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Posts tagged with "shortcuts playground"

Introducing the All-New MacStories Shortcuts Archive

Alongside Federico’s release of Shortcuts Playground, we have a new and improved Shortcuts Archive page. The design adopts a new modular card system for navigation, search, filtering, and the shortcuts themselves, making it easier than ever to find what you’re looking for from among over 400 shortcuts.

With so many shortcuts spread across multiple categories, it was important to design something that is easy to navigate, which is why there are a variety of ways to do so:

  • Categories lets you jump straight to a collection such as Music, Health, Photos, the Action button, and many more.
  • By default, the Shortcuts Archive shows you a featured collection followed by an alphabetically organized list of all our shortcuts. However, by clicking Filters in the navigation bar, you can rearrange the archive to display the shortcuts alphabetically or in reverse alphabetical order, arrange shortcuts by category, or start with the recently updated shortcuts.
  • Search is a brand new feature of the Shortcuts Archive, too, allowing you to run keyword searches against the name of the shortcut and its description. The search field helpfully adds a pill indicator beneath the search field if you have a filter applied that will impact your search results.

The Archive also includes a new featured collection. With the release of Shortcuts Playground today, that collection spotlights over 100 shortcuts that were built using Shortcuts Playground and verified by Federico. From here, you can also access our special Shortcuts Playground landing page that includes more details about what it can do and links to the agent plugin, announcement post, and more.

If you have an app or service to promote, the Shortcuts Archive is a great place to do so.

If you have an app or service to promote, the Shortcuts Archive is a great place to do so.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that we also have a dedicated callout slot for advertisers at the top of the Shortcuts Archive. The Archive is the second most visited page after the MacStories homepage, which makes it a great place to promote apps and developer tools to a an audience of creative professionals, developers, and app enthusiasts who care deeply about the apps and services they use. Currently, it promotes Club MacStories, but if you have an app or service to promote get in touch. We’re offering exclusive monthly and annual spots.


The Shortcuts Archive represents years of work and is packed with excellent automations that are ready for you to use off the shelf or as inspiration for your next automation project. And, with Shortcuts Playground, it’s never been a better time to try your hand at automation. Enjoy browsing the Archive. We hope you like it.


Introducing Shortcuts Playground: Create Apple Shortcuts with Claude Code or Codex

Shortcuts Playground in Claude Code.

Shortcuts Playground in Claude Code.

Today, I’m pleased to introduce something I’ve been working on for the past six months: Shortcuts Playground, a plugin for Claude Code and Codex that can create any shortcut for Apple’s Shortcuts app using natural language. With Shortcuts Playground, you can simply prompt Claude Code or Codex with a sentence requesting a shortcut of any kind; a few minutes later, you’ll end up with a real shortcut in Finder, ready to be imported into the Shortcuts app. It’s as simple as that.

Shortcuts Playground is free and open source: anyone can download the plugin from this GitHub repo, where I extensively documented how it works behind the scenes and where you can also inspect the code yourself.

Just point your preferred desktop agent to the repo, and it’ll find the plugin marketplace to install it for you. You can also check out the dedicated mini-site we launched for it at macstories.net/shortcuts-playground.

For Club MacStories+ and Premier members, I’m also releasing Shortcuts Playground as a generative shortcut. It’s quite meta: once you have the main plugin installed on a Mac, you can use a shortcut to make more shortcuts and install them directly on an iPhone, iPad, or other Mac. The Shortcuts Playground shortcut is highly customizable, and I’ve shared a detailed guide for Plus and Premier members here.

As part of this announcement, we’re also launching the completely redesigned MacStories Shortcuts Archive. The new archive is easier to browse with new categories and filters, and it also includes 100 shortcuts that were entirely generated by Shortcuts Playground and verified by me. I figured that it’d be nice to offer concrete evidence of Shortcuts Playground’s capabilities; I think 100 shortcuts should do the trick.

You can read more about the new MacStories Shortcuts Archive here.

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