How to share and personalise Apple Shortcuts
Are you tired of boring, impersonal shortcuts? Want to add some pizzazz to your automation game? In this blog post, we’ll explore the wonderful world of “set-up” and how it can help you personalize your shortcuts like a pro!
Set-up is like the wardrobe department of the shortcut world — it allows you to add your own personal touch to your shortcuts and make them truly one-of-a-kind. So, buckle up and get ready to spice up your Shortcuts life!
Creating a Shortcut for yourself is great, but sharing them with others is even better. We can enhance Shortcuts by allowing users to personalise certain features, this is known as “set-up”.
In a previous post I mentioned a list of handy Shortcuts that you could learn from. One of those Shortcuts called, “Morning Briefing Set-up”, had an interesting feature, which when selecting “Adding Shortcut” it asked you to set up certain properties of the Shortcut so you only needed to enter that information once.
In this post let’s go through how we can set up our one of our own simple Shortcuts.
We’ll first create a Shortcut to open the Podcast app, then add the set-up feature to ask the user for their favourite Podcast when they add the shortcut to their system for the first time only.
Prerequisites
You’ll need to have macOS Monterey installed and have already listened to a few Podcasts, so they show up in the “Listen Now” section in the Podcast app, see below
Create the Shortcut
First open the Shortcut app and select the “+” icon
Select any name you like for the Shortcut, I’ve gone with “Play favourite pod”, please choose a name that make sense for yourself.
Next, we want to find the script to play a podcast. Select “Apps” in the left panel, then select “Podcasts”, followed by tapping “Play Podcast” twice to add the script, see below…
If you tap the play button in the top right of the left panel the Podcast app will open and from there you can select the Podcast you want to play. But we want to go one better than that and set up our Shortcut so that it knows our favourite podcast to play.
One simple way to pre-select the podcast is to tap the “Podcast” light blue text in the script. This will display a list of the podcasts you already listen to.
Select a podcast from that list and then select the play icon to run the Shortcut. This time the Podcast app will open and the preselected podcast will start to play.
That is a nice little Shortcut already, but my favourite Podcast might not be the same as yours. If I share my shortcut with yourself, you’ll need to know how to open the Shortcut once installed and know how to amend the pre-selected podcast. Handily for us Apple provides a way to set up a Shortcut on installing so we can all have unique favourite podcasts without having to know how to amend the Shortcut script ourselves.
Before we continue, we’ll need to revert our script back to image 4 so there are no pre-selected podcasts. To do this select the pre-selected podcast and in the list that appears select “clear”.
Shortcut Set-up
In the right panel, select “shortcut details”, followed by “Set-up” and then the “+” icon, see below
The Shortcut app is clever enough to know which properties you would like to set up based on the current script (so you’ll need to have your script complete before trying to set-up). In the case for our simple podcast app we will be presented with an interface like so..
Select “Click to Choose”, where you will be asked to enter the text to present the user when they install the Shortcut, you also get the option to enter a default value too.
As you have the Shortcut already installed on your machine, you cannot select “Add Shortcut”, so instead select “Customise Shortcut” (I’ll show you how to test “Add Shortcut” later).
You will then see the set-up interface where you can select your favourite podcast. Choose your favioute podcast. Then when running the Shortcut next the Podcast app will open and your pre-selected podcast will start playing.
And thats all there is to it. But we have not yet seen what happens when another users installs this Shortcut.
Testing “Add Shortcut”
As we created the Shortcut we could not test the “Add Shortcut” button and instead had to customise it ourselves. But before handing out the Shortcut to others it would be helpful if we could test “Add Shortcut” ourselves first.
To do that, go to the root window of the Shortcut app and right click on the “Play favourite pod” Shortcut. From the menu, select “Share”, then “Messages”. You will then be asked to “Create iCloud Link”, select “Share”, from there you can select the url that appears. You can share with any app you like, I tend to use Messages as its easy to copy the url from.
Copy the url into a web browser and select the “Get Shortcut” button, followed by the “Add Shortcut” button, so you can test that user journey.
If that has inspired you to create a Shortcut of your own, check out other post here.
Hope that helps you out and happy Shortcuting.
