I’ve been using the public betas of iOS 12 since July and right off something I noticed about the suggested Shortcuts were that the specificity made them mostly useless. Why would I want to resend a message to my sister which I sent 30 minutes ago? No thanks. No, I’ve already viewed that website, I don’t need it suggested again for a voice controlled command. Another pitfall is the repeated suggestion that I can call my brother or another recently called contact. I can already do that with Siri simply by saying “Hey Siri, call my brother.” Why would I bother creating a Shortcut? During the beta period I failed to find a single suggested Shortcut that would be useful. They were all duplicates of something Siri already handles or they were far too specific to a previously done action to be useful. But I had hope that with the release of the updated Shortcut app and new apps designed to take advantage of the new system we would get some useful voice commands.

We’re only a couple days in so it’s too hard to say. There’s a lot of excitement in the Apple nerd community but I will say that I think this is going to take some time. Of the apps currently offering recordable Shortcuts, my favorite is Carrot Weather which offers several very easy to set-up voice commands. This Shortcut makes sense to me as it allows me to get my weather via voice. I can listen and be done. What makes less sense to me are the recorded shortcuts for apps that I’m likely to be interacting with on-screen. Two examples are Drafts and Things which also offer Shortcuts.

Mixing up the inputs: Visual and Audio
What we have with Shortcuts in iOS 12 is a merging of visual and audio computing. We’ve had a taste of the audio for the past few years with Siri. This is Apple’s attempt to mix it up a bit and it will be interesting to see how it pans out. Frankly, in these early days I find it a bit confusing as do my devices.

When I’m at a screen, usually the iPad, sometimes the iPhone, I will use the occasional Shortcut created by the Shortcut app. For example I’ve got one that I’ve used consistently to convert pdfs into jpgs with cropping and resizing as steps. Very handy for turning pdf flyers into jpgs for posting to client websites. I’ve also got Shortcuts for opening or creating file archives which can be handy and nice to be able to do this without third party apps. Various shortcuts for blogging such as one which takes the url and rich text from web pages and copies the combination for pasting into Drafts or iA Writer.

Another, this one used from iPhone, is a mileage calculator that I use to append text to a plain text file stored in iCloud. I get gas then run shortcut which appends the date, gallons, miles and mpg to the text file. Just a tad easier than tapping the text into Notes which is what I used to do.

Speaking of Notes, I’m surprised and disappointed that Apple has done nothing to connect Notes and Shortcuts. If they expect third party developers to take advantage of Shortcuts they should do the same. As of this moment the only Shortcut step for Notes is to create a new note. Why not let me do more? I don’t use the Bear notes app but those that do have access to at least six built in Shortcut functions. I’d love to be able to use a Shortcut to append to a note, for example,the above mentioned gas and mileage log. I’d rather keep it in Notes.

Another log that I keep is for heating and cooling my sister’s vacation cabin. We share a utility line so in the hot and cold months I keep track of the heating and cooling so that I can better estimate our shared utility bill. I’ve set-up a Shortcut that lets me simply say “AC Log On” or “AC Log Off” whenever I’ve turned her A/C on or off. At the end of the month I have a much better idea of how much her bill is. That will also come in handy during the winter when I run her heater. This also goes to a text file when it could be stored in Notes. This difference between this and the mileage log is this is one I trigger just using my voice. I wanted something super convenient because I do this action often and it is indeed very easy to do! I can use this via iPhone, iPad or HomePod. I should also be able to activate via the AppleWatch but currently get an error.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be exploring Shortcuts a bit more. Will they live up to the hopes and dreams of the Apple Nerdery? Will they prove useful for average users? Also, how do they fit into personal and work life? I’m looking forward to finding out.