You can go beyond want to creating simple shortcuts: you can create conversational Siri actions. Apps can expose different actions to Siri and the Shortcuts app.
#Apple shortcuts app series#
A shortcut executes a series of Actions to get to a result. This allows them to create powerful shortcuts, with your action serving as a functional organ in them.Ī Shortcut is made of Actions. And developers can now create actions that permit users to customize them. In iOS 13, the Shortcuts app is now better than ever. Developers could integrate Shortcuts into their apps, but they were limited and there was no way to parametrize them. This was in iOS 12, and as the initial release of Shortcuts, it was still very limited. This app was built on top of Workflow, and as an Apple app, it allowed it to do many things that Workflow just wasn’t allowed to do, such as toggling system settings, integrating it with other apps (!!), and it was also natively integrated into Siri. This was very exciting, but we didn’t hear anything from the app since. You could create and automate different tasks, such as controlling a server via SSH, downloading all the images from a website, and more… Much, much more.Īpple saw the power of the app and acquired it in March 2017. However, these iWork actions are a great stake in the ground for first-party apps - Apple has demonstrated their intent to make apps like this have feature parity when it comes to Shortcuts support, they've pushed quality-of-life updates for users wanting to take more advantage of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, and they're honing in on the particular use cases for each app and making them easier.All the way back to 2016, a group of very talented iOS developers released Workflow, a very popular app to let users create actions of different kinds within the system’s constraints. Plus, Numbers should be able to insert data in the background without opening the app - that experience is very antithetical to the Shortcuts experience and unfortunately means many people won't utilize it. In the next iteration of these, I'd love to see more ways to interact with my iWork files: getting data out, inserting data, and being able to extract details from the file's parameters would enable much more programmatic access to everything. Screenshot of iWork shortcuts in the Shortcuts app (Image credit: iMore) Overall, these set of Shortcuts actions for Pages, Keynote, and Numbers are welcome - each application is on a level playing field across iOS and Mac, they provide great access to files and the templates in the app, and Apple gave Keynote and Numbers extra attention for their app-specific features. Plus, your "logging" shortcuts work on mobile and desktop, so your workflow can be smooth anywhere.
#Apple shortcuts app manual#
When you run the shortcut, get the prompts, and input all your data, the action will then take you into the Numbers app and insert your values directly - this requirement to manually open the app is the one downside of the action and a weird limitation from Apple, as inserting values in the background would be much smoother.ĭespite the manual input, this action is extremely useful - you can use Shortcuts' scripting and Numbers to do all sorts of data entry that'd otherwise be very laborious to enter manually, especially from an iPhone or iPad. Using Shortcuts' other scripting actions, you can create/ask yourself to enter those values on the fly using a series of Ask For Input actions, with prompts like "What's the description?", and "What's the amount?", then add those results (and the current date) into the Values field (note: leave any columns blank if you don't want to add values). Screenshots of Personal Budget template in Numbers and shortcut to add to the spreadsheet.
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