Thank you, that explanation makes sense. So I want an automation on the Mac that will speak the phrase “Your MacBook’s battery has risen above 80%” just as I already have a similar automation on my iPhone.
But automations don’t seem to exist yet in Shortcuts on macOS Monterey, right?
I use a shortcut a couple of times a day to process RSS feeds and add them to my Safari reading list, which I prefer to a separate app. I can now run it on the Mac too.
Shortcuts implementation is impressive, although having shortcuts on the Mac that refer to apps on my phone is a little odd - it would be neat if I could remote trigger something on my phone (I think - I don’t have a use case!)
Apple has a bunch of REALLY neat shortcuts!! Under Gallery. Mac OS Meets Shortcuts! Those are the best I have ever seen! AND on the App page itself. Apple really went all-out.
I downloaded a LOT of wonderful shortcuts MOST of which I cannot get them to work on the Mac. Most are working fine on my iPad. I have not a clue what I am doing wrong. Help!!!
LOL!. Never mind. I figured it out!
Btw, this is the very last time I download a new update right away. I am weary of all the problems.
Automations are a series of actions which can run automatically based on certain triggers. They are device specific. Shortcuts are macros that you can run at any time - manually, or using the “run shortcut” action in an automation, and those sync across your devices.
To add to what @RosemaryOrchard said: if you want to use an Automation on multiple devices, make the only action in the Automation the “Run Shortcut” action and build the rest of it as a Shortcut. You’ll have to set up the Automation with the Run Shortcut action on each device, but the Shortcut will sync between devices.
But in this case, I don’t see the “When battery level rises above 80%” action on the Mac in Shortcut actions. So it seems I’m out of luck for now. I can still run Marcel Bresink’s Battery Monitor app on the Mac to get verbal alerts when the charge level changes. I was hoping that using Apple’s action might be more power efficient.
I don’t really see this happening but it does bring up an interesting question: Are there any shells on i[Pad]OS?
Aside: We really need to come up with a shortcut for “i[Pad]OS”.
A stray thought: Is it possible that Mac OS might be a better place for creating and curating shortcuts - for use on any platform?
I’m thinking things like extracting a list of shortcuts, automating cloning with substitutions. It’s a bit of a stretch as the UI doesn’t look particularly scriptable.
You’re confusing the trigger with the action, the trigger is the battery rising, which causes the shortcut to run - and Shortcuts for Mac doesn’t have automation triggers in the app. However, you can use pretty much anything to trigger the shortcuts actions - you just need something to monitor the battery, etc.
Correct. There is a Mac shortcut action that reports the state of battery charge and I could write a shortcut, I think, to periodically poll the the battery for its charge. But I doubt this is an efficient approach. Better to register as a listener to an internal Mac process that already monitors battery state and is willing to report that data to all of its listeners. But that sort of interface integration is tough to get in a scripting environment, aka Shortcuts. So I will have wait until Apple provides a shortcut action that does.
Yesterday, Jason Snell posted an article which discusses the ins and out of Building cross-platform shortcuts. He demonstrates how to handle differences between platforms within the same shortcut, including interacting with a different app on each platform. At the end he even provides links to a few example shortcuts which make use of the methods discussed.
I haven’t tried this yet, but I am looking forward to being able to have a single shortcut which syncs to and runs on any of my devices.
Follow up: Today I created a shortcut on Mac for PCalc and another for MindNode. Did some work on each of these on the iPad. Worked fine in both places.
What does your Shortcut for Mind Node do?
Right now less than I’d like:
I wanted the next bit to be to prompt for a file name to save this Markdown to. And then it would create a make file to run mdpre and then md2pptx to create Powerpoint.
I can’t figure out yet either of prompting for a new directory and filename. Nor how to write text to that new file.
The descriptions are a little flimsy.
That’s terrific! You’ll get it.
I had forgotten but I had done a number of shortcuts on my iPad although I can’t recall how! Nothing quite as fancy as yours though.
They are fairly easy once you get the hang of them. I never did anything complicated, as I said, but some of it is pretty cool. Definitely user friendly and I think in all likelihood I was working off my other scripts and the scripts of others.
Reminds of of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. I heard him explain it on a video. I understood much to my total amazement while he was explaining. After all, he was a professor. An hour later I was quite confused!
Check out macstories.net. Federico has a wealth of Shortcuts there. I tried to put the link in but Spell Check kept changing it.
(I am an exceedingly good speller so I turned off Spell Check. I had to turn it back on because I am an exceedingly poor typist!)
In the end I adopted a hybrid approach as I outlined in this blog post: Instant Presentations?.
Basically - on Mac:
The net effect is I have all I need to build my PowerPoint presentation with mdpre / md2pptx from a simple invocation of make on the command line.
So, as I say, a hybrid approach - between Shortcuts and Keyboard Maestro - worked out best for me.