501: iOS 13 and the Shortcuts Field Guide

Concerning Shortcuts: There is no way to toggle vibration on and off with a shortcut, is there?

Nice trick is if you hit the volume button you can drag on the volume indicator that pops up to change the volume instead of just using the hardware buttons.

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I also tried to play a sound when my automation ends. It seems I can’t choose the type of sound but I could ”paste from Clipboard”? Anyone tried to paste a file from clipboard?

I have a Shortcut that plays a sound from a Dropbox file. Roughly it’s Get File → Play Sound. Does that help? I haven’t tried using the clipboard.

Thanks. I’ll try that out.

Ok, this IS inconsistent. How come “Connects to CarPlay” and “Play Music” combo allows to run automatically without intervention?

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be “Because someone at Apple decided that was OK.”

Why do some require confirmation? “Because someone at Apple decided that was required.”

I assume that there is some sort of logic behind it. but I don’t think we know what it is.

Perhaps they decided that if the shortcut to play music gets accidentally triggered, it only bothers you, but if the message shortcut accidentally gets triggered, that might bother someone else?

We can speculate, but I don’t think we can really know.

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Completely agree. Automations that require human intervention are “Manuals”…not Automation. It is so stupid. I set up an “Automation” to text my wife when I leave work, but all I get is an alert to then manually send it. What a joke. Apple please fix this.

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Btw, if you don’t like that your phone always place music when plugged into CarPlay, there is a “Play/Pause” actions which you can choose when the trigger is “Connect to CarPlay”. That will stop the pesky music and you don’t need to resort to playing a silent track named “Aaaaaaaaaaaa”.

This also works when connecting to the car’s Bluetooth wirelessly, although, you do need to manually run the shortcuts (sigh!)

In the episode they didn’t mention the improvements to text editing/selection. I haven’t had too much time to really evaluate this, but if it’s true this would be one of the most important features. Text selection was one of the biggest flaws imho.

But there’s supposed to be a new contextual menu with copy/paste/undo which sounded great, but I didn’t see this anywhere yet. How do I invoke that? I still only get the old black bar.

When editing text, tap with three fingers. A little modal pops up with some buttons for undo, copy, etc.

You can also swipe left with three fingers for undo and right for redo.

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Catching up with Episode 501, and I’ve heard no mention of the principle issues with Shortcuts, both in organising shortcuts in the App and the frustrating way shortcuts run, stepping through actions line by line. This should be a de-bugging tool and not the standard when running workflows.

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