So exciting. When Shortcuts was first announced I was thrilled since I could think of hundreds of flows that would be amazing for my daily life to simplify things. But quickly realized there were many limitations such as it couldn't be run automatically at a set time, and nearly every flow I wanted it was missing a few actions to make them fully possible. As such I used a couple but overall didn't use it at all.<p>With this update, Personal Automations for me at least opens up many possibilities by removing so many limitations. Such as now when connecting to CarPlay you can automatically trigger workflows like opening Waze in background for alerts, getting directions to your next even that has a location, asking if I have kids in the car, if I say yes, play kid friendly podcast station, if not play my other station, and so on.<p>There are still so much unmet potential. Core apps like Apple Podcast have so few actions compared to third party options, which is very odd. And then other third party apps that would so love to have certain actions offer none at all.<p>So hopefully with the Personal Automation people will use it more, and with that use, Apple will offer more actions for their core apps causing more people to use it and then eventually more third party apps to offer actions, and then hopefully Apple offering a dedicated app store section for them for true mass appeal. Of and of course having it available on macOS (replacing Automator) would be wonderful since writing more complicated scripts is much easier on the Mac.
I've been looking forward to this feature, but I must say I'm pretty disappointed that most of the personal automations still require a manual approval before they will execute. For example, I can schedule a particular shortcut to always run at a specific time. When that time comes, however, my phone will display a notification which I must physically tap to execute the automation. If I miss the notification, nothing will happen. The same is true for "When I Arrive..." and "When I Leave..." triggers. Which means, often, I'll get a notification in the car, while I'm driving, which I must tap to execute the automation.<p>I can see why Apple would want to step cautiously with consumer-based automation, but I was really expecting that all of these new automation triggers would fire without needing any manual approval, or at least that there would be a way to configure them to do so.<p>I have read that you can use a HomePod, Apple TV, or always-plugged-in iPad as a home hub, and my understanding is the triggers offered here will run in a fully automated fashion. I hope to explore that at some point.<p>Still, I'm very happy to see the progress in Shortcuts, and I expect it will only get better.
I'd been trying to figure out why they required a user interaction for some of these. 5 out of 6 of these can be explained by debouncing.<p>• "Wi-Fi" and "Bluetooth" connection triggers are extremely susceptible to bouncing on and off with variable radio conditions<p>• "Arrive", "Leave", and "Before I Leave" are all susceptible to bouncing in and out; they combine a fuzzy location of variable precision with a point and radius<p>By requiring a user interaction, it makes sure that bouncing never causes the shortcut to trigger more often than desired. Apple certainly tries to debounce the event automatically, but that comes with other side effects: the trigger can be delayed significantly and unpredictably.<p>(As for why "Time of Day" requires a user interaction, I have yet to hear a satisfying explanation. I want my Cron!)
The iPhone Xs was my first ever iPhone. Before that I had been an Android power user for 8 years. I installed my own custom ROMs, xposed framework, rooted, etc.<p>Although I'm firmly in the iPhone camp for privacy and other reasons now, I miss the automation provided by Tasker and the Android OS.<p>I used to have many useful location + time based profiles. For instance, I had a profile for if I was at home and it was between 9pm and 7am, Do not disturb mode would be turned on (which still allowed 'emergency' calls) and i would switch to a dimmer screen brightness profile. If I was at work, my media volume would be put to 0, phone would change to vibrate, etc.<p>The point is, many repetitive tasks were easily automated on Android and it required ZERO interaction from my end. No shortcut button press or anything. Smart phones should make our lives easier.
Shortcuts is an amazing, truly underrated app. Almost anything your phone can do, Shortcuts can do. Extremely powerful.<p>For fun, I created the Martin Luther Insulter shortcut[0]. Say, "Hey Siri, have Martin Luther insult me", and it fetches the list of insulting quotes from Martin Luther's books via GitHub, then reads the insult back to you in a dark, slow raspy voice.<p>[0]: <a href="https://shareshortcuts.com/shortcuts/725-martin-luther-insult.html" rel="nofollow">https://shareshortcuts.com/shortcuts/725-martin-luther-insul...</a>
Kind of neat that the way these are shared is a PNG file with appended data. The PNG file is the icon for the Shortcut :)<p>Example: <a href="https://cvws.icloud-content.com/B/AZc9tIA45EozUwn3Zs0zZEJSUYDF/${f}?o=AkPv3CP_VY0w1Zu2JecEaam7o2Gs-5y0Kdb1rIVF5X_WEKbBWbfgD0n7seUdfmAr3g&v=1&x=3&a=CAog2q0-Z0L-xGftYglvATFw5hzCRPeoDRUu6MrKDqYIOzwSFxCv2pP21i0Yr7fv99YtIgEAUgRSUYDF&e=1569525062&k=_&fl=&r=d2d8928c-0fe9-4f9e-b92e-ea9e1a57ceba-1&ckc=com.apple.shortcuts&ckz=_defaultZone&p=33&s=g0pGb50ZInQRJr5qHah0tp_LZeQ" rel="nofollow">https://cvws.icloud-content.com/B/AZc9tIA45EozUwn3Zs0zZEJSUY...</a>
Has anyone found any of these useful?<p>I'm racking my brain for something that would benefit me, but nothing comes to mind... but I feel like I'm just lacking creativity here.
I don't know if shortcuts included ssh key support before this update, but I just noticed that it does now! ed25519 appears to be the default key type.<p>Now I can run Terraform automatically when I get home to provision some tea! /s
I started small. I have an automation that launches at 8 pm that does three things:<p>* Sets dark mode
* Sets reduce white point
* Runs a shortcut I made asking me a few questions<p>The questions are:<p>1. Will you get ready for bed? Sleep affects your next day. (I have to click yes/no)
2. Will you go brush your teeth after this? (The first step. I have to click yes/no)
3. It gives me a list of things I may want to do to wind down: a walk (based on steps), tidying, reading a book
4. Then it prompts me to look at a small diary/todo I made in the morning and comment on it. And then look at my screen time stats.<p>I find this helpful. And since I always want to reduce white point, this means I will automatically want to click the notification to run it.<p>I hopefully eventually they will have AND and OR conditions in automations. Eg if between 8:30 and 11:30 AND I open instagram, open my todo list.
> The following automations cannot be run automatically:
> Arrive
> Before I Leave
> Bluetooth
> Leave
> Time of Day
> Wi-Fi<p>Well that's disappointing. It isn't automation if you have to have a human involved.
I tried to have it launch spotify when Airpods were connected, but found only Apple music supported. I’ve always wondered, is the lack of Spotify support in Siri, Shortcuts, due to Spotify or due to Apple blocking them?
So far my cleverest idea:<p><pre><code> when beorg is opened, pull this repo in working copy.
</code></pre>
maybe also:<p><pre><code> when carplay connects, stop playing music.</code></pre>
I was <i>hoping</i> Personal Automation would solve a long-time goal of mine: waking up to a carefully curated playlist rather than a ringtone. But it looks like this still won't work, because it requires human interaction to kick off the 'automation'. That's a shame, since this is something that every radio alarm handles.
I tried to build an automation that would send a message to my wife with my expected time of arrival as soon as I leave work.<p>Unfortunately, the transit skill can only tell you the travel duration, but doesn’t take into account departure times.<p>It will tell me that I need 20 minutes by train, but it’s impossible to tell at what time the train will depart.
Absolutely love this. Realized it is scriptable. Managed to create notes from templates in Bear Writer and in iA Writer, also started logging my caffeine consumption (a predefined shortcut), log my expenses by appending to a csv file and many more things. This is like Automator for iOS. Opens totally new perspectives and use-cases for iOS devices.<p>I am having so many ideas for scripting my iPhone. Totally sold.<p>Been using automation tools on my Mac for quite some time. Tools like Keyboard Maestro, Alfred App, shell scripts, Python scripts, snippet expander like aText or Dash App. Now we get a tiny bit of this on iOS. Right direction.
Another issue. When setting time of day you can choose says, but unlike Apple Calendar or any third party calendar app like Fantastical, you can't set custom. Such as Repeat Monday and Wednesday every 2 weeks, etc. Everytime I get excited to use Shortcuts I see seemingly small but major issues that prevent from creating the desired workflow, so end up giving up. Since when it was owned by Workflow had hopes little things like that would get resolved quickly, with Apple, assume if its not part of the first release most likely won't be fixed until next year as a 'feature'.
Does this finally end the nonsense that is Dropbox being unable to stay open and finish uploading photos? I.e. could I set it to open the Dropbox app every ten minutes during the night?
I’m missing the “Disconnect” action for Wifi and Bluetooth. I’d like to be able to increase text size automatically when getting in the car (based on bluetooth connecting to the car) for improved visibility, but to undo it when I exit the car. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be possible (yet).
Cool! I'm on 12.4.1 and for a while now enjoying my simple accessibility shortcut > color filters to enable triple-click side button to toggle greyscale vs normal color mode. Less battery usage, helps keep the device less unnecessarily stimulating, doesn't interfere w/ sleep, and sometimes good for random conversation ("how'd you do that?"). :)
Still no way to turn off my coffee machine half an hour after I turn it on. Seems like such an obvious and useful thing to do, and yet nobody has this feature. This, to me, suggests that nobody is seriously using home automation.
I love that I have a shortcut set up to play my podcast and navigate to home when I leave my office... and that it still prompts me to start it, so I can <i>not</i> do that when I'm actually driving to lunch with coworkers.
Great release; looking forward to the future of this feature.<p>My one complaint with shortcuts is that the apps have to expose an interface of "actions" which so far is very limited for tons of apps. I want to create a shortcut to the "user & passwords" store under "Settings", but I can't because it isn't exposed as an action.