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Jun 8, 2021 12 tweets 5 min read Read on X
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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More from @ToolboxProApp

Jul 11, 2022
In the latest iOS beta you can now try out 2 GPT-3-powered text generation actions:

⚙️ Generate Text
✏️ Edit Text

This let’s you do some truly ✨magical✨ things - from creative writing & language translations to unstructured data parsing & sentiment analysis. ImageImageImageImage
GTP-3 charges a small price per request. Rather than charge a subscription I’m aiming for a bring-your-own-key model.

You can use ‘Generate Text’ 15 times to try it out before requiring your own API key from OpenAI (while my tokens last!).

‘Edit Text’ is currently free to use.
Be sure to check out usage examples:

beta.openai.com/examples

And get some tips on prompt writing:

beta.openai.com/docs/guides/co…

Please note that including these actions in TBP’s release version will be subject to approval from OpenAI.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 23, 2021
👀 ImageImage
Writing to a Sheet ✍🏼
This will likely be part of a new app (after Menu Box) providing a suite of automation actions for Google's services Image
Read 4 tweets
Feb 16, 2021
A new version of Toolbox Pro is now working its way through the App Store, with:

💪🏻 Powerful reimagined actions that open TBP less
✨ 10 brand new tools
🌍 Global Variables visual refresh
📁 Newly free tools
🐞 Bug Fixes

🔗 apps.apple.com/gb/app/toolbox…

More below 👇🏻
With iOS14 lots of tools can now do more right inside the Shortcuts app.

Perform OCR on multiple images, detect faces along with facial landmark coordinates, filter multiple photos, create mattes or icons of any size, filter or rearrange long lists & more.
Bookmarking folders and files is now much more powerful, allowing access to files & folders outside the Shortcuts sandbox right inside your automations - without switching apps.

These tools are also now *free* to use!
Read 6 tweets

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