 In this video, we're going to build out our first shortcut in the Shortcuts app. Rather than taking one from the gallery of stock shortcuts, we're going to actually start from scratch and look at the process of doing that. This is the second in a series of videos I'm doing all about shortcuts, and I'll leave a link to the full list of videos down in the description so be sure to check those out and see which areas you want to work on to improve on. But let's get straight on into this particular task today, which is looking at how to build out our own custom shortcuts. Now, in the last video, we looked at the gallery and how we can take shortcuts from there and maybe tweak them to more suit our needs. But as I say, in this video, we're just going to start from scratch. So the way we're going to do that is we're going to come out from the gallery and we're going to move over to where it says All Shortcuts in the sidebar. And when I click on that, you'll see a list of all of our shortcuts. Incidentally, these are by default organized in this sort of grid pattern, but you can come up to the top here and you'll notice you've got this sort of familiar to icons for either grid or list view. So if I move over and click on the list view, then you'll see that now those are organized in possibly a more easily readable list. It does give you a little bit more information at a glance there as well. So it will tell you the last modified date, but then it will also tell you how many actions are within those particular shortcuts. So that might be an interesting one to note just so that you can see the complexity of them. But in any case, it does make them a little bit more easy to find and read perhaps. But anyway, I'll change back to that view for the moment because that is the more familiar view that you'll have when you go into it. And you'll notice that there is also a little plus icon next to those two and that's where we're going to create a new shortcut. You can also do this from the Shortcuts menu as well with the familiar keyboard shortcut Command N for creating a new. So that's just global in Mac OS Command N. It's for new document, new email, new whatever application you're in. So yeah, just coming up to the Shortcuts menu in the menu bar, I'm going to file new shortcut is the other way to do that. But for now, I'll just use the button here and I'm going to click on that. And that will basically create a new blank shortcut. You can see it's just popped it there at the top. You can organize these. You can sort of drag them around and move moving around in here and the same when you're in the list view. But it will always just put a new one right at the top there. So you can also organize them in folders and I'll come on to that a little bit later. But for now, let's just look at editing this new shortcut that has been created. So I mentioned in the last video, you can always right click to change the color and the icon. So if you wanted to change it to a different color, add in a different icon, for example, then whatever it happened to be, I'm not sure, knife and fork is going to be relevant to what I'm doing here. But you get the picture. So then what you do is you would double click it and it would open up that secondary window. So let's have a little look at that. Here it's opened the editing window. And basically this is where we edited the one in the previous video, which was the days until my birthday shortcut. And you'll notice that we have now got this tabbed view. So this is quite good if you want to just sort of flick between two different shortcuts. So for example, if you were to have taken a template from the gallery, for example, and then you wanted to work on that alongside the new one that you're creating from scratch, then it's a good way to do that. But an even better way to do that, bear in mind, with most things with tabs these days, you can just literally grab a tab and drag. And now we've got ourself two windows. So if you do want to do that, comparing to an existing shortcut set of actions, then just drag that out and now you've got two windows next to each other. So I'll just close this one down for now because I don't really need it for this demonstration, but just worth noting that. So the interface now is looking a little bit more sparse because all we've got here is a sort of blank canvas. And as you can see, it says add actions from the right to build your shortcut. Now there are lots of ways that you can sort of chain different actions together and you can come up with some really quite complex shortcuts. I'm going to start with the easy things and I'm going to start with just a few that just contain a couple of different actions and simple actions at that as well. However, as we go through the video series, then I'm going to build these out and adding in more and more complexity to show you what can be done. And hopefully by the end of the series, you'll be away and flying with shortcuts. So let's have a little look now at how we actually do go about building this out. So over on the right hand side, we've got a list of, it will default to suggestions. So it'll give you suggested shortcuts, but you've also got, sorry, suggested actions, I should say. So shortcuts is the thing that we're going to trigger. All of these things that we're going to put in are different actions. And you can bring up a list of all actions. If I click on there, you can see there is quite a lot to choose from. So definitely worth just sort of going through this list and actually having a look at all the actions that are available because that will give you a really good idea of the sorts of things that you might be able to do, the sorts of things that you might be able to automate. But as I say, we're going to start with some basics. Another way that you can organize these, instead of by all actions, you can also organize by favorites. So if there are things that you're using quite a lot, let's say you do things with the new calendar event, for example, or at a new event. Let's say that's one that you're going to be using often in your different shortcuts that you're creating. Then if you click on the little information symbol next to any of these, it will give you more information about them and you can have a little read of exactly what these do and the different options that are available with each one. But then you've also got this one here to add as a favorite. So you can just toggle any one of these to be a favorite and you can actually just add them into the shortcut from here and it will add it in over here. There are other ways that you can do that as well. If you just double click, it will also add it in. Or if you want to drag it, you can drag it in as well. The reason why you might want to drag it is because if you just double click, it will automatically add them to the bottom of the stack. However, if you drag it in, you can be a little bit more intentional about exactly where you place it. So those are the different options that you've got when actually adding actions in. So back over to this organization here. So we've got the favorites, now there's only one in there. You've got other things related to sharing as well. So these are common things that you might want to do when creating shortcuts as you might want to, for example, share some information from one thing to another, or you've grabbed an image from one place and you want to send it somewhere else or some text from a website and you want to send that into an email. So sharing is related to all things to do with that. Next, you've got documents. So these are all different actions that are related to documents, whether you want to send them, organize them, rename them, things like that. Next, we've got web. So this is going to be for things related to the web, working with URLs and things like that. And then you've got the suggestions we've touched on and scripting. I'm going to leave scripting alone for the moment, but it is just worth thinking about the fact that you can actually do some quite advanced scripting much as you would have been able to do in Apple's Automator, if that's something you used before. You can do scripting in shortcuts, but it is also worth noting that that is a Mac-only feature because scripting isn't available on iOS, so any scripting type shortcuts you create will be Mac-only. But that is something for a little bit more further down the line, and I'll be covering those in some advanced shortcuts videos that I do. Next, we've got things that are related to location. So it speaks for itself, really, and things related to media as well. So things related to videos, photos, and things like that. So that is how you can organize the different actions. Now, you can also sort them by apps as well. So if you want to work with a specific app, then you can just click on here, and then you can have a look at all the apps. Now, it's not going to necessarily be absolutely every app that is on your computer, but it is going to be all of the ones that are on your computer and have built-in integration with shortcuts. So that isn't necessarily every single app, but it will be a large proportion of them that will have some sort of integration so that you can work with them. So, for example, if I bring up the Notes app, for example, that might be a good one to choose. If I can find it. They're in alphabetical order, so it shouldn't be too hard. Skimmed past it. There we go. So here you can see some different functions that you can do related to Notes. And in fact, I'll be having a video in this series all about things that you can do with shortcuts specifically for Notes and also for some of the other apps. But let's have a look at just some simple actions to begin with, shall we? And I'll pick one, because the things that you build with shortcuts can be as simple as a single action. They can be as simple as that. So there are some quite interesting ones built in that you might not immediately think of that come to mind. For example, there's one that I can use to create a QR code. So if I just type in QR, here you go, there is Generate QR code. We can add that in there. And I could literally, if I wanted, just actually do it in here. So I could, because this isn't something that I'm going to be doing very often, it's still something handy to have. So I could just create this one that says Generate QR code and come in here and manually type in a web address, for example. So if I was to type in my website address, I can't speak and type, like this. There we go. www.takeonetech.io, like that. And then I was to just press Return. It's created that. Now, if I run the macro, so you're, sorry, the shortcut, you remember from the last video, we used to run shortcuts. We can have them running from the menu bar. We can have them running services. We can assign shortcuts and things like that. Or we can just run them from within here. So if I just run this one, then it's as simple as that. That has now generated a QR code for my website. So I could maybe post that on merchandise, on websites, wherever I wanted to make it easy for people to find my website. I'm not sure many people would, but nevertheless, it's a nice little built-in feature. But it can be as simple as that. And there are some that you may just want to run from within the shortcut's application itself because of how often you're going to be using it. I could obviously now take that image and save it out so you can see it's got the little share sheet there. So I could click on that and I could just send that in an email or I could add it to my photos or download it or whatever. So I've got all of those things built in. So that is something that I'm just literally running from within the shortcut's app itself. But if you wanted to, you could also assign, make a variable, we'll be looking at variables so that you could take something that you copied from a website and you could just paste that into here and run the shortcut in the background and it would create a QR code for that website. I'll be coming on to variables though in a later video. Let's have a little look at some other easy things that we can do. So this one, let's say that one is now done. And if I come over to my other view where you can see my shortcuts, this one here is just called new shortcut. So what I might want to do is give that a bit of a better name. So if I come back over to here and I'll just call that one create QR code like that. And so now given that one a name and if I come back over to here, you can see that it's actually changed the name of this one. And again, that's a bit of a silly icon. I'm not necessarily going to find a QR code icon but let's just have a look at something that maybe looks a little bit better. Just for the sake of this demo, I will just give it a picture of a picture. There we go. So just to demonstrate another kind of shortcut that you might want to have where you are basically adding in multiple different actions to one, let's have a little look at how we could do that. So I'm going to come over and create a new action here and then I'm going to come into that shortcut and then we'll have a little look at what it looks like in the editor. So we're starting with a blank canvas once again and let's just say that we want to have something where when we're doing, I don't know, some research or something like that, we want to have a web page open or the Safari open and then have the Notes app open or something like that, maybe Microsoft Word. And so we want a little hotkey that we can press that's basically going to open these apps up. So let's have a little look at how we might chain these things together. So what we're going to do is give it a name. Let's just call this research app, research apps. And let's just say that we want to open Safari. So I'm going to come over to the search and let's search for the open command because we might want to open a specific app or folder or file or something like that. And you can see that just by typing in the word open it's brought up a number of different options. Some of these are specific apps. So if those have got some sort of open command related to them that we can trigger then those have come up. So as we come down we can see all sorts of different ones like open URL, show web page, open app is the one that we might want to begin with. So let's just say open app and then let's just call this one a Safari. So where I've added it in, let's just click on that and we will just search for Safari rather and then that's going to open Safari or perhaps we want to open a specific URL. So if there's somewhere we go and search for information then maybe we want to add in a URL. Maybe we want to open a specific word document or something like that. So let's have open app and we could search for Microsoft Word if we just want to open up a blank document or maybe we want to open up the notes app and we want notes to open. Instead of that you could also open a specific file. So if we had a specific research file that we wanted to open then you could just search for the specific file in here and it would just open that file up then in whatever the default app was. And here you can actually, it's just popped up the little search window. So here I could actually search for a specific file within here and then just drop it in and then it would open that file. So here I could just choose whatever file I wanted and it would open that one up in whichever was the default app. So by chaining all of those things together I'm now creating a workflow so that if I come in in the morning ready to do my research, whatever it is I'm researching I can just press the shortcut whether it's activated from the menu whether it's activated from a shortcut key or from stream deck by the way I'll be talking about how to integrate stream deck with shortcuts in one of the later videos in the series so do check that one out in the description as well. But basically I can just chain any different things as I want together here and those things can all activate with the touch of a button as I say. You might want to then do something similar to close these things down. So if you are opening specific URLs opening specific files, folders or whatever then let's say you might want to do that as well by the way so you could just add it in a specific folder if you want to open a specific folder so reveal files in folders so perhaps there's something, specific file location that you want to load and once again it is just bringing in the file location here and you can just add a specific place in that you want those to come. So yeah, you may then want to create one to close these apps down so let's just say that we want to do that so now we've done all of our work for the day having used this to trigger all of our apps so let's just come back over to the shortcuts and this one is research apps so perhaps we should have actually called that open research apps like that and now it's changed there you go so then if we do another one which is to close the apps so I'll come back into my editor and then for here I'll say close research apps I'm just using that as an example obviously you decide what things you need to open maybe you're not researching anything and in here we can do close so search for close and then it's actually quit isn't it but quit app so then what you could do here is let's say you want to have a word is an app that you want to close and then Safari is another one you want to close like that and so there we go we've now got two different actions we've got two different actions one to open the things that we want to work with and then one to close them down again once we've finished our work so that is basically a really simple way a really simple overview basically of how you create actions and how you can sort of stack actions together within a single shortcut now in the next video we're going to be looking at how to assign variables and don't go anywhere because that video is coming up right now just over there