I’ve really enjoyed watching the Workflow app get acquired by Apple and turned into Shortcuts. Each year Apple adds more features that point to it being the primary future of Apple’s automation strategy. With Apple’s scale, this is surely introducing the Shortcuts app to many people as their first automation tool. But with the march of new features, alongside new users, comes massive engineering challenges to satisfy an increasing number of Shortcut contexts and devices.
If you use HomeKit and get into automation, it won’t be long until you encounter Shortcuts in some form. You can create specialized shortcuts for automating your home inside automations in Apple’s Home app. You can also tie commands to your home with commands to your phone and apps inside the Shortcuts app. This is all very powerful, and there’s no shortage of great content on the internet to help you learn more. My favorites are MacStories.net, Matthew Cassinelli, and Christopher Lawley.
This year Shortcuts came to the Mac with macOS Monterey. Apple has integrated it into macOS in some very Mac-like ways including running shortcuts from the menu bar, and the services menu. But I still think there are a variety of issues with Shortcuts that make it difficult to use for complex tasks.
Too many platform-specific actions needed
Apple replaced their old automation app, Automator, with Shortcuts for Mac. In order to do so, they added a number of exciting commands to Shortcuts including more for managing files. Understandably, some Automator actions don’t carry over to other devices. You don’t eject a drive or use Disk Utility on iOS. The problem is that there are certain actions, specifically Safari actions, that theoretically should have come over to the Mac from iOS, but did not. This mismatch of what will work where is confusing for users. If you are trying to get a Shotcut to work across platforms, Matthew Cassinelli recently posted this helpful tweet summarizing what to do:
While this works, I think there’s a more Apple-style, effortless user experience somewhere between the example above and the impossible goal of having every action everywhere.
Buggy Mac app
John Voorhees at MacStories summed it up perfectly in his macOS Monterey review:
“I still think Shortcuts will get there, and I believe Apple is committed to Shortcuts on the Mac, but the version of Shortcuts that has shipped with Monterey is still more a promise than a workable solution.”
You could make the argument that the Shortcuts team didn’t put enough effort into the Mac version, but from the outside, it feels to me more like they underestimated the scale of building an automation tool for the Mac. Add to that building this new Mac app with Apple’s newer SwiftUI framework, and it’s an even bigger challenge.
I had a Workflow automation that I used for starting new YouTube videos. It copied a template project folder from iCloud to the Movies folder and renamed some files to match the project name I supplied when it ran. When I converted this to Shortcuts, I found it hard to follow the converted actions, and difficult to modify. Rebuilding the idea from scratch in Shortcuts, I had to drop down to shell script for part of it. While it’s a power user feature, I’m so glad it’s there. Also, copying of a .fcpbundle
file is not as straightforward as you might think (hint: cp -R
is your friend!). I might still change this to be an Alfred workflow, since I think that’s a better fit for my needs now.
Aside from my YouTube project issue, I find the Mac app difficult to use for someone who already understands Shortcuts. Way too much functionality is hidden in context menus for a new user to understand.
Stalling home commands
Outside the Mac, one of my biggest complaints about using Shortcuts to automate my home is that large home actions can often stall a shortcut. For example, my bedtime shortcut sets my security system, runs my good night scene turning off all the lights, turns on Do Not Disturb, and presents a menu of alarm times. The problem is that both “Control home” actions in shortcuts can stall indefinitely as I run this from tapping an icon on the home screen. I wish there was some intelligence with Siri around shortcuts to be able to run home actions at the same time as the device-centered actions. This way I could be choosing my alarm times while the home requests were still waiting for a callback from the home hub. I could partially work around this by moving my alarm selection to the start of the Shortcut, but it’s still not doing the tasks in parallel.
Can I trust Shortcuts?
There are a handful of simple jobs that are slightly faster when I use actions in Shortcuts to merge multiple steps into one. I’ll probably do a YouTube video on some of these in the future. I’m amazed by some of the more complex Shortcuts I see out there on the web like Federicco Viticci’s Apple Frames Shortcut.
But given the challenges I’ve faced in creating and using custom Shortcuts, I still don’t trust that I’m going to get back my investment of time to build a fancy new shortcut since it might be riddled with bugs and unforeseen shortcomings. Most automations I rely on every day on the Mac are run in Keyboard Maestro, Alfred, a script, or some combination of those three.
The problem might be me. Is my intention to build shortcuts that are more autonomous than their name implies? The best Shortcuts in my experience, live up to the name shortcut. In other words, they simply compress a few steps into one action that is faster and easier to do. I remain hopeful and optimistic that Apple’s investments in Shortcuts will gradually create a rock-solid automation solution across all their devices and HomeKit. Until then, it remains relegated to very simple tasks for me.
My video
This week I talk about some of my favorite smart home products that are easy to install and work great if you are renting and can't install more permanent tech like thermostats or in-wall switches.
Around the web
Aqara E1
Aqara launched a new tiny hub that is powered by USB. The Brad Lloyd has more details:
Meta
Facebook is restructuring with a parent company called Meta overseeing the family of apps we are most familiar with, alongside their increasingly separate VR/AR/metaverse projects like Oculus. Ben Thompson from Stratechery has some great thoughts on this move that I won’t try to summarize here. He also got to do an interview with Mark Zuckerberg himself!
https://stratechery.com/2021/meta/
Giveaway Winner
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My new computer!
I got a new MacBook Pro earlier this week. I landed on the 14” M1 Max with a 32 core GPU, 64GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD. It’s super fast and I love the 14” size.
I might share more about this computer in the coming weeks, but we have a lot of smart home tech to cover first. November is shaping up the be a busy month for this newsletter and my YouTube channel. Buckle up. 😃
Thanks for the heads-up. It’s a real testament to how well Apple devices integrate with one another that it never occurred to me to think that shortcuts might not cross the iOS/MacOS divide flawlessly. Now I know better. As for complex shortcuts hanging midway through execution, I encountered this on iOS when I tried to set up a toggle to turn my home theater lights on and off. This was a while ago, so I can’t recall the details. Suffice it to say, I share your pain!