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Posts tagged with "shortcuts"

Introducing S-GPT, A Shortcut to Connect OpenAI’s ChatGPT with Native Features of Apple’s Operating Systems

S-GPT for Shortcuts.

S-GPT for Shortcuts.

Update, April 13: I’ve updated S-GPT to version 1.0.2. You can read the full changelog here. All download links have been updated.

Update, April 13: For Club MacStories+ and Premier members, I’ve published Part 1 of an extensive ‘Making Of’ series about S-GPT. This is a technical deep dive for my Automation Academy series. You can find it here and sign up for or upgrade to a Premier account using the buttons below.

Update, April 7: For Club MacStories members, I’ve shared some optional prompts to add different personalities to S-GPT, including two inspired by Roy Kent and Steve Jobs. You can get the prompts and read more here; the main S-GPT shortcut is and will remain free-to-use for everyone, of course.

Update, April 7: I’ve updated S-GPT to version 1.0.1. You can read more details here. All download links to the shortcuts have been updated to the latest version.

It’s the inaugural week of the second annual edition of Automation April, and to celebrate the occasion, I’ve been working on something special: today, I’m introducing S-GPT, an advanced conversational shortcut for ChatGPT that bridges OpenAI’s assistant to native system features of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS.

S-GPT (which stands for Shortcuts-GPT) is free to use for everyone, but it requires an OpenAI account with an associated pay-as-you-go billing plan since it takes advantage of OpenAI’s developer API, which has a cost. S-GPT was built with the latest ChatGPT API, and it can be used both with the existing ChatGPT 3.5 model or – if you have access to it – the ChatGPT 4 API.

While the shortcut is free for MacStories readers, I will be publishing a detailed, in-depth Automation Academy class soon for Club MacStories Plus or Premier members to explain the techniques and strategies I used to build this shortcut. I genuinely think that S-GPT is, from a technical perspective, my best and most advanced work to date; I hope my Academy class will help others learn some useful tips for Shortcuts and, in return, make even better automations for our contest.

With that said, let’s look at what S-GPT is and what you can do with it.

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Jack Wellborn on Making Computers Personal with Automation→

Jack Wellborn, one of our Automation April Shortcuts Contest judges, has a great post on his website that’s perfect for Automation April.

As Jack explains, apps built for a general audience require some features to make way for the ones that most people use. While the approach is understandable from a design standpoint, it can be frustrating if any of those semi-hidden features are ones you rely on. However, as Jack explains, there’s a solution:

This is where personal automation comes in. Personal automation gives individuals the ability to choose which of their features should be most easily accessed. I used Shortcuts and AppleScript to elevate star ratings using dedicated keys on my Stream Deck. Now I can rate songs regardless of what app I am currently using, and in one step instead of five. Using personal automation, I have also changed how Time Machine works, streamlined pasting links from Safari, and made joining Zoom meetings practically effortless.

Personal automation doesn’t need to involve expensive third party hardware, or require scripting. It can be something as simple as customizing keyboard shortcuts or defining text replacement macros. Apple’s Shortcuts app is completely drag-and-drop, and makes building personal automation easy enough for even basic users. On top of the many automation apps and features included with Apple’s platforms, there are also a slew of great third party apps that unlock even more possibilities.

I love Jack’s perspective on automation. He was the winner of our Best Overall Shortcut in last year’s Automation April Shortcut Contest. It wasn’t the most complex shortcut we received, but it had the perfect combination of originality, thoughtful design, and everyday utility that our judges look for. As Jack points out, personal automation is about making your devices work for you and not the other way around, which is what Automation April is all about.

To learn more about how to submit a shortcut to the Automation April Shortcuts Contest, be sure to check out my story with all the details that was published on MacStories yesterday.

You can also follow MacStories’ Automation April coverage through our dedicated hub, or subscribe to its RSS feed.

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Automation April: Thinking About Linking

Links are the currency of information overload and distraction. There’s more media available than we could ever get to in a lifetime, and more things we might want to buy, places may want to visit, and other things to explore online than can be fit into a day.

The same problem exists in our work lives. That’s especially true for the kind of work I do. Links are part of everything. Whether I’m researching, writing, or preparing to record a podcast, I’m collecting, managing, and sharing links. I could follow all those trails as they cross my path, but I’d never get anything done.

Instead of flitting from one online discovery to the next with no plan, wasting precious time, I save links for later, putting them aside until I have time for them. I’ve been doing this forever, but I’ve also never been happy with my system. So, it was inevitable that I’d begin tinkering with my setup again, both with the apps I use and the shortcuts that support them.

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Enter Your Shortcuts in the 2023 Automation April Shortcuts Contest

We’re very excited to announce the second annual Automation April Shortcuts Contest, which, along with all of Automation April is dedicated to the memory of Alex Hay, the developer of Toolbox Pro and other apps.

As we had hoped when we introduced Automation April last year, the Automation April Shortcuts Contest became the centerpiece of Automation April. Last year, we had over 200 contest submissions across six categories of shortcuts. We received some remarkable shortcuts that showed just how creative and clever this community can be. But best of all, we saw the automation community come together to help each other when they got stuck and share the shortcuts they made.

Like last year, we encourage to you build a shortcut and submit it to the contest whether you’re a Shortcuts expert or just starting out. Shortcuts do not need to be complex to win in one of contest’s categories. That’s true for all the categories, but especially true for the Best Everyday Shortcut category, which we created because we know from experience that some of our most valuable and frequently-used shortcuts are among the simplest.

Our panel of judges will be evaluating submissions based on originality, performance, design, user experience, and usefulness. Pushing the boundaries of what is possible with Shortcuts is certainly a factor that will be considered in originality, but, at the same time, usefulness doesn’t require complexity, which is something we’ve emphasized often in our writing about Shortcuts. So, no matter your level of experience, we’d love to see what you build.

Entries must be submitted by 5:00 PM Eastern US time on April 17, 2023, so let’s dig into the details.

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Apple Frames 3.1.1 with Support for Passthrough Mode→

The 'Shortcut Result' variable, used as an image variable in a shortcut that calls Apple Frames.

The ‘Shortcut Result’ variable, used as an image variable in a shortcut that calls Apple Frames.

I just released a small update to Apple Frames 3.1, which came out earlier this week, with a new output command: &passthrough. With this output command for the Apple Frames API, you’ll be able to generate a framed image (from whatever source you like) and simply pass its result to the next action in a shortcut as a native image variable.

I wrote about this as part of my Extension column in MacStories Weekly today, where I also covered the ability to run Apple Frames from the command line on macOS. Here’s the excerpt about version 3.1.1 of Apple Frames and the new passthrough mode:

As I was researching this column for Weekly, I realized there was an obvious candidate for an output command I did not include in Apple Frames 3.1: a passthrough command to, well, pass framed images along as input for the next action of a shortcut.

Here’s what I mean: when you run Apple Frames from a helper shortcut using the ‘Run Shortcut’ action, that action produces an output variable called ‘Shortcut Result’. If you’re running Apple Frames as a function, thus turning it into a feature of another workflow, it can be useful to take the framed images it produces and use them as a native variable in other actions of the shortcut. The problem is that the output commands I launched with Apple Frames 3.1 all involved “storing” the framed images somewhere, whether it was Files or the system clipboard.

This is no longer the case with the &passthrough output command I added to Apple Frames 3.1.1, which you can redownload from the MacStories Shortcuts Archive or directly from this link. If you run the Apple Frames API with this command, framed images will be passed along as native output of the shortcut, which you can reuse as a variable elsewhere in a shortcut that’s invoking Apple Frames.

And:

Any shortcut or longer workflow that involves running Apple Frames in the background and retrieving the screenshots it frames can take advantage of this method, allowing you to bypass the need to store images in the clipboard, even if temporarily. Essentially, passthrough mode turns Apple Frames into a native action of the Shortcuts app that returns a standard image variable as its output.

This is the only change in version 3.1.1 of Apple Frames, and I’m excited to see how people will take advantage of it to chain Apple Frames with other shortcuts on their devices. You can download the updated version of Apple Frames below.

Apple Frames

Add device frames to screenshots for iPhones (11, 8/SE, and 12-13-14 generations in mini/standard/Plus/Pro Max sizes), iPad Pro (11” and 12.9”, 2018-2022 models), iPad Air (10.9”, 2020-2022 models), iPad mini (2021 model), Apple Watch S4/5/6/7/8/Ultra, iMac (24” model, 2021), MacBook Air (2020-2022 models), and MacBook Pro (2021 models). The shortcut supports portrait and landscape orientations, but does not support Display Zoom; on iPadOS and macOS, the shortcut supports Default and More Space resolutions. If multiple screenshots are passed as input, they will be combined in a single image. The shortcut can be run in the Shortcuts app, as a Home Screen widget, as a Finder Quick Action, or via the share sheet. The shortcut also supports an API for automating input images and framed results.

Get the shortcut here.

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Things 3.17 Overhauls the App’s Shortcuts Actions

Things 3.17 is out for iPhone, iPad, and Mac with greatly expanded support for Shortcuts. That opens up a much wider variety of possible automations than ever before. It’s a lot to take in at once, but I’ve been playing with these actions since the end of last year, so I thought I’d highlight what each does and share a few shortcuts that I’ve built with them.

At the highest level, these are the kind of Shortcuts actions I like best. They work across all of Apple’s platforms and include parameters and predicate filtering, which allow users to build fine-tuned shortcuts that either weren’t possible before those features were added to Shortcuts or would have required users to jump through many more hoops to achieve.

When you start exploring Things’ Shortcuts actions keep in mind that they operate on more than just tasks. When you see ‘items’ referred to in the actions, that could any of the primary components of the app, including projects, headings, tasks, areas, or checklists. Not all actions support all item types, and each item has a unique set of properties that can be accessed depending on the action, so it’s worth experimenting to understand everything that can be accomplished.

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Masto-Redirect, a Mastodon Shortcut to Redirect Profiles and Posts to Your Own Instance

Using Masto-Redirect in Safari.

Using Masto-Redirect in Safari.

Like many others over the past month, I’ve been thinking deeply about my experience with Twitter and whether I want to align my social media usage with the kind of platform Twitter is rapidly becoming. It’s a complex discussion (if my readers are still on Twitter, am I doing them a disservice by not using Twitter?), but in the meantime, I’ve decided to learn more about Mastodon. And in doing so, I came across an aspect of the service that I wanted to improve with a shortcut.

I created an account on Mastodon.social all the way back in 2018, and you can find me as @viticci there as well. I don’t want to turn this post into a guide to Mastodon (you can find an excellent one here), but, long story short, Mastodon is a decentralized service that is based on a federated network of instances. Essentially, there isn’t a single “Mastodon website” like, say, twitter.com; instead, there can be multiple Mastodon instances across different domains (hence why it’s “decentralized”) but, thanks to an underlying API, you can follow and be followed by people regardless of the instance they’re on. I can be on Mastodon.social, and you can be on Journa.host or Mastodon.online (different instances of Mastodon), but we can still communicate with one another via the protocol Mastodon uses. It’s like living in different countries but speaking the same language. You can read more about this here.

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Apple Frames 3.0: Completely Rewritten, Support for iPhone 14 Pro and Dynamic Island, New Devices, Multiple Display Resolutions, and More

Apple Frames 3.0.

Apple Frames 3.0.

Today, I’m pleased to announce the release of version 3.0 of Apple Frames, my shortcut to put screenshots taken on various Apple devices inside physical frames for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch.

Apple Frames 3.0 is a major update that involved a complete re-architecture of the shortcut to improve its performance and reliability on all Apple platforms. For Apple Frames 3.0, I entirely rebuilt its underlying file structure to move away from base64 and embrace Files/Finder to store assets. As a result, Apple Frames 3.0 is faster, easier to debug, and – hopefully – easier to maintain going forward.

But Apple Frames 3.0 goes beyond a new technical foundation. This update to the shortcut introduces full compatibility with the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max with Dynamic Island, Apple Watch Ultra, and the M2 MacBook Air. And that’s not all: Apple Frames 3.0 also brings full support for resolution scaling on all iPad models that offer the ‘More Space’ display mode in iPadOS 16. And in the process, I also added support for ‘Default’ and ‘More Space’ options on the Apple Silicon-based MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, and iMac. All of this, as always, in a native shortcut designed for high performance that uses Apple’s official device images and requires no manual configuration whatsoever.

Apple Frames 3.0 is the biggest, most versatile version of Apple Frames to date, and I’m proud of the results. Let’s dive in.

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GoodLinks 1.7: New iOS 16 Shortcuts Actions, Focus Filter Support, Lock Screen Widgets, and More

I’m really excited about the latest update to GoodLinks for iPhone. The app has always had some of the best automation support of any link management or read-later app I’ve used. However, with version 1.7, which was released last week, GoodLinks has taken its automation tools to a new level, opening up more ways to customize how you save, manage, and use links than ever before.

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