Once in a while, on the weekends, I wake up with the urge to check out what new apps are on the App Store. And this past weekend, I stumbled upon Shortcuts.
What is Shortcuts?
Shortcuts allow you to integrate different apps and automate actions together. If you're familiar with Alfred, it is similar to Alfred Workflows. And how you build your actions and events is very similar to the scratch interface. Shortcuts was developed by Apple and it was previously called Workflow. Now you know why I brought up Alfred Workflows 😃.
So What Can You Do?
There are tons of things you can do with it. Here are a few:
- Send ETA with a button press
- Share Location
- Download files on the iPhone
- Send pre-defined text message
- And many many more
You can find a whole list of Shortcuts that other people have posted on ShortcutsGallery.
Making Your Own
These are pretty self explanatory if you have some experience with programming. You can do everything from setting variables, using variables, asking for user input from an input dialog, or show input result.
What makes Shortcuts so powerful is that you can integrate with many native apps. This gives it an edge over IFTTT which mainly gives you access to other published apps. I personally use both IFTTT and Shortcuts to suit my needs. Customize what you want and automate those repetitive tasks!
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