesn't have an automation tool built-in).
Shortcut is one of the main selling point for an iphone vs an Android. There is just nothing comparable.
Yet even then, I know I have particular need, I'm not the average apple customer. Most people never heard about shortcut and wouldn't care if it disappeared.
Working on shortcut must be quite time consuming and benefit something like 1% of apple customer, so I get that it's never really going to be a priority.
They would rather focus on artificial intelligence that the average Joe can use.
I spend way more time with automation on a macOS than I probably should. I need a new hobby. . .
Anyway, something I do appreciate about Shortcuts is that most shortcuts can be invoked via CLI, so one can do some interesting things with them.
Honestly though, I still prefer AppleScript and/or Swift for most automation.
I made one to connect to VPN when I leave my place (disconnect from my home wifi), and disconnect from VPN when I’m back. The only thing I don’t like is that it generates a notification on the lock screen whenever it runs, and there’s no way to disable that.
I only have configured a task in Shortcuts that I find useful. I'm a freelance, and sometimes I have to use my personal car to do some work. So, I did a task that I voice activate on CarPlay in order to record the current mileage into a Notes note, storing the current date and the voice transcribed mileage.
I could not find another use for Shortcuts because there aren't enough integrated apps.
The most useful Shortcut I've written on macOS is a simple 'toggle dark mode'. It's very simple and works as a good 'first task' if you've never used the app before. I wrote up the process here: https://medium.com/@bobbyjack/how-to-toggle-macos-dark-mode-...
Overall, Shortcuts feels like a nice polished app, but it's definitely severely lacking compared to Automator.
I’ve been struggling to make a simple “door left open too long” alarm. The first problem I ran into was weird inconsistencies between personal shortcuts that run on your device vs home shortcuts that run on HomePod. For example, there is no Speak Text action on HomePod, so I can’t have the alarm say “front door open” unless it runs on my phone, which means it won’t work when I’m not home. Oh well, a generic alarm sound will have to do. Oh wait, it doesn’t have that, either. The alarm sound has to come from Apple Music. That means this alarm relies on the internet! Oh well. At least there are plenty of sound effects albums on there. Hey, why isn’t the alarm working today? Oh, that album was taken down, probably due to a copyright dispute. That’s annoying, but at least there are plenty more to choose from. WTF, it’s not working again, only a month later, same thing. Fine, more whack—a-mole…
Next problem: I had to set the alarm sound to play at high volume since the effect itself is relatively quiet. Woah! That volume is permanent and now after an alarm, everything plays loud. Ok, no problem. I’ll just have the shortcut get the current volume and save it to a variable at the beginning and then change the volume to that variable at the end. Oh, there’s no way to set the volume to the value of a variable? WTF? The HomePod has actions for resizing and rotating images, even though it doesn’t have a display, but it can’t do what I need it to as a speaker?! Alright, hardcoded 50% volume will have to do.
Final problem: My shortcut repeatedly waits a few seconds and then checks the state of a door sensor in a loop. It would be nice if I could have a condition to exit the loop early but keep running the rest of the shortcut. Oh, Apple made a whole scripting system for shortcuts but didn’t include a `break` keyword. Lovely.
I officially have a love/hate relationship with shortcuts, which leans towards hate most of the time.
Shortcuts is too complicated. Most folks have a hard time using it.
I recently learnt that you can use Shortcuts to enable power-saving mode on unplugging from the charger. It's amazing. Now I no longer regularly go around turning on power-save on all my family's devices to avoid them hogging all the chargers right before a trip.
Even though they are a bit limited I still find Shortcuts very useful. I have one that adds a global share option that triggers the download of any X video. I also have a few that run a Python script via a-Shell mini.
Shortcuts should have been in "Vibe coding" style. I find it frustrating to use because unlike with straight coding the UI is verbose and its abilities are cryptic.
Instead of this cumbersome UI they should have provided a UI where you just normal Swift and ability to generate that Swift from prompting.
This post uses the term “automation gap”, in quotes, in its title and then never uses it in the body. About to go Google what it means but that’s mildly annoying and/or bad writing.
Despite being a "power user" of macOS (and having had been for close to 25 years now), I only tried Shortcuts for the first time last week, to try to automate opening any of the live TV streaming apps (YouTube TV, Fubo etc) to a specified channel in one button click. Unfortunately none of the TV apps on the platform have bothered to expose such basic functionality, so I ended up cancelling my subscription to each one I tried.
If anyone knows of an app that gives access to live TV and actually cares about the basic functionality of the platform they run on, I'd love to hear about it and they can have my money.