Transcription
AI might have just taken my job of building shortcuts, or has it?
So Federico Viticci over at MacStories, one of my shortcuts heroes, has just launched Shortcuts Playground. It is a free plugin that you can just download right now for Cloud Code or OpenAI Codex. And with it, you can just prompt your AI of choice to build shortcuts for you. They install, they run. And for MacStories members like me, you can even get a Shortcuts Playground remote and create shortcuts from a shortcut.
Now, before we get carried away, in my very last video, I just tested an app that builds shortcuts for you called Shortcut Studio. And while it can do pretty well, there's times where it doesn't connect variables. The shortcut doesn't run out of the box. So how does Shortcuts Playground do?
Well, step one, I'll put this link down in the video description, but you need to go get the plugin. You'll be sent to this GitHub page. And when you scroll down, you do have to have some things installed, namely Cloud Code or Codex. I'm going to be doing it through Cloud. You have to have Python installed, which you can install it through Homebrew if you have that. So this is a little more complicated than running the Shortcut Studio app on your iPhone.
So I installed the plugin through Cloud. Now, I'm usually in Cloud or Cloud Code work, and so I'm not as familiar with code. Took me a little while, but I copy and pasted these commands. Cloud Code kind of walked me through some stuff I installed using Brew. And it finally got up and running.
Now, I'm going to show you a bunch of examples of shortcuts I just built using this new Shortcuts Playground. But I want to be clear, even Federico Viticci says Shortcuts Playground can take you roughly 90% of the way to complete functioning shortcuts. And like the Shortcut Studio app I just talked about and Shortcuts Playground, some shortcuts work right out of the box, especially simple ones, maybe that don't take a lot of actions. But there are a lot of times where there might be a single action or variable not connected. So let me show you what works and what doesn't.
The first one I tried is actually an example that Federico puts in the GitHub, which is: "Give me a shortcut that takes my five most recent screenshots and send them to a contact on iMessage." When you prompt Cloud Code to build it, it actually will create a folder in your documents called Shortcuts Playground here on your Mac. And then all the shortcuts that you ask it to build, it will just place them here. So you have these shortcuts and you add it just like you're downloading it from one of my links.
Now, for that shortcut in particular, it's the Send Recent Screenshots one. I can just run it, takes my last five screenshots. It's about to send it to a recipient. But as you can notice, it didn't connect that recipient variable. So if I dive into that shortcut, there's lots of comments, kind of lets you know how it was thinking to put together the shortcut. But you'll see the recipient area was not connected to the contact variable. This is that 90% of the way there. If I right click and select a variable and then choose the contact, I can run the shortcut again. And when I actually choose the contact in that pop-up like myself, now it's going to send the message and the shortcut is ready to go. There's a text message. It just sent it to me with all those photos.
Now, one that worked out of the box, literally with me not changing anything, is a morning routine shortcut. This was always a popular kind of shortcut. And I asked Cloud Code to just make a morning routine that pulls my reminders, my contacts, any birthdays that might be today, and a weather forecast and put it all into an Apple Note. This shortcut, I didn't touch anything. When I run it, it actually-- It has today's events, it has any reminders that are due today, it would list any birthdays if I had them, and even gives me the weather forecast. So that morning routine, two thumbs up. Worked right out of the box, asking Cloud Code to make it.
One of my top shortcuts of last year was to create a packing list based on a trip using Apple Intelligence. So I asked the Shortcuts Playground to build that shortcut. Not a super long prompt. I'll dive into the "pack for a trip" shortcut. It asks where I'm traveling to, how long, what kind of luggage I'm taking, and sends it all to Apple Intelligence Private Cloud Compute, and adds those things to a reminder list. It'll ask where I'm traveling, I'll say Hawaii, I'm going for one week, I'm bringing a checked bag, it's going to run that through Apple Intelligence, and sure enough, I get a list of things that it's going to add. I put that quick look in there, the shortcut didn't have that before. But it did forget the one variable, namely the "repeat with each" where it would add every one of those items to a new reminder. It didn't connect that variable automatically. Again, that's that 90%.
Another one was checking my screen time for the last month. So I want to pull the number of hours I've used the apps and show me a list of my top 10. Shortcuts Playground built this top app usage shortcut, and it's pulling screen time, but it did just for today, not the last month.
Now, one of the things you can do with Shortcuts Playground is what Federico calls "remixing shortcuts." So you can use that same conversation, the one that I have going here, and because it only pulled screen time for today and only showed one app, I asked it to fix it. I said, "Try again, it's not pulling a list of apps, only the top one, and I want the last month, not just today." So it creates a new shortcut, this one's called the "remix." I've added that and let's jump in and see what actions it has now.
So in this remix shortcut, it is adjusting the date going back 30 days. But this action right here that get app and website activity is still set for today and in the end, it's still just pulling the activity for today. This could have been fixed by changing today to this month or saying in between these dates. So between the formatted date that it has earlier and today's date, but it didn't do that. Also at the end of this shortcut, it's getting the first item from all the apps and then it's trying to combine them again and show them in a list, but that's causing it to the one app, Safari. If I just were to remove the first item from list and the combine and instead just show the repeat results, I can run the same shortcut and now I get an actual list of all the apps that I've been using today on my Mac and the number of minutes.
I also asked it to get events from the Apple Sports app, namely for the Yankees, and then add those games to my Apple Calendar. It attempted to do it. It did use the Apple Sports action correctly. It didn't choose the team for me here. I'll specify Yankees in the action and then... It is repeating with each item in those sports events, but unfortunately if I were to just run this, it's failing because it's not pulling the right variables. Again, where it says add title for the event, it's trying to say it's typed dictionary and I think that's breaking it. If I were to manually clear the variable, I'll connect the repeat item, and then when I tap here, you'll see sports event is what's selected, and I can choose the title of the event here. I would also have to fix the start and end time. Now when I run the shortcut, has it properly, it has the name of the event here, start.
Federico Viticci spent six plus months on it, and it is really difficult to get AI to build shortcuts, especially connecting all those intricate variables. So incredible work to Federico for getting it this far. And if you want shortcuts that you know work out of the box right now, go to the MacStories shortcuts archive. They just redesigned this whole page today. And all of these are verified by Federico, you can download them and they just work out of the box. And these were all built with Shortcuts Playground.
One of those that I just downloaded to try was the weather outfit. And when you run it, it gets the weather forecast for today, uses Apple Intelligence and gives you some ideas on what to wear. Footwear, sun protection, rain gear, all of that. That's totally free and you can download a bunch of those shortcuts for free. So I'll put a link to that as well.
And one last shortcut, one that I was really proud of building last year was my movie and TV shows using the movie database finder and adding to reminders. So I actually asked Shortcuts Playground to do that too. I told it to use the movie database API. I gave it my API key and it actually set all that up properly. It's searching the movie database. It gives me a choose from list. And so if I run it, I can do something like The Odyssey. It'll search the movie database. It has all these different options. I can choose one. But you can see it still fails on that last 10%. It didn't connect to the title variable properly to the movie that it's pulling from movie database. And it also didn't attach the poster image. All the actions above it actually are pretty good and are pulling the right information. But it's not connecting those variables at the end. And that's really where the 90% to 10%, in which Federico fully admi-- That's what this is for. It'll get you 90% of the way there. But even for a complex shortcut like this Movie Database one using an external API, kudos that it gets that far.
So I think my job of building shortcuts is still safe for now. But if you wanna learn how to do shortcuts from scratch and being able to use something like Cloud Code, build a complex shortcut most of the way, but then debug it on your own, you should check out Shortcuts University. Shortcuts University is my course, 13 lessons over 12 hours of video, and it starts you from the very beginning of creating shortcuts. I walk you through everything step-by-step with example shortcuts explaining how to use the principles. And then we go even to advanced topics like Apple Intelligence, using third-party APIs, dictionaries, automations, and more. It's $50 off until WWDC and you get lifetime access and I'm going to be updating it when new features with iOS 17, Shortcuts, and Apple Intelligence launch this summer. So you can get it right now by scanning this QR code or going to ShortcutsUniversity.com.
If you want to see my video on that Shortcuts Studio app, I'll put it right here. And when you join Shortcuts University, you also get a discount on my shortcuts community. Over 4,000 people there are building, helping others, troubleshoot their own shortcuts. And if you become a member, you can access my weekly live streams where I share new shortcuts. You can watch all the past live streams like this past one where I did a splitting the bill shortcut, talked about new apps, transcribing podcasts, and more. You can join for free at shortcut.bot and all the links to everything I mentioned are down in the video description.
But overall, huge kudos to Federico for spending six months on building really a powerful plug-in for code and codecs. And and let me know if you're using Shortcuts Playground with opening a codex and getting a better result. And maybe more of that last 10% is actually finished. I'd love to hear about it in the comments, but follow along and get subscribed here. New shortcuts videos coming all the time. And I think I'm still going to be building them for many years to come. Thanks for watching.