Apple Shortcuts - Building your first Shortcut

1. Introduction and What to expect: Hi there. My name is Craig Male, and thank you for joining me on this little journey of learning about apple shortcuts. So this is an introduction. Of course. It's very beginner level. And the idea behind this is by the time that you've gone through all the bits and pieces of it, you should be quite familiar with what apple shortcuts are, where they came from, as well as what you can actually do with them. Before I jumped too far, though, into this whole thing. I do want to take a brief moment and introduce you to a friend of mine, this guy. Now, for the majority of the course material, you'll probably see this little talking head of myself. I like to use the talking head, the an emojis that Apple provides simply because it takes up a lot less screen space and is not as distracting as my big face right there on your screen. Especially when you're working with apple shortcuts, which gives us a small environment toe work with if you're doing it on your phone or your iPad. So this is probably what you'll see most off, so you'll probably see him a lot more than you'll see me, even though he is May I guess, Uh, but the idea here is I want to let you be able to focus on the project at hand and the project that would be working on which is a again. It's an introductory project on getting started with apple shortcuts. There'll be two aspects to it. One will be helping you create a shortcut that will be interactive with you but also attaching that shortcut to a personal automation to help automate your day. So we'll be working on what I refer to as the wake up and go automation that will connect to our personal automation set up when our alarm clock is stopped. So I hope you stick around and I hope you enjoy it. Coming up in the next part is a brief history of apple shortcuts, and exactly what are they 2. What are Shortcuts and a bit of History: coming up in the next part is a brief history of apple shortcuts, and exactly what are they? So what exactly are apple shortcuts? If you look at the official documentation on Apple's website, a shortcut is a quick way to get one or more cast on with your APS. The shortcuts APP lets you create your own shortcuts with multiple steps. For example, build a surf time shortcut, the grabs the Surf Report gives any today at the beach and launches your surf music playlist. But if you're not a surfer, that really doesn't mean anything. So what is Apple shortcuts or what are shortcuts to me? Well, I'm a developer, or at least I used to be a developer in a previous life. Now I do a lot of power point, but I also have a lot of tasks that I have to keep track of. And honestly, there's not a lot of time in the day, so short cuts offer me an alternative. So what do I mean by an alternative, though? Well, I have a lot of shortcuts now. There's a lot of people out there with even more than me. However, I have a lot of shortcuts that help me automate a bit of my day. For example, I have a short cut that allows me to speak to my phone. It captures what I'm saying. It translates that into a note and makes it available for me later while also prompting me with a reminder a week from now to follow up. Sure, I can do all that stuff manually. So could you. But the real power of the shortcuts come by, enabling you to do it one time. Call out to Siri and have Siri prompt you. You speak, Siri dictates, puts it in the notes, create the reminder. And all at once, you have just saved yourself quite a bit of time. That's the true power of shortcuts. All right, so that's a bit about what shortcuts are, at least what they mean to me. But where where did shortcuts come from? So short cuts started it as an app called workflow. It was developed by primarily by our ive Einstein, Conrad Cramer and Nick Fe. They wanted award an Apple Design Award at Dub Dub D. C. In 2015 Um, and some time in roughly around March of 2017 Apple actually acquired them very quiet, not sure how much the acquisition went for, but it was acquired. And after the acquisition was made public, Apple put the APP into the APP store for free, rebranded as shortcuts. And that's where shortcuts came from. Up next, What can you do with him? What do you need to get started and actually getting started with your first shortcut? 3. Building your first Shortcut: up next. What can you do with him? What do you need to get started and actually getting started with your first shortcut? All right, so let's tackle the very first thing. What I need to get started. What you need to get started. Well, very simply, you need the shortcuts app. Go to the APP store and download it. It's free. So that's how you got to do. All right. Now that you have the shortcut downloaded, you'll notice down on the bottom. We have my shortcuts, Automation and galler. Inside the gallery are examples of different shortcuts that you can actually get yourself. These are all just different ones available. Different categories. Is air all basically approved? Enlisted by apple? Um, and there's a lot of really great stuff in here. Some of the first ones that I looked at and I think are great are things like the home E T . A. The home E. T. A. Is actually really cool one. When you click on it, you see that there's what it is and then the actions that it has. This one has four actions, and if you click on that, you can open up those four actions you can see this is where I put in my street address. It does a map to get the driving time from the current location to the street address that I put in. Creates a text message or text field that puts in that travel time and then sends it to whoever I designate other recipients. So once this is all filled in, you put your date in no matter where you are, you can hit that little button on your phone when you're about to leave. When you start driving toe, let your friends, family or whoever know how long it will be roughly before you get home. Fantastic little thing. Very simple, very easy to do and honestly saves The guesswork. Saves you having to go in and type up that recipient. That message, everything yourself. But there's a lot of other ones in here as well, and you can take a look. It's different ones. You can see silence during the meetings, which is another great one, so you don't get little pop ups on the screen and everything in front of you as well. So it's really kind of cool again. Nine actions You can take a look at all those actions you can start to modify and adjust it after you have a copy of it Locally, you can then modify, do all the adjustments and everything like that that you need. But Apple is not the only one that provides a shortcut gallery. There's websites like routine hub share cuts and others that what they do is they provide a gallery of shortcuts based on category, that you can actually get copies off onto your local devices. Well, once you have them, of course, you can modify minute as you like each one of these. When you goto added, it also shows you the actions that are involved. But it also will require you to allow for an untrusted shortcut now an untrusted shortcut. What that actually is that's from 1/3 party website or from a friend. So if I want to share a shortcut with somebody, it's the same thing on Do you'll have to modify your settings in your IOS or iPad OS device . So on your iPhone, your iPad, whatever you have to go into the settings under the shortcuts and allow for untrusted sources. But once you have it. So what this means is, once you're allowed those untrusted sources that allows you to go in and take a look at the shortcuts here, share with friends and family. It could be something from spend tracking using Apple notes in the finance category or just taking a look at the other categories Here, for example, health and fitness. There's a lot of different things, like food tracking, Kiddo Meds Ben Time thought journal for fighting depression. There's a lot of different ones out there, and it's made by folks just like you and me, and the whole idea behind it is to share, and now it's time to create our first circle. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna get the current weather at our current location, and we're gonna take a look at what that puts it in. So here we go. Very simply, get curtain weather current location and then do a quick look that'll show you what's in there, but we don't want to see the weather conditions. What we actually want to look for is the purse chance of percent dictation, which is currently for me 50%. So this actually works out beautifully because now I actually can start to do a little bit of work around this with actually getting results. So what we don't do is want to create a number on that precipitation chance. That way we can check if the numbers greater than equal to less damn etcetera. And here we're going to do if it's greater than and let's say, 15. So 15% chance of rain and I want to bring an umbrella and that's what we're gonna do. So we're gonna put a text box field in with a little bit of, ah, text in their bring your umbrella. Um, if the number is greater than 15 if it's not greater than 15 we want to go ahead and put another textbooks filled in. And we want to write something like, Oh, I don't know. Um, no umbrella necessary. Less than a 15% chance. Arrange something along those lines. It's it's really just a message for you yourself as this thing runs. So I think, less than 15% chance of rain today. That's all we need to know Now. Here's the thing, though. How am I going to show the results of one or both or either one of those text fields. Ah, this is where variables variables are very important. So this is where variables come into play. So we're adding a variable called rain minus chance. So it's just the name could be anything you like and we're gonna put one in were on after each text box to set the text to the variable name. So, as you say, we have rain minus chances. Set the text in both cases. But this what this allows us do is then to show the results of the variable and what's in the variable itself. And there we go. All right, but we have rain. But now let's go for something else. If it's not raining, we want to check for the UV index now. The weather, of course, has this as invariable as well. So we check the we add the weather conditions again, we switch down to UV index. We create a number out of that just very similar to what we just did with the precipitation chance, right, All simple, all easy to go. And what we're gonna do is we're going to basically minute all of the things that we just did, Right? So here we are testing, are you? The index is currently zero, and that's probably because it might be that I'm running this at the middle of the night. So, of course, our values or zero, but it does give us a value and we want to do is greater than but what's the value that we choose? UV Index has different rating, so let's just do a quick little check over here on Google for what the standard UV values are. So 0 to 2 is low, 3 to 5, moderate, 67 high. And of course, 8 to 10. Very high. So anything higher than two, we might want to think about sunscreen. So we're going to do this again. Same things that we did. We're gonna grab a text action. We're gonna put two of them in on the if and then the otherwise, and then we're gonna put our to text statements in there as well. So if it's greater than two, maybe think about sunscreen. If it's less than two, probably nothing necessary at all. Okay, so here we go. We're putting these things in, and of course, what we will do after this is grab our variables as well. So as you can see, just from one starting action the weather conditions. We have a lot of different things available to us. From air quality Teoh UV index to precipitation to sunrise to sunset. All of these different factors that we can use together to enhance our little shortcut. No, in this case were just checking for whether we need an umbrella or sunscreen before leaving the house to start our day. But you could be checking for air quality wooden conditions depending on what you're about to dio again setting the variable here. There we go. UV Index. That's all we want to dio. Then we have our values, of course, showing the results of the UV index variable. Here we go. Show results. There we go. Very UV Index doesn't make a lot of sense, though, if I need an umbrella toe. Also check for UV. So let's do a little check based on the two values. So we're going to do another is statement. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna check to see if we need an umbrella. If we need an umbrella, we're not gonna bother with the UV index, But if we don't need the umbrella, then of course, we're going to check for the UV index so very similar to what we just did set up wise. It's selecting if statement So the if action, right, it's under scripting. And then what we're going to do is put that in a the end, and then we're gonna check if our rain chance equals the actual text field that we put in up at the top. We're gonna use that magic variable. We're gonna jump back up to the top, find that text field where we set the text field, bring your umbrella, right, And we're gonna make sure if the rain chance equals that text, that means we're bringing our umbrella. And therefore we don't need to worry about checking for are, um you ve But it doesn't mean we want to show the results. So we're gonna put our we're gonna move our show action down and put it here. Then we're gonna move our show UV index value, and we're gonna put it into the otherwise. So if the rain chance equals the tax, then show the rain chance otherwise show the UV index. All right, we are almost there. Were almost ready to call this shortcut complete. Now, if you just click it, it runs, gives you values. It's complete. But remember, we want to actually try to put this into a personal automation, in which case we need something a little bit more persistent than just the the information , the result on the screen when we run. So this is where we're going to switch over to actual putting notifications. That way, when I walk out of my house with my iPhone and my notifications air there on my screen, I remember to take a look. So there's a action called show notification. So we're gonna go in, We're gonna take out that hello world we're actually going to put are variable rain Chance , then under the title just to make it a little fancy, we're gonna put our wake up and go, which is the name of our shortcut gonna put that in there. Then we're going to do another show notification for the UV index. Same thing. Put the variable in change the title. And now we can actually remove the show results. Actions that we had. So the show Rain chance and show UV index. We can remove both of those. We don't need them anymore, because now when we run the shortcut, we're actually going to get a notification. Instead, the only item left now is to scroll back up to the top click on next, and when you do so it'll propped up. We give our shortcut a name, wake up and go click on the little icon. You can change the color if you like. You click over on the cliffs and you scroll through and find the cliff that you feel matches. Best to your shortcut. Click on done, and it adds it into your collection of shortcuts right there for you to click so up. Next, enhancing your shortcut, sharing your shortcut and using your shortcut and a personal automation. 4. Sharing, Enhancing and using your shortcut in a Personal Automation: so up Next, enhancing your shortcut, sharing your shortcut and using your shortcut and a personal automation. So we ended the last section with a fully function Korca. However, it's kind of a standalone. And yes, it does do everything that we asked to dio. There are ways to enhance it to enhance the experience of it. And of course, there's ways to automatically trigger it. So that's what we're gonna look at now we're gonna look at it, enhancing it and personal automation. Okay, before we start to enhance it, though, which means making changes and everything like that. I want to show you how to share your shortcut. Now, there's two purposes for this first off by sharing it your also making a copy of it at that exact moment. So if anything should go wrong, you make a whole bunch mistakes. You go down a path you don't like, how it ended up. You can actually go and reload from that same link, and you'll get the exact copy from that moment back. But sharing is actually quite simple. Um, so once you have your shortcut in like we do, we can go down here to the bottom of the screen where we have the little box with the up arrow and that little box with the up arrow is the ability to share. And when I do, this dialog box will pop open. The easiest way to do the sharing, of course, is copy the iCloud link. Now, when I copied the I Cobb link, I get a u. R l posted to the clipboard, which then I can either put into an my message or a text message or a WhatsApp message or email or any other type of message that I want. I can even put it on a website if, like, um so that's really cool. So we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna click the iCloud copy iCloud link. Right? I now have a copy of this link, so the link is now copied, and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna open up my browser just to show you what it looks like. Wouldn't somebody sees that link? As you know, a little web page automatically created when I click the get short option, this is what the other person will see. They'll get this this thing here it says, Add the shortcut. Review contents of the shortcut and you can look through and you can see everything that the shortcut does, which is exactly what we asked it to dio. And then, of course, because I'm not Apple, right, Um, I am an untrusted shortcut, so it's coming from 1/3 party. It's not coming from the Apple Gallery or something like this, Um, and then it's allow for an untrusted shortcut. Now, in order to allow for an untrusted shortcut to things have to happen. One. You have to have run a shortcut. For the first time on the device, you have to at least run a short cut one time on the device. Second, you go into the settings app. You scroll down the left hand column, you'll see short tons in the list, and there'll be a couple setting options and one of which is to allow untrusted shortcuts. So as long as you have done that, you can click on the add untrusted shortcuts, and you will get a copy of the shortcut into your collection under my shortcuts. All right, so now that we know how to share a shortcut, which also allows those to save a shortcut. Let's go ahead and do some enhancing here. So there's a lot of different things that we could dio. But I really want this to talk to me. I'm going to be having this link toe a personal automation, and I don't wanna have to look at the screen. I wanted to automate, you know, and do something automatically for me. So we're going to take a look at, um, the opportunity to make this speak to us. We already have a notification that says something, but I want to actually hear it. So there is a action called speed text. It takes the text input and speaks it out. So we're gonna go ahead and grab one of these speak text actions, and we're gonna drag it in there right after our show notification. And there we are. Now, we don't need the if results. So we're gonna select that little keyboard. I come in the bottom left corner and remove the if results, and we're going to actually give it the rain chance. Variable. Now what we have here with the speed Texas, we have the ability to make a lot of different settings, But one of which is the language. We can choose what language we wanted to speak in. Um, I'll choose English, and you also have the ability to choose which voice you would like to hear. I'm just gonna leave this as the Serie female voice as a default. Then I want to grab another speak text action. I want to drag it in afterward. My second show notification on the UV index, and I'm gonna repeat the steps, take out the if result, add the UV Index one and I'm good to go. All right, So now at this stage, what's left to do other than to run it and see how it sounds To make sure captured this just right. I'm going to actually record it with my phone and run it on the iPad. So here we go. We're going to choose down here in the bottom corner, the little place symbol, and we're going to run this and there we have it. We have an enhanced shortcut ready for us to take it one step further and do personal automation. All right, so this is a screen that were used to We've been working inside of the Mike Shortcuts, and we've looked at the gallery already. But now it's time to take a look at the personal automation, which is the time in the middle of the bottom. So we're gonna go ahead and select that time in the middle, and this will open up our automation area. Now there's two types of automation. There's the personal automation, which is where we'll focus. But there's also home automation. So if you have home kid enabled items or anything like that, like automatic lights or sensors or anything, but like I said, we're going to focus on the personal automation. In order to do this, we need to click the little blue plus symbol in the top right corner, which will then launch open our automation selection. We're going to create a personal automation, and here we have an alarm type and we want to focus on the alarm type, and we're gonna set it for when it stopped and any type of an alarm clicking the next. We can have actions now. Now we can add in all of those individual actions that we just did. But in our case, we have a shortcut already, So we're gonna focus on the short cut itself, which has two different options for us. So we type in shortcut. Here we go. We're going to select the shortcut. We're going to choose the run shortcut here. We can now select from our existing shortcuts. So just a matter of searching. We're gonna choose our wake up and go under the show Mawr. We don't have any input variables, and we don't want to look at it while it's running. Ideally, we're going to be half asleep in our beds when this thing goes off. So now when it opens now, what we do want to make sure that we do, though, is we don't want it to ask before running. So we don't wanna have to wait and look at the screen and click a button extra. We want this to just run. So by checking off this box, it's going to prompt us and want to make sure that are you sure to automatically run this shortcut? And of course, we say, Yeah, don't ask. Run it for me, please. So there we go. All right, so there we have it. We now have a brand new personal automation when any alarm it's stopped. So now it's time to test that personal automation. All right, so to test this personal automation, we need to set an alarm. So here we go. We're going to set an alarm, and we're going to set it for on. Of course, At the time of recording this video, it's been a long day. So we're gonna set it for Let's see here. We're gonna set it for, uh, 7 32 we're gonna say, and here it is. And in just about 10 seconds, the alarm will go off. The UV index is rather low. Might not need sunscreen. And there we go. At this stage, you've been able to create your shortcut. You've been able to enhance the shortcut. You've been able to share the shortcut, and now we've linked it to our personal automation. So in the morning, when your alarm goes off and you hit stop, you will automatically have your phone talking to you. The futures here. All right, there we have it. It is now time to wrap it all up. 5. Wrap Up: all right, there we have it. It is now time to wrap it all up. And there we have it. A few short lessons to get an introduction toe apple shortcuts. By now you know how to create a shortcut. How to find a shortcut, how to share, shortcut and, of course, how to optimize and enhance your shortcuts for different things. Such a speech or notifications and, of course, how to connect it to your personal automation. So shortcuts confused for a Rieti reasons. I find them to be extremely useful in making my day more productive, more efficient. But you can do other things with him as well. You can use them to check on sports scores. You could use them to pick a recipe for the evening instead of trying to figure out or decide amongst yourselves which what you're going to cook but their there and they're there for you to use. So I hope this course was useful for you. I hope you learned a little bit from it. And I hope it enables you to begin using shortcuts and seeing what your imagination can do with them. So all the best and until next time