Some first impressions on Shortcuts for Mac…
AppleScript and JavaScript actions!
Excited to play with these. Great for bringing legacy workflows over from Automator.
#WWDC21
The Find, Resize & Move Windows actions look really powerful and are much more intuitive than using AppleScript for the same thing.
One of the new Finder actions is “Label Files’.
You can add colours but you can’t add custom tags.
This action isn’t available in Shortcuts on iOS, though the Files app supports labelling and tagging.
I don’t remember seeing this ‘Format File Size’ in Shortcuts before?
There are some Disk Utility actions which allow you to Eject Disk and Make & Mount Disk Images.
No action for listing all volumes.
In theory though, you could just do this with AppleScript…
…however I’m getting errors trying to run AppleScript at the moment.
I *think* this is just a bug where I’m not being shown the Security & Privacy prompt.
Some nice keyboard shortcuts for quickly adding common actions 👌🏻
You can import Automator workflows.
I wondered how this would work with actions like ‘Watch Me Do’, which aren’t available in Shortcuts.
It still works! It also includes the speed parameter in the action.
You can then copy and paste that action to other Shortcuts 🤯
This is what ‘Choose From List’ looks like on the Mac.
You can switch between single, list and grid views.
No search for long lists at the moment.
There are no automations yet on the Mac.
Presumably this will be added in a later beta or version 2?
You also can’t export a shortcut as an application like an Automator workflow so you can’t run it from a Calendar event, for example.
The new Files/Finder actions are great but it would be even better if we could get the relative path from a file.
In this instance I’d like to save extracted text in the directory next to the source image, but I can’t find a way to do that without manually choosing the folder 🤔
With AppleScript support in Shortcut for Mac, you can now customise your shortcuts’ prompts even more.
For example, you can prompt for a specific file type, pick a colour or show dialogs or alerts with a certain number of buttons or even unique icons!
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