Given other people's response, I'm clearly the odd one out here, but I found it buggy and infuriating to use. I wanted what I can't imagine is a unique shortcut, "Good Morning", which should:<p>- Set the volume to 50% on my home pod<p>- Start playing an ambient radio station in Apple Music<p>- Start a slow fade in on my bedroom lights<p>It's been a nightmare, and I finally gave up altogether. I got my shortcut configured and set up with Siri. It's pretty simple, being only 3 steps, so I don't see where there's that much room to go off the rails, but oh boy does it.<p>The HomePod responds, and says "okay, running your shortcut". It then sets the volume on my <i>phone</i> to 50% and starts playing music there instead. It then tries and probably 80% of the time fails to set the home scene to turn on the lights. When it fails, it says "Please continue on your iPhone", where Siri's output states that it doesn't understand, as if I misspoke something to it... but it's running a set list of commands, there's no room for me to misspeak when setting the HomeKit scene. And clearly the shortcut triggered since it's now playing music at half volume a foot from my head.<p>And there's no way that I can tell to have it specify an AirPlay speaker to play out of. I don't get why the home pod, which responded to the request in the first place, can't play the music. If I tell it to play the exact same playlist directly it does so just fine. Maybe I'm "too advanced", being a tech person myself, but this really feels like basic stuff, and it seems to have missed the mark by a wide margin.
Shortcuts is the most exciting release of iOS 12.<p>Every time I run into a recurring task on my phone, I can usually make a shortcut to do it for me. For example, when I get an email saying my build failed, I open it and click “view logs” but need to scroll to the bottom of a very long page to see why the build failed. Now I just run “Scroll to Bottom” [1] and then I’m looking at what previously took a solid 15-20 seconds of scrolling.<p>I can only imagine how many thousands of hours are lost per day on similar recurring tasks across all mobile users that could be saved with a shortcut. I’m really excited Apple is taking iOS in a direction where anyone can be a developer.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/e1daf0c6017e4db382272390f8910646" rel="nofollow">https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/e1daf0c6017e4db382272390f89...</a>
For those who also just started playing around. I just found out yesterday that you can write full blown python programs with packages and everything in <a href="http://omz-software.com/pythonista/" rel="nofollow">http://omz-software.com/pythonista/</a> and trigger it from Shortcuts. That’s pretty powerful, especially if combined with Slack webhooks and other external services.
Neat, so it's like scripting but for normal people. This is honestly a good idea for making phones more useful without extensive programming knowledge.
I just tried Shortcuts for the first time then opened the "Play Favorite Albums" to see how it works and now it feels like I'm dumb. It took me a long time to understand; start from a empty text (I didn't event know I need to fill texts here) , separate lines, set variables, and count. The visial representation was not obvious at the first look.<p>I doubt "normal" people would understand and create new shortcuts.
This should probably be titled 'iOS 12 Shortcuts User Guide' instead.<p>I'm a relatively new Macbook user, so I was looking forward to reading about all the keyboard shortcuts and touchpad gestures I'm missing out on.<p>I only buy Android phones, though, so :(
Shortcuts was the most exciting thing from the WWDC Keynote this year, but I still haven't really found a killer use for it yet. But I do have some simple ones, such as a Shortcut I use on an image that prompts me to rename it before triggering the "Save to Files" flow (as Save to Files doesn't let you rename the image before saving).<p>Federico Viticci over at MacStories.net did post a pretty cool one though, which adds iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max frames to screenshots you take. <a href="https://www.macstories.net/ios/adding-device-frames-to-iphone-xs-and-xs-max-screenshots-with-shortcuts/" rel="nofollow">https://www.macstories.net/ios/adding-device-frames-to-iphon...</a><p>I'd love to see a version that just adds the rounded corners and the notch, instead of the full frame, but I'm a bit too lazy to figure out how to adapt his shortcut to do that (the idea being to share a screenshot that represents what's visible on the screen, rather than trying to make it actually look like the phone).
I'd like to use this for making a shortcut to connecting to a specific Bluetooth device, but it seems that changing the iPhones settings is not part of actions that you can choose from. My stereo does not connect automatically, so I have to always go to Settings -> Bluetooth to connect them. Would be nice if I could just push a button / ask Siri to connect it.<p>From iOS 11 it is no longer possible to develop widgets that does this: <a href="https://forums.imore.com/ask-question/376402-no-widget-connect-specific-bluetooth-device.html" rel="nofollow">https://forums.imore.com/ask-question/376402-no-widget-conne...</a>
Does anyone have example SSH, Javascript or Python shortcuts? e.g. would be nice to have a shortcut for Textastic to push a file over SSH then run Jekyll build on the server.<p>This shortcut will put a video into PiP mode for iPad multitasking: <a href="https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/dda08a01a17d41feb3e887a4a12a7621" rel="nofollow">https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/dda08a01a17d41feb3e887a4a12...</a>
I have been able to piece together some simple shortcuts that I use frequently.<p>My biggest complaint so far is that they do not run in the background.
I downloaded “Calculate tip” from their library and it returns total garbage. Most of the time it adds some random percentage to the total I enter instead of calculating 20% of it. Maybe it has to do with my regional settings, but I already stopped bothering.
I’ve a great shortcut to download YouTube videos.<p><a href="https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/c2997c4bcd0a4a01a470ac7f6c1476ec" rel="nofollow">https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/c2997c4bcd0a4a01a470ac7f6c1...</a>
I use shortcuts to do time tracking at work, which works great.<p>I do hope though that they bring back Shortcuts for the Apple Watch - with the old Workflow app I could do everything on the watch, now I have to grab my phone every time.
Why on Earth did they tie it to Siri? Why can't I drop a shortcut on my home screen and tap it? Why does Siri have to be enabled? This feels like just a ploy to get Siri usage up.
It's really innovative how they were able to add all these features but still prevent customers from creating an action like "Play I am the Walrus on [competing music service]."
Useless app. They rebranded it recently. It is not deeply rooted with iOs. I gave up a while ago.<p>Side not: This title is helluva misleading. I thought it is a list of shortcuts for OSX.
One of the nice and quite innovative features of IOS 12 update, however I can’t feel good about this update because it has completely ruined Apple News.
Apple News used to be a very nice slick news browser - I used it a lot, until some retard UI designer, decided to steal 1/3 of my precious screen estate - why?? for a horrible ugly useless navigation bar, with no way of collapsing it in landscape mode - I NEVER use Portrait mode on iPad.