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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone found any of these useful?

I'm racking my brain for something that would benefit me, but nothing comes to mind... but I feel like I'm just lacking creativity here.

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Checkout Federico Viticci at MacStories - he's been using Shortcuts and Workflow before it to automate his entire iPad based life. Some of the stuff he gets it to do is amazing.

Any links? Googling seems to just give me a list of random shortcuts rather than any discussion on how he uses them

https://www.macstories.net/shortcuts/

and another collections https://shareshortcuts.com/ https://shortcutsgallery.com/ https://routinehub.co/ https://sharecuts.app/

As well as leo-tada's links, this is a good article on how Federico uses the iPad as his primary computer (including how Workflow/Shortcuts is essential to that) - although this predates iPadOS

https://www.macstories.net/stories/beyond-the-tablet/8/#cont...

I made one just for fun to see how they work.

I say "Siri, record my weight" and the iPad response "Sure, how much do you weigh?" I say the number and it gets appended to a Google Docs spreadsheet with the current date.

The next step that I never finished was to have Google Docs generate a graph and mail it to me every month.

I did the same thing but it just records it directly into Apple's Health app. Then you get the graphs for free!

For some reason you can't put the health app on an iPad and that's my only iOS device.

I got a shortcut to log when I've fed my baby, and create a reminder to let me know when he'll start to get hungry again. This way I'm not constantly checking my watch. The best part is that it works with Siri, so I can trigger it with my voice since I won't have a hand free.

Shortcuts in general are nice, particularly now that they can be conversational. Hey Siri log... lets me easily log my weight, water and caffeine intake just by speaking. I already had shortcuts to do those through tapping, but the easier I can make things to do the more likely I'll do them.

Another I have is "Hey Siri, heading home" which texts my wife my ETA and starts my last played podcast.

Question: how do you get your last played podcast in Shortcuts?

I use Overcast. If I just call "Play Overcast" from the shortcut, it starts playing the last podcast that was playing. I assume Apples Podcast app would do the same?

Some things that I've setup or use in shortcuts:

- "gas prices" pull up the gasbuddy website, regex the first element and get siri to read it aloud.

- "going home" Uses maps to obtain how long it takes to get home from my current location, sets the volume to 70% to get siri to dictate it, and sends the ETA and a nice message to my +1 that i'll be home soon. Version 2 will be to prompt me when I actually leave the GPS of my office around 5-7pm and send it after verbal confirmation. (Barring if there's a pop up that has been mentioned)

- "Share Location" this is one of the ones available in gallery that let's you send people your current location. I hope they make 'Share ETA' available but I don't see that option in maps yet. That would let people know when i'm arriving at their house.

This is fun enough that I'm hoping to buy some NFC stickers and get some homekit devices to play with.

Apple Maps now shows a "Share ETA." You can slide up from the arrival time to find it after setting a destination, but it also popped up pretty prominently a few times. The only bummer (the only time I've tried to use it) is that it only has options to send to contacts.

I think it's one of those tools that everyone has their own niche use. These are for Home, not for Shortcuts or Personal automation, but my wife tends to leave the floor heaters on. So I have an automation that turns them off at 10am and midnight. I get home after dark, so I had my front porch light turn on at sunset and off at midnight. For awhile my garage door opened onto a busy street, so we often left it open. I hadn't automated it, but I wanted either for it to automatically close or message me if it was open for 30+m and have the option to close it remotely. We have room heaters in my young son's room. It would be nice to remotely control that instead of going downstairs (thankfully his baby monitor shows the room temp). Most of these could be addressed with a manual device, but the lack of friction really helps--until your network goes down.

As for Personal Automation, I've heard others text their spouse every day as they leave work. Now they can do that automatically with an ETA.

I wrote a shortcut that posts to HN from a Safari page !!

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/5f95b87eba6544929fb2a40b72c...

I have an NFC sticker on my fridge that runs an automation to set a reminder that something will expire, like milk. I have some to quickly set up calendar events, send my wife my location or the amount of time until I get home, calculate how much time in hours and minutes is left until the sun goes down, turn on assistive touch with one click when my mouse pairs to my iPad, log my weight to the health app, just to name a few.

I definitely felt like that for a long time. With automation, I only have a few ones right now: One that is activated with my alarm in the morning and opens my Things agenda and the weather, and ones toggling Do not disturb when I get to/leave work.

Of course, everything shortcuts can do can be done manually, but for some I think it can be worth it to automate or reduce the workload of a lot of menial tasks

Not everything could be done manually, for example injecting JS into a webpage in Safari

Apple provides a gallery of script ideas, so you might start there and see if anything inspires.

I spent the other night writing a cowsay shortcut, so that’s something.

I sorta feel the same. But I did make one that I’m using a lot. It’s a typical “read later” workflow but it adds the site to both safari reading list and pinboard at the same time.

A simple shortcut to send web urls through outline.com and or archive.is is a life saver for mobile browsing particularly when EU blocking news sites are the target

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