Transcription
What are Apple Shortcuts and, more importantly, how can you use them to their fullest potential for your particular use cases?
Hi, I'm Chris, and today we'll be going over Apple Shortcuts and how you can use them on your iPhone, your Mac, or even your iPad. So, what are Apple Shortcuts? Apple Shortcuts are a way to utilize various components of apps or features that already exist on your device, stringing commands together to do things that you might normally do manually, automatically, and more simply.
Okay, that's a lot of complicated, jargony tech speak for a minute, but I promise you that in this video, we're going to have use cases both for the super nerds like me, or the everyday people who are just looking for something simple and useful for them. We're going to start with the simple, everyday use cases, 'cause it's an easy way to build upon the concepts as we go, and because the broadest amount of you are probably going to be interested in those versus the super users, and you guys can stick around to see those later on. Chapters will be down below for you to jump to the relevant parts.
So, Apple actually has some starter shortcuts that you can use, and they can also show you the potential for the shortcuts that you could create for you. They have a whole gallery that you can go through, both on the phone and on your computer, to see the shortcuts that already exist. For example, they have one where you can send the last image you took to a recipient in your text messages. So, imagine, for example, your dog did something really funny. You just took a picture of it, and you wanted to send it to your friend who's also a dog lover. You can immediately just hit this. It will attach the last image that you took, and then you put in the recipient, and it goes there. If you had a recipient that you're always sending messages to, you could actually change the shortcut so that it goes to just that recipient, and you don't have to input that at that step.
I created a shortcut because I have a young baby, and she's always doing cute things. All the parents out there probably understand what I'm talking about. Your baby starts doing something cute, or maybe your pet starts doing something cute, and you're rushing to grab your phone, unlock your phone, open the camera app, hit record, and by then, the moment is gone. So, I created one called "The Baby is Being Cute." I'm not going to say the name of the personal assistant because it might go off for everyone in the audience. I'll just put it on screen, but you could say that, and then "The Baby is Being Cute," and then immediately the camera will pop up, already recording video, and you just need to point it in the right direction.
You could even pair this with other customization features, like I have, where you use the tapback feature in the settings. So, you have two tapback features. You can tap it back twice to create one custom action, and tap it three times for a separate custom action. So, for me, for the double tapback, I have it for "My Baby is Being Cute," and the recording automatically starts. My triple tapback, I've allocated to a different shortcut that I created that I'll show you later on, that is for creating social posts.
You could use this for completely fun and silly things, too. Like, for example, I like Star Trek. And in the show Star Trek, they have these things called replicators. And the replicators replicate things, mostly food, during the series. And so, each captain in each Star Trek series has their favorite hot beverage: Earl Grey, hot, for Captain Picard, or coffee, black, for Captain Janeway, for example. I like drinking coffee black. Every time I brew my coffee in my French press, I have to set a four-minute timer for the steeping. So, I created a shortcut where I say, "Coffee black, like Captain Jane Way would," and then it, it verbally responds to me, "I, Captain Replicator, and countdown timer engaged." Starts a four-minute timer, and then does some various sound effects from the show for the replicator. None of those things are necessary. They're just fun things for me.
If you are utilizing something that triggers certain reference files, like the sound effects in this, and you want it to work on all of your devices, the best way to do that is make sure that the sounds, in my case, these sound effects, are located on your iCloud Drive. That way, whether you're on your computer or your phone, it can be referenced in each of those cases.
Another useful one that I created, I called "Image to Notes." So, I want you to imagine a scenario. You're a student. You're watching a video lecture. They put up slides on the screen. You want to copy those notes. Those notes go too fast, and so you missed those notes. Now, what you could do is you could take a screenshot later. You could try and type those up yourself, or use the features that are built into your Apple device to highlight the text from the image and copy it to your notes. But going back to the fundamentals of what Shortcuts are, you could instead automate that whole process so that you don't have to do all of those steps individually and manually, repeatedly.
So, what this "Image to Notes" does is, when you trigger the shortcut, it will automatically take a screenshot. Unfortunately, I've only figured out a way to be able to take a screenshot of the entire screen, not of select areas using Shortcuts. If anybody knows how to do that for select areas, please let me know. That would be super handy in certain automations. But essentially, it takes a screenshot of the whole screen. So, it's best to make sure that if you're going to be utilizing this, that you make your video lecture full screen. Otherwise, this is also going to take a screenshot of all the text that is on your top bar, and it's going to mess up later steps down the line. But if it's full screen, it takes a picture of just your slide. The next action extracts all of the text. Following that, it copies it to the clipboard. Then it pastes it into a note of your choice. So, you could pre-select this ahead of time. I've made one here called "Studying," and it just copies all of that raw text into there. And you may want to go back and format it yourself later, but this makes the capturing process a little more seamless. So, students, there's a freebie for you.
Which, by the way, if you're interested in that particular shortcut, or some of the others that I'm talking about in here, some of these shortcuts that I'm talking about in this video, I've actually created a public file that you can access, so you can use that shortcut yourself, or reverse engineer it to make your own shortcuts at home. To get that, click the link in the description below to sign up to my newsletter, and I will give you access to download each of these shortcuts soon.
Let's move into some more niche use cases. So, obviously, I'm creating content for the internet, like this video right now. So, I want to keep people updated on what I'm working on. So, I utilize social medias like Twitter, Threads, and Blue Sky. If you're familiar with these platforms, they're text-based, and they basically all do more or less the same thing. So, I'm duplicating these posts to each one. There are apps and websites out there that you can sign up to so that you can automate this process. Most of them require you to pay for them, though, which makes complete sense. They're worth their due. But if you're trying to keep the cost down, you're a small-time creator like me at this point, you could utilize a shortcut like this.
Now, I've built this in two stages. There's a mobile version of the stage. There's a desktop version. The desktop version is much more fully featured, much more automated. The mobile version, you have to do a few more of the steps yourself. I've also created a quality check for my posts, which shows you how you can string one shortcut to another shortcut, which I'll show you in a minute.
So, first of all, we have the mobile version. What this mobile version does is ask you for an input. In other words, your tweet, your post. You type that in. When you hit send, it copies it to the clipboard, and then it opens each of the apps, Threads, Twitter, and Blue Sky, one after another. Then all you have to do is press paste, post, swipe to the previous app, paste, post, swipe to the previous, previous app, paste, post. You're done. You posted to all three.
Now, the desktop version, however, is a bit more automated. Using AppleScript, you can actually tell the computer to trigger keystrokes, which is super amazing and opens up a lot of possibilities when you realize that a lot of features, if not all features in a lot of apps, can be triggered through keyboard shortcuts. So, if you can map those things to keyboard shortcuts and then trigger keystrokes, you can actually basically automate almost any aspect of an app.
So, in this particular case, what I did was set it up so that you get a prompt, same as you do on the phone. You type in your message, it copies it to the clipboard, then it opens up a browser. In this case, Opera. There's a reason why I'm using Opera, and I'll tell you in a minute. And no, they're not sponsoring me, but if they'd like to, they're welcome to. It opens up a new tab. It opens up the first social media site. It pastes that content using the AppleScript and using these keystrokes for Command-V to paste in there. Then it does Command-Return to send and publish the post. Then, after waiting a moment to ensure that it's fully sent, it opens up the next social media site, paste, post, etc. It does it to the third one. Then, after it's done that to all of them, it waits a moment and does Command-W three times to close each of those windows, and finally, Opera altogether, making it a clean, seamless experience where all you have to do is input your post, hit send, and it does everything else. Just wait a minute, and you watch it on the screen.
Now, of course, like anything like this where it's putting in the keyboard shortcuts, it's very important that you don't click anything else on the screen, or it'll mess up where the keyboard shortcut is executing and do it in a different program, and it might not be exactly what you wanted to happen happening.
Now, the reason why I said a minute ago that I used Opera specifically is not specific to Opera itself, but it's because it's secondary to the browser that I'm primarily using. But maybe if you were a sponsor. Sorry, Opera. Nothing personal. And the reason for that is I wanted a clean experience where I could open each of the tabs, close each of the tabs, and then be done with it. I have a separate browser where I actually keep these apps open so that I can reply to comments and check notifications, check how those posts are performing, etc. This was meant to be a seamless experience. If you use the browser that you normally daily, it could mess some of these things up. It's just not quite as clean. So, even if you just install a browser that you know you're never going to use, just so that you can use this and put it to that, you can go ahead and do that. And if you daily Opera and you want to use a different browser like Safari, it's just as easy to open this up and literally all you have to do is change the words "Opera" in here to "Safari," and it should work.
Now, let's talk about an extra layer that I've added onto this. Let's imagine for a minute that I want to post something on here that could be a little bit too edgy, or maybe could be perceived in a negative way, or get me in trouble. So, basically talking about anything to do with Linux whatsoever, positive or negative. That is where my QC check social post comes in. And this one's really cool because it's utilizing multiple steps and then triggering another shortcut, the social posting desktop one that I just showed you.
How this works is it gives me an input. Then I type in my input, just like in the previous shortcut I showed you. But then it will open the Copilot app on my computer. Yeah, I know I'm crazy. I'm using Microsoft Copilot on a Mac, but you could easily change this to be ChatGPT or a different LLM that you like. Then it pastes from the clipboard the post that I made, along with an extra text that it types out, which is a prompt to Copilot, basically telling Copilot to analyze the post that I'm trying to post and try and figure out if it's going to get me in trouble, and rate it on a scale of one to five, without telling me the rating. And there's a reason why, which you'll see in a second. Basically, behind the scenes, it rates it from one to five, of one being unlikely to get me in trouble, five being definitely going to be getting me in trouble.
Then, what it does is, if it's one or two on the scale, it will spit back to me my message verbatim as it already was. Then I can copy that, and then it will pop up after a delay the shortcut for social posting. I can paste it in there. It will do what it did before with opening each of the social media sites and automatically posting, and then closing Opera when it's done. If, however, I get a three to five on the scale, saying that it could be misinterpreted, it could go wrong, then it can suggest to me a more positive version that I could do of the same essential idea of that message.
Now, I'm not really trying to do some sort of AI farming posting thing here. So, I'm not really planning on copy and pasting that AI version of it, but it can prompt me in a different direction to make me see maybe that's going to be misinterpreted. Maybe I don't want to post that, and give me some ideas of a different way I could word things, even if I don't use its actual wording, which I probably won't.
Now, you might be asking, why didn't I just build this all as one shortcut from the beginning instead of linking these two shortcuts? Because honestly, I can usually tell if a post is not going to go over well, and I either post it because I just decide I want to anyway, or I just know that it's going to be fine. So, usually I can bypass that whole QC check. I just kind of wanted to see if I could do it, which is some of the fun things about these shortcuts. However, if I needed it, it's there.
Let's talk about two final, very specific use case shortcuts that I've made before we wrap up. These are actually two different categories. Now, one is for video editors. This is specifically for Premiere, the video editor that I use most often. I also use DaVinci Resolve. I'm often having to reframe the sequences into vertical videos for social media. When I do that, I want to ensure that the final footage is 1080 by 1920 for the best viewing experience. The original footage may have been lower than that at 720p, or higher than that at 4K. So, I have to resize the dimensions. This is a repeated task that I literally do, you know, a dozen times a day. I created this shortcut that essentially, once I click into the box of the first dimension, and I hit Control-1 on my keyboard, that is Control, not Command, um, then it will do Command-A to select all of the text in that text box. The number is in the first one, type in 1080, hit Tab, which will automatically select the next text box anyway, hit 1920, and hit Enter or Return twice to get through the dialogues and automatically essentially resizing it to a 1080 by 1920 sequence.
The reason I wanted to highlight this one, even if you're not a video editor, is because it shows that you can actually assign keyboard shortcuts to your shortcuts. So, you don't actually have to go into the Shortcuts app or drag the shortcut to your desktop to be able to click it, which, quite frankly, is really clunky. They give you these giant enormous widgets that if you even happen to just accidentally click on, triggers everything, and that's annoying. And in this case, I actually want to be in Premiere before I actually trigger it. And then if I clicked off of it, then it actually wouldn't work because it's not in the text box. So, I would actually need to program in a delay, which would be super annoying. So, you can just go over to the section here, you hit the little "i" button, then you can assign any keyboard shortcut. So, you may have to play around with it. If the shortcut you use doesn't trigger it at first, it could be that that's already being utilized by something in the app that you want to trigger it in, or in the system itself. So, you may have to try a few. Hence, Control-1. There's not a lot of Mac shortcuts that I'm aware of that use Control, but I could be totally wrong.
Okay, final shortcuts that I'm going to show you. These are actually three different shortcuts, but they're in the same category. I use a third-party app called Mousecape that can basically put a cape or a skin over your mouse to make it look different. It doesn't really serve a lot of practical purpose, but it's kind of fun. But I have two practical use cases in my case that I do use it for.
The first one is, I'm like that 7% of people that uses both dark and light mode depending on what time of day it is, rather than light mode or dark mode only. I have found that it is more useful to have a white cursor when you are in dark mode, or a black cursor when you're in light mode, because it's just easier to see in the contrast with the background. Because of that, I've created a light and dark cursor shortcut in Mousecape that opens Mousecape, hits the down arrow the appropriate number of times to be able to get to the particular cape or skin for the mouse that is light or dark depending on the shortcut, and then does Command-Enter to apply it, and then Command-Q to close out Mousecape.
I've also created one that I've been actually using within this video behind the scenes, and that is one for tutorials. I made this cursor in Photoshop, and basically what's different about it has a great big circle around it that is semi-transparent that makes it easier for you to see exactly what I'm clicking. It's also really, really big because in the settings of Mousecape, you can set the mouse bigger or smaller. Having a really big mouse on screen just makes it easier for you to follow along in my tutorials, what I'm doing on screen, and what I'm actually clicking on. So, this shortcut actually does the same thing. Down arrow the appropriate times to the appropriate Mousecape. Command-Return to apply that Mousecape, and then sizes up the mouse to size five to make it very visible on screen.
Now, not all of these are necessarily going to be the ones that you would use, but there are tons out there in the gallery to get you started and thinking about the regular things that you would use. To my experience, these are really not going to add functionality to your computer that didn't already exist, per se, but it is going to show you how you can make links between features in one program and another, one function and another. The same could be said on your phone. A lot of the stuff that I've been showing you can work on both the phone and the computer, but anything with AppleScript is not really going to work on your mobile devices, but you can still do a lot of super cool things on your phone as well. I encourage you to go through the gallery and the starter shortcuts to get an idea of the kinds of things you could do, and then just let your creativity go from there.
And again, if you liked some of the shortcuts that I did in this video, comment below about what your favorite one was, but also use the link in the description to join my newsletter where you'll also be able to download my shortcut links. I hope that you enjoyed this video and give it a thumbs up, and please subscribe if you want to see more content like this. I'm trying to get up to those thousand subscribers. I don't want to be one of those cringey begging YouTubers. And share this video with somebody else. Have a great day. Peace.