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Comment by stopachka | Hacker News Reader

Interesting! The folks who built this made what became Shortcuts on iOS. They are great hackers.

There are a few other comments like yours but it it doesn't mean anything to someone who doesn't use iOS. I had to look it up and it lets you create automated tasks using different iOS apps.

Yes.

Some more interesting background:

The founders originally built Shortcuts as a separate startup. From memory I think both were under 20 at the time. They were acquired by Apple, and turned their startup into a default application that people actually like.

One of my younger teammates got into programming thanks to their app.

That makes me so happy to hear! I programmed my dad's old TI-82 to stay entertained in high school math, and I always wondered if kids would do that with Shortcuts.

you can see where it all started back in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49JJnJ2i4oc

Thanks for sharing, absolutely amazing

Nice to see you around these parts, Conrad.

Which afaik is something that has been in Android for ages. What's so special about the iOs implementation?

Does Android have it? Some Googling tells me it has third party apps which enable it but no built-in equivalent.

Yeah the closest thing I recall using is tasker but that relies on mostly private intents, the nice thing with shortcuts is it uses the same intents developers use for things like Siri Shortcuts so there’s first class support

Well, the first app of this kinda was in Android. About 5 years before Shortcuts iirc. Most people on here seem to be iOs users so they are not aware of it

Yeah but it was third-party right?

Shortcuts is about a decade old and was acquired by Apple 8 years ago. It has hooks into the OS and allows apps to expose their own hooks for automation.

Are you looking for a real answer or is this some weird defensive Android thing in response to someone describing the existence of an Apple feature?

Not sure what makes you think I was on the defensive, I asked a question. I am a regular user of both operating systems so I have no 'team' nor am I an iOs hater.

A similar app has existed for Android for about 15 years at a time when nothing like that existed for iOs. It was actually used by Google to showcase Android's potential for automation in contrast to iOs which had nothing like that at the time.

macOS exposes a lot of affordances to code/xrpc/services/etc that Shortcuts (and previously automator) used. They let you do basically anything you'd want on macOS programmatically, without going through accessibility frameworks, code signing and sand-boxing issues. iOS as well to some extent.

Presumably if OpenAI is dog-walked/locked out of these by Apple at some point, they would be stuck in the Chrome/Chromebook feature jail. My guess is this gives OpenAI a team to put in charge to give them a chance to wedge themselves into the OS before Apple changes their mind or puts scare-box dialogs everywhere.

Either that or there's nothing so complicated and OpenAI just wants to re-build this stack inside ChatGPT as quickly and well as they can.

Shortcuts is the strangest programming "language" that I make useful things in.

My favorite is an automation that triggers when I turn on my motorcycle helmet's bluetooth module, it checks the time of day and starts playing my favorite type of music for riding at that time - hard rock at daytime, EDM/synthy music at night.

Shortcuts convinced me to go to iOS. Android has similar stuff but they're all kinda futzy and hacky in unfortunate ways.

It's a bit surprising to me that, say, Zapier hasn't skunkworked up something like Shortcuts that could be crossplatform. It's not immediately their core competency but being able to roll out low code UIs across employees of a phone through that would make a lot of sense.

The unfortunate thing with iOS is that while there's some secret stuff with deep linking ultimately less stuff is exposed than what one might entirely want. But I _was_ able to make a "fake" Find My for my bluetooth headphones in about 5 minutes (bluetooth disconnect -> record lat/lon into a text file on my phone) and that was fun.

I should look at iOS again - every so often I try something like this in Android and people commonly suggest Tasker, but it's such a PITA to write anything in Tasker that I usually abandon the project.

Same, never got Tasker to do anything useful for me (though it's been a while, granted)

they have a new Gemini integration, pretty useful for me now.

Please ride safely

Workflow / Shortcuts was a neat idea that never really worked or expanded beyond a small group of users. I don't think you can really extrapolate "great hackers" from that. The programming interface they exposed was truly awful and the tools around it weren't much better.

I'm not really sure but my recollection from talking to them in 2019 was that it was quite difficult to get features shipped because of e.g. hacking risk.

It's certainly true that iOS's strict sandboxing and aggressive resource management probably made life harder for them, but that doesn't excuse the lack of deep integration for 1p automation. That's the kind of stuff AppleScript allowed two decades prior without any background runtime.

I've tried Shortcuts but I found the settings app really confusing. They really don't do a good job of explaining how to use them.

Thiel Fellows too.

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