This video is sponsored by Morning Brew.
I get so many requests here on the channel to make some content about the Shortcuts App
for iPhone.
And I can understand why, because in my opinion, it’s one of the most misunderstood, but
at the same time most powerful apps in the Apple ecosystem.
You can do so much with this app, and whilst it’s true that becoming a real Shortcuts
expert isn’t easy, especially when compared with other Apple apps, don’t let that put
you off - there really is something here for everyone, regardless of how tech-savvy you
are.
I’m going to cover Shortcuts in a range of videos, but for now, this is my introduction
video, where I’ll explain what a shortcut is, the different ways that you can get a
shortcut up and running on your phone, and even show you a couple of simple shortcuts
that you can create yourself, today.
This is Shortcuts basics, shortcuts 101, so if that sounds good to you, stick around until
the end of the video, I think you’ll be pretty surprised at just how much cool stuff
you can do with your iPhone and this app.
I’m already working on some more shortcuts videos, where I’ll be diving deeper into
the app, so do consider subscribing to the channel if they sound good to you.
OK, let’s get into it.
If you’ve ever used a Macro in something like Excel, where you pre-programme a bunch
of functions to happen in sequence, at the push of a button, that’s essentially what
a shortcut is on your iPhone.
A shortcut allows you to run functions, the same functions that you might otherwise do
manually, just by pushing a button or saying a spoken command to your phone.
But it’s the ability to customise these functions, and run multiple functions automatically,
one after another, that make shortcuts so extremely powerful.
So, an example, and a pretty basic one.
I’ve got a shortcut setup where, if I speak the phrase ‘get me home’ to my phone,
my phone will open up Maps, input my home address, find me the fastest driving directions
to my address, and then automatically begin turn-by-turn driving directions for me.
I literally just have to say that one phrase, and my phone will complete a number of tasks
that I would otherwise have to do manually, which is great if I’m sat in my car at the
time, and need to do everything hands-free.
But Shortcuts can do so much more than that.
Some of the more advanced shortcuts can do things like create meeting notes for you at
the touch of a button, or capture a screenshot of what’s happening on your screen, and
automatically send the image to a pre-determined contact, or delay the sending of a text message
for you, sending it automatically, later on, at a time of your choosing.
Shortcuts cover pretty much every aspect of your Apple device, and they can even integrate
with third party apps, so the potential for creating meaningful shortcuts that will make
a real difference to you is pretty much limitless.
And thankfully, as I’ll show you a bit later on in this video, you don’t need a degree
in computer coding to be able to create some for yourself.
Before we continue, a quick word from the sponsor of today’s video, Morning Brew.
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A quick mention of Siri, because I think this confuses a lot of people.
Apple themselves often refer to shortcuts as ‘Siri Shortcuts’, and that’s simply
because for each shortcut that you create, you can choose to either run the shortcut
by tapping a button on your iPhone, or you can assign a specific phrase to the shortcut.
Then, when you say that shortcut to Siri, it will run the shortcut for you instead,
which of course can be helpful if you need to do something hands-free.
For example, a shortcut that you might decide to run could be a shortcut that automatically
uses maps data to establish the length of time it’s going to take to drive from your
home to your office, to then add a little bit of time for you to walk from your car
to your office, and then to figure out, based on current traffic conditions, what time you
need to leave the house, in order to get to work by whatever time you start work at.
This might sound extremely clever, but it’s actually pretty simple stuff that your device
is doing, it’s simply pulling together data alongside data it already knows about you,
to give you an answer to a question, and that question is, ‘what time do I need to leave’.
So, where Siri comes in, is in your ability to assign this shortcut to a phrase.
The phrase can be whatever you want it to be, you literally record yourself saying whatever
you want to say, but the most logical would be ‘what time do I need to leave’.
The idea then is that, when you’re rushing around in the morning, looking for your keys
and grabbing your toast, you don’t even need to pick up your phone, you can simply
trigger Siri on your phone, or your Watch, or your HomePod, and say ‘what time do I
need to leave’, and Siri will speak the answer back to you.
Clearly, some shortcuts work much better with Siri than others, and you don’t have to
use Siri, it’s merely there as an option, should you want it.
OK so, we know what a shortcut is.
How do we go about getting some shortcuts?
Well there are 2 methods, one is very simple, and the other ranges from very easy to ‘you
probably need a little bit of coding knowledge to make this work’ difficult.
We’re going to keep it simple in this video though, so don’t worry.
We’ll talk about the easy one first.
You can download shortcuts that other people have created.
Apple have created a bunch of them themselves, and included them within the shortcuts app
in the gallery, I’ll show you this in a few minutes.
But you can also get them from the web.
In much the same way that Spotify users can create playlists and share links to them,
or in the same way that you can upload a file to Dropbox and share that file with other
people, you can share shortcuts that you’ve created with other people, and you can download
shortcuts that other people have made public or available to you.
You might need to do a little bit of tweaking to get the shortcut to work just right for
you, but in general, this is a pretty easy way of getting shortcuts.
The other method is to create your own shortcut, from scratch.
This is definitely more complicated, and it can get really complicated if you want it
to, but for a lot of shortcuts, it’s actually much easier than you might think, and to prove
this, I’m going to walk you through two examples in the next section.
OK so, I think the best way of understanding what a shortcut is, is to create one, so let’s
do that.
Let’s start really simple.
Let’s say that you always FaceTime call a specific person from your contacts list
everyday.
Now, the manual way of FaceTime calling that person would be to open up the FaceTime app,
then search for that contact within the list, then press the FaceTime button.
What we can do, is create a simple shortcut, that can live on our phone’s Homescreen,
that will allow you to do all of that, just by tapping one button.
We start by opening the Shortcuts app, which you can find by going to the spotlight search
of your phone and looking for it.
If you don’t have it downloaded on your phone already, head to the App Store and download
it.
It’s free, it looks like this, and it’s an Apple app, so it’s perfectly safe to
download.
Once you’ve done that, open up the Shortcuts app, and then tap this little plus icon in
the upper-right of the screen.
This is the button we use to create a new shortcut.
We’ll start by naming the shortcut.
So because I’m going to create a shortcut to FaceTime my friend John, I’ll call the
shortcut ‘FaceTime John’.
I’m then going to tap the ‘Add Action’ button underneath, to begin creating the actual
shortcut.
We’ll focus on this section up at the top of the screen, where we’ve got a header
called Categories, and a header called Apps.
Basically, this is where we can choose from all of the various commands that we might
want to use as part of our shortcut.
We’ll explore categories in more detail in a moment, but for now let’s keep things
simple, and let’s get the command we need for our shortcut.
Do this by choosing Apps, and then choosing FaceTime.
In my case, the app is suggesting a contact for me to include already, but this isn’t
the right contact for me, so I’m going to tap here where it says FaceTime.
Back on the shortcut screen, you can see that the command to FaceTime call a contact has
been added to our shortcut.
Notice that the FaceTime part of this is in clear colour, but the ‘Contact’ section
is kind of greyed out.
This is because the app is waiting on us to choose a relevant contact, so I’m going
to tap into that.
I’m then going to choose my contact from the list.
And that’s it, for this shortcut, that’s all we need.
The way shortcuts work, visually, is that the shortcut will begin at the top, and work
it’s way down through the commands, so if we look at this, we can see that this shortcut
is going to launch FaceTime, then call the contact that we’ve selected.
If you think about it, that’s it, that’s all we need.
We could add more commands in underneath if we needed to, but we don’t for this particular
shortcut, so I’m going to finish up.
The final thing to do, is down here at the bottom of the screen, choose Add to HomeScreen,
so that this is on our home screen, ready to go.
Then on this page, I’m going to tap into the icon, and tap ‘choose photo’, and
then I’m going to select a photo of John that I’ve got in my photo library.
And now, back on my Home Screen, you can see that the ‘FaceTime John’ button is there,
complete with his photo.
Tapping that will immediately launch the FaceTime app, and call John.
Now, that’s obviously a very basic shortcut, but it was just to give you a feel for how
shortcuts work.
Let’s look at something a bit more complex in the next example.
This time, let’s create a shortcut that will take a screenshot of whatever is on our
screen at that moment in time, and send it automatically via email to a pre-determined
contact.
Again, the idea here is that we’re reducing loads of steps down to just one button, and
having the shortcut do everything for us.
I just want to hit one button, or speak a phrase, and have the phone do everything for
me.
This could be useful if you have something happen on your device that you’re unfamiliar
with like an error message for example, and you want to share it with a friend or family
member who might be able to help you figure it out for example.
So again, just like the previous example, we begin by opening up the Shortcuts app,
and then choosing the plus button in the upper right of the screen.
For the name, I’m going to call this ‘Email Screen’, as that’s pretty much what we’re
going to be doing here.
Then I’m going to choose ‘Add Action’.
So let’s think about what we want to do.
We want to take a screenshot, and email it, so the first thing that has to happen, is
we need our phone to take a screenshot for us.
Now remember, in the last example, we searched by app, and we went to FaceTime to choose
an option from there.
This time around, app isn’t going to work, because capturing a screenshot isn’t linked
to an app, it’s a generic phone action.
So for this, we need to look under categories.
You can see that we have an option called ‘All Actions’, which is of course useful
because it shows you everything, but that in itself can be an issue, as it can get a
bit complicated in there.
Scripting, if you look in there, does have some useful options, but it doesn’t have
the option that we want.
For us, we need to head into Media, and then scroll down to where it says Device, and there
you can see ‘Take Screenshot’, which is the first action that we’re looking for.
I’ll tap on that to add it in.
Remember that I mentioned in the previous shortcut example, that the way a shortcut
works is it begins at the top, and works it’s way down.
So right now, our shortcut is going to take a screenshot of whatever is on the screen,
but nothing more than that.
So we need to add another action.
To do that, tap the cross down at the bottom to get the search menu, and tap into that
to bring us back to the previous screen.
If you think about it, the next action that we want, is to take our screenshot that we’ve
just created, and email it.
So I’ll tap on Sharing, and you can see that I’ve got a range of sharing-relevant
options to choose from.
I could send this screenshot in a message to someone.
I could post it to a shared album in Photos.
I could airdrop this to someone, or send it via WhatsApp.
Obviously for this, we’re going to send it via Email, so that’s the option that
I’m going to choose from the list.
You can see that I’ve got some information that I need to fill in.
Where it says ‘recipients’, it’s greyed out, so as we know, the app is waiting for
us to confirm some information here.
If I tap into that, I can choose a recipient.
I’m going to input an email address in there.
Then underneath that, we’ve got the same kind of field for ‘Subject’.
I want to have the shortcut automatically input a subject line for me, I don’t want
to have to do anything manually, so I’m going to tap into there, and type a subject
out.
If I scroll along here, you can see that we can automatically add some other details in,
like including the device details of the phone I’m using, or adding in the current date.
I’m not going to add any of these, but they are there if you need them.
So, our shortcut is taking shape.
We can check progress by pressing the play button at the bottom right of the screen to
see how the shortcut is looking.
If I press that, you can see that the phone takes a screenshot, and inserts it into an
email, but then the email pops up on screen.
We have to manually press the send button, which is still pretty good, but it’s not
what I want, I want the entire thing to happen automatically, which we can achieve, we just
have to tweak a couple of the shortcut settings.
To do this, I’m going to tap on this down arrow, to bring up some options.
In the From field, I’m going to type my name.
You can also see that you’ve got a CC, a carbon copy field, which lets you add an additional
recipient or recipients in if you wish.
BCC stands for blind carbon copy, it’s the same as CC, but the recipient won’t be able
to see any of the emails included in this field.
The important menu for us to change is this one here, ‘Show Compose Sheet’.
Essentially, if that’s toggled on, when you run the shortcut, it will compose the
email for you, but will then show you the email for you to approve and manually send
first.
We don’t want that, so I’m going to toggle that option off.
Notice that when I do that, we then have to choose which email account to send the email
from, which I’ll now do.
OK, so we now have a shortcut that will take a screenshot of our screen, input it into
an email, populate the subject of that email for us, and send it to an address we’ve
approved, from an address that we’ve chosen.
That’s essentially everything, so I think we’re good to go.
Notice up here at the top, underneath the name of the shortcut, it has a Siri command.
That’s because that’s the command that we need to speak, in order to run our action,
if we’d like to do this using a voice command.
So I’m going to close out of this, and then I’m going to open up another app, let’s
open up Safari.
And let’s just say for the sake of illustration, that I’ve got a problem with this web page,
and I need to send a screenshot.
I’ll access Siri and just say, ‘email screen’.
If you get a message asking you to allow the shortcut to run, choose Always Allow, you
shouldn’t have to allow it again.
And look, just like that, our shortcut has run.
I can see in my email inbox, that I’ve got a screenshot, that has been sent out automatically.
And we literally just had to speak a phrase to our phone.
Amazing right?
Now obviously, I get that this is a niche shortcut, not everyone is going to find this
useful, but the idea was to show you just how quick and easy it is to get started with
shortcuts, and just how powerful they can be.
We’ll explore more shortcuts in future videos, but for now, let’s move on to the next section,
which is even easier.
If making shortcuts isn’t really for you, you’ll be pleased to know that there is
a much, much easier option, that still gives you enormous potential for adding incredible
shortcuts to your device, and that’s to download shortcuts that other people have
created themselves.
There’s a couple of ways that you can do this.
The first is via the Shortcuts app.
Instead of going into Automation, choose Gallery down here at the bottom of the screen.
I’m then going to scroll down a bit, until you begin to see these sub-sections.
I’ve got one called ‘Get Stuff Done’, then one called ‘Essentials’, then one
called ‘Work from Anywhere’.
Let’s take a look at some of them.
To do that, we just tap on one of the shortcut tiles, to learn a bit more about it.
So, Turn Text into Audio will create an audio file using text to speech.
So in other words, if I’ve got a notes document that I’ve compiled or downloaded, I could
use this to quickly create an audio file that I could then listen to while I’m on the
treadmill or out for a walk or something like that.
If I tap on the elipsis menu, I can actually see how this shortcut has been created.
Down here at the bottom, in the ‘About this Shortcut’ section, you can see that there’s
a voice command to run this shortcut, it will appear in Quick Actions on my Mac, and it
will even appear on Apple Watch.
This sounds pretty useful, so I’m going to add the shortcut, using this blue button
down at the bottom.
Let’s keep looking.
Here’s another useful one, Make GIF.
If I tap into that, you can see that the way this works, is that it will create a GIF file
from a Live Photo or a video.
We’ll keep looking.
Here’s one called Time Tracking, and this one is interesting because it’s a good example
of a shortcut that you have to configure in order to run it.
So, if I click into it, you can see that this is a quick way of tracking time spent on tasks,
and inputting that information into a Note.
If I tap into the ellipsis for Time Tracking, you can see a comment, that explains that
we’ll need to input some data before this will be able to run.
The data is in this list section here.
So, for me for example, if I was going to use this, I might have an option in the list
called ‘script writing’.
And then option two could be ‘shooting video’.
And then option three could be ‘editing video’.
And then once this is configured, I could add this shortcut, and then run it each time
I want to log some time that I’ve spent working on the various parts of my business.
There’s loads of different ones to choose from in the Gallery, way too many for me to
include in this video, so it’s definitely worth you spending some time having a look
to see if any of them would work for you.
The other way that you can add shortcuts that other people have created, is to download
them directly from the web.
So there you go, an overview of the Shortcuts app.
Honestly, the best thing you can do now is go and open the app up, and spend some time
with it.
Think of an action that you carry out on your phone on a regular basis, and then see if
you can automate it using the shortcuts app.
I’ve deliberately kept this video pretty basic, but I do plan on making some followup
videos, where I’ll look at more specific shortcuts, and get way more in-depth.
What about you?
Have you created any useful shortcuts yourself?
If you have, drop me a comment and let me know about them.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like, and
subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.