Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome to another episode of App Stories. Today's episode is brought to you by Incogni. I'm John Voorhees, and I've got Federico Vaticci with me, as always. Hey, Federico. Hello. You got me, as always. That's all you have. As always. I got you. I got you. That's a song. That's a song.
Right? Don't you remember? Oh, which one? UB40. I got you, babe. I have no idea what you're talking about. You don't know. You don't know UB40? UB40? UB40, the like reggae style band from the UK in the 80s? I am sorry. You're too young. You're too young. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I don't. Wow. Wow. I've both embarrassed and aged myself. Federico, let's do a podcast. We shall do a podcast. What are we talking about today, John? Today, we are going to talk about...
about shortcuts helper apps because these apps are both great and a little bit of a condemnation of what Apple's been doing with shortcuts lately in the sense that I think particularly on the Mac, the way we've seen in the last few years
a lot of third-party developers filling in gaps with shortcuts in terms of actions and things that are available as triggers and things that you can do. And that's in large measure because shortcuts on the Mac really hasn't done much since it was introduced like three years ago now. These kind of apps have existed for quite a while on the iPhone and the iPad as well. But I think on the Mac where there's
you know, developers have a little more access to system level stuff. There's been some really interesting things going on, but we thought we'd cover all of them because we did this, like you reminded me like five years ago or something, we talked about some of these apps, but the landscape has changed quite a bit, quite dramatically since then. Some of those apps that we talked about back then are still around, but there are a whole bunch of new ones too.
Yeah. We did an episode five years ago. The landscape is in many ways similar, but also quite different. This is not going to be an episode about Apple intelligence and app intents, because that
That feature does not exist. But we are going to talk about some of the utilities that we use with shortcuts. And some of these I use every single day for the various shortcuts that I have to help with the production of Mac Stories Weekly, for example, but also for collecting links for the things that we do with the MPC now. So they're like real life examples of utilities that we use with shortcuts. And I think by far, if I may begin with my list,
The most important one in my workflow is the Actions app by Sindra Soros. Oh, 100%. Sindra Soros has to be like the king of indie developers at this point. He's releasing apps almost on a weekly basis now. One of the most proficient indie developers on Apple platforms at the moment. Just about anywhere on iOS, iPadOS, on the Mac.
Cinder just released, I don't know if you saw this, Googly Eyes. No, I missed that one. So Cinder put out this little menu bar utility that is literally just googly eyes that follow around your mouse cursor. Okay. And they are just a silly, funny utility. But in any case, Actions is the premier utility for Shortcuts Power Users.
It's a so-called headless app in the sense that, sure, you can download actions from the App Store, but when you open it, it doesn't really have a UI. It just has a splash screen that tells you this is all there is to find the actions. You can open the shortcuts app and search for actions and see all of the extra, well, actions. I know that this is like...
building a shortcut in shortcuts, like all these words and these nouns are the same. So it's not my fault, so forgive me. The Actions app tells you open shortcuts and when you're putting together a shortcut, search for the actions from Actions.
Oh, God. And a lot of apps that we're going to cover are like this. They're ones where there really isn't much UI to the app themselves. It's really a way to bring actions into the Shortcuts app itself. And I do remember when we saw some of these early ones in the early days from Alex Hay, we wondered whether AppReview would even approve these applications.
Because, you know, at the app itself, there's this there one of the rules is you have your your app has to have utility. And it's it was kind of an interesting question at the time whether the app had utility or whether it was the things that came along with the app that had the utility. But fortunately, that's not a one. Although there have been many problems with app review over the year, this turned out not to be one of them. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
And so Actions has dozens and dozens of actions that you can set up in Shortcuts. Most of them, they run without opening the Actions app. They just run contextually within the Shortcuts. And especially if you disable the show when run toggle, they just run as native actions inside of your Shortcuts. And there are some of these that I want to specifically shout out on the show. Perhaps my absolute favorite is
This is going to sound so ridiculous. Get title of web page. Now, you may be wondering, why would you want to use the get title action when you can do this for free by default in shortcuts using the Safari action? So let me tell you about special characters. The Apple actions, usually powered by the Safari engine, they often fail when it comes to retrieving special characters that require encoding for Unicode.
So things like double quotes or apostrophes or special Unicode characters, very often those Safari actions, they just give you the raw HTML image
unencoded version of the character, whereas Actions with the getTitleOfWebPage action is super reliable, always gives you the proper special characters. It works so well and it never fails. I've been using it for years and I highly recommend it. I use that action in all of my shortcuts that deal with retrieving the title of a web page from the web. But I also want to mention the action that merges dictionaries.
This one, you can give multiple JSON dictionaries and it just merges them into one. Very convenient if you're working with web APIs, for example, and you have JSON responses from those APIs, you can merge them together. You also have an action that gets the orientation of the device, gets whether it's the device is upside down or not. Like they have all of these system actions that really should be baked right into shortcuts by default, but they're not.
And so that's why if you're a shortcuts power user, you need actions. Yeah, yeah. No, that is probably, especially when it comes to iOS and iPadOS, one of the ones that I use the most. But it's obviously available on the Mac as well. The first one I want to mention is MenuBot, which is a very simple...
shortcut app that allows you to take text that you've generated from a shortcut and put it in your menu bar and do so on a schedule. Really simple app. So the thing that I use it mainly for is to put the weather or the temperature of my office and also my balcony off my living room in my menu bar. So I can be sitting here
And because my office often gets hotter than where the thermostat happens to be on this floor, I can see, oh, yeah, it's uncomfortable because it's two or three degrees warmer in here than it is in the rest of this floor. And the way I do that is very simple. I just use a home app shortcut.
shortcut action that pulls the temperature from a sensor in my office, converts it to Fahrenheit, and then adds a little SF symbol as an icon. And that text string goes to MenuBot and every single, I guess every 10 minutes or so, it runs the shortcut.
and updates the temperature in the menu bar. I've also done it in the past, as I said, with my balcony where I have a temperature weather gauge out there and I can kind of see how comfortable it is out there if I want to sit outside to work or something like that. There's a million different things you can do with this, but I find when you want to, you know, one of the things about the Home app is surfacing the temperatures is it's kind of buried. You have to tap through multiple levels to get to it.
And so having that available, just sitting up in my menu bar is pretty nice. That's very nice. One of the things you can do on a Mac that you cannot do elsewhere. I want to continue down my Cinder Source path. And I want to mention another thing
app called Actions, but specifically AI Actions by Sindra Souris. So Sindra put out a separate utility called AI Actions that is based on the same concept as Actions, but for, well, Actions for ChatGPT and Cloud.
You have two actions. One is called Ask AI and the other is called Ask Cloud. The first one is for ChargeGPT and the second one is for Anthropics Assistant. And this is basically a visual way to send out a web request to the ChargeGPT or Cloud APIs and get a response back. Now, you have to provide your own OpenAI or Anthropic API.
API key. I've mostly been using the one for cloud because that's my, together with Gemini, those are my assistants of choice these days. And now, as of today, we're recording this on Thursday, as of today, the AI Actions app still has not received an update to include support for cloud 3.7 Sonnet.
So you're still using 3.5 Sonnet over the API, but it works pretty well for the things I do like summarization or proofreading, that sort of stuff. And what I like about the action is that you don't have to deal with the API. You have a visual building block in shortcuts
And what I appreciate is that you can split out the system message and the user message. In AI terms, the system message is sort of like the context that you initially provide to the assistant. Like you are a WordPress proofreading expert, like that sort of stuff. Whereas the user message is the actual content. Like, hey, proof this draft for me. So I appreciate that you have these multiple fields.
in the action that you can configure with native variables and text in shortcuts. You can also define the number of output tokens if you expect like a shorter response or a longer response from the AI.
And I just appreciate how, since everything is visual, you can use your variables, you can use your parameters to configure everything, and you don't have to deal with just manually dealing and working with the web API. I hope that Sindra can put out an update soon with 3.7 Sonnet.
support, as well as the new responses API from OpenAI, which is sort of the follow-up to the completions API, which was the existing ChaiGPT API. They have a new one called responses that is, you know, not to get too technical here, but the previous completions API from OpenAI was a so-called stateless API, meaning that when you were working with that API in shortcuts or other systems,
The API was not really saving the context of your entire conversation. You had to do that work yourself. Whereas with the new responses API, it is a so-called stateful API, meaning that it's saving the whole context of your conversation. So hopefully Sindra will put out an update soon with these new additions, as well as Cloud 3.7 Sonnet.
Yeah, that sounds great. That sounds really good. So what kind of give me a example or two of how you're using this?
For example, when I save a link for Mac Stories Weekly, I save the original source URL. And also alongside that, I save a summary of the webpage. First, I extract the text of the webpage using shortcuts. Then I give that text to Sonnet so that when it's Friday and it's time for me to assemble the links, I have both the source webpage and the summary. And I remember more quickly what is it about.
And so I sort of use that as a jumping off point to write my, you know, silly links with the jokes and the, and you know, the things that I do for a Mac stories weekly. Yeah, no, I've seen those in, in to do it. So I know what you're talking about. That's a, that's a great use case.
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Using our link and get 60% off an annual plan. That link is incogni.com slash appstories. It'll be in the show notes too. Our thanks to Incogni for their support of the show. I want to mention Shortery, which is...
an amazing deal. This app on the Mac is just $10. And to me, this is easily one of the most powerful shortcuts helper apps that's out there because it's all about triggers. And what it allows you to do is create triggers based on all kinds of different system events. And then it supports a whole bunch of different parameters when you're ready to run your shortcuts. So
Just to give you an example of kind of the breadth of this, you can trigger shortcuts based on when you're switching from light mode to dark mode or when you're starting or quitting an app.
Or if you're recording audio, have you started recording it? Have you stopped recording it? You know, it can be based on calendar events. It can be based on time of day and repeat events using time, uh, variables. It can be the based on when you connect to wifi, uh,
And when your Wi-Fi connection changes from one network to another, it can encompass things like when you plug into power. So if you're using a laptop, if you plug into power, and that means you want to do certain things when that happens, or maybe when you, you know,
Deconnect from power. If you unplug your laptop, you want to quit some of those apps that use a lot of power automatically. You can do that. You can also, you can trigger things based on Bluetooth and USB connections, both very useful for if you're using various peripherals with your Mac and
and webcams too. So for instance, once you fire up your webcam, maybe you want to start recording or maybe you want to start some sort of app like Granola, which is going to do an AI-based summary of your meeting, your Zoom call or whatever it is. So lots of different things that can happen there.
And this works reliably in your experience? Yeah, I mean, my use of it so far has been relatively light. And I use it for more for the kind of things like when an app is quit or opens, for instance. I haven't tried it with as many of the hardware things myself. But so far, I haven't had any issues with it. And that's one thing that's worth, I guess, mentioning here is that
But this is a category of apps where I find a lot of bugs, I have to say. I mean, there are some that I thought about talking about today that I took off my list because I hadn't used them in a while and I went back and tried them again and they weren't working reliably. I think that that's one argument as to why...
Apple should be doing some of these things themselves and not leaving it to third-party developers who oftentimes have to kind of find ways to kind of hack their way through to these system events using things like AppleScript and that sort of thing. But Shorty is a really solid app. I've really enjoyed it. At least for the things I've used it for, it's been working very well. That sounds incredible. Makes me jealous. So yeah, it's basically combining system events
on macOS with running shortcuts. I'm going three for three, John. My next step is also called actions. Oh, good for you. For Obsidian. See? Yeah, there you go. So this is another app that is mostly headless. You configure access to your Obsidian vault in the app settings.
And that's pretty much it. After that, you have access to a whole collection of actions and shortcuts to do something with your Obsidian. They have actions to create notes, append notes, perform data view queries, retrieve notes, doing all kinds of things like run commands. These are all things that you could do with some of the default or third-party Obsidian URL schemes.
But it's 2025. We shouldn't have to use URL schemes anymore. And Actions gives you a visual way to trigger all of these things in Obsidian with visual building blocks in shortcuts. So I use this a lot. For example, when I need to create a new note, I can pre-fill in shortcuts the file name using a variable, for example.
I can do all those kinds of things, combining the visual aspects of variables and parameters of shortcuts with these actions for Obsidian. Now, it works really well. The one thing I've got to mention is that, obviously, under the hood, actions for Obsidian does rely on URL schemes. So when you run an action,
that belongs to actions for Obsidian, you will see this weird dance of actions launching and then Obsidian launching and then doing like the back and forth. But as long as you just run the shortcuts, this is what I do. I run the shortcut and then I just stare at the screen for like 10 seconds. It does its whole weird back and forth, but it works. And I've been using it for
almost a year at this point, whenever I need to prepare like a template, for example, in my Obsidian, I have my shortcuts that have the actions for Obsidian actions and it works perfectly. And I know that the same developer also created a similar app that I think is in your list, John. That is right. I want to talk about browser actions, which is also by Carlos Zotman. And this is
is an app that adds a bunch of actions that are web browser based and it works with Safari, Edge, Chrome, Brave and Vivaldi. So you've got a bunch of options there. Does not work with Firefox, does not work with Arc.
But if you're using one of these browsers, you could take advantage of it. And there's a bunch of things that can be done that are broken down into a bunch of categories. One of them is tabs. You can manipulate tabs by closing tabs, opening tabs, getting details about a particular tab, opening a URL that you've already got into a tab or reloading a tab. There are some others too, but those are kind of the common ones.
In terms of the browser itself, you can do things like get menu items and select menu items. So you're actually manipulating the browser from the Mac's menu bar itself. Or actually, it's a menu system, I should say, not the menu bar. And simulating things like typing or running AppleScript.
or pressing keys. It's really kind of wild. I know that a lot of this is using JavaScript and AppleScript under the hood, but it really extends significantly what you can do compared to what's built in to Shortcuts itself. Then with web pages, you can do things like clicking on various elements, whether it's a button or a link that's on the page. You can also do things like run JavaScript against a web page.
scroll and even set values in forms, stuff like that. And then finally, I think the other category that Zotman has that if you go to the website, you'll see is are things related to browser windows, you know, closing the window, creating new windows,
setting the focus of a particular window or getting the foremost window. If you've got a bunch of browser windows open at once, you can grab that one, which is one of those things that works really well with some of these other actions where you can get that foremost window, go to a particular tab, do something with that webpage and then move on with the rest of your shortcuts. So yeah, it's one of those that has a
a very, very wide-ranging set of possibilities if you work in a browser a lot. That sounds great. I suppose you can combine those actions with something like a Stream Deck, for example.
- Yeah, you can. And that's something actually I've been thinking about doing. I have not done that, but I've been thinking about having a profile set up so that as soon as I open up Safari, I just have push button stuff I can do where I can take URLs, send them off to a note in Obsidian or do all kinds of different things. Copy it, save it, close it, move on to the next thing as a way to kind of manage my browser tab problem. - Nice.
I want to mention all the apps from the late Alex Hay, who sadly passed away last year. All of his apps, Toolbox Pro, MenuBox, Logger, and Automate, these are all under new ownership now.
they were all transferred to the folks at Snail Dit Development. I know that friend of the show and really friend of ours, Rosemary Orchard, is involved with the development and sort of progress of these apps. These are like Toolbox Pro is the OG here. It really is. It was the first app that pioneered the idea of like, what if an app could just be a container of a bunch of actions for shortcuts? And
I'm just so happy to see that Alex's legacy can live on with developers who care about preserving not just the history of Toolbox Pro, but continuing to evolve Toolbox Pro. And Logger is an incredible utility if you have long shortcuts and you want to have like a console to check, you know, errors, for example, in your shortcuts, which is something that Apple never did before.
Notomate, if you use Notion, this app gives you a whole bunch of native Notion actions for your shortcuts. And the Notion API, let me tell you, I worked with it. It's not an easy API to understand. It's very complex. The way that they deal with objects and data stores is...
It's very complicated. Notomate makes it super easy to get started with Notion. And Notion for itself doesn't have its own actions. So this is a really critical shortcuts app if you're using Notion.
Yeah, and Menu Box allows you to build nicer looking menus in shortcuts, leveraging like this little weird trick of sort of tricking shortcuts into thinking it's dealing with contacts and address book instead of lists. It's very clever. And obviously, Toolbox Pro continues to be, I think, the only app that has Apple Music native API based actions.
Truly an incredible roster of shortcuts apps that were created by Alexei, one of the most innovative, truly a genius developer who left us way too soon. But like I said, it's good to see, you know, despite everything that his legacy can live on with new developers. And so highly recommend all of these four apps if you are a shortcuts power user.
Yeah, yeah. They're all great apps. I think I'm going to close out with one more by Carlos Zotman, which is in public beta right now. So I would expect some bugs. It has not always worked perfectly for me yet. But again, it's early days. Wait, what's this? I have no idea. I never...
It's called Barcuts. Barcuts? And it's one of the more clever apps I've seen that supports shortcuts because all it is is an action that essentially allows you to tag your shortcuts.
with a particular app. Oh my God. And what this means is instead of having to deal with that shortcuts menu that gets very long, very fast, you know, that's built into the system and sits up in your menu bar, you can use bar cuts and say you have five or six Safari related shortcuts. When you have, when you have Safari in the forefront, uh,
and you click on the Bar Cuts menu bar item, you only see those five or six Safari shortcuts that you've designated for that app. And that works with any app. It's just a matter of pairing the app
with the shortcut by using a single action in the shortcut. And it is, I mean, if Carlo can get this operating consistently, it's going to be one that I use a lot because it really will expand how much I use my menu bar for shortcuts. As I said, I have had some issues with it, but it's very early days. And so I think that
And, you know, Carlos got a great track record with his other apps. So keep an eye on it because I think this is one to really look forward to in hopefully the near future. I love this. I love this. And I was just browsing around Carlos' website. Did you know that they also have UI actions on the Mac? Yes, yes, which...
I think might be on the back burner because I looked into that one and I don't think that there has been an update to that. I think it's a beta also, but that it has not been really updated.
I haven't seen a lot of action on it in the last year or so. Okay. Yeah. These are, uh, UI scripting basically. Yeah. Yeah. Which, which I, yeah, would, could be really good, but that's kind of the thing that's very hard to do too. I think. Yeah. Carlo is, is building a nice collection of shortcuts. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. It's, and, and I, you know, between the obsidian one, uh, actions for obsidian and browser actions, those are both, uh,
two of my favorites. So I'm excited to see how Carlo does with bar cuts and in the UI actions one too. Yeah. My final pick is not a headless app in this case because this app also has function ID when you use the actual app. It's
It's called Text Workflow. This is a text transformation app that lets you process and remix your text in a whole bunch of different ways, like make it lowercase, make it title case, which kind of title case, you know, prepend text, append, like all kinds of text-based transformations, which you can use without seeing the actual app in shortcuts as native actions. I use
I don't have complicated use cases here. I just use it all the time for one action, which is format my headline for Mac Stories using the Chicago Manual of Style headline capitalization guidelines. And what I appreciate here is it's not just that it's using the CMOS guidelines. It's that it combines that with an exclusion list.
This is one of the things you can do in text workflow. You can go in and for every action that you configure as a workflow, which later shows up in shortcuts, you can have an exclusion list of words that you never want to capitalize in a different way. In our example, in our case, for example, we have some Apple products like HomePod that are camel case. So the H and the P are both capitalized.
If you use the default capitalization, it would be written out with just a capital H, just HomePod with a lowercase p. But I created a whole collection of words that are not supposed to be processed by Tax Workflow. So things like ChatGPT or iPad or...
or iOS, like all these product names. So those are always excluded from my action and it just runs beautifully. So yeah, and look, I barely scratched the surface of what text for workflow can do. And just make sure that if you use one of those actions in your shortcuts, that you disable the show when run toggle. If you do that, the action will just run in line without any confirmation. It just runs in two seconds.
Yeah, there's an action with text workflow too that works with ChatGPT. I was using that for a while to do various things, text transformations that I would run through ChatGPT and then return back to the clipboard. So it's an incredibly long list and worth checking out if you work with text. Yeah.
Well, I think that about does it for the regular episode. John, what are we going to talk about in the post show for App Stories Plus members? We are going to talk all about your recent story. All
all about the iPad and web apps. So I got a preview of this a couple of weeks ago, and I saw it again, obviously, as it was published last week, and it is a fantastic story. So we're going to dig in a little deeper and talk about some of the things that has been on Federico's mind now, I think, for many weeks.
All right, everybody, that's it for this week's episode of App Stories. You can find the two of us over at MacStories.net. And thanks again to today's sponsor, Incogni. Federico and I are also on social media. Federico is at Vitici, that's V-I-T-I-C-I, and I'm at John Voorhees, J-O-H-N-V-O-O-R-H-W-S. Talk to you next week, Federico. Ciao, John.