 In this video I'm going to be giving you an introduction to the Shortcuts app which is Apple's latest addition to Mac automation as of Mac OS Monterey. Now if you have been using iOS shortcuts then this will probably be somewhat familiar to you and indeed the way that you actually create shortcuts by building up a series of actions is exactly the same process. Also if you have created shortcuts on iOS then those will automatically sync over iCloud over onto the Mac as well and assuming they're not dependent on anything that's running on your iOS device such as a particular iOS app or something like that then they will also work on the Mac as well and vice versa anything that you create on the Mac will also sync across to iOS as well so it is a great way to sort of combine these workflows that we've got across all of our devices. So without further ado let's just jump straight into the interface shall we and this is basically what it looks like when the app opens up you'll find that you are in this view which is the gallery view and you'll have this sidebar over on the left hand side if it's not showing up then you may want to just press this little button here which is the toggle for the sidebar so click on that one and the sidebar will pop out obviously it's popped out to the wrong side for me but there you go and now you can see it and as you can see we've got this menu item here called the gallery and this over here on the sort of right hand side the large pane window that is the gallery view and that consists of a number of pre-made shortcuts that Apple has created very kindly that we can use as a starting point with automation and I'm going to come and have a look at those in a little bit more detail in a moment but let's just have a look at what else is in the left hand sidebar as well so underneath that you'll have a section which is labeled my shortcuts and so you'll see these three headings all shortcuts where you'll find all of your shortcuts that you've created and you'll also find quick actions and menu bar items now I'll come onto those in a little bit more detail later now for you if you haven't already created shortcuts on iOS then you may not have anything else but I've got some here that are different folders of organization of my existing shortcuts and I should say that also you'll see for all shortcuts you'll see that there is potentially a number there and that is in my case 49 because that is the number of shortcuts that I created on iOS that have now been synced across to my Mac but for you that might be zero but don't worry about that we're soon going to build out your list of shortcuts and get some productivity going on but let's come back to the gallery view shall we and let's have a little look at the way that this is organized so we've got some little articles here so shortcuts for mac os so this is just specific things for mac os and then here you've got different games and things like that those two headers but for me there's not a huge amount in there I would concentrate more if are you on having a look down here at these different categories because here we've got a series of categories there are only four items shown in each one for different shortcuts however there is also this little see all link here that will expand that out to all of the shortcuts that are within that particular category so the sorts of categories we've got are get stuff done get organized essentials work from anywhere so these are things like break timers start my next meeting start a personal conference call reflect on the day always a good one don't forget to do that journaling at the end of the day morning routine so what time do I need to leave by things like that going through this list of shortcuts is actually a great way to get an idea of what is actually possible with shortcuts and it can really get the mind going to think about how you might be able to work these into your sort of daily workflow and how you may be able to get some great optimized working and productivity out of them some of them are also just nice to have things like maybe a coffee timer or something like that while you're waiting for your coffee to brew whatever it happens to be but I'm not going to go through all of these lists obviously because there are too many to just go through one by one but really go and have a dig in and just look at even the titles will give you an idea of what they're doing but you can also go a little bit deeper with all of these now if I scroll back up to the top and we'll take this category at the top get stuff done as I said there are only four displayed on this particular window here but if you click on the see all then you'll will see that it does expand it out and it will show you all of the ones that are within that category the other thing that that's done then as well is it has actually expanded it out to give you the description of each one as well so here you can see what these particular things do so this one here turns text into audio so there you would be able to just highlight a patch of text on the screen and have it read it to you for example this one here how many days until so this is see how many days there are until a particular milestone of your choice and so on so you can just see what's going on in each of these you can also click on any one of these and it will bring up a bit more information about it so there you've got the same description but here also you'll notice that this one does also work on the apple watch so that's something as well as being available on mac os and ios i should also mention that it's also available on watch os as well so there are shortcuts you can create and you can create them on the mac and then have them working from your watch so we could just add this into our list of shortcuts now if we wanted just by clicking on here but maybe we want to just have a little bit more of a dig into it before we do that well there is this little button up at the top of any of the shortcuts where you've got these three little dots now clicking on that will open up a way to examine exactly what all of the actions are within the shortcut so a shortcut consists of a series of actions that it's going to perform whenever it is triggered i'll come on to different ways that you can trigger these a little bit later by the way but this is how basically these shortcuts are built up so in this case it's going to take some text it's going to take a specific specified date and then it's going to get the time between that the current date and that date and then it's going to show us the result related to the text and the time between those two dates as an output a lot easier for me to just actually demonstrate this to you but that is basically just a great way if you want to actually dig into what's going on so remember these three buttons at the top these three dots i should say at the top click on that and you'll be able to just sort of examine exactly what's going in so a great way to reverse engineer these shortcuts and figure out how you want to build something yourself but let's just actually add this one in shall we so i'm going to add this shortcut and here it's prompting me for a couple of bits of information in order to set up the shortcut we're only going to have to do this once but then in this case um but then once it's done we'll just be able to trigger this and we'll i'll show you how we can do that in a moment so what it's asking me for is bear in mind this is how many days until that's the name of this shortcut so it's saying when is the event you are counting down to so let me just pick a totally arbitrary day the third of may happens to be my birthday so i'm just going to type three may there now i could put a specific year if i wanted to count down to my 50th 60th 100th whatever it was then i could put the actual year in there as well but if you just leave it blank and just put the day and the month then it will count down to just that month every year or that date every year now what is the name of the event uh well it is my birthday so i'm just going to type that in there and now i'm going to click on add shortcut and that is it we've set up that shortcut so where do we find that now well you'll notice that this number of shortcuts has now gone up to 50 so if i come into the all shortcuts you can by the way drag these around to organize them there are other ways to do that with folders and so on so i'll come into that a little bit later but when you create a new shortcut it will just default to coming right at the top left here so you can see here how many days until this is the new shortcut we've just created and it's just popped up to the top there if you want to color code these by the way you can just right click on them and change the color and icon so this one has got an icon in the top corner which is a little calendar you can see that all of these have got some form of icon in them and the actual tile itself is a specific color as well so i can edit the color and icon and i could come in here and let's say i want to make this one red for example and then let's say you want to change the icon you could make this whatever you want and not sure i can pick up a birthday cake just straight away out of there but let me just pick something as an example just to show how easy it is to change so i'm just going to pick that icon and there you see we've changed it to red with a little sunshine icon because i'd like to think it always shines on my birthday but in any case if i click on the little play button now so this one is going to trigger it you can notice as i hover over them it's got this little play button symbolizing that this one is available to trigger so if i click on that then what's happened is it's just bought up this little pop-up window over here and it says my birthday is in two months 16 days 21 hours and 16 minutes so that's very good i'll be using that every day just to count down the days of course but maybe i want to edit that because that did give me quite a lot of information i don't think i need to know it right down to the second so let's just use this as an example of how we can actually go and edit any of these so all i'm going to do now is if i just click on the the shortcut so i'm just going to double click on it not on the play button on the actual action itself the shortcut itself rather and now this is opened up the editor so this is a second window and this one is where we're going to edit this particular shortcut and you can change the title so this is how many days until that's just the default title of it but let's say i'm going to count down to lots of different days so i might want to just be more specific here and i could just call this one days until my birthday there we go and what this is doing is it's got some a variable which is a bit of text so this one in this case is what we specified at the beginning my birthday so there we're actually specifying some text then the next thing is we're looking at a specific date and this is called specified date and the the date of that was the third of may and then what it's doing here is it's actually performing this little action so get time between the current date so current date is a variable that it can just pull out and say like what's the date today so it's getting the time between that date and the date which is this one here and then it's looking at that in the total time and then what it's doing for the output in this show part here is it's created this little pop-up with this little output and this is outputting text and then it's so the text is this part my birthday and then it's saying is in and then it's adding in this variable the time between the dates so that's where we're getting my birthday is in and then the total time where it gave me the time in days minutes and seconds and whatever so let's say i want to change this and instead i just want it to be in a specific number of days well i can come in here and i can click on this total time and instead of being in total time maybe i want to come down here and just change that to days so that's now going to give me a number of days and so in this output what i want to do is i just want to add in the word days at the end so it's going to have my birthday is in and then it's going to give count the number of days and then at the end here i'm going to just come in here and oops a daisy don't see that i want to just come in here and edit this bit and i'm going to put days like that so i'm just going to type that in manually now when i run this one what you'll see is it's popped up and instead it's reflecting that change that we've just made so now it says my birthday is in 75 days so that is how we can go in and edit these things don't worry about all of these different things in terms of variables and all that sort of stuff i am going to come on to those in a later video as well i'm just showing you the principle that once we've got a specific a specific shortcut we can go in and sort of analyze it we can tweak it we can change it to be whatever we want and in fact you could add in a whole series of other actions here so over on the right hand side i had to think about my left and right there over on the right hand side we've also got the way to add in other actions so you've got all actions related to different things you can add in calendar events all those sorts of things this is another great way by the way to just get an idea of what's possible with shortcuts is to just go into this editor here and then go to all actions and then you can just sort of scroll down this list and as you can see it's really quite a long list of all the potential actions so you can get an idea of the sorts of things that you might actually be able to do within your automations and within your shortcuts so let's say that i'm happy with that i just want to be able to show my birthdays in 78 days or however many days it's in so how are we going to trigger that well we can obviously do that from within the shortcuts app as we've seen we can open the shortcuts app and we can come and we can press the little play button next to the thing next to the the shortcut but of course as you start getting more and more of these then you're not going to want to go in there it sort of defeats the object if you're having to do that all of the time so how can you actually trigger these well when you come into the editor then you've got this little section on the here in the top menu bar and this is the shortcut details and when you change to that you've got a few different options so you can pin the shortcut into the menu bar what that will do is it will add it up into the menu bar so we've got a little shortcuts icon just there in the menu bar and if i click on that one you'll see that it's got all of the shortcuts that i have assigned to the menu bar feature there so only one at the moment and if i did have multiple ones then it would just still be that one icon but just with a drop down with all of those different shortcuts and then you can trigger them from there so i could click on that and that is now going to activate that shortcut and sure enough if i come back to this view again then here we go we've got the output is my birthday in 75 days so that has been calculated from the click into the menu bar that still might not be very relevant for all of the shortcuts that we're using so there are some other options so here we've got use as a quick action and it will default to this one so we can either use it from the finder or the services menu services menu is a way to create different shortcuts and then trigger them from within certain applications so if i come over to the notes for example and i'm just going to share my screen again and i'm just sharing now this is actually my e-cam live window but here if i come into notes then you'll see here we've got this services menu and there you can see that shortcut has been added in there so you will have some that are at work well for specific applications and so you may want to have them in that particular services menu there are a couple of other options though as well and one of those is to have it you work with a keyboard shortcut so we'll click on that keyboard shortcut there and you can just assign a keyboard shortcut to it so i'm just going to assign something a little bit random there we go hang on a minute it's obviously not liking that there we go i'll put that one so now if i just click out of there and i click on that keyboard shortcut then sure enough it has just triggered that little shortcut again so those are the different options you've also got if you want to have this shown in a share sheet so a share sheet in an ios is where you want to share something and you want it to go to a particular place well maybe you want to perform actions for example like on an image or something like that and so you want to include this in ios so that you save an image and you want to have you click the share sheet action to be able to do something else with it and have these actions that you're creating these shortcuts you're creating rather be available on ios so here as you can see you've got ways to allow it to work on ios and you're specifying where it will work and here as well show it on the apple watch so you can decide whether you do want it on there or not because obviously you don't want a load of stuff on your on your eyewatch if it's on your apple watch if it's not going to be useful so this is where you can just have a look at the visibility there is also a privacy setting if you have needed to give it access to particular apps or things like that then those will all feature in here and you'll have to grant access to things like that or if you're doing screen recordings or something like that so this is where you have a look at the permissions that basically this particular shortcut has and you can revoke those from within here and then you've got a couple of other things to do with the setup so this is basically the if you remember when I set it up what was the date and the text so here is where you can add in other fields and customize the shortcut so this is all within this section here the shortcut details and that is basically how we we can play around with these to to look at how they're working we can add in different actions and things like that what we're going to be doing as we go forward with the future videos is i'm going to be basically building this out so that we can look at some other examples of how we might go about building our own actions and using some of the components that we've got in here to then go on to build something a little bit different now i'm going to leave a link to the next video in the series over on that side so do check that one out and let's get straight into the next video