- Thanks to Hover for sponsoring this video
and supporting my channel.
Two weeks ago Apple released the long awaited iOS 14.
And while it's got lots of new bells
and whistles we could talk about,
today, I we're going to explore what I think is hands down
the most useful productivity feature it has.
So iOS 14 came out of beta just about a week or two ago
and I think most people would say the most exciting feature
in iOS 14 is the ability to put widgets
on your Home Screen to customize them.
I know my Android user friends have had this ability
for years and I'm sure there's gonna be some
of the comments rubbing my nose in it,
but personally, as somebody who's been using an iPhone,
since, I think, 2011 or 2012, this has been something
that I had been wanting for a really, really long time.
But as cool as this feature is as a whole,
it wasn't really exciting enough
for me to make a full video on it
until I found out about the Shortcuts Widget.
So Shortcuts is an app that bought
from a third party developer a few years ago
and integrated into iOS.
And it essentially lets you create custom shortcuts
to do a whole ton of different things.
And personally, I'd never really played around
with the Shortcuts app very much
until I saw it in that list of widget options,
but after playing with it over the weekend,
after learning what it could do,
after learning that it can actually create scripts
and do lots of really cool custom stuff,
I started getting that same mental rush that I get
when I pull off a particularly complex magic,
the Gathering Combo
I live for stuff like that and for stuff like this.
So this is the Home Screen setup that I'm rocking right now.
Like I said, I've got my screen time widget
and my exercise widget right here,
but the real cool stuff lives here in the Shortcuts Widget
on the homepage.
So first I've got a button for Notion
and this was actually my inspiration for making this
because Notion doesn't currently have a widget
which I would love to see them make,
but for now I can click this button
and I have several different choices.
I can go to my inbox,
which I talked about in my Notion note taking video.
This is my quick capture area
where I can easily create a new note very, very quickly,
or I can go to the full notebook area if I wanna get
into a specific notebook
like content or music, or I can go to my workspace here.
So this is a custom workspace
for myself that I've been developing.
I can go down here
and I can see all the different projects I have
in progress across my business,
all the videos I'm working on,
the newsletters I need to write.
I can go down here and see my editorial calendar.
And I'm actually working on a course,
all about how teams and creators can use Notion.
So if you're interested in getting updates
about that and maybe even getting into a beta version
that'll go live before the full price version,
I'll have a link in the description down below
where you can sign up for an email list to get updates.
But secondly, we have a Spotify playlist thing.
So often when I go to the gym,
I wanna easily launch my workout playlist.
I can do that from here
and it'll instantly launch it, which is pretty cool.
I've got a Slack DM button here.
So I've got several people across different Slack workspaces
who I DM on a daily basis.
And it's kind of a pain to switch workspaces
in the Slack app, so using deep Slack URL linking,
I can open up, say, a DM with Tony, basically instantly.
Lastly, I've got Record Now,
which just opens up the voice recorder app
and starts recording immediately.
So what I wanna do for the rest of this video is show you
how to set this up.
And hopefully this is gonna serve
as both the tutorial for the Shortcuts app
and also how to set up widgets in general.
So to start this out,
let's get a widget onto the Home Screen.
You can hold down here
until you get this whole edit interface here.
I'm just gonna swipe over to a brand new Home Screen,
hit this plus button and start searching for widgets.
You got a ton of different choices here,
but these shortcuts one is gonna be near the bottom.
So we'll grab that.
And I'm just gonna go
with one of these four grid boxes here.
You can do a really big one, if you want,
you can do a single one.
I like this one.
So we'll go with that.
And right now it's just gonna show the top four shortcuts
in my entire Shortcuts app.
So what we really wanna do is create a custom folder
where we can choose which shortcuts are shown
in this widget.
So to do that first, we're gonna
to the Shortcuts app itself and create a folder.
Back here, I'll just create one called Demo
for this purpose.
And as soon as I add it,
I can come back to this widget we've created.
I can hold it for a second, hit Edit Widget,
and then choose this Demo folder.
So right now it is gonna be empty, which means
that we need to start populating it with shortcuts.
So let's go back to that Shortcuts app
and I'm gonna create a very, very simple one
to start us out.
Let's do that Voice Memos one,
since it's kind of a built in feature.
So if you hit plus here, we can hit Add an Action.
And you've got a whole bunch of different choices here.
You can call people, you can text people,
you can get into scripting.
Right now, let's just go to apps
and find that Voice Memos app right here.
And you've got a couple of different choices.
Listen to my most recent one or record a new voice memo.
This is the one we wanna pick for quick capture.
I don't want a show when run confirmation here
and then wanna give it a name.
So let's just call it Record.
We can come in here and I'll just choose, I don't know,
this baby wearing a bow because why not? (chuckles)
Oh, and one thing I do wanna mention here.
So I talked
about this whole shortcuts process on my Twitter.
In fact, if you want to follow me over @TomFrankly,
you might be able to see stuff like this
before it gets on this YouTube channel,
which takes a lot more production time,
but if you add this to your Home Screen,
and let's go ahead and do it right now.
We'll call it New Shortcut.
I don't really care what I call it
because I don't really want it.
I'm gonna add it to my Home Screen,
and then I'll hit Done as well.
So now it exists in our widget here.
And if I tap it,
it's gonna immediately start recording my voice
which is great, that's the behavior we want.
If we use the little Home Screen shortcut here, it works,
but when I tap it,
it's gonna pass through the Shortcuts app first,
which is just kind of annoying.
I know it's not really that big of a deal,
you get into it and it starts recording immediately,
but it's just sort of inelegant.
So if anybody at the Apple design team is watching this,
I would love for this Add to Home Screen feature
to function just like the widget.
Just do a no app pass through,
just go right to the app that we want.
So this one was easy.
Let's create something a bit more complicated.
How about opening a Notion page,
like my inbox right here?
The cool thing about Notion is you can grab the link
to basically any page that you want.
So if we go to here to the three dot menu
which you can also do on the desktop and hit Copy Link,
that's gonna copy the link to your clipboard.
And if we head back to Shortcuts,
what we can do is create a shortcut adding an action
in the web category called Open URLs.
And if we paste that URL right here,
it's gonna open this page
and we're just gonna call that Inbox.
Again, I will give it a glyph.
This one will be a Play button, I don't know why.
We'll let it be red.
And now it's gonna be in our demo widget here.
So if I click this, and there is our inbox.
And this process is not unique to Notion.
If you have an ability to copy URL
and that will launch the app using that URL,
you can build a shortcut for it.
So let's go ahead
and do it with a Spotify playlist real quick.
I've got my workout playlist here.
Maybe I wanna link to something different.
Maybe I wanna link to my Sunday Study playlist.
So let's find that here it is, copy the link to it,
which is just gonna be done through share and Copy Link.
And we can go right back to Shortcuts,
go like that, go to Web, go to Open URLs,
paste that URL in, bada boom.
Hit Done, hit Done, and boom, now we have a launcher
for our Study playlist,
but of course, what I showed you at the beginning
of this video is a little bit more complicated
than what we've just built
because on my true widget over here,
when I tap these, I get a menu
so I can choose several different places to go.
So now I wanna show you how to construct that.
And to do it, we're gonna get a little bit
into the scripting side of Shortcuts.
Now this can get really, really complicated
to the point where people used to share shortcuts
that would be full of like actual malware
and Apple had it clamp down on people sharing shortcuts,
and you actually have to go into your settings
and disable that protection
if you want to download shortcuts from other people.
We are not gonna get that crazy here,
we're just gonna use a simple menu to give you some choices.
So let's take this Inbox one right here,
which I realize I just misspelled,
and we'll open up the details of it.
And instead of just doing this,
we'll go ahead and cancel that out
and add an action from the Scripting menu.
So you've got a ton of different options here,
as you can see, you've got If and Repeat
and all kinds of weird programming stuff,
but the first one is what we're after, Choose for Menu.
This is just gonna give you a menu
like you saw in my example.
And since we're creating a Notion launcher,
let's go ahead and make one for Inbox and one for Notes.
So that's gonna give you two different choices here
and now you've got Inbox and Notes as little blocks here.
If you hit the plus button,
you can then go to our trusty little web category
and hit Open URLs.
And then by dragging it,
you can nest it underneath each of these choices.
So we're gonna get two
of these blocks, nest them like that,
and then just go and grab our URLs like we did before.
First, we'll do Inbox and we will copy that link.
And then we'll go over to our general Notes home
and copy that link as well.
So now just to review,
we've got a scripting tool that opens the menu,
giving us the choice of Inbox or Notes.
I can add more items if I wanted to.
I can move these around if I want to.
And then I've got a block that will open a URL based
on the choice I make.
So each one has its own unique URL.
We'll hit Done there.
And I'll leave it misspelled because I don't care.
Now, if we go over to our launcher, I hit this,
I'm gonna have those choices.
Hitting Notes will open up my notebook
and hitting Inbox will open up my trusty handy-dandy inbox.
Now, one final tip I wanna share with you here is
that you don't actually need to have all
of the shortcuts you wanna use in a shortcut widget
because you can say the name
of the shortcut to Siri like so, DM Tony.
And boom, there is my DM with Tony.
So you can use this trick to easily launch shortcuts
that don't even exist in this widget.
Just make sure
that you name them something that's easy to remember
and easy to say.
And speaking of things that are easy to say,
if you want an article version of this video
with some references for the shortcuts that we just built,
you can go over to thomasjfrank.com/shortcuts,
which should hopefully be easy to remember,
not least of which because I have a fairly easy
to remember domain name
for my personal website.
And not only does that make the reference easy
for you to get to,
but ever since I built this website back in college,
it's made it easy for job recruiters
and other people to find my portfolio
and to contact me, which is why
if you don't currently have your own domain name
for your portfolio website,
you should go over to Hover and get it for yourself.
Hover has hundreds of different extensions
to choose from, ranging from your .coms and .mes,
which are great for portfolio websites,
but they also have lots of more fun ones
like .lol, or even .blog.
And once you have your domain name, they also have a couple
of really cool features
that can help make that domain even more useful.
Number one, they've got an email feature
so you can create a very professional looking email address
for yourself like thomas@collegeinfogeek.com
or a little bit more professional
than a Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail.
And they also have a Connect feature,
which lets you easily hook your domain up
to website builders and even online store builders.
So once again, if you wanna get 10% off
of your domain name purchase
and make sure that you get your domain name
before somebody else takes it and steals the rug right out
from under your feet, go over to hover.com/thomasfrank,
and to grab that domain.
Also if you enjoyed the video,
hitting that Like button is a great way
to tell the YouTube algorithm
that this video isn't complete and utter garbage,
and maybe it should show it
to somebody else once in a while,
wouldn't that be cool? (chuckles)
You can subscribe right there.
If you haven't done so already,
definitely hit that Subscribe button
so you don't miss future videos we have coming out.
Last but not least, I'm gonna have a playlist
of other videos here on tech videos I've done,
so if you want to learn how to set up your Home Screen
or make your phone a little bit less distracting,
check those out or check out my music channel right here,
or don't do any of this and go buy a cooler Lama statue
than I have right here
because as always, I can't tell you what to do,
I'm not your dad.