Seeing that Workflows and now Siri Shortcuts have brought automation in iOS beyond what Automator does on the Mac, the upcoming macOS Mojave has improved access to Automator workflows yet hasn’t done anything to Automator itself. For me, Automator has always been a disappointment. It never does what I want, and every Automator workflow I’ve ever written has in it a shell script or Applescript to do the actual work. Heck, I rely on automation features of Hazel and even Alfred far more than Automator!
But might this be a turning point, with the accessibility improvements in Mojave and the possibility of “Back to the Mac” of Siri Shortcuts? Nothing much was done to Automator since it first came out, and it really has always seemed like an unfinished work.
Any thoughts? Or is there no future here since the exit of Sal Soghoian?
OT: May be this belongs in “Automators” but it’s not obvious how to find it, and do I want another forum?
I can see Apple bringing Siri Shortcuts to macOS next year especially if they are able to port the iOS app across. Not sure if that will be in addition to or a replacement for Automator though.
If they add a “run shell/AppleScript/Automator script” action to it it could really open up automation (make it more accessible to non power users) on the os and make it quite a powerful tool. They may not though as these workflows wouldn’t be able to run on iOS devices.
I’ve not played with Siri Shortcuts yet so I’m not sure what’s been added/removed since the last version of Workflow. A comparison of the two, even before Siri Shortcuts if released, would make a good episode of Automators cough @MacSparky @RosemaryOrchard cough
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I have Shortcuts a few days. Didn’t have much time to play with it yet, but it seems that the only thing missingas opposed to Workflow app, at least for the time being, is support for other cloud storage providers than iCloud. Also sharingdownloading of shorecuts is officially not possible right now, but there is already a workaround on sharecuts.app.