The Importance of Choosing the Right Device for Your Workflow

As someone who has explored various devices and workflows, I can attest that having the right tool for the job is crucial for productivity and efficiency. For me, the dongles are an essential part of my workflow, allowing me to easily transfer files between devices. I have a just like an SD card importer attached to my Mac Mini, which makes it easy to work with my laptop. However, when working straight from my laptop, I prefer to use the built-in features and not rely on dongles.

Using Both Devices for Maximum Productivity

I've been particularly fond of using both my laptop and iPad, as they offer a great combination of flexibility and portability. My Mac is perfect for tasks that require more power and processing capabilities, while my iPad excels at tasks that require mobility and ease of use. For instance, I can work on my catalog with the web design features of my laptop, but then switch to my iPad for tasks like editing images or creating content. This flexibility has allowed me to maximize my productivity and get more done in less time.

The Power of Shortcuts

One of the most powerful tools that has revolutionized my workflow is shortcuts. With shortcuts, I can perform complex tasks with ease and speed, thanks to the customizable nature of these actions. When it comes to using shortcuts, Matthew Scher's analogy about choosing the device that does the job for you and then moving up as needed resonates deeply with me. This philosophy has helped me streamline my workflow and reduce distractions.

The Learning Curve of Shortcuts

While shortcuts can be incredibly powerful, I acknowledge that there is a learning curve involved in mastering them. The sheer number of variables and options can be overwhelming at times, making it difficult for some people to get started. However, with the right resources and support, anyone can learn to use shortcuts effectively.

Managing Multiple Shortcuts

I personally have 45 shortcuts, which I've created for every single preference pain in the system preferences. This number may seem daunting, but trust me, it's worth it! With these shortcuts, I can perform tasks with ease and speed, saving me time and effort in the long run. However, managing multiple shortcuts can be a challenge, especially when it comes to organization and navigation.

The Power of Stream Deck

One device that has changed my workflow forever is the Stream Deck. This tool offers unparalleled customization and flexibility, allowing me to create complex workflows with ease. With 15 profiles on my Stream Deck, I can access a wide range of actions with just one tap. The power of this tool lies in its ability to simplify complex tasks into manageable, one-tap actions.

Learning from Matthew's Resources

If you're new to shortcuts or struggling to get started, I highly recommend checking out Matthew's resources on his website. He offers an incredible newsletter that includes downloadables and tutorials, as well as a wealth of knowledge through his YouTube channel and Twitter feed. As a member of the club, you'll gain access to exclusive content, including live streams where we can build shortcuts together.

Joining the Club

If you're interested in joining the club and learning more about shortcuts and workflows, I encourage you to check out Matthew's website and social media channels. With regular live streams and an archive of past sessions, we can work together to create custom shortcuts that meet your specific needs. Don't be intimidated – with patience and practice, anyone can master the art of shortcuts and workflow optimization.

Conclusion

In conclusion, choosing the right device for your workflow is crucial for maximizing productivity and efficiency. By embracing flexibility and simplicity, you can streamline your workflow and achieve more in less time. Whether it's using dongles, shortcuts, or stream decks, the key to success lies in finding the tools that work best for you and mastering them with ease.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to a special episode of the Apple Insider podcast this is your host Steven robbles and today is joining me very special guest for his second appearance on the Apple Insider podcast Matthew cassanelli shortcuts extraordinaire expert Maven I'm not sure what other adjectives to put behind there but Matthew thanks so much for joining me again hello hello thank you for having me I appreciate being back on it is an exciting time with shortcuts for Ma out so it is an exciting time also tumultuous but we'll get to that in a second oh yeah and just want to say right off the bat everyone if you are just getting into shortcuts or want to learn more about shortcuts or just get cool ideas and just download them and use them Matthew cassanelli doccom that link will be in the show notes I have become a member since he was last on the show and you got some cool stuff on there so kudos to you doing great work awesome thank you very much absolutely well my my question is we have Mac OS montere it is now publicly available it's came out I installed it on day one of course because I was most excited for shortcuts on the Mac I didn't run any beta over the summer saw guys like you and Federico vtii saying pretty buggy you know maybe not worth it just yet so I waited and so I have it and I've been playing around with it my my question to you Matthew is why is it broken why is all of this broken what is happening with shortcuts on the Mac I mean maybe as we've seen from the iOS release as well just because it's out doesn't mean it's not Bren um it might still be in beta technically I don't know yeah I mean I've been thinking about the line the future of automation on the Mac and how maybe that implies it's not the present of automation on the Mac because of some of those problems that's that's Savage Matthew very good there's a more philosophical part about how like even if you are already automating on the Mac you don't have to replace your current stuff and you can just integrate with shortcuts too so that's but I think the bugginess comes from it is a holy Swift UI app and so I think some of that is just kind of maybe not even the shortcuts team itself but I think there's also some just philosophical differences about the platforms that I think you're probably running into and it's just kind of not clear from Apple whether that's a bug or is just kind of how it is or something like that my experience was I mean I have I'm looking right now 161 shortcuts which I know is no comparison to what you know you and vtii have and you have hundreds and hundreds I'm I'm a mad man so but I have some that I use very often for work especially this podcast ones that format links and take stuff from my clipboard and you know get article titles and I use them on my iPad effectively every week I love them and so I was very excited to just open shortcuts on my Mac run the same shortcut with the same formatting tools so I didn't have to break out my iPad I could just do it all on my Mac and I found that most of them just don't work out of the box meaning meaning they worked on my iPad but they don't work on the Mac has that been your experience in this whole transition I think the main thing that you're running into is the Safari Integrations because on iOS they built in uh originally workflow had a tool called diffbot which I just now realized maybe you could actually if you really wanted to send your data to this API and get the same information back but when when it was workflow it basically was a tool to identify whether a link was an article or not and then if so you can get certain parts of information out of it Andor Safari web pages as like a item in short cuts have special capabilities where you can get like the selected text or something like that that's all very iOS technology and so like the they built what they called the Safari reader integration when they switched away from diffbot in in shortcuts and so I just don't think that's on the Mac yet right I think um I I think that's what's kind of weird and we sort of expected to be able to get this stuff right away but there wasn't really communication or even some some actions actually just say this doesn't work on the Mac and I believe the Safari ones just fail so like it should just say that it doesn't actually have the error so it's kind of confusing right and that's you know this is a special episode of the podcast we we can nerd out get a little deep and so I want to get some specifics but before we even get to that I have shortcuts open on my Mac right now and I I just got one of these Sophie's Choice voice schroen your shortcuts problems where I opened a shortcut and it says this shortcut was modified on October 30th on this device then it was modified again on November 7th also on this device I think those errors are wrong I I this is live live feedback yeah live feedback I think one of those titles is incorrect and it so it should say that it was modified on a different device but like there's some sort of even simple overwrite error yes I it is it's fascinating having gotten into shortcuts because I understand some just like simple programming problems that would happen like if I was doing a shortcut where I used get item from list and had the wrong index that's all that this problem could be but when you're using it you're like I don't understand this it's trying to differentiate between the same device which doesn't even make sense so do you default to just like the newest version like whatever the latest date was yeah definitely I mean that's also why I try to back up my shortcuts as well because I I mean I'm trying to build these four people and as like my like this podcast is your thing shortcuts are my thing and so I have to keep them backed up yeah and so now that you are making shortcuts for both or all platforms iPhone iPad and now the Mac how has your process changed in like how you start building a shortcut has it changed at all or is it remain unchanged or how do you make it do you make some specifically just for iOS or do you try to be crossplatform from the beginning on every new thing you make I think I leaned towards making it just work regardless because I didn't want to have second shortcuts for the same task on a different platform especially if it was just trying to accomplish the same thing and one of the biggest things for me with the iPad and the iPhone and then when they brought back the Apple watch which was also there for morlow and then they took a couple years and fixed it up you kind of build once and deploy everywhere sort of thing obvious I mean you do have to make some considerations and I probably make the least for the Apple watch actually just because oh yeah I have hundreds and I'm not going to be running hundreds for my watch so I don't really need to think about it but um I definitely like a shortcut that just works everywhere because if you just run it and it fails or especially because I'm giving them to other people if you run it and it fails you just don't understand why and you're never going to be able to fix it right so I wanted to guarantee at least that anybody who picked up a shortcut could run it Apple also thought about this and so in shortcuts in iOS 15 or I guess shortcuts for back wow I'm so used to saying that um right there's a capability in the if action which allows you to create conditional flows for different things that you want to happen and in there you can get the device details and extract this device type is Mac or iPad or iPhone and so you you used to always be able to use the get device details action but now they added it just built into the if action so you don't have to do it 800 time for like I would have had that action in every single one of my shortcuts now it's just if and so it's like if it's on the Mac do this if it's not on the Mac do something else got and I've even had one or two clever uses where this was always this was very specific but I used the device name and if I if it had the word book in it for MacBook Pro or MacBook Air it um for the this is just like dumb but the energy saver preference pain in the system preferences on Mac is called battery if you're on a mobile device or a mobile laptop versus a Mac Mini and so it had to have like an if conditional based on the name not just the device type wow yeah so you can get pretty specific um but I think it it creates for just more clever opportunities and I do really like just being able to do the exact same thing that you would on your computer on your phone really quick when you need to because otherwise if you don't account for that you're just kind of like left in the dust absolutely now one of the things I have shortcuts for sharing my different podcasts and we'll put some shortcuts in the show notes not so you listeners can maybe download them and try them out but I have this one shortcut where I I tweet about the Apple Insider podcast every week and I want to get the link from Apple podcast from overcast and then Spotify or pocketcast whatever I feel like is winning at the time and I want to get the links to the specific episode from each of those services and shortcuts makes it really easy where I can actually get the Apple podcast URL without ever looking at anything it can just load the last item from a particular podcast in my Apple podcast app get the URL and done and then I can use it in a text block later nice but for overcast you actually have to open what I have is a open the Safari view to Apple Insider in overcast like the show and then I tap and hold and copy to get the URL for that specific episode I hit done and then the shortcut keeps going and and it'll do whatever that's on iPhone or iPad but on Mac when you have that open a safari website you have just the little red x uh as in this popup window and when you click it it just stops the shortcut oh so what other like weird quirks have you been running into like that is it mainly just the safari stuff I guess that's a majority of what I use it for I think some of those native iOS Technologies they brought over but can just be kind of odd sometimes like that is even there's a show web page action instead of a u open URL which that's one do yeah that's exactly um I guess it's a safari view controller where it just pops up on top of the app right but on the Mac it's just like this tiny little window because it doesn't really make sense in the way that it's built on iOS so I think I think the most unfortunate part is just that all of us power users are the most likely to run into those edge cases while also shortcuts is like let's deploy a brand new technology on a brand new stack across the entire platform and and people the people who are going to use it are the most likely to just dig in and immediately run into all those problems um and build it on a brand new language yeah exactly so I do think even though I've I've gone through like a roller coaster of emotions with the feedback app I do think you have to sub submit the feedback especially with shortcuts because you're the one who just ran into that for the first time ever probably or something like that like the shortcuts team doesn't have 2,000 shortcuts and processing them all the I mean like I always am like ah I want I like wish you could just have my my device and just test them on that um yes but there's definitely so many bugs but I think it's you can actually get them fixed and I I'm like I have a little shortcuts User Group Discord and I've been posting all of the feedback in there and I think that helps I don't know like it just can concentrating it with other people and understanding that these are common problems can help identify like I also can identify usually what the technical problem is versus right it just doesn't work is kind of what most people run into I do think by the way while you were saying that I have run into the exact same overcast thing and it turns out that Marco has a stack or a scheme for using the podcast ID from iTunes in the URL I guess it wouldn't be the episode it would just be the show yeah they he uses the show ID I like to get the links directly to the episode uh kind of thing dang it I was hoping I could solve your problem but I just made a shortcut to do that cuz you can look at the current podcast search it in in the podcast app for the ID and then apply that overcast the like default URL and then open it right so what I have resolved to do is I have a folder in my shortcuts Mac application and the folder is called Mac OS I'm basically I'm building shortcuts just to run on my Mac you know just just to make sure they they work and I can just leave those as they are so my next question for you is one of the exciting parts of of shortcuts on the Mac is you can trigger them in many different ways and because it's the mac and you can have like systemwide you can trigger shortcuts either with a keyboard shortcut or the menu bar you can put it in the services menu in like different share buttons so what have you found to be your preferable way to trigger shortcuts on the Mac I mean all of those are definitely great it I have different uses for the different sections um I think the menu bar is just really good for obviously like the most quick access to especially I've been doing stuff with apple script to press keyboard shortcuts for me to like log out of my computer and so I have um those up in the menu bar but I also like that when you hover over an item in the menu bar there's a little open Arrow which to me means this is the quickest way to open a shortcut like a predefined list of shortcuts so essentially if I'm working on something I'll throw them in the menu bar so that I can just get back to it immediately um oh that's pretty slick I also do like the the doc icon if you rightclick on it there is an open recent menu and then there's also a run shortcut menu which shows you every single one of your folders and any shortcuts that aren't in a folder wow so I have hundreds of folders I'll say um hundreds of folders yeah I'm making my own Gallery basic I I worked on the workflow gallery and so what I do now is basically Gallery collection type stuff and so I just think of like anything that I can and make shortcuts for it um that's amazing it's like or sound recognition I can make 10 different shortcuts or something um amazing there's a whole philosophical question about whether you should have shortcuts that just do one thing or like a menu but even that's a good example of the menus are kind of bad on the Mac and so I don't want to click I don't want to use a keyboard shortcut go click in the menu it's just like too slow right now I think there are just some like rough edges that they could like I can't even tell if it's just Swift UI or The Oddities of like technically the shortcuts team became Mac developers and I mean they obviously have always developed shortcuts and workflow from a Mac so like that's the part is I just don't understand and haven't honestly talked to them in a long time of like did you guys just not think about that or is that how swift UI works it's kind of odd sometimes and it is just like again there's 300 actions and shortcuts I think now there's up to like 70 ways to run one single shortcut if you count every single automation oh my of the shortcuts for Mac features and stuff like that um wow so so my so my thing is I was trying to use keyboard shortcuts to trigger just some simple text formatting shortcuts like remove the question mark UTM you know reference tag at the end of a link but I didn't see any visual cue that my shortcut was running I think the menu bar flashes is the main thing does it because I use so also use the stream deck right because shortcuts can be triggered by any sort of Apple script and there's an apple script plugin for the stream deck so I have physical buttons for every single one of my shortcuts which is also very wild I like give I'm giving away those profiles to my members because it's like I I spent hours and hours just clicking and dragging icons and this oh my good I used I like generated all of the Apple scripts too that's amazing every time I press the stream deck icon I can see the menu bar flash so that's kind of just the the subtle thing but it is weird I mean technically you could put like a show result action in to let you know that you finished but it kind of just depends so I yeah I just tested it and it's a very quick flashing of the shortcut I guess if you have a longer shortcut it'll be visible like it'll change color for a longer time yeah but for a simple texting it was just like flashed real quick I agree that that's weird but also at a certain Point that's really awesome because it's just fast like I realized the other day I was um trying to log the links for my newsletter into air table because after I go through them I want to just make sure I keep them over time and on iOS I would have to like right click on each link go to the share sheet and run the shortcut and then it would run and then it I'd be done but on the Mac I just right clicked and did like log link and then it was done yeah that's pretty and then I did it again and it was done and I just went like click click click click click click click and I was like oh my God because that was just so fast and I just made 18 API calls to air table and I opened the app and they're all sitting there and the same thing it like scraped the titles out of it and everything so I was like oh that was awesome I was like shortcuts is cool like yeah cuz I've I've been a longtime text expander user where you know I have a lot of little shortcuts for semicolon these couple letters and it makes either it's a sponsor HTML paragraph for a post or even just my email address I have like semicolon em and it just puts my email address you know expands into that ni that's so I talking to Wes hilard at Apple Insider who has been iPad only really as his main work machine and he just got one of the new Macbook Pros and so he was trying to see like what Mac apps are really worth it and I said oh text expander and then we got into a conversation of can shortcuts almost replace what something like text expander does like with formatting of text and I feel like it's it's close to it the one thing that shortcuts can do correct me if I'm wrong is if you do have like a text formatting type shortcut it can't just place the text yeah for you you always have to end the shortcut with a copy to clipboard and then you manually command V it in a form or on a page is that true yes although now that I think about it you could use the Run Apple script action to simulate the keyboard shortcut for paste and it past it for you but I do agree that Tex expander I think just Tex expander is probably more purpose-built for what that is yeah and you can do inline prompts in Texas expander I think one of the funny things for me just as an aside is that I used the Mac before I used the iPad and shortcuts to this degree so I'm coming back to now to like Tex expander and Alfred stuff that I always used before and now I can just like figure out which one works best too so I do think I like Tex expander for even just the workflow of creating text yeah the keyboard shortcut to replace it and then managing that versus hundreds of shortcuts for the same kind of thing I think is probably right like more purpose built and there a little sound effect that it plays it like I that's exactly what I thought of when you said it it doesn't do anything it's Tech expander has the little or something that little that little pop sound yeah it's a very reassuring like it worked and the text is there this is why every single time the answer is just make another shortcut that plays a sound at the end of one of your shortcuts no Matthew no we but I've actually wanted that for NFC tags and it kind of does make sense for some shortcuts to confirm that it's done all right I'm I'm gonna do it right now so can you now sound file oh my goodness so I'm looking on the Mac you can add a play sound like step action and then I guess you can use whatever do you like yeah I mean now that especially on the Mac compared to the the iPad and iPhone where people just don't think of files in the same way you just have a sound file anywhere on your system there's an action now uh one of the things shortcuts for Mac got was or actually both platforms got better file support for the entire system and so there is an action just called file and if you go into like your audio file or your audio folder and pick an audio sound I don't know it's so weird to talk about audio files sometimes um but if you pick a sound and then put it in there and then play the sound can just be like a little ding every single time okay well I mean that's not a whole new shortcut you could just add this the action you know to make a sound that's pretty slick yeah that's true I guess you could just use the built-in ones as well all right point for Wes I guess because you can kind of mimic it but but I still I mean I have a whole text expander library that I still use um for like yeah rep doing the a good one is like uh I use semicolon and then command and it will put the icon for the command key because now I'm referencing lots of keyboard shortcuts and so I actually I've been using that a lot very nice one of the things I still have to get used to is using shortcuts on iPad or iPhone you know you tap the little three dots to edit it or you just tap the shortcut anywhere else to run it and on Mac you either have to press the play button I guess it's I mean if you're looking at the shortcuts in the shortcut app you have to press the play button and because if you just click in the color nothing happens it just stares at you and you double click to open and edit I think that's again it's I think they did try to meet Mac users where they are more than account for people who are using their iPad because that's a good point I think even just because of the fat finger syndrome of like clicking on a shortcut icon with the mouse is so much more prec I don't know it's even because it's on a screen it does feel like you have to scroll around across the shortcut a lot to I don't know it's just kind of an odd experience if you did just click shortcuts with your mouse once and they ran it would be like oh God I'm running shortcuts constantly so I bet that was like a thing that they learned from experience um but the expectations are just going to be slightly different another one that related to this farar thing that we were talking about before is that the share sheet on the Mac is really has always historically not been a thing or deprioritized and on iOS was like the thing for sharing in between apps and so you can't even run a shortcut from the share sheet which is very weird I honestly think yeah that doesn't make sense to me I was I was looking for my shortcuts in the share sheet but it's the services menu not the share sheet that they go to yeah I think the thing actually that um Chris loly was mentioning to me that I hadn't thought about it slightly does depend on the situation but if you use the get what's on screen action you can get the frontmost browser window or something like that and then that's a whole new action that was added just in iOS 15 and Mac OS um it's a on iOS it's also one of the sharing options is getting the onscreen content because that was always the thing is you couldn't get the current U URL from Safari or or a like a deep link from the notes app or something like that so right they're kind of like a that can actually be a solution besides running it from the share sheet for like the menu bar for example right I need to play around with that more though because I just figured that just to be clear too is the it's called receive what's on screen is feature like the share sheet for iPhone and iPad but there is an action called get what's on screen that does work on the Mac as well so I just like didn't realize that because it I I had kind of associated those features together right well tell me I mean let's go to the positive of shortcuts on Mac have you like what are some of your favorite shortcuts or most used most useful shortcuts that you have been using on the Mac so I think one of the interesting things is is that there is so much from the iPhone and iPad that I can bring across like anything that I was doing with calendars and things like that becomes a lot more functional on the Mac because that for most people this is where you actually do that work and so I think a lot of times in the past I had like you said all of those text formatting things I have all these shortcuts and have for years that does this but when you're just picking up your iPhone like a lot of people kind of just don't care or it's just not as interesting versus specialized situations like that so I definitely do a lot of text manipul or like photos is a really good if you're working with images you can batch process like 100 photos and rename them sequentially or something like that shortcuts in General on iPhone and iPad and Mac are good for sort of mental bookmarks like obviously in the name a shortcut to something but files websites parts of apps like deep links into apps I use some that can I basically have a menu of slap uh slack channels that you can dive into I know the URL scheme for slack that's actually a thing is the URL schemes for Mac apps are very alive and well because that's also how they use just like get the window to open to a specific page and so if you figure that out for any part of the platform it can usually work of just like I have Discord deep links as well that I can generate that's pretty sweet yeah that stuff is awesome They just added a bunch of new PDF manipulation features which are um really powerful and even something you've always been able to to do with shortcuts is because it has the scripting tools you can take text and split it apart and then yes basically turn it into comma separated values and like generate a whole spreadsheet of data and then paste it on top of your spreadsheet and it'll just fill into the cells and stuff like that so there's just really powerful it's just a base level of automation for all of these things that you might be doing for your job like I mean another one is creating folder structures like it can create o common one for video makers is like you have the project and then you have like audio video and then within video you have a roll b roll and stuff like that and so it could just create that immediately for you which is really nice I'm making notes of shortcuts I'm going to try and make after we cool yeah I mean totally like if you have a list too I can probably send you ones that I've already made for some of this stuff um that's amazing it's it's just so powerful and I think this is where a lot of the stuff that for most people I think just the association with the phone is your personal life and then your work computer is your laptop or something like that I'm going to leave the whole iPad thing aside because sure in many ways for me it's kind of nice now that I don't have to justify an iPad I can Al it's like you can just use it anywhere and the iPad's also really great because it has shortcuts on it right right so I do have like tons of shortcuts that are for personal life but then that's a lot that also is great for work right yeah even just opening the right apps and positioning them for you in the way that you like is really powerful like one click set up for or I do like live streams or something like that and the windows need to be in a very specific spot or just like how you like to do your Zoom calls and have your notes on one side or something like that you can rearrange all the windows as much as you want but I'm not going to lie one of the things I am enjoying the most is using Apple script because it's just in the same way that shortcuts always enabled me to do more with the apps and built-in actions with apple script I can just go like on top of that and it's Al just really nice because I just Google it and a lot of people have shared Apple scripts from the last 20 years right I saw one on Twitter that was like extract the presenter notes from a keynote what and I was like oh my God like some of that stuff is like wow this is if they build that power of Apple script into shortcuts over the next three years that's where it's just going to be messed up how good shortcuts is and and even then right now you can tap into that and just kind of play around like I do just I love triggering the keyboard shortcuts like I saying using an apple script so I can tell my system to press command k or something like that and open a switcher depending on the app or um yeah just like logging out it is amazing how much value there is in keyboard shortcuts that now I can just turn into a shortcut that I can tap once and it'll just do the thing you can even like do terminal commands um through Apple script it can run a shell script and so one of the stupid things that I did was do you remember the magic Genie minimiz for if you held option it would slowly close all your windows that's been gone for a couple of years but there's a terminal command that you can uh like kill the system override and reactivate it and so I have a shortcut that you can run and deactivate the thing later if you don't want it but just to add in that dumb feature that like so when you hold option and minimize it it'll just go extremely slow like well it's so helpful because you know you can have a lot of keyboard shortcuts memorized but when you have text expander and shortcuts exactly and any other number of utility applications it's hard to remember so many keyboard shortcuts and so something like a stream deck where you can also program it to do keyboard shortcuts by itself or like a shortcuts menu to run just different commands so you just don't have to remember it all I do like that visual element of the shortcuts ecosystem totally like shortcuts I think that's what is fascinating about getting into it and looking at all of these existing Mac automation tools is so many times they did just need a front end to run it right and so that's what shortcuts can be is the menu bar and a dock icon as a as just the way as a shortcut to run your Mac automations versus eventually shortcuts itself will be able to do all of those things as well right but at least until then it does just give you that access which is really nice um I forgot to mention too you can add shortcuts to the doc right through the file menu which isn't as obvious and then there's even a bonus feature beyond that is if you once it's in the doc if you rightclick on it and then do option show and finder it'll show you a folder of all of your shortcuts as dot applications because that's all it really is in the doc is like you click it's like a application wrapper then runs the shortcut using assume Apple script or something like that right but it basically means that that is a application file for your shortcut so your shortcut is now officially an app and you can put it anywhere in your file system and run the shortcut from your file system as well so like in the folder of your taxes in your taxes folder you can have a shortcut that opens like the slack channel to your tax guy and stuff like that so wow it's wild like that stuff yeah and and just the keyboard shortcuts too like I do think keyboard shortcuts I just have so many there's no way I'm ever going to be able to realistically use most of those um via the keyboard but right it's still wild and you can trigger them from launch bar or Alfred or uh better touch tool I don't I guess Hazel could be involved as like the listening to your file system thing and then I'm curious if it could run a shortcut when something happens I haven't even thought about that oh my goodness well goodness you blew my mind several ways I'm just going I just did the show and finder on a dock icon for a shortcut and then you can do the rightclick show package cont contents and it's got everything like a version pist info pist oh full it's a full application like it's so wild so that's cool and I was also going to say about hazel which we've talked about on Apple Insider before William really loves Hazel I started using it they'll automate either renaming files or moving files around depending on what folders you put them in and I was thinking I guess shortcuts could rename and move files for you but what it's missing and hopefully I imagine will add this sometime soon is an automations tab in the Mac shortcuts app yeah I don't I mean one of the things if you do look at the automation stab on iOS is it's very built for mobile features like right moving around and things like that that kind of just don't apply to the Mac um although it could because you can do like yeah you know your Mac has a location when it connects to a Wi-Fi network I have a feeling just kind of based on how things have gone I I mean partially as if you already know how to automate your Mac you can automate shortcuts using like cron jobs I don't even this is a I literally don't even know what I'm saying at this point because I don't know how to do terminal stuff but like you can use any of those other Mac apps to automate shortcuts itself because anything on the Mac can just run whenever it wants so like there's an app called signals for homekit that has been using homekit integration like it can listen for homekit events and run shortcuts for you so that's wild alone right that's just like genius and so powerful and it's just like oh it's just another app that can just do this now um so any of the like hazel probably that's what I'm just saying is like I just don't know I haven't practiced with hazel in a while can it run scripts like a shell script I assume it can yeah well I have Hazel right here just click on that for a second yeah I'm gonna open Hazel we're doing some lot yeah run Apple SC oh yeah man that's that's amazing that's so good it could so it could run a shortcut so it can just trigger a shortcut at any process step and shortcuts itself can also rename files and move file not that I think in the same way use Hazel to create the advanced system that you want and then just run a shortcut that gets the thing like I mean shortcuts can a really powerful tool that I just want to say because this is also what I get a lot of value out of shortcuts from is interacting with web apis yes through the get contents of URL action and so shortcuts could you could have Hazel like monitor your file system a file changes shortcuts makes an API call to get the data from your web service and then it's on your Mac and then Hazel continues on with it or something like that too so like it's this is like I mean this guy's the limit so I love I love hearing you get excited because that makes me more excited too because it's like I think especially I what happens with personal life stuff is I sort of have to make it more generic to apply to more people and I mean obviously like specific life stuff is still relevant but specific work stuff is like that's where literally the money's at saving you time right and effort for your daily job or like those repeated things so even as a podcaster yeah like every single part of that process once it's done you can rename it put it in the right file tweet it out you could like clip audio from it at certain moments that I don't know like oh my goodness I want to talk to you more about it because I'll automate your podcast for you I have I have a short a set of shortcuts for podcasters because I do I have a show called smart Tech to but I've been meaning to get sent it out so oh my goodness well I'm thinking now cuz if you could automate with like a new RSS item where it can trigger the shortcut that I use to share you know the podcast oh my goodness like it's just wild okay that's that's amazing but I feel like you know looking at the automation Triggers on iOS there is like the location based arrive leave that might not work on the Mac but you could use triggers like when you connect to a certain Wi-Fi network which would be very useful you know if you're in the office or you're at home Bluetooth and even like battery levels if you're on a MacBook Pro MacBook and you want to trigger low power mode which is a thing now on the Mac I believe is it I thought it was do um yes there's also the high mode for the other Macs although I don't think the short that's another good example the shortcuts action does not work for low power mode on the Mac because it was very much built for iOS and it could just even be out of the hundreds of things that's probably not the the priority of it just actually working right now um oh my this going to be a three-hour podcast just going into the nerd stuff so let me ask just a couple more questions sure one what have been new like triggers or actions maybe an iOS 15 15.1 15.2 I don't know if you're running the beta that you have really been finding useful or enjoy I just personally found scrolling through the automations tab on my iPhone in the shortcuts app that sound Rec ignition is now a trigger yeah that one's awesome um I just just saw on Reddit too I couldn't I've been trying to think of like just kind of helpful ideas for that where it's like oh I'm like the automation beep goes off and then or like actually the signals app that I had it was for it was supposed to be for knocking because I was I just rearranged my desk so it's not like this anymore but I had my back to the door and so I'd be wearing my airpods Max and I could never hear my girlfriend come in and I would be like Jesus like as she said something scares you and so the idea was that when there was door knocking my phone would use the signals app which the main functionality of it is just to um flash a light flash flash a light for your humi bolt which is not possible otherwise and so it would flash my desk light so that I knew that somebody was knocking um wow yeah and so those automations are great but the one that I saw on Reddit was just coughing to log it if you have covid symptoms and I was like oh my God that's actually really powerful and like could save your life or like that's like real data to give to your doctor and stuff like that and so I I had never seen this menu before apparently sound recognition is in the accessibility menu on in your iPhone and some of the sounds like Matthew was saying you could do like coughing but also glass breaking baby crying door knock dog doorbell water running car horn like this is I had no idea this was here this is wild yeah and they added it last year but it you could shortcut could turn it on but it couldn't do anything with it and so I think now that it can trigger something afterwards that's where it's really powerful yeah like baby crying could just immediately open your baby monitor app I think one of the weird things there is the true automation versus just a prompt because right um my neighbor does Construction And so there's knocking noises all the time and so if it was just constantly flashing my lights it would be insane but also if I had to run it every single time it just wouldn't even make sense at all right from the menu and so like I think in general I what I kind of assume with shortcuts for Mac not having these is just that um you probably would get into a situation where you actually created issues more that like I think they're really trying to move slow so that you don't just have you don't make a shortcut that runs every minute of every day and then creates 10 billion files and like you just are like oh my God like shortcuts really does have the potential to just it could go wild scale exactly unintentionally so I think they're trying to even just in general it's like introduce the people to it and then make it more powerful again versus bringing over all the power at once and then you just lose your head even though it's obviously still so powerful so right which let me also say apple please put the Notification Toggle for shortcuts legit yeah in the settings app even if you have to like make the user build a medium complicated shortcut to have the ability to turn off or something cuz I imagine that's what Apple's afraid of is they don't want some random shortcut running and a user is like what just happened with my device at least the notification lets them know what happened but I don't know the men bar thing is exactly that though like you kind of don't know that it's running and but I also wish that was all it was on the iPhone I think they should put it in the notch where the the clock is it should just be a little check that goes off and animates so you see it and then there's also like a special section in notific CER or still just in there but you just don't have to physically see it each time I mean it's got that is brilliant because right now like the location arrow is right next to the clock whenever your location is being accessed on the iPhone just put the little shortcut symbol there that's brilliant exactly that's something I probably should have follow his feedback also and is like a good example of just I thought of that a while ago and like maybe they just hadn't or something I don't know well I I believe Apple listens to the show they're they're hearing all your ideas right now in real time so it's not a problem that's fair but anyway act back to back to the question from 10 minutes ago any actions that you've really been liking that I added in 15 15.1 or point2 yeah I mean I think some of that Mac stuff is is what I'm having the most fun with I think the oh yeah the focus automation actually is really powerful um and because it compensates the lack of true automation with location based things or like you were saying with the Wi-Fi thing I think in the same way all of those are like if it thinks you're there but then it thinks you're not there and then it thinks you're there again shortcuts are just going to be running constantly so that's not the most reliable way to choose like I'm at work with Focus modes they have Smart activation and better location they act they have true location automations for turning on and off focus modes those are also automation triggers and so in effect you can have true location automation through Focus modes and it also I think it more realistically reflects a context shift where you are moving from one spot to the other and want to change modes and so something else happens but it's basically like if your work mode you can have your work turn on automatically at a location and then your work Focus triggers a shortcut so I think they've kind of achieved it through a different route sort of and even just like the focus automations are at the bottom of the list and so people might not see them as much which is kind of a bummer yeah exactly but but that is really powerful too and just I think in the same way though it's it's lacking from the Mac because I would love for when I go into my work mode or my podcast mode all of my apps just open because the shortcut triggers but right now there's not an existing way to do that I don't know if there's a Mac automation tool that can figure out what your current Focus mode is that because that's one of the things where we had someone ask us on the show can a scheduled Focus mode do other things besides just the focus mode features and it can't go that one way but you can create a shortcut that sets a focus mode and then does other things like play a music playlist or whatever yeah both kind of it you can do the the focus mode is an automation trigger on iOS but not on the Mac so I think that's that's where it's kind of missing and then if you really want to get into it there's an action called run script over SSH that you can use to trigger stuff to happen on your Mac from your iPhone and so in theory actually you can I actually do this a lot is if I have a Mac it's sort of a Mac only thing I will have the if conditional if the type is Mac do the thing if otherwise run a script over SSH that does this on my Mac for me oh my so it's kind of like even if I because in theory also that means that you could say it to the homepod and it could run it from your phone to trigger the Mac to do the thing and so you can do handsfree series stuff as well um oh my goodness I didn't even I have not even this whole time thought about hom pod and triggering things from there that's why it's like I've it's it's just so complicated at a certain point like it really is I had to create a whole database of my shortcuts filter them by all of the different ways that I know that they can be run and that how I've built them and then now that's all like integrated into my website and then across all of the different types and so it is like it's very complex how how are you color coding your shortcuts nowadays I developed a system a while ago to basically assign colors to categories um and I actually think this helps a lot and I think I wish I had shared this earlier because it makes the biggest difference for me the icons are secondary to the color because your brain reads that color first and so I went to like red is calendar orange is like text stuff because it kind of looks like the color from the ulys app which is orange and then or like dark orange is the Home app look like Papyrus that's stuff you use all the time to write stuff down and yellow is the notes app cuz it's yellow green was messages so communication kind of stuff um so I just started assigning groups like that and then that's why I can look through my giant list and then I have a swath of green and I know that I'm in the communication section and stuff like that which applies across folders and I mean I have stacks of folders on iOS for every single one of these things uh one of the secrets that I learned after going way way way way too far overboard with Focus modes and home screens was that actually the better solution is to have kind of dedicated home screens for like specific mode but then use the today widget section for all of your shortcuts folders um and put them in Stacks in there because then they're always accessible across different home screens which can now be hidden by Focus modes and things like that so they're kind of it's a universal place for shortcuts plus I don't think anybody uses that area anyways so it's kind of like this is the best spot for shortcuts right and it's actually really nice so that's been working out um I had like 15 home screens and 15 Focus modes and it just fell apart it just a little much well I just I only did it because they didn't give us a change home screen action right which they should have because then I can hide the different show different home screens at different times without doing the focus modes which is why I was doing that um so that was definitely overwrought but yes it also like I was doing a podcast and a newsletter and videos and so having different shortcuts up front ready when I switch into each each of those modes is definitely that's the my favorite part about iPad OS right now is just that on the Mac there's no way to bring forward your setup right like you can using shortcuts manipulate your windows and things like that but I wish they added in um like a spaces exactly the if they had dedicated spaces with names like the home screens a shortcut could switch spaces and even like your menu bar stuff could be a little bit better or I mean the dock so right I don't know I feel like it is is going to be a slow converging in a way that makes sense for both platforms though and so it's pretty it's pretty awesome right now like yeah I think um I guess even just to say because I don't know I didn't know about the services menu really or like I did through like Brett terpstra's markdown stuff but I never really knew that that was such a thing that every classic Mac User like loves apparently but that is when you right click on any sort of file or even like selecting text the services menu is kind of like the share sheet and you can run shortcuts through there um so that is like another a way to get data into your shortcuts from what's on your system and it's also in every like whatever app is active in the menu bar if you click the application name like Safari Services is right under there oh nice I did not even really realize that that's hilarious that's oh my God is that what it's supposed to be instead of the right click thing yeah cuz the right click if you right click if you right click a file Services is not there I don't think no it's in the bottom see I don't but it doesn't have the same okay I've been having this issue is my my shortcuts were sh showing up in that menu and then stopped at one point yeah and also there's a quick actions menu in the finder so that technically there's finder quick actions and services quick actions and so it was showing them in that in the quick actions thing not for services but that's fascinating I've never ever seen the services menu in the menu bar I have I have an apple script that opens cuz like you can do Apple scripts that look at specific panes in an app and then like click on a thing at a certain point and stuff like that that is really powerful um oh my goodness oh that's interesting though I'll have to that's fascinating that's just like I think that's a good example of how I mean I don't know if iOS tips are much better shared but there are just like so many specific things the Mac the Mac is a longstanding platform with lots with lots of hidden things uh at least to you know if you don't know what's there you just you know there's no no way to know you just hear it on a podcast like this one yeah exactly that's Matthew you've sufficiently blown my mind on this episode I was not mentally prepared to talk about running SSH scripts and Hazel automations but uh not shortcuts related just wanted to ask one question did you get one of the new Macbook Pros I have not because I went into the M1 world because I knew that I basically don't actually use the power of a computer that to that degree that I need I'm building shortcuts and uploading them to the web I do edit video and the the camera that I have works fine on the M1 Mac Mini and I needed a mini to stream and things like that so I got that and then the error and now I'm basically just waiting until I can like justify a better camera to like justify the power of the computer so I think that's I was going to get it but I kind of Switched towards the MacBook Air earlier this summer instead because I was like I can probably wait although I'm very jealous it there it's pretty nice I'll be honest I was I couldn't resist anymore but I I do a lot of video work and I do a lot of website work too and and the it's actually helpful for some of that but yeah when you do your work do you reach for the iPad first sale or do you go Mac first I mean that's been the question for me this entire summer since this stuff has came out is like what actually should I be using because there is like benefit I think I have been gravitating towards the Mac more I think I like the home screen setups that I have on iOS and so I appreciate that a lot even just the fact that shortcuts is a little bit more native to iPad I pick that up to like dive into some deeper shortcuts but also sitting up right at a monitor turns out is pretty ergonomic um so that's been nice right I definitely that's why I got the MacBook Air also was to not be stuck at my desk and be able to use that so I think the big thing with the MacBook Pros just to go back to that from the because of the iPad thing is just that I didn't really realize how bad they were before cuz I've been so in the iPad world and I had an iMac and so I kind of like missed that whole cycle of I used my girlfriend's work laptop and I was like oh my God this I cannot type on this thing like it was not good and so I think I think that's why now that I have the error it's it's satisfied like every part of what was wrong with the laptops for me and it is like I do think for most people you probably could use a MacBook Air unless you are especially doing stuff like I don't know I've also maybe the longer the pandemic has gone on been a little bit more cautious about justifying my purchases especially as I have multiple iPads and Macs I'm like okay I do not need a MacBook Pro right now so yeah and I think you know you know SD card usage not having to carry a dongle I was thinking about it the other day I might not need need the 50 dongles that I've purchased over the last 4 years because if all I use is SD card like that's really what I mainly use the dongles for exactly and I think for me I have a just like an SD card importer attached to my Mac Mini so at least it's I think for the daily issues if I was working straight from the laptop I would probably do that more but I I've been especially that I'm having that iMac before I got very into the desktop and iPad lifestyle more than the laptop only lifestyle and I think cuz it could just let me have the best of both worlds yeah abolutely versus kind of like a laptop plus a 12.9 inch iPad is kind of like you should use one or the other yeah not really both but I do actually use both devices pretty regular like I'll have my Mac and then I'll do some stuff on my iPad and so I think I've very much backed off of the iPad only World which I just could do and but also like stuff like air table is not I mean web design is not great from the iPad and so I really needed to do more of that with as this catalog got more and more complicated um and so I'm kind of trying to I feel like I'm living in that what's the Phil Scher quote of like pick the device that does the job for you right and then move up as if it doesn't do that job and then anyways with shortcuts too is like in theory I could do some of that stuff for my watch because the shortcut works there so like shortcuts fits perfectly into that analogy and it's across all platforms which is just so nice like I'm just ready people to get into it because I feel like everybody's kind of been waiting because it's it's kind of too complicated for certain stuff but I mean I think the learning curve is still really high and just getting past variables and things like that is is a pretty big barrier for a lot of people but right I think then there's just like the high-end issues of how do you manage 18886 shortcuts um is that how many you have yeah oh my goodness I mean I made 45 I made one for every single preference pain in the system preferences so I just go I'm very sure maximal and it's I don't I think it's biting me in the butt sometimes with the with the Mac is it's like I I have 10 in my menu bar not 100 or like it worked with the folder stacks on iPad but right I have to use the right click on the shortcuts menu to access all my folders because that actually still works very well so like or the stream deck I'm going to have 15 profiles on my stream deck but it works man that's the thing is it's very it's wild but once especially the stream deck part is that's the only time anywhere on any platform it's a one tap action to do something and that's really powerful it's just like I was just sitting there kind of like uh doing the like uh I don't know if you can hear that just where you're like tapping your fingers on a desk but like you could just run four shortcuts in a row just by tapping on the stream deck so like it's actually yeah really cool there that pretty cool well listeners hopefully we did not intimidate you too much with shortcuts what you need to do that's so creepy what you need to do is go to Matthew cell.com and he's got an incredible newsletter and you can just download shortcuts and run them you know if if building them is intimidating just takes some of the ones from his newsletter and run them and that's great but if you want to really dive into it you can become a member on his website and just an incredible amount of resources and shortcuts to run anywhere else you'd like to point people um I'm ramping up YouTube as well um just to kind of show people more too because that's always the difficult part is you can just hear about it and it sounds great but then once you see it in action you're like oh okay now I get it so that helps a lot another thing I am doing for the membership as well is more live streams and like an archive of that stuff so we can actually build them together you know what you and I Stephen let's do one I know we live we were talking yeah see I I mean it's been so buggy I could not do it live it was I would go you could see my face just like drop over the stream because I'm just like oh my God it's just not opening um so we'll we'll get those in there but yeah yes definitely I'd love for people to join the membership that really helps and I can push things a lot further too especially with the YouTube channel going further so of course and we'll put Matthew and my Twitter handles are in show notes as well Matthew thanks again so much for coming on the show yeah thanks for having mewelcome to a special episode of the Apple Insider podcast this is your host Steven robbles and today is joining me very special guest for his second appearance on the Apple Insider podcast Matthew cassanelli shortcuts extraordinaire expert Maven I'm not sure what other adjectives to put behind there but Matthew thanks so much for joining me again hello hello thank you for having me I appreciate being back on it is an exciting time with shortcuts for Ma out so it is an exciting time also tumultuous but we'll get to that in a second oh yeah and just want to say right off the bat everyone if you are just getting into shortcuts or want to learn more about shortcuts or just get cool ideas and just download them and use them Matthew cassanelli doccom that link will be in the show notes I have become a member since he was last on the show and you got some cool stuff on there so kudos to you doing great work awesome thank you very much absolutely well my my question is we have Mac OS montere it is now publicly available it's came out I installed it on day one of course because I was most excited for shortcuts on the Mac I didn't run any beta over the summer saw guys like you and Federico vtii saying pretty buggy you know maybe not worth it just yet so I waited and so I have it and I've been playing around with it my my question to you Matthew is why is it broken why is all of this broken what is happening with shortcuts on the Mac I mean maybe as we've seen from the iOS release as well just because it's out doesn't mean it's not Bren um it might still be in beta technically I don't know yeah I mean I've been thinking about the line the future of automation on the Mac and how maybe that implies it's not the present of automation on the Mac because of some of those problems that's that's Savage Matthew very good there's a more philosophical part about how like even if you are already automating on the Mac you don't have to replace your current stuff and you can just integrate with shortcuts too so that's but I think the bugginess comes from it is a holy Swift UI app and so I think some of that is just kind of maybe not even the shortcuts team itself but I think there's also some just philosophical differences about the platforms that I think you're probably running into and it's just kind of not clear from Apple whether that's a bug or is just kind of how it is or something like that my experience was I mean I have I'm looking right now 161 shortcuts which I know is no comparison to what you know you and vtii have and you have hundreds and hundreds I'm I'm a mad man so but I have some that I use very often for work especially this podcast ones that format links and take stuff from my clipboard and you know get article titles and I use them on my iPad effectively every week I love them and so I was very excited to just open shortcuts on my Mac run the same shortcut with the same formatting tools so I didn't have to break out my iPad I could just do it all on my Mac and I found that most of them just don't work out of the box meaning meaning they worked on my iPad but they don't work on the Mac has that been your experience in this whole transition I think the main thing that you're running into is the Safari Integrations because on iOS they built in uh originally workflow had a tool called diffbot which I just now realized maybe you could actually if you really wanted to send your data to this API and get the same information back but when when it was workflow it basically was a tool to identify whether a link was an article or not and then if so you can get certain parts of information out of it Andor Safari web pages as like a item in short cuts have special capabilities where you can get like the selected text or something like that that's all very iOS technology and so like the they built what they called the Safari reader integration when they switched away from diffbot in in shortcuts and so I just don't think that's on the Mac yet right I think um I I think that's what's kind of weird and we sort of expected to be able to get this stuff right away but there wasn't really communication or even some some actions actually just say this doesn't work on the Mac and I believe the Safari ones just fail so like it should just say that it doesn't actually have the error so it's kind of confusing right and that's you know this is a special episode of the podcast we we can nerd out get a little deep and so I want to get some specifics but before we even get to that I have shortcuts open on my Mac right now and I I just got one of these Sophie's Choice voice schroen your shortcuts problems where I opened a shortcut and it says this shortcut was modified on October 30th on this device then it was modified again on November 7th also on this device I think those errors are wrong I I this is live live feedback yeah live feedback I think one of those titles is incorrect and it so it should say that it was modified on a different device but like there's some sort of even simple overwrite error yes I it is it's fascinating having gotten into shortcuts because I understand some just like simple programming problems that would happen like if I was doing a shortcut where I used get item from list and had the wrong index that's all that this problem could be but when you're using it you're like I don't understand this it's trying to differentiate between the same device which doesn't even make sense so do you default to just like the newest version like whatever the latest date was yeah definitely I mean that's also why I try to back up my shortcuts as well because I I mean I'm trying to build these four people and as like my like this podcast is your thing shortcuts are my thing and so I have to keep them backed up yeah and so now that you are making shortcuts for both or all platforms iPhone iPad and now the Mac how has your process changed in like how you start building a shortcut has it changed at all or is it remain unchanged or how do you make it do you make some specifically just for iOS or do you try to be crossplatform from the beginning on every new thing you make I think I leaned towards making it just work regardless because I didn't want to have second shortcuts for the same task on a different platform especially if it was just trying to accomplish the same thing and one of the biggest things for me with the iPad and the iPhone and then when they brought back the Apple watch which was also there for morlow and then they took a couple years and fixed it up you kind of build once and deploy everywhere sort of thing obvious I mean you do have to make some considerations and I probably make the least for the Apple watch actually just because oh yeah I have hundreds and I'm not going to be running hundreds for my watch so I don't really need to think about it but um I definitely like a shortcut that just works everywhere because if you just run it and it fails or especially because I'm giving them to other people if you run it and it fails you just don't understand why and you're never going to be able to fix it right so I wanted to guarantee at least that anybody who picked up a shortcut could run it Apple also thought about this and so in shortcuts in iOS 15 or I guess shortcuts for back wow I'm so used to saying that um right there's a capability in the if action which allows you to create conditional flows for different things that you want to happen and in there you can get the device details and extract this device type is Mac or iPad or iPhone and so you you used to always be able to use the get device details action but now they added it just built into the if action so you don't have to do it 800 time for like I would have had that action in every single one of my shortcuts now it's just if and so it's like if it's on the Mac do this if it's not on the Mac do something else got and I've even had one or two clever uses where this was always this was very specific but I used the device name and if I if it had the word book in it for MacBook Pro or MacBook Air it um for the this is just like dumb but the energy saver preference pain in the system preferences on Mac is called battery if you're on a mobile device or a mobile laptop versus a Mac Mini and so it had to have like an if conditional based on the name not just the device type wow yeah so you can get pretty specific um but I think it it creates for just more clever opportunities and I do really like just being able to do the exact same thing that you would on your computer on your phone really quick when you need to because otherwise if you don't account for that you're just kind of like left in the dust absolutely now one of the things I have shortcuts for sharing my different podcasts and we'll put some shortcuts in the show notes not so you listeners can maybe download them and try them out but I have this one shortcut where I I tweet about the Apple Insider podcast every week and I want to get the link from Apple podcast from overcast and then Spotify or pocketcast whatever I feel like is winning at the time and I want to get the links to the specific episode from each of those services and shortcuts makes it really easy where I can actually get the Apple podcast URL without ever looking at anything it can just load the last item from a particular podcast in my Apple podcast app get the URL and done and then I can use it in a text block later nice but for overcast you actually have to open what I have is a open the Safari view to Apple Insider in overcast like the show and then I tap and hold and copy to get the URL for that specific episode I hit done and then the shortcut keeps going and and it'll do whatever that's on iPhone or iPad but on Mac when you have that open a safari website you have just the little red x uh as in this popup window and when you click it it just stops the shortcut oh so what other like weird quirks have you been running into like that is it mainly just the safari stuff I guess that's a majority of what I use it for I think some of those native iOS Technologies they brought over but can just be kind of odd sometimes like that is even there's a show web page action instead of a u open URL which that's one do yeah that's exactly um I guess it's a safari view controller where it just pops up on top of the app right but on the Mac it's just like this tiny little window because it doesn't really make sense in the way that it's built on iOS so I think I think the most unfortunate part is just that all of us power users are the most likely to run into those edge cases while also shortcuts is like let's deploy a brand new technology on a brand new stack across the entire platform and and people the people who are going to use it are the most likely to just dig in and immediately run into all those problems um and build it on a brand new language yeah exactly so I do think even though I've I've gone through like a roller coaster of emotions with the feedback app I do think you have to sub submit the feedback especially with shortcuts because you're the one who just ran into that for the first time ever probably or something like that like the shortcuts team doesn't have 2,000 shortcuts and processing them all the I mean like I always am like ah I want I like wish you could just have my my device and just test them on that um yes but there's definitely so many bugs but I think it's you can actually get them fixed and I I'm like I have a little shortcuts User Group Discord and I've been posting all of the feedback in there and I think that helps I don't know like it just can concentrating it with other people and understanding that these are common problems can help identify like I also can identify usually what the technical problem is versus right it just doesn't work is kind of what most people run into I do think by the way while you were saying that I have run into the exact same overcast thing and it turns out that Marco has a stack or a scheme for using the podcast ID from iTunes in the URL I guess it wouldn't be the episode it would just be the show yeah they he uses the show ID I like to get the links directly to the episode uh kind of thing dang it I was hoping I could solve your problem but I just made a shortcut to do that cuz you can look at the current podcast search it in in the podcast app for the ID and then apply that overcast the like default URL and then open it right so what I have resolved to do is I have a folder in my shortcuts Mac application and the folder is called Mac OS I'm basically I'm building shortcuts just to run on my Mac you know just just to make sure they they work and I can just leave those as they are so my next question for you is one of the exciting parts of of shortcuts on the Mac is you can trigger them in many different ways and because it's the mac and you can have like systemwide you can trigger shortcuts either with a keyboard shortcut or the menu bar you can put it in the services menu in like different share buttons so what have you found to be your preferable way to trigger shortcuts on the Mac I mean all of those are definitely great it I have different uses for the different sections um I think the menu bar is just really good for obviously like the most quick access to especially I've been doing stuff with apple script to press keyboard shortcuts for me to like log out of my computer and so I have um those up in the menu bar but I also like that when you hover over an item in the menu bar there's a little open Arrow which to me means this is the quickest way to open a shortcut like a predefined list of shortcuts so essentially if I'm working on something I'll throw them in the menu bar so that I can just get back to it immediately um oh that's pretty slick I also do like the the doc icon if you rightclick on it there is an open recent menu and then there's also a run shortcut menu which shows you every single one of your folders and any shortcuts that aren't in a folder wow so I have hundreds of folders I'll say um hundreds of folders yeah I'm making my own Gallery basic I I worked on the workflow gallery and so what I do now is basically Gallery collection type stuff and so I just think of like anything that I can and make shortcuts for it um that's amazing it's like or sound recognition I can make 10 different shortcuts or something um amazing there's a whole philosophical question about whether you should have shortcuts that just do one thing or like a menu but even that's a good example of the menus are kind of bad on the Mac and so I don't want to click I don't want to use a keyboard shortcut go click in the menu it's just like too slow right now I think there are just some like rough edges that they could like I can't even tell if it's just Swift UI or The Oddities of like technically the shortcuts team became Mac developers and I mean they obviously have always developed shortcuts and workflow from a Mac so like that's the part is I just don't understand and haven't honestly talked to them in a long time of like did you guys just not think about that or is that how swift UI works it's kind of odd sometimes and it is just like again there's 300 actions and shortcuts I think now there's up to like 70 ways to run one single shortcut if you count every single automation oh my of the shortcuts for Mac features and stuff like that um wow so so my so my thing is I was trying to use keyboard shortcuts to trigger just some simple text formatting shortcuts like remove the question mark UTM you know reference tag at the end of a link but I didn't see any visual cue that my shortcut was running I think the menu bar flashes is the main thing does it because I use so also use the stream deck right because shortcuts can be triggered by any sort of Apple script and there's an apple script plugin for the stream deck so I have physical buttons for every single one of my shortcuts which is also very wild I like give I'm giving away those profiles to my members because it's like I I spent hours and hours just clicking and dragging icons and this oh my good I used I like generated all of the Apple scripts too that's amazing every time I press the stream deck icon I can see the menu bar flash so that's kind of just the the subtle thing but it is weird I mean technically you could put like a show result action in to let you know that you finished but it kind of just depends so I yeah I just tested it and it's a very quick flashing of the shortcut I guess if you have a longer shortcut it'll be visible like it'll change color for a longer time yeah but for a simple texting it was just like flashed real quick I agree that that's weird but also at a certain Point that's really awesome because it's just fast like I realized the other day I was um trying to log the links for my newsletter into air table because after I go through them I want to just make sure I keep them over time and on iOS I would have to like right click on each link go to the share sheet and run the shortcut and then it would run and then it I'd be done but on the Mac I just right clicked and did like log link and then it was done yeah that's pretty and then I did it again and it was done and I just went like click click click click click click click and I was like oh my God because that was just so fast and I just made 18 API calls to air table and I opened the app and they're all sitting there and the same thing it like scraped the titles out of it and everything so I was like oh that was awesome I was like shortcuts is cool like yeah cuz I've I've been a longtime text expander user where you know I have a lot of little shortcuts for semicolon these couple letters and it makes either it's a sponsor HTML paragraph for a post or even just my email address I have like semicolon em and it just puts my email address you know expands into that ni that's so I talking to Wes hilard at Apple Insider who has been iPad only really as his main work machine and he just got one of the new Macbook Pros and so he was trying to see like what Mac apps are really worth it and I said oh text expander and then we got into a conversation of can shortcuts almost replace what something like text expander does like with formatting of text and I feel like it's it's close to it the one thing that shortcuts can do correct me if I'm wrong is if you do have like a text formatting type shortcut it can't just place the text yeah for you you always have to end the shortcut with a copy to clipboard and then you manually command V it in a form or on a page is that true yes although now that I think about it you could use the Run Apple script action to simulate the keyboard shortcut for paste and it past it for you but I do agree that Tex expander I think just Tex expander is probably more purpose-built for what that is yeah and you can do inline prompts in Texas expander I think one of the funny things for me just as an aside is that I used the Mac before I used the iPad and shortcuts to this degree so I'm coming back to now to like Tex expander and Alfred stuff that I always used before and now I can just like figure out which one works best too so I do think I like Tex expander for even just the workflow of creating text yeah the keyboard shortcut to replace it and then managing that versus hundreds of shortcuts for the same kind of thing I think is probably right like more purpose built and there a little sound effect that it plays it like I that's exactly what I thought of when you said it it doesn't do anything it's Tech expander has the little or something that little that little pop sound yeah it's a very reassuring like it worked and the text is there this is why every single time the answer is just make another shortcut that plays a sound at the end of one of your shortcuts no Matthew no we but I've actually wanted that for NFC tags and it kind of does make sense for some shortcuts to confirm that it's done all right I'm I'm gonna do it right now so can you now sound file oh my goodness so I'm looking on the Mac you can add a play sound like step action and then I guess you can use whatever do you like yeah I mean now that especially on the Mac compared to the the iPad and iPhone where people just don't think of files in the same way you just have a sound file anywhere on your system there's an action now uh one of the things shortcuts for Mac got was or actually both platforms got better file support for the entire system and so there is an action just called file and if you go into like your audio file or your audio folder and pick an audio sound I don't know it's so weird to talk about audio files sometimes um but if you pick a sound and then put it in there and then play the sound can just be like a little ding every single time okay well I mean that's not a whole new shortcut you could just add this the action you know to make a sound that's pretty slick yeah that's true I guess you could just use the built-in ones as well all right point for Wes I guess because you can kind of mimic it but but I still I mean I have a whole text expander library that I still use um for like yeah rep doing the a good one is like uh I use semicolon and then command and it will put the icon for the command key because now I'm referencing lots of keyboard shortcuts and so I actually I've been using that a lot very nice one of the things I still have to get used to is using shortcuts on iPad or iPhone you know you tap the little three dots to edit it or you just tap the shortcut anywhere else to run it and on Mac you either have to press the play button I guess it's I mean if you're looking at the shortcuts in the shortcut app you have to press the play button and because if you just click in the color nothing happens it just stares at you and you double click to open and edit I think that's again it's I think they did try to meet Mac users where they are more than account for people who are using their iPad because that's a good point I think even just because of the fat finger syndrome of like clicking on a shortcut icon with the mouse is so much more prec I don't know it's even because it's on a screen it does feel like you have to scroll around across the shortcut a lot to I don't know it's just kind of an odd experience if you did just click shortcuts with your mouse once and they ran it would be like oh God I'm running shortcuts constantly so I bet that was like a thing that they learned from experience um but the expectations are just going to be slightly different another one that related to this farar thing that we were talking about before is that the share sheet on the Mac is really has always historically not been a thing or deprioritized and on iOS was like the thing for sharing in between apps and so you can't even run a shortcut from the share sheet which is very weird I honestly think yeah that doesn't make sense to me I was I was looking for my shortcuts in the share sheet but it's the services menu not the share sheet that they go to yeah I think the thing actually that um Chris loly was mentioning to me that I hadn't thought about it slightly does depend on the situation but if you use the get what's on screen action you can get the frontmost browser window or something like that and then that's a whole new action that was added just in iOS 15 and Mac OS um it's a on iOS it's also one of the sharing options is getting the onscreen content because that was always the thing is you couldn't get the current U URL from Safari or or a like a deep link from the notes app or something like that so right they're kind of like a that can actually be a solution besides running it from the share sheet for like the menu bar for example right I need to play around with that more though because I just figured that just to be clear too is the it's called receive what's on screen is feature like the share sheet for iPhone and iPad but there is an action called get what's on screen that does work on the Mac as well so I just like didn't realize that because it I I had kind of associated those features together right well tell me I mean let's go to the positive of shortcuts on Mac have you like what are some of your favorite shortcuts or most used most useful shortcuts that you have been using on the Mac so I think one of the interesting things is is that there is so much from the iPhone and iPad that I can bring across like anything that I was doing with calendars and things like that becomes a lot more functional on the Mac because that for most people this is where you actually do that work and so I think a lot of times in the past I had like you said all of those text formatting things I have all these shortcuts and have for years that does this but when you're just picking up your iPhone like a lot of people kind of just don't care or it's just not as interesting versus specialized situations like that so I definitely do a lot of text manipul or like photos is a really good if you're working with images you can batch process like 100 photos and rename them sequentially or something like that shortcuts in General on iPhone and iPad and Mac are good for sort of mental bookmarks like obviously in the name a shortcut to something but files websites parts of apps like deep links into apps I use some that can I basically have a menu of slap uh slack channels that you can dive into I know the URL scheme for slack that's actually a thing is the URL schemes for Mac apps are very alive and well because that's also how they use just like get the window to open to a specific page and so if you figure that out for any part of the platform it can usually work of just like I have Discord deep links as well that I can generate that's pretty sweet yeah that stuff is awesome They just added a bunch of new PDF manipulation features which are um really powerful and even something you've always been able to to do with shortcuts is because it has the scripting tools you can take text and split it apart and then yes basically turn it into comma separated values and like generate a whole spreadsheet of data and then paste it on top of your spreadsheet and it'll just fill into the cells and stuff like that so there's just really powerful it's just a base level of automation for all of these things that you might be doing for your job like I mean another one is creating folder structures like it can create o common one for video makers is like you have the project and then you have like audio video and then within video you have a roll b roll and stuff like that and so it could just create that immediately for you which is really nice I'm making notes of shortcuts I'm going to try and make after we cool yeah I mean totally like if you have a list too I can probably send you ones that I've already made for some of this stuff um that's amazing it's it's just so powerful and I think this is where a lot of the stuff that for most people I think just the association with the phone is your personal life and then your work computer is your laptop or something like that I'm going to leave the whole iPad thing aside because sure in many ways for me it's kind of nice now that I don't have to justify an iPad I can Al it's like you can just use it anywhere and the iPad's also really great because it has shortcuts on it right right so I do have like tons of shortcuts that are for personal life but then that's a lot that also is great for work right yeah even just opening the right apps and positioning them for you in the way that you like is really powerful like one click set up for or I do like live streams or something like that and the windows need to be in a very specific spot or just like how you like to do your Zoom calls and have your notes on one side or something like that you can rearrange all the windows as much as you want but I'm not going to lie one of the things I am enjoying the most is using Apple script because it's just in the same way that shortcuts always enabled me to do more with the apps and built-in actions with apple script I can just go like on top of that and it's Al just really nice because I just Google it and a lot of people have shared Apple scripts from the last 20 years right I saw one on Twitter that was like extract the presenter notes from a keynote what and I was like oh my God like some of that stuff is like wow this is if they build that power of Apple script into shortcuts over the next three years that's where it's just going to be messed up how good shortcuts is and and even then right now you can tap into that and just kind of play around like I do just I love triggering the keyboard shortcuts like I saying using an apple script so I can tell my system to press command k or something like that and open a switcher depending on the app or um yeah just like logging out it is amazing how much value there is in keyboard shortcuts that now I can just turn into a shortcut that I can tap once and it'll just do the thing you can even like do terminal commands um through Apple script it can run a shell script and so one of the stupid things that I did was do you remember the magic Genie minimiz for if you held option it would slowly close all your windows that's been gone for a couple of years but there's a terminal command that you can uh like kill the system override and reactivate it and so I have a shortcut that you can run and deactivate the thing later if you don't want it but just to add in that dumb feature that like so when you hold option and minimize it it'll just go extremely slow like well it's so helpful because you know you can have a lot of keyboard shortcuts memorized but when you have text expander and shortcuts exactly and any other number of utility applications it's hard to remember so many keyboard shortcuts and so something like a stream deck where you can also program it to do keyboard shortcuts by itself or like a shortcuts menu to run just different commands so you just don't have to remember it all I do like that visual element of the shortcuts ecosystem totally like shortcuts I think that's what is fascinating about getting into it and looking at all of these existing Mac automation tools is so many times they did just need a front end to run it right and so that's what shortcuts can be is the menu bar and a dock icon as a as just the way as a shortcut to run your Mac automations versus eventually shortcuts itself will be able to do all of those things as well right but at least until then it does just give you that access which is really nice um I forgot to mention too you can add shortcuts to the doc right through the file menu which isn't as obvious and then there's even a bonus feature beyond that is if you once it's in the doc if you rightclick on it and then do option show and finder it'll show you a folder of all of your shortcuts as dot applications because that's all it really is in the doc is like you click it's like a application wrapper then runs the shortcut using assume Apple script or something like that right but it basically means that that is a application file for your shortcut so your shortcut is now officially an app and you can put it anywhere in your file system and run the shortcut from your file system as well so like in the folder of your taxes in your taxes folder you can have a shortcut that opens like the slack channel to your tax guy and stuff like that so wow it's wild like that stuff yeah and and just the keyboard shortcuts too like I do think keyboard shortcuts I just have so many there's no way I'm ever going to be able to realistically use most of those um via the keyboard but right it's still wild and you can trigger them from launch bar or Alfred or uh better touch tool I don't I guess Hazel could be involved as like the listening to your file system thing and then I'm curious if it could run a shortcut when something happens I haven't even thought about that oh my goodness well goodness you blew my mind several ways I'm just going I just did the show and finder on a dock icon for a shortcut and then you can do the rightclick show package cont contents and it's got everything like a version pist info pist oh full it's a full application like it's so wild so that's cool and I was also going to say about hazel which we've talked about on Apple Insider before William really loves Hazel I started using it they'll automate either renaming files or moving files around depending on what folders you put them in and I was thinking I guess shortcuts could rename and move files for you but what it's missing and hopefully I imagine will add this sometime soon is an automations tab in the Mac shortcuts app yeah I don't I mean one of the things if you do look at the automation stab on iOS is it's very built for mobile features like right moving around and things like that that kind of just don't apply to the Mac um although it could because you can do like yeah you know your Mac has a location when it connects to a Wi-Fi network I have a feeling just kind of based on how things have gone I I mean partially as if you already know how to automate your Mac you can automate shortcuts using like cron jobs I don't even this is a I literally don't even know what I'm saying at this point because I don't know how to do terminal stuff but like you can use any of those other Mac apps to automate shortcuts itself because anything on the Mac can just run whenever it wants so like there's an app called signals for homekit that has been using homekit integration like it can listen for homekit events and run shortcuts for you so that's wild alone right that's just like genius and so powerful and it's just like oh it's just another app that can just do this now um so any of the like hazel probably that's what I'm just saying is like I just don't know I haven't practiced with hazel in a while can it run scripts like a shell script I assume it can yeah well I have Hazel right here just click on that for a second yeah I'm gonna open Hazel we're doing some lot yeah run Apple SC oh yeah man that's that's amazing that's so good it could so it could run a shortcut so it can just trigger a shortcut at any process step and shortcuts itself can also rename files and move file not that I think in the same way use Hazel to create the advanced system that you want and then just run a shortcut that gets the thing like I mean shortcuts can a really powerful tool that I just want to say because this is also what I get a lot of value out of shortcuts from is interacting with web apis yes through the get contents of URL action and so shortcuts could you could have Hazel like monitor your file system a file changes shortcuts makes an API call to get the data from your web service and then it's on your Mac and then Hazel continues on with it or something like that too so like it's this is like I mean this guy's the limit so I love I love hearing you get excited because that makes me more excited too because it's like I think especially I what happens with personal life stuff is I sort of have to make it more generic to apply to more people and I mean obviously like specific life stuff is still relevant but specific work stuff is like that's where literally the money's at saving you time right and effort for your daily job or like those repeated things so even as a podcaster yeah like every single part of that process once it's done you can rename it put it in the right file tweet it out you could like clip audio from it at certain moments that I don't know like oh my goodness I want to talk to you more about it because I'll automate your podcast for you I have I have a short a set of shortcuts for podcasters because I do I have a show called smart Tech to but I've been meaning to get sent it out so oh my goodness well I'm thinking now cuz if you could automate with like a new RSS item where it can trigger the shortcut that I use to share you know the podcast oh my goodness like it's just wild okay that's that's amazing but I feel like you know looking at the automation Triggers on iOS there is like the location based arrive leave that might not work on the Mac but you could use triggers like when you connect to a certain Wi-Fi network which would be very useful you know if you're in the office or you're at home Bluetooth and even like battery levels if you're on a MacBook Pro MacBook and you want to trigger low power mode which is a thing now on the Mac I believe is it I thought it was do um yes there's also the high mode for the other Macs although I don't think the short that's another good example the shortcuts action does not work for low power mode on the Mac because it was very much built for iOS and it could just even be out of the hundreds of things that's probably not the the priority of it just actually working right now um oh my this going to be a three-hour podcast just going into the nerd stuff so let me ask just a couple more questions sure one what have been new like triggers or actions maybe an iOS 15 15.1 15.2 I don't know if you're running the beta that you have really been finding useful or enjoy I just personally found scrolling through the automations tab on my iPhone in the shortcuts app that sound Rec ignition is now a trigger yeah that one's awesome um I just just saw on Reddit too I couldn't I've been trying to think of like just kind of helpful ideas for that where it's like oh I'm like the automation beep goes off and then or like actually the signals app that I had it was for it was supposed to be for knocking because I was I just rearranged my desk so it's not like this anymore but I had my back to the door and so I'd be wearing my airpods Max and I could never hear my girlfriend come in and I would be like Jesus like as she said something scares you and so the idea was that when there was door knocking my phone would use the signals app which the main functionality of it is just to um flash a light flash flash a light for your humi bolt which is not possible otherwise and so it would flash my desk light so that I knew that somebody was knocking um wow yeah and so those automations are great but the one that I saw on Reddit was just coughing to log it if you have covid symptoms and I was like oh my God that's actually really powerful and like could save your life or like that's like real data to give to your doctor and stuff like that and so I I had never seen this menu before apparently sound recognition is in the accessibility menu on in your iPhone and some of the sounds like Matthew was saying you could do like coughing but also glass breaking baby crying door knock dog doorbell water running car horn like this is I had no idea this was here this is wild yeah and they added it last year but it you could shortcut could turn it on but it couldn't do anything with it and so I think now that it can trigger something afterwards that's where it's really powerful yeah like baby crying could just immediately open your baby monitor app I think one of the weird things there is the true automation versus just a prompt because right um my neighbor does Construction And so there's knocking noises all the time and so if it was just constantly flashing my lights it would be insane but also if I had to run it every single time it just wouldn't even make sense at all right from the menu and so like I think in general I what I kind of assume with shortcuts for Mac not having these is just that um you probably would get into a situation where you actually created issues more that like I think they're really trying to move slow so that you don't just have you don't make a shortcut that runs every minute of every day and then creates 10 billion files and like you just are like oh my God like shortcuts really does have the potential to just it could go wild scale exactly unintentionally so I think they're trying to even just in general it's like introduce the people to it and then make it more powerful again versus bringing over all the power at once and then you just lose your head even though it's obviously still so powerful so right which let me also say apple please put the Notification Toggle for shortcuts legit yeah in the settings app even if you have to like make the user build a medium complicated shortcut to have the ability to turn off or something cuz I imagine that's what Apple's afraid of is they don't want some random shortcut running and a user is like what just happened with my device at least the notification lets them know what happened but I don't know the men bar thing is exactly that though like you kind of don't know that it's running and but I also wish that was all it was on the iPhone I think they should put it in the notch where the the clock is it should just be a little check that goes off and animates so you see it and then there's also like a special section in notific CER or still just in there but you just don't have to physically see it each time I mean it's got that is brilliant because right now like the location arrow is right next to the clock whenever your location is being accessed on the iPhone just put the little shortcut symbol there that's brilliant exactly that's something I probably should have follow his feedback also and is like a good example of just I thought of that a while ago and like maybe they just hadn't or something I don't know well I I believe Apple listens to the show they're they're hearing all your ideas right now in real time so it's not a problem that's fair but anyway act back to back to the question from 10 minutes ago any actions that you've really been liking that I added in 15 15.1 or point2 yeah I mean I think some of that Mac stuff is is what I'm having the most fun with I think the oh yeah the focus automation actually is really powerful um and because it compensates the lack of true automation with location based things or like you were saying with the Wi-Fi thing I think in the same way all of those are like if it thinks you're there but then it thinks you're not there and then it thinks you're there again shortcuts are just going to be running constantly so that's not the most reliable way to choose like I'm at work with Focus modes they have Smart activation and better location they act they have true location automations for turning on and off focus modes those are also automation triggers and so in effect you can have true location automation through Focus modes and it also I think it more realistically reflects a context shift where you are moving from one spot to the other and want to change modes and so something else happens but it's basically like if your work mode you can have your work turn on automatically at a location and then your work Focus triggers a shortcut so I think they've kind of achieved it through a different route sort of and even just like the focus automations are at the bottom of the list and so people might not see them as much which is kind of a bummer yeah exactly but but that is really powerful too and just I think in the same way though it's it's lacking from the Mac because I would love for when I go into my work mode or my podcast mode all of my apps just open because the shortcut triggers but right now there's not an existing way to do that I don't know if there's a Mac automation tool that can figure out what your current Focus mode is that because that's one of the things where we had someone ask us on the show can a scheduled Focus mode do other things besides just the focus mode features and it can't go that one way but you can create a shortcut that sets a focus mode and then does other things like play a music playlist or whatever yeah both kind of it you can do the the focus mode is an automation trigger on iOS but not on the Mac so I think that's that's where it's kind of missing and then if you really want to get into it there's an action called run script over SSH that you can use to trigger stuff to happen on your Mac from your iPhone and so in theory actually you can I actually do this a lot is if I have a Mac it's sort of a Mac only thing I will have the if conditional if the type is Mac do the thing if otherwise run a script over SSH that does this on my Mac for me oh my so it's kind of like even if I because in theory also that means that you could say it to the homepod and it could run it from your phone to trigger the Mac to do the thing and so you can do handsfree series stuff as well um oh my goodness I didn't even I have not even this whole time thought about hom pod and triggering things from there that's why it's like I've it's it's just so complicated at a certain point like it really is I had to create a whole database of my shortcuts filter them by all of the different ways that I know that they can be run and that how I've built them and then now that's all like integrated into my website and then across all of the different types and so it is like it's very complex how how are you color coding your shortcuts nowadays I developed a system a while ago to basically assign colors to categories um and I actually think this helps a lot and I think I wish I had shared this earlier because it makes the biggest difference for me the icons are secondary to the color because your brain reads that color first and so I went to like red is calendar orange is like text stuff because it kind of looks like the color from the ulys app which is orange and then or like dark orange is the Home app look like Papyrus that's stuff you use all the time to write stuff down and yellow is the notes app cuz it's yellow green was messages so communication kind of stuff um so I just started assigning groups like that and then that's why I can look through my giant list and then I have a swath of green and I know that I'm in the communication section and stuff like that which applies across folders and I mean I have stacks of folders on iOS for every single one of these things uh one of the secrets that I learned after going way way way way too far overboard with Focus modes and home screens was that actually the better solution is to have kind of dedicated home screens for like specific mode but then use the today widget section for all of your shortcuts folders um and put them in Stacks in there because then they're always accessible across different home screens which can now be hidden by Focus modes and things like that so they're kind of it's a universal place for shortcuts plus I don't think anybody uses that area anyways so it's kind of like this is the best spot for shortcuts right and it's actually really nice so that's been working out um I had like 15 home screens and 15 Focus modes and it just fell apart it just a little much well I just I only did it because they didn't give us a change home screen action right which they should have because then I can hide the different show different home screens at different times without doing the focus modes which is why I was doing that um so that was definitely overwrought but yes it also like I was doing a podcast and a newsletter and videos and so having different shortcuts up front ready when I switch into each each of those modes is definitely that's the my favorite part about iPad OS right now is just that on the Mac there's no way to bring forward your setup right like you can using shortcuts manipulate your windows and things like that but I wish they added in um like a spaces exactly the if they had dedicated spaces with names like the home screens a shortcut could switch spaces and even like your menu bar stuff could be a little bit better or I mean the dock so right I don't know I feel like it is is going to be a slow converging in a way that makes sense for both platforms though and so it's pretty it's pretty awesome right now like yeah I think um I guess even just to say because I don't know I didn't know about the services menu really or like I did through like Brett terpstra's markdown stuff but I never really knew that that was such a thing that every classic Mac User like loves apparently but that is when you right click on any sort of file or even like selecting text the services menu is kind of like the share sheet and you can run shortcuts through there um so that is like another a way to get data into your shortcuts from what's on your system and it's also in every like whatever app is active in the menu bar if you click the application name like Safari Services is right under there oh nice I did not even really realize that that's hilarious that's oh my God is that what it's supposed to be instead of the right click thing yeah cuz the right click if you right click if you right click a file Services is not there I don't think no it's in the bottom see I don't but it doesn't have the same okay I've been having this issue is my my shortcuts were sh showing up in that menu and then stopped at one point yeah and also there's a quick actions menu in the finder so that technically there's finder quick actions and services quick actions and so it was showing them in that in the quick actions thing not for services but that's fascinating I've never ever seen the services menu in the menu bar I have I have an apple script that opens cuz like you can do Apple scripts that look at specific panes in an app and then like click on a thing at a certain point and stuff like that that is really powerful um oh my goodness oh that's interesting though I'll have to that's fascinating that's just like I think that's a good example of how I mean I don't know if iOS tips are much better shared but there are just like so many specific things the Mac the Mac is a longstanding platform with lots with lots of hidden things uh at least to you know if you don't know what's there you just you know there's no no way to know you just hear it on a podcast like this one yeah exactly that's Matthew you've sufficiently blown my mind on this episode I was not mentally prepared to talk about running SSH scripts and Hazel automations but uh not shortcuts related just wanted to ask one question did you get one of the new Macbook Pros I have not because I went into the M1 world because I knew that I basically don't actually use the power of a computer that to that degree that I need I'm building shortcuts and uploading them to the web I do edit video and the the camera that I have works fine on the M1 Mac Mini and I needed a mini to stream and things like that so I got that and then the error and now I'm basically just waiting until I can like justify a better camera to like justify the power of the computer so I think that's I was going to get it but I kind of Switched towards the MacBook Air earlier this summer instead because I was like I can probably wait although I'm very jealous it there it's pretty nice I'll be honest I was I couldn't resist anymore but I I do a lot of video work and I do a lot of website work too and and the it's actually helpful for some of that but yeah when you do your work do you reach for the iPad first sale or do you go Mac first I mean that's been the question for me this entire summer since this stuff has came out is like what actually should I be using because there is like benefit I think I have been gravitating towards the Mac more I think I like the home screen setups that I have on iOS and so I appreciate that a lot even just the fact that shortcuts is a little bit more native to iPad I pick that up to like dive into some deeper shortcuts but also sitting up right at a monitor turns out is pretty ergonomic um so that's been nice right I definitely that's why I got the MacBook Air also was to not be stuck at my desk and be able to use that so I think the big thing with the MacBook Pros just to go back to that from the because of the iPad thing is just that I didn't really realize how bad they were before cuz I've been so in the iPad world and I had an iMac and so I kind of like missed that whole cycle of I used my girlfriend's work laptop and I was like oh my God this I cannot type on this thing like it was not good and so I think I think that's why now that I have the error it's it's satisfied like every part of what was wrong with the laptops for me and it is like I do think for most people you probably could use a MacBook Air unless you are especially doing stuff like I don't know I've also maybe the longer the pandemic has gone on been a little bit more cautious about justifying my purchases especially as I have multiple iPads and Macs I'm like okay I do not need a MacBook Pro right now so yeah and I think you know you know SD card usage not having to carry a dongle I was thinking about it the other day I might not need need the 50 dongles that I've purchased over the last 4 years because if all I use is SD card like that's really what I mainly use the dongles for exactly and I think for me I have a just like an SD card importer attached to my Mac Mini so at least it's I think for the daily issues if I was working straight from the laptop I would probably do that more but I I've been especially that I'm having that iMac before I got very into the desktop and iPad lifestyle more than the laptop only lifestyle and I think cuz it could just let me have the best of both worlds yeah abolutely versus kind of like a laptop plus a 12.9 inch iPad is kind of like you should use one or the other yeah not really both but I do actually use both devices pretty regular like I'll have my Mac and then I'll do some stuff on my iPad and so I think I've very much backed off of the iPad only World which I just could do and but also like stuff like air table is not I mean web design is not great from the iPad and so I really needed to do more of that with as this catalog got more and more complicated um and so I'm kind of trying to I feel like I'm living in that what's the Phil Scher quote of like pick the device that does the job for you right and then move up as if it doesn't do that job and then anyways with shortcuts too is like in theory I could do some of that stuff for my watch because the shortcut works there so like shortcuts fits perfectly into that analogy and it's across all platforms which is just so nice like I'm just ready people to get into it because I feel like everybody's kind of been waiting because it's it's kind of too complicated for certain stuff but I mean I think the learning curve is still really high and just getting past variables and things like that is is a pretty big barrier for a lot of people but right I think then there's just like the high-end issues of how do you manage 18886 shortcuts um is that how many you have yeah oh my goodness I mean I made 45 I made one for every single preference pain in the system preferences so I just go I'm very sure maximal and it's I don't I think it's biting me in the butt sometimes with the with the Mac is it's like I I have 10 in my menu bar not 100 or like it worked with the folder stacks on iPad but right I have to use the right click on the shortcuts menu to access all my folders because that actually still works very well so like or the stream deck I'm going to have 15 profiles on my stream deck but it works man that's the thing is it's very it's wild but once especially the stream deck part is that's the only time anywhere on any platform it's a one tap action to do something and that's really powerful it's just like I was just sitting there kind of like uh doing the like uh I don't know if you can hear that just where you're like tapping your fingers on a desk but like you could just run four shortcuts in a row just by tapping on the stream deck so like it's actually yeah really cool there that pretty cool well listeners hopefully we did not intimidate you too much with shortcuts what you need to do that's so creepy what you need to do is go to Matthew cell.com and he's got an incredible newsletter and you can just download shortcuts and run them you know if if building them is intimidating just takes some of the ones from his newsletter and run them and that's great but if you want to really dive into it you can become a member on his website and just an incredible amount of resources and shortcuts to run anywhere else you'd like to point people um I'm ramping up YouTube as well um just to kind of show people more too because that's always the difficult part is you can just hear about it and it sounds great but then once you see it in action you're like oh okay now I get it so that helps a lot another thing I am doing for the membership as well is more live streams and like an archive of that stuff so we can actually build them together you know what you and I Stephen let's do one I know we live we were talking yeah see I I mean it's been so buggy I could not do it live it was I would go you could see my face just like drop over the stream because I'm just like oh my God it's just not opening um so we'll we'll get those in there but yeah yes definitely I'd love for people to join the membership that really helps and I can push things a lot further too especially with the YouTube channel going further so of course and we'll put Matthew and my Twitter handles are in show notes as well Matthew thanks again so much for coming on the show yeah thanks for having me\n"