A note from Federico: This year, I’ve decided to try some new things for my annual iOS 16 review. Some you’ll see on Monday. One of them is previewing small excerpts from the review in the OS Preview series on MacStories and MacStories Weekly for Club MacStories. Today, I’m posting a preview of a section...
Shortcuts in iOS 16: The Potential of App Shortcuts for Everyone
A note from Federico: This year, I’ve decided to try some new things for my annual iOS 16 review. Some you’ll see on Monday. One of them is previewing small excerpts from the review in the OS Preview series on MacStories and MacStories Weekly for Club MacStories. Today, I’m posting a preview of a section of the Shortcuts chapter here, and a section of the Everything Else chapter in MacStories Weekly. I hope you enjoy these. I’ll see you for the full story – and more reveals – on Monday.
In iOS 16, the Shortcuts app hasn’t undergone a major redesign or technical rewrite; instead, Apple’s efforts have focused on adding more actions for system apps, extending the developer API, bringing more stability, and making Shortcuts more approachable for new users.
The last point is both important and likely the reason why some Shortcuts power users will be disappointed by this year’s update. There isn’t a lot for them in this new version of the app: as we’ll see in my iPadOS review, there’s no integration with Files quick actions, no support for Stage Manager actions, and no system-wide hotkeys still. If you’re an advanced Shortcuts user and were wishing for more system-level enhancements in addition to stability this year: I hear you, but we’ll talk about this later on.
What we do have in iOS 16 is a fascinating new feature to get newcomers started with the Shortcuts app, a grab bag of useful new actions for Apple apps, and some solid developer-related enhancements that will make third-party actions much better than before. Let’s take a look.
macOS Ventura with Jason Snell
John
Let’s Fix the Music App
What Makes a Great Modern Shortcuts Action?
AppStories Episode 292 - What Makes a Great Modern Shortcuts Action?
0:00
43:12
43:12
This week, Federico and John consider what it takes to create a great set of modern Shortcuts actions using examples of what Apple is doing in its own apps and what some of our favorite third-party apps are already doing to make Shortcuts accessible to a wider audience and more useful to power users.
Repurposing Quick Note for iPad as an Obsidian Launcher
As part of the process of writing my annual iOS and iPadOS review, I constantly re-evaluate Apple’s default apps and how they’ve changed over the past year. One of the apps I’m always keeping an eye on is Notes, particularly on the iPad because of its system-wide Quick Note capturing feature, which lets you capture...
2022 OS Preview: watchOS 9
AppStories Episode 291 - 2022 OS Preview: watchOS 9
0:00
53:35
53:35
This week, John is joined by Alex Guyot to talk about Alex’s MacStories origin story and walk through all of the changes coming to watchOS this fall as part of the MacStories Summer OS Preview series.
How iOS and iPadOS 16 Are Affecting Our Lives
Wiping Significant Locations from iOS’ Intelligent Suggestions
Silvia and I recently bought our first house in Rome (hence why I couldn’t go to WWDC this year and why my schedule has been all over the place for the past four months), and, as part of our move, we obviously ended up with a new address. In addition to all kinds of paperwork...