How to use an Apple Shortcut Menu + Variables Actions
In this post we are going to learn how to use a Shortcut menu action in combination with variablesand see how we can use it to extend the usefulness of our Shortcuts.
Previously we created a super simple RSS viewer that showed 10 items from one RSS feed. This means though that we need to create one Shortcut for every RSS feed we are interested in. What if we instead created one Shortcut that can handle multiple RSS feeds. This is where a Menu action comes in handy.
Quick recap of our simple RRS viewer, we ended up with a specific RSS viewer for a single Apple feed, see below…
Adding a Menu action
In the right panel search for menu and a the actionChoose from Menu to the top the the list in the left panel. You will then be presented with the default memu.
Change the menu item name by first selecting the menu item name, then select the “i” icon in the bottom right of the ‘Choose from…’ action.
For my Shortcut I have changed the first menu item to “MIT Tech Review” and the second to “Techmeme”. You can add more by selecting the “+” icon.
Those menu items on their own don’t really provide much functionality, what we want them to do is display a list of RSS items. We could do that by adding “Get 10 items…”, “Choose from …”, “Get URLs” and “Open URL” actions to each menu item. But this will get cumbersome if we do that for 20 different menu items. So let’s get a little smarter and use variables instead.
For each menu item add a “URL” and a “Set variable” action. For each URL action set the correct url text and for each variable action set the name to feed .
Next replace the current action “Get 10 items from ….”, with a new “Get Items from RSS feed”, but this time we want to get the RSS url from the variable feed.
Unfortunately at this stage the Shortcut menu actions underneath, e.g “Choose from list”, “Get URLs” etc no longer work. Simply delete those and add them back in again (if I find a better way to do that I’ll let you know).
Finally you should have a Shortcut looks like…
This Shortcut will display you a menu list of RSS feeds to choose from. When selecting a particular menu item its RSS feeds items should appear for you to again select to read the associated article.
Want to learn more? I’ve created a list of handy links to learn from.
