The Shortcuts app for Mac is missing one of the iPhone’s best features: automations. The Mac Shortery app bridges the gap.
Shortcuts on iPhone has an “Automations” tab, which lets you automatically launch shortcuts when certain things happen. For example, you can turn off your alarms when you leave the house (a feature I use to turn off my cat’s food alarms when I’m away from home). The Automations tab is missing on Mac, however, which is odd because Automator, the precursor to Shortcuts, offered some of these features: you can, for example, use Folder Actions to trigger an automation whenever a file is added to a folder. . This solution still works because Automator still exists, but it’s understandable to prefer shortcuts at this point: it’s clearly the automation tool Apple is currently pouring resources into.
This is where Shortery comes in. This app is free but offers extremely limited functionality: the full version costs $10. With this app you can configure custom rules to trigger shortcuts. There are 17 different categories of triggers, such as when the contents of a folder change or at a certain time of day.
Credit: Shortery/Justin Pot
You can configure rules and choose a shortcut to launch when these triggers occur. For example, let’s say you want documents to print when added to a particular folder. First, you would create a simple shortcut to print a document using your default printer. Next, you will set up an automation in Shortery that will run this automation every time a new PDF is added to this folder.
Credit: Shortery/Justin Pot
Click on To safeguard when you have everything set up the way you want and you’re done: every PDF you add to this folder will print.
This is just an example. I have an automation set up that instantly starts a Time Machine backup every time I connect my backup drive. Lars Gerckens, a member of the two-person team that built Shortery, told me that users have set up automations to do things like control their lights based on the time of day and automatically turn on the Do not disturb mode when they are physically on site. desk.