Technology

Simple - a share menu shortcut that just says “remind me about this later” and a small pop up asks if to remind you in 2 hours/in the evening/on the weekend/when i get home. Superr useful.

A few of my absolute essentials:

• Open URI - what it says on the tin. So very helpful for all those times when a YouTube link opens in the browser.
• Quick Look - also what it says on the tin. Invaluable for previews- I also recently discovered it can be used as an ephemeral markup button! Helpful for filling out bingos and immediately texting the result.
• Fetch Image - helpful when trying to share “images” (that are actually image links - Discord especially likes to be annoying about this) to other apps. Just fetches the image and lets me share the actual image instead.
• Stitch - a really budget version of the Tailor app. Usual workflow goes like, take a bunch of screenshots, crop them so they perfectly align vertically, share to Stitch and copy the result to clipboard :)

I mostly use these shortcuts on iOS; on macOS, Preview does everything I need and more!

Yes, on iPhone only, though. I like that you can schedule them to run at certain times which is super helpful with home automation. As a former jailbreaker, I used to miss Activator but Shortcuts does everything I need.

A few good ones:

1. "I'm being pulled over" will start recording video and stream it as well as text contacts your location. The ACLU put this one out in 2020.
2. "On my way" will calculate my driving time to home, pad it by a few minutes for stoplights, and text it to my wife.
3. I have a HomeKit garage door opener/sensor. I have a shortcut that runs at 9pm and texts me and my wife if any of the doors are still open and displays a prompt to close them.

I’ve got a few on my phone:

• one for playing a sound when my phone is charged
• another for starting my Streaks timer when certain reading apps are opened, so that I can track how long I read every day across apps automatically
• when my Sleep schedule begins (when I’m going to bed), I automatically change the screen colour to grey to help prevent being distracted. When I wake up, it turns that off.
• I have one HomePod, and I don’t use it much, but it has a temperature sensor and when that goes over 25C I get a notification so I know to turn on the AC

Toggle VPN off, tied to my Work focus. One time I logged into work email while connected to a VPN. Freaked out my IT.

I have a shortcut that turns on my tv’s in the morning (Apple TV), switches them to Spotify, and plays a logo music playlist for me. It lets me have music playing throughout my house as I’m waking up making breakfast

I have an automation that reminds me to drip the faucet if it’s going to freeze overnight.

I have one to setup my primary and backup alarmclocks. It trigger when i plug the charger and gives me 2 options. If i dont press any then no alarm set.

I also use datajar to store variables, this way the clock automation toggles an automation in the morning to put a on a dimmed smartlight. It should also show me the weather and windspeed for the day but i always seem to miss that notification.

For a while i also had a system where a light changed color depending if i still have time or am running late but that one i have to redo since reconfiguring some stuff.

Almost forgot: an automation to reset the variables and clocks again for the next day.

I have been considering making it even more smart like checking my work schedule and such but I haven’t gotten around to it. Also sucks that ipads no longer support the newer HomeKit update.

For one thing, you don’t need a Shortcut to change wallpapers based on time-of-day — that’s natively supported by “Dynamic Wallpapers,” and you can make your own out of arbitrary images! https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/30/how-to-use-find-make-dynamic-mac-wallpapers/

As for Shortcuts — well, I use ones for starting and ending my workday, a lot (tying together various work-timers like Hubstaff and Harvest and Timing; changing Slack status, changing my focus-mode for the day … etc.); but they’re honestly kinda underwhelming / underpowered.

I get the most out of them by gluing together several automation tools — command-line scripts, Shortcuts, and kinda-janky GUI-automation tools (like https://keysmith.app, although it’s janky enough that I dunno that I can wholeheartedly recc’ it …). Sadly, though, it’s rare that it saves more time than it costs to set up. /=

I have some on my phone.

I mostly use “Going home” which sends a text to my wife with my ETA. I copied and modified that for “biking home” and “walking home”.

I’ve also used one I found that generates a QR code for your wifi connection, which you can then print out for your guests to scan so they don’t have to bother with a password to use your wifi.

I have one each to turn Theater Mode on/off on my Apple Watch when Sleep Mode is on/off since I think it's a lot better than the watch's Sleep Mode UI.

I also used to have one to open the Yubikey app when I held my Yubikey to the phone but that's not necessary anymore since it does that by itself now.

Nope. Everything I have tried setting up has required me to do something every time it tries to run. Kinda defeats the purpose if I have to authorize or open the app when I want it to run automatically.

I have exactly one shortcut I use on my iPhone, and it’s a photo shrinker because I realized the PNGs that come off this bad boy are like 12MB, and that feels like a lot to be asking folks to download for a quick pic of my flowers or a shitpost I made in mematic.

I use one that allows me to use Siri to ask Google stuff instead. Could surely be used with other search engines as well.

Somewhat specific, but I use it all the time with Home Assistant. Can turn lights on and off just clicking on the shortcut.

I have a shortcut that prepends archive.is to the current website, then opens the new URL in a new tab. Really good for bypassing paywalls!

I have quite a few personal shortcuts based on my alarm, bedtime, and location. They mainly send a signal to home assistant, which actually handles the rest of the automations.

I have a shortcut for each of my two main email addresses (more like a text expansion), emoji picker mapped to Fn key, some universal shortcuts for switching screen in Twitch broadcast thing, and CMD+SPACE has had Spotlight replaced with Raycast, which in turn has a bunch of internal shortcuts 🙂

And probably more than a few Obsidian shortcuts that I can't remember 😁

EDIT: Just read the rest of the comments, and can see by the context that I completely misunderstood the question 😅

I’m a Voice Control user, and have built a ton of stuff with Shortcuts and AppleScript to do complex tasks with single commands. Like:

1. I use a window manager app, and have commands to position windows how I like them using complex keyboard shortcuts.

2. I have a bunch of voice commands that I built to do stuff in the terminal.

3. I have a bunch of shortcuts that are templates for kinds of documents or notes

That sort of thing. It’s a full automation suite, so you can treat the shortcuts like macros and assign keyboard shortcuts or voice commands to them,

I've only once played around with shortcuts and that was for a ChatGPT thing prior to the official app (and it still does more than that such as making Apple Music Playlists due to its integrations). Never tried to on the Mac. I still use automator there.

I have an odd one but one click accessibility to make the screen a green text and dark backgrounds. Makes it super easy to read at night.

Command+space is the greatest thing that ever happened other than mapping Alfred to option space

If I want to send a snippet of a podcast to a friend, I use the record screen function and then I have a shortcut that will separate the audio from the video and save it as a voice memo

I have a shortcut that wakes my MacBook up via ssh cause for whatever reason my external keyboard and mouse doesn’t wake up sometimes

I have one setup to trigger the built-in background sounds that were recently added to the accessibility settings. It lets me play the sounds (which are basically like white noise or like a loop of water running in a creek). Normally you have to dig through the menus, but my shortcut does it with one tap!

My main use for them is to streamline how I use OmniFocus. I have shortcuts for adding items directly to certain projects rather than having to send them to the inbox first. I use certain projects as recurring checklists, so one of my shortcuts collects them all into a list and lets me pick which one I want to open.

I also sometimes use them to get around limitations in Apple apps. The favorites feature in Maps didn’t work great for me, so I made shortcuts that will let me pick from an arbitrarily long list of favorites.

Edit: I forgot to mention that this is all on iOS. I have really used them on Mac OS

i use the shortcuts feature to change my app icons so my iphone home screens are themed. i’m one of those people

I backup my photos with OneDrive and PhotoSync, then I have a shortcut to find 250 photos over 6 months old to delete.

I went in there and examined the demo scripts and was so blown away by how powerful they made it. However, I have yet to use it for anything myself.

I have a Clear Queue shortcut for Apple Music cause Apple arbitrarily decided to remove tbat function in-app

I use it for creating certain automations for my Home Assistant Installation.

I use Tailscale to stream music from my PC to phone when I connect to my network (ie. get home) I auto-disconnect because it murders my battery.