This week, I got a streak of inspiration after finding about Ivory's URL scheme for Lists and dove into the Mastodon API to pull my List data out & work with it.

The result is this folder of shortcuts, making it easy to open Lists on the web or in Ivory, create new lists or use my preset batch, and even add people to a List using just the URL.

These shortcuts are exclusive for members — I've also written a series of blog posts explaining the methods I've used too (coming next week):

Jason Snell has published a blog post on Six Colors explaining how he’s using AI to transcribe his podcast recordings and create a searchable archive for himself.

I’ve done something similar by importing my livestreams into Descript in the past, but I never got around to exporting the whole thing to search through later… 💡

Justin Meyers posted this interesting piece about Apple Watch Mirroring and how to use it with your iPhone to control your watch without holding your wrist up — and yes, you can trigger it with Shortcuts.

I actually hurt my wrist after falling while skateboarding about 5 years ago and definitely have trouble holding my wrist in a rotated position to show the watch screen, so I may just use this more — plus it’d be handy for livestreams:

The folks at Eze Fidelity have shared this overview for Shortcuts for Mac, the features you can take advantage of, and a handful of ideas to get you started.

I also enjoyed the shortcut introduction of “benefits” Shortcuts users can enjoy — sometimes writing a brief summary like this is oddly challenging for an expert like myself, who tends to go overboard in the explanation; I’m going to use this as inspiration for more beginner-oriented guides:

Dan Uff of Compuscoop published this piece that, while admittedly slightly hard to digest, actually resonated with me because it’s a method I use regularly — the jist is this:

If you’re always annoyed when you visit a site and then have to find their login page, you can simply copy the URL, put it in a shortcut, and open that URL to immediately start logging in:

Hiba Fiaz of Make Use Of has shared a set of handy shortcuts related to your iPhone across a few categories. 

The piece includes some great shortcuts for media in particular, covering things like photos, screenshots, GIFs, and background removal:

Andrew Ford has put together a guide on their website for getting started with ChatGPT and Shortcuts – everything from getting an API to making your first request:

Larry Hudson put out a shortcut and an accompanying screenshot on his shortcut for saving back-and-forth conversations with ChatGPT where each reply builds off the last:

Ivan Campos posted this incredible piece that truly asks the hard questions that Apple is staying silent about:

“…can Siri speak with a Boston accent?”

In other funny Shortcuts news, Bruno Pantaleão shared this excellent shortcut to take the real message that you wish you could send to your coworkers and rewrite it using professional corporatespeak.

I think we all could use this assistance every once-in-a-while...

Fabian Heuwieser shared this post on Medium that includes five shortcuts that work on Apple Watch without an iPhone around.

Like any roundup these days, it has to include ChatGPT — but the Create New Note option is also very useful, especially since it’s otherwise impossible to do on the Watch at all:

This thread from Justin Alvey caught my eye because of the unique way he’s creating his own ChatGPT experience that’s closer and closer to the movie “Her.”

He actually processed the audio responses on his own to create his own voice, and then uses Shortcuts to make a web request & retrieve his generated replies — very cool:

Rada Lemeden shared this blog post from Alex Kolchinski that highlights one detail in particular that’s great both for ChatGPT shortcuts, but also any shortcuts you’re running with Siri — toggling on “Prefer Spoken Responses” so Siri will always dictate your prompts and dialogs:

Brady on Twitter shared this tweet that sums up a lot of my feelings that I’ve been developing around AI and Shortcuts as of late — I’m really impressed with what’s out there, but none of those services have hooks into tools you actually use to get things done.

If Apple pushes forward on the front-end, they’ve already laid the groundwork for the back-end — and that’s the hardest part: actually doing something useful.

My pal Chris Lawley put out this video right at the start of February walking folks through his regularly-used set of Automations in Shortcuts — find a good spot to sit and take it all in:

Robin Dupuy shared this shortcut 1:37 video for his YouTube channel SoundTech that walks viewers through using the Remove Background from Image actions in Shortcuts for Mac — check it out and give his video a thumbs up:

Keegan Donley wrote this great blog post while trapped inside his house sharing how he’s using Shortcuts to log water while he drinks coffee, plus input daily supplements into the Health app:

ZacLol shared this blog post explaining his setup for generating link posts and posting them to his Hugo website:

Bobby Bobak (what a great name) shared this preview of his app Filtru’s Shortcuts support, which lets you estimate the remaining number of cups of coffee from a certain amount of beans — I just ran out today, so I wish I’d seen this sooner 😇:

Nathaniel Drought shared this great shortcut for switching Profiles in the Firefox web browser by using a Shell Script trigger inside Shortcuts — great for separating out your browsing experience for different accounts like Work vs. Personal:

Sindre Sorhus is back yet again with yet another awesome Shortcuts-enabled app, this time designed mainly to send links you’re looking at on your phone or iPad to your Mac — however, Sindre noted that you can send any URL, including deep links… like Shortcuts’ URL scheme for running shortcuts.

So now, you can run Shortcuts on your Mac from your iPhone or iPad — goodness this is so powerful, I’ll need a bit to fully wrap my head around how I can use this to the fullest:

Drafts reshared this guide from their community forums explaining how to pass text from a draft into Shortcuts — using a shortcut, of course:

@Im0nMicrosoftIE shared this quick shortcut to taking a time value and converting it to UNIX time, which Discord can then display for each reader in their native time zone — I’ve seen shortcuts like this before, but it’s worth checking out if you don’t have it yet:

Mike Sammartano shared this quick video that highlights his shortcut for downloading app icons from the App Store using Shortcuts — I have something similar for my “Add to Home Screen” shortcuts:

I came across this reply from Carl Vellotti sharing step-by-step instructions for switching your Timer alarm to “Stop Playing” and utilizing that as a Sleep Timer for the Podcasts app:

Diego Jimenez shared this excellent shortcut built out of frustration from seeing prices in America that don’t include tax — this calculates the tax and adds it to the total so you can see the true cost:

Lee LeFever shared this handy shortcut for downsizing excessively large images before sharing them on his chill-sounding sanjuans.life Mastodon instance.

This kind of shortcut would be good for anyone trying to reduce their impact on their Mastodon instance (via @Sumocat):

MartinDB reshared this shortcut he created a few years ago that's designed as a fun educational game for kids — they receive a special message encoded based on the position of the letter in the alphabet, then they have to decode it in their head and guess. Amazing:

Sumocat saw this post from Apple reviewer John Gruber requesting a Markup for Safari feature and dedicated to make a close-as-possible version in Shortcuts.

His shortcut lets you take a screenshot, save the marked-up file to iCloud drive, then re-access the annotated file again from Safari when you want to pull it up – he’s calling it WebCatch:

Chris Rowe on Twitter shared this shortcut in a reply to Jack Bingham who has a daily repeating reminder with Daily Stoic Don’ts – Chris’ shortcut similarly puts daily stoic quotes into Things automatically.

“It is not shortcuts that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to make shortcuts” – Matthew Aurelius, probably:

This thread from @YourDadvice is actually amazing — he was getting spam texts repeatedly for days, until... 

He started spamming them back, using Shortcuts to send them excessive messages — this likely resulted in a bunch of charges for them, and the spammers dropping him from the list:

Dan Becker on Twitter shared this clever shortcut that takes the contents of the Literature Clock website—a site that shows you the time by finding a quote from a book that includes the time—and speaks it out loud for you:

Derek on twitter shared this interesting idea around using Shortcuts to update iOS bundles — he’s referring to the package code and resources stored that are used to generate an app with Xcode. Basically, I take it to mean he can technically *develop his app* using Shortcuts, which is amazing.

Separately, it also got me thinking about “bundles” on the Mac, which, for end-users, are .applications — when you right click on an app, you can “Show Package Contents” and see all the files it’s using to run the app. That means, with Shortcuts, you could theoretically update or retrieve the contents of your apps by looking into the Mac app’s .application package — another idea I’ll have to explore in the future…

Eric Thurow replied to this prompt “What do you listen to when you don’t know what to listen to?” with a Shortcuts automation that shuffles a preselected playlist — perfect for a CarPlay automation:

Roman Pshichenko remarked on Twitter about the power of off-the-shelf tools, which does indeed describe Shortcuts.

In his shortcut, he uses the Extract Text from Image and Make Spoken Audio actions to generate a whole audio file from an image of some text, then plays it out loud:

This is another amazing thread where Nick Oso shared the harrowing tale of his child using Shortcuts to prank him and say “Initiating factory reset” and turning his screen red using the Color Filter feature — this kid is going somewhere:

Braden on Twitter shared this teaser set of shortcuts for his DNS service ControlD, which provides an API and user control over activity on their network — interesting idea:

Lineage Gaming shared this clever shortcut for reducing one’s time on social media without entirely giving up the services — using shortcuts to pick which one to open, then setting timers and the Vibrate Device action to buzz at short intervals until it kicks you out of the app:

Martin DB shared this other handy shortcut for setting a pre-set length for a reminder that a parking meter is going to expire — I set up something similar when I had a coworking space last summer:

Spencer Chang on Twitter and Martin DB both shared posts mentioning the same problem I’m having — editing Keys in a dictionary action will cause the entire app to crash, like it can’t save the string in the field:

Vince Schwidder took the words out of my mouth with this post — I’d love the ability to toggle Continuity Camera on/off so that, at times when I’m not using my phone, it will stop automatically connecting anytime I open a video app.

When converting Markdown or HTML to Rich Text, the Shortcuts app has been coercing the entire output into an .HTML file randomly and not actually producing usable rich text:

Since sometime last summer, the Combine Images action on Mac has been broken and errantly moves half the images it combines down about 50px, ruining the output of the result (and it works fine on iPhone and iPad).

I use this functionality to generate images for my Shortcuts Library, which I do every single day — right now, I have to round-trip images to my other devices, combine them there, then bring them back to my Mac, which is a huge pain.