Quickly Access iCloud Keychain With This Apple Engineer’s Shortcut

Ricky Mondello works on app and website authentication as well as password management at Apple. They recently created a shortcut that lets you quickly access iCloud Keychain, so instead of opening Settings and scrolling down to tap on Passwords, it’s a one-tap method to directly open the Passwords section. Separately from that, this is also something you can do yourself using the Settings Shortcut Generator. You can quickly jump to a variety of different places within Settings. One that I recently created is jumping to Settings > Privacy > Photos to manage app access to photos.

‘Data Jar’ is the Perfect App for Shortcut Dictionaries

Data Jar is a great app I discovered a while back and weirdly haven’t written about yet. This app helped me unlock my automations that require dictionaries. Data Jar lets you store key-value pairs and let them persist outside of Shortcuts. While I was trying to build a dictionary into my Shortcuts, I found that they couldn’t be updated using native actions; the data had to be stored elsewhere. The app lets you store text, numbers, Booleans, lists, dictionaries, and files. It’s free with an optional tip jar to support the developer Simon B. Støvring.

This ‘Clear Clipboard’ Shortcut Empties Your Clipboard Automatically

Redditor u/SpamSencer created a Clear Clipboard shortcut that does exactly what the name says: It automatically clears your clipboard. With iOS 14 Apple introduced a feature that shows when an app accesses the clipboard, like TikTok and Microsoft. You could even set it up as an automation so that whenever you open any app of your choosing, the shortcut will run (an iOS 14 feature). You’ll just have to painstakingly tap on every app you have installed if you choose to automate it.

Batch Rename Files on iOS Using This Shortcut

One task that was always easier on macOS was to rename multiple files at once using Automator. The Files app on iOS/iPadOS doesn’t have a lot of bulk actions. But I finally cracked it with Shortcuts to let you batch rename files on iOS and iPadOS. My shortcut lets you do three specific things: prepend text, append text, and replace text in a file name. If I think of more things to do with file names in the future, I’ll update the shortcut.

‘SW-DL’ Shortcut Brings YouTube-DL to iOS

YouTube-dl is a command line tool that lets you download videos from websites, although it’s commonly used for YouTube as the name suggests. With a-shell, a terminal emulator I covered, it’s possible to install the downloader on your iPad and iPhone. Someone also created a shortcut for youtube-dl (Reddit post here, shortcut link below). Note that it currently crashes on the iOS/iPadOS 14 betas. It’s possible to install youtube-dl in a-shell with the command “pip install youtube-dl.” Since I’m running the betas, I’m going to tinker with using a-shell.

Programmer, Author, Podcaster Rosemary Orchard - TMO BGM Interview

Rosemary Orchard describes herself as a geek, nerd, and programmer. She works full time as a developer of web applications, but her real loves are automation and productivity. She’s also a book author and podcaster.

Rosemary told me the story about how she started with computers and programming. After a bad experience with a Toshiba notebook and Windows Vista, she bought a MacBook Air for her university work—and loved it. At this point, she was still pursing human languages, but in time gravitated towards, instead, creating computer software that would make peoples lives easier. And she never looked back. We talked about her Web app development, her books (one on Shortcuts) and finished with how she learned to podcast. Today she does two. You’ll enjoy hearing how Rosemary’s career has developed.

LaunchCuts Adds Folders, Search Filters, More to Shortcuts

Writing for MacStories, Federico Viticci reviewed LaunchCuts, a launcher for shortcuts that can organize them into folders, gives you search filters, and more.

…LaunchCuts’ sole purpose is to offer an alternative view for your shortcut library with folders and powerful search filters. If you have less than 20 shortcuts installed on your iPhone or iPad, you’re likely not going to get much benefit out of LaunchCuts’ advanced organizational tools; but if you’re like me and use hundreds of different shortcuts on a regular basis, and especially if your library has grown out of control over the past few years, you’re going to need the assistance of LaunchCuts to make sense of it all.

App Store: US$7.99

MusicBot is the Shortcuts Companion to Apple Music

Federico Viticci recently announced his shortcut called MusicBot, which he says is the all-in-one assistant to Apple Music.

I created MusicBot for two reasons: I wanted to speed up common interactions with the Music app by using custom actions in the Shortcuts app; and I also wanted to build a series of “utilities” for Apple Music that could be bundled in a single, all-in-one shortcut instead of dozens of smaller, standalone ones.

I haven’t used this yet but Mr. Viticci is a master of shortcuts so I’m confident it’s a great tool to use.

How to Call Your Legislators With a Shortcut

Matthew Cassinelli was part of the team that created Workflow, which Apple acquired and turned into the Shortcuts app. He recently created a shortcut that lets you enter your zip code and automatically call your legislators.

Hello. You can use this tool to immediately call your senator/representative based on your ZIP code. Contact them now.

Finally a Way to Batch-Rename Files on iOS

Every since I bought an iPad Pro I’ve been able to conduct most of my work and personal life on my iPad. But I still need my MacBook Pro for a couple things, like using Automator to batch-rename files (renaming multiple files simultaneously). This isn’t possible to do on iOS, until now. A shortcut I found on RoutineHub lets you do this. It lets you rename your files in custom formats, like alphabetically, prepending text, sorting by date modified, etc.

Google's AMP URL Technology Spreads to Images

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a Google invention that is meant to speed up web pages on mobile devices. But since it wraps the page in a Google-controlled container, it’s a harmful technology to the open web. The company has started to bring AMP URL technology for Google Images.

When you select an image, you’ll see a preview of the website header at the bottom of the screen. You can keep scrolling through Google Images, or swipe up on the preview to load the AMP (accelerated mobile pages) version of the site.

Earlier I found a shortcut that can clean AMP URLs. Or, use an alternative search engine like DuckDuckGo.

File Apple Feedback Using Shortcuts

Matthew Cassinellli shared a shortcut to let people file Apple feedback using the Shortcuts app. He says it’s for iOS 13 beta users.

…this shortcut has you describe the problem first, asks you to list the steps to reproduce it, has you enter your expected results versus what actually happened, and copied it all to the clipboard.

Then, it uses Open App to go into Feedback, you fill out the menial parts of the form, and paste in your completed description.

Get Apple News Original URLs Using This Shortcut

A Mac app called StopTheNews has been making the news rounds lately. It lets you open Apple News original URLs directly in Safari. I wanted to share a shortcut that does the same thing on iOS.

Share an Apple news article to this shortcut, and get the original URL back. Prompt at the end lets you pick between copying the URL to your clipboard or sharing it somewhere else.

Unlike macOS, you can open an Apple News article in Safari on iOS. Then from Safari you can copy the URL. But this shortcut removes that step, so you can share the article to the shortcut, then copy the URL to the clipboard or share it elsewhere.

These Academic Shortcuts Help You Maximize Your Research

Last night I came across a website called Appademic, which shares academic shortcuts that can help students and researchers. One example is a shortcut that gives you better BibTeX citation keys for Pandoc.

This is the long awaited iOS Shortcut for Zotero to extract Better BibTeX citation keys for Pandoc. I know a fair few people have been waiting on this, apologies it has taken so long to post. If you need more detail, read on, otherwise the shortcut can be downloaded below.