Shortcuts

I like having one button or word set my volume, playlist, and shuffle/repeat, especially when my central nervous system is acting up and this playlist is something that helps. I really like it. I also see why other people are wanting more. You have hooked me and I want more. Right now it is like playing with blocks in a vacuum: limited output nodes and iOS does not let Shortcuts know what is going on outside. I have to make broad assumptions about when most of these shortcuts will fire, my playlist being an exception because it is completely contained in my phone. I understand the desire for privacy and not executing arbitrary programs no matter how small, but Shortcuts is advertised as being able to order your favorite coffee at your favorite cafe. If it is allowed to touch my credit cards, why is it not able to know my location and the viable routes to my destination and the travel time of each route the way some apps can if I go the long route? In other words, if I make the shortcut or give it off of the approved gallery and other apps cannot make shortcuts, what is wrong with making a delayed text message or other shortcuts that do arbitrary things? This a toy, demonstrated by the gallery still only having 50 shortcuts a year later. I request that we be allowed to go deeper, because clever use of websites allows for arbitrary exploitation in a way that is more likely to involve bad actors.

I had used the Workflow app for a while before they joined apple, and it blew my mind how completely it improved the way I interact with my phone. Now that Workflow has changed to Shortcuts the app is so much faster and seems much more deeply integrated into iOS. Editing shortcuts is much more intuitive now that the actions menu remains available at the bottom of the screen. The visual redesign is also really refreshing. It still amazes me that I can do so much with this app. My only complaints: I have Drafts 4 installed but Shortcuts doesn’t recognize it and continues to redirect me to the app store to download. This is a huge pain as many of my shortcuts are based on that version of Drafts. Additionally, the Drafts actions show the icon for Drafts 5, but the actions themselves refer to Drafts 4 (the “View in App Store” link even directs me to Drafts 4, which I already have installed). My other smaller complaint is that I wish there were more connections to system settings - I would love to be able to turn rotation lock off or on with one click, or access and update my alarms via Shortcuts but neither of these seem to be possible (yet).

Apparently this is the easiest way for me to make a feature request 🙄 Anyway, I’ve been using this app before Apple took it over, and it’s generally really useful. I do have a few complaints though: 1. The new UI flow for creating a shortcut is generally hard to use. I understand why the shortcuts are on a card at the bottom now, b/c it gives more of a feeling of being able to flip back and forth, but you have to pull the card up from the bottom slowly or else you pull up the widget screen, and what’s on the card first is suggestions (not what I want) & I have to tap on the search bar to bring up the actual categories and get over to Favorites (generally what I want to see first). 2. There are still some gaps in terms of actions. For example, the reason I’m writing this review is that I want to change a reminder from checked to unchecked through Shortcuts, but the only option I have is to delete the reminder instead, an action that requires three confirmations before executing. That’s a major slowdown to my script. Plz add this feature.

This is a good app. I am glad to see the ability to create Siri Shortcuts. However, while it has more functionality, it is not as stable as Workflow. Apple Watch functionality has been largely crippled, as it can only run shortcuts that don’t have menu options such as logging caffeine or setting a tea timer. It is great to see some advanced functions like running an script over SSH, but it is missing some of the basics capturing a webpage to Notes (like Evernote can). Shortcuts also needs a training manual to help us learn how these commands work. It is powerful, but that comes with complexity. At the end of the day, Shortcuts is a great idea, but at the end of the day, we need our digital assistants to be simple. They need to understand us. Having to train them this way isn’t going to further our adoption. Automation is great in its own right, but a digital assistant needs to be easy, simple, adaptive to us, able to understand us in context, in tone, etc. Shortcuts is great for automation, but not a true replacement for the work needed to make Siri a serious tool in the digital assistant space.

response required

UPDATE: In the ~10 months since I originally left this review, they’ve made one minor feature update. Still pointless and at this rate it always will be. Reducing to rating from 2 stars to one, as development seems effectively dead. I like where they’re going with this but in its current state it has extremely limited functionality. It’s kind of strange; even really simple, obvious stuff is missing from a lot of the built in apps. For example, you can get an ETA to a destination from Maps but there’s no way to return any information about the route. So I can get it to tell me how long it’s going to take to get to work in the morning but will not get any indication of which of the numerous routes it’s referring to. Ok, no problem, I’ll get directions and parse out some route details... nope, the only map directions-related actions open the Maps app, you can’t just have it return text. I don’t want or need this because I’m not going to navigate a route I drive multiple times a week, I just want “19 mins via Highway 123”. I’ve thought up a dozen different shortcuts I’ve wanted to make but only had one not turn out to be infeasible the apps limitations. Maybe this will be great after a couple years of development. Right now, it’s a novelty.