While I’m frustrated by some of Shortcuts gaps, it has solved some long standing problems. I use apps like Drafts less because I can do basic clipboard transformations with Shortcuts, triggered by Siri. Here are a few the clipboard Shortcuts I use the most. Paste to Drafts This is one that saves me from opening Drafts and tapping one key. Don’t judge me. The trigger is a simple Siri phrase. While Drafts provides its own Siri action (added through the Siri preference) I prefer this Shortcut because it first test if the clipboard is an image before trying to save it to Drafts.

I’m still trying to bend Apple’s Shortcuts app to my will. I probably would have given up long ago were it not for the joy I get from my HomePod when it actually works. I’ve definitely run into the rough edges of Shortcuts, edges that feel like they result from a small team with too much on their backlog.1 Let’s walk through a few rough edges and get this written down for posterity.

Calca is a terrific little plain text calculator app that I feared was abandoned. As a fan of Markdown and all things plain text, Calca appeals to me desire for simplicity and portability. I write the text and Calca does the math. The latest update adds iOS 11 support which is not a typo. Still, it means I get another year with the app. The beauty of Calca is that the notes I made when buying a house or planning a basement remodel will outlive the app because it’s all just text files.

Even without the “big bucks” of affiliate links, I still have some iOS apps to recommend. I recently bought Picsew to create a single long image of a Shortcuts macro. It worked a treat. Point it at multiple screenshots and then export as a seamless single image. There are several more controls to fine tune the image, like crop and blur but the real magic is how Picsew figures out the edges of images and magically merged them together.

The Problem I’m a big fan of Drafts for iOS. It’s a terrific writing environment and it can integrate with just about anything through URL schemes. But, URL schemes have a major limitation when I write long blocks of text. A URL can only support a finite number of characters (around 2000). I want to export text from Drafts and send it to other apps as a Markdown file. If I have a markdown header line with a “title” defined I want the file to be named with that title.

I still prefer Apple Maps over most other mapping apps because of its simplicity, integration with iOS, and support for pausing other audio sources.1 As with nearly every Apple app, many of the best features aren’t obvious to a casual user. This information is available in many other places on the internet but I’m posting it here for all of the friends of Macdrifter.com and as a reminder that it’s hard to make an app that is both simple and powerful.

I read this New Yorker article not because I care that much about Linux but because I became fascinated about the concept. On Sunday, the benevolent dictator announced that he would be stepping down temporarily, to “get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately.” Torvalds, who is forty-eight and lives with his family outside Portland, Oregon, made clear that he wasn’t burned out. “I very much do want to continue to do this project that I’ve been working on for almost three decades,” he wrote in a post to the Linux-kernel mailing list.

I like pretty much everything David Sparks makes. He has good insight and generally soothing style. But, like many folks I’ve mostly given up on Apple’s iBooks platform. I’m happy to see David transition to an all new learning platform for his wonderful field guides. Siri Shortcuts is a terrific new automation tool in iOS 12 but it comes with a fairly steep learning curve. The least of that curve is just understanding what value there is in even using Siri Shortcuts.

With two HomePods in my house (so far) I have moved on to giving them the keys to as much as possible. My second step was to deploy Lutron smart switches to replace some Hue bulbs. Why Not Hue Hue bulbs are excellent. They are responsive, last a very long time over traditional incandescent bulbs, and have a pretty good app. What I don’t love is that I have to cover every physical switch in my house because if you turn off power to a Hue bulb they magically stop working.

There’s quite a bit of excitement for Shortcuts since iOS 12 released. I expect to see more things like this gallery. I’m skeptical and optimistic about how much Shortcuts will be adopted by average users. Resources like these help.