Malcolm Owen
An employee of Siri Shortcuts progenitor Workflow has shared a collection of over 150 Siri Shortcuts for people to use, providing a way for iOS users to get more out of the virtual assistant's automation toolkit.
The library of Siri Shortcuts published by Workflow employee Matthew Cassinelli covers a wide variety of tasks in a number of areas, including the calendar, setting of routines, editing text, and surfing the web, among other productivity areas. Highlights include the ability to set up daily events for 31 days in a row in Calendar, setting up time tracking, performing Find & Replace on clipboard content, and replacing text in Safari with their emoji counterparts where possible.
The collection also includes a selection of entertainment tasks and more fun uses for the tool, such as saving the description from a YouTube video, saving content from Pocket or Overcast, combining photographs together into a GIF, and to turn off Wi-Fi and turn on Do Not Disturb for an hour for a quiet gaming session.
Cassinelli, previously worked for Workflow and added collections of shortcuts to that app's gallery up until March 2017, when Apple acquired the company. Apple has since incorporated the technology behind the app, which allowed users to create custom tasks that would run in various apps, into its own Siri Shortcuts, and has ceased updating the Workflow app entirely.
Cassinelli stayed with Workflow during the transition period after the acquisition was announced, but departed once it had completed.
His original goal in joining Workflow was to "help everyday users take advantage of the power of scripting on mobile devices," with Cassinelli writing in a blog post he could tell it was "cool, but also very complicated." After seeing the launch of Shortcuts, he restarted his mission with the same goal, to demonstrate how Shortcuts could be used in daily life with ease.
"While Apple and the team that I worked with have been and will continue to take Shortcuts to new heights," said Cassinelli, "I want to be there along the way showing you how a 'normal person' can use this tool too."
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17 Comments
that's nice!
Wow, that's pretty cool. I'll have to check out the full list when i have more time.
I'm torn by Siri Shortcuts. I really want Siri Shortcuts to be useful but, for me, I don't find much that is. I have a few that I use and 2 in particular that I use daily. However, those 2 I use daily seem slightly broken since iOS 13. I used to be able to trigger them from my Apple Watch but now I get an error on the Watch. When I use them from my phone sometimes they work as expected and other times there are extra steps involved, like unlocking and opening the phone. For the past year that has not been their behavior.
When I try to build my own (with no scripting experience, mind you) they typically don't/won't do what I expect. For instance, I have a Shortcut that will send a message with my expected arrival time home from my current location. It works really well. I tried to make a similar Shortcut that would give my expected arrival to another person based on their location in Find My Friends. When the Shortcut ran it had no issue locating people using FmF but I could not figure out how to pull the location info and pass it along to another task. Everything I tried failed and I eventually gave up. It also isn't uncommon for me to see a Shortcut that IS useful but can already be achieved by asking Siri. In those cases it just seems redundant or more effort, unless there's something I'm missing.
I have set up a few shortcuts that are really helpful but there are still some things Siri can do that I haven’t been able to incorporate into shortcuts.
I might look at these to get a better understanding of how Shortcuts work/s, but I think I will have the same frustrations as I do currently which are.
Maybe I'm a dummy, but while better, Shortcuts doesn't seem like it's "there yet".