You don’t have to be a programmer to learn to create custom shortcuts. As you may know, I am a marketer. I have created dozens of shortcuts like Remove Image Background, Shortcuts Finder, TikTok Downloader, etc.
In this article, I will show you how I learn to create my own shortcuts. It is not hard. Because I can, so can you. Not much effort is needed, actually.
Why should you?
In case you have not made up your mind to get started with Siri Shortcuts. I will talk a little more about what shortcuts can do.
Shortcuts can automate many things as you see from my previous videos. Within shortcuts app, there are many actions you can use to create awesome shortcuts on your own without any coding background.
Well, some actions are not available in Shortcuts app. You can combine third-party services like IFTTT. As Shortcuts grows more popular, more and more apps and online services will give access to Shortcuts. Not to mention, Apple will develop more useful actions for you to use.
Even now, many talented users have developed amazing shortcuts that you don’t even believe. I am actually obsessed with new shortcuts that come out every day. Shortcuts app is limitless.
What to begin?
I personally know nothing about coding when I created my first shortcut. A shortcut is made up with a few actions. There are hundreds of actions that you choose to build shortcuts that do the things as you want.
If you have never heard of Siri Shortcuts, then i suggest you read Apple’s official guide about shortcuts.
If you don’t want to read that much, you can simply download a few pre-made shortcuts to figure out how each action works. That’s how i learn to create my own shortcuts.
When you open a shortcut, you will see a few short lines here, which means this action will process the output result of the previous action. If you want to use this output of this action elsewhere, you can set it as a variable. Whenever you want to use this result, just use the Get Variable.
Of course, you can also use Magic Variable. With Magic Variable, you don’t have to set Variable, you can pick the result of any action.
The best way to learn Shortcuts is to check other pre-made shortcuts. Reverse engineering will be very helpful here.
Just grab a few shortcuts and look at each action to see if you can figure out what it is for. If you don’t understand, just add a Quick Look action to see the result.
You can use the Copy and Paste shortcut to search for actions that you don’t understand in your shortcuts gallery. When you find that shortcut, just add a Quick look action below the action you don’t understand. Then you can run this shortcut to see the result of Quick Look action. In this way, you can understand every action from any shortcut.
Allow Untrusted Shortcuts
According to Apple, all shortcuts from sources outside the Gallery are considered “untrusted”. When you try to add a shortcut from the internet for the first time, you will see the message saying “the shortcut cannot be opened because your Shortcuts security settings don’t allow untrusted shortcuts”. If that’s your case, you can follow the steps below to allow untrusted shortcuts.
Step 1. Open the Shortcuts app and run any shortcut. If you don’t have any shortcuts in there, just create a new one by dragging any action in there.
Step 2. Go to Settings > Shortcuts.
Step 3. Toggle on the option “Allow Untrusted Shortcuts”. You will see the Allow Untrusted Shortcuts option is greyed out if you have not run any shortcuts.
Where to download pre-made shortcuts?
Besides Shortcuts Gallery in Shortcuts app, there are a few websites that allow you to download or upload shortcuts. As you know, Shortcuts is the updated version of Workflow. First, you have the workflow subreddit community, where you can discuss, share, or request shortcuts.
As Apple acquired Workflow and renamed it Shortcuts, then you have the shortcuts subreddit.
Besides these two, you have a few dedicated shortcuts sharing websites, like routinehub, sharecuts.app. Shortcutsgalley, shareshortcuts, etc.
If you ever want to find a shortcut, you can perform a search via Google Custom Search to see if there is already an existing one. I made this one to search for shortcuts from all these shortcuts sharing sites. You can mostly welcome to try it out.
Well, I have also made a shortcut to search for shortcuts. You can check the video below to see how it works.
What if i want to dig deep?
For those who have made up their mind to master shortcuts, you will need to learn regular expression, and dictionaries, so that you can make use of other API access and web tools.
Of course, you don’t have to master all regular expressions, just a few basic ones. There are many online resources to help you. There are regular expression cheat sheets, regular expression testers. As for the dictionary, this tutorial is enough.