Bartender sold to some sketchy company. We’ve all been moving to the open source Ice app now.

Let's see, I have 157 shortcuts defined at the moment. That wasn't due to some mass effort, just a bunch of little things that accumulated over time.

I have one shortcut that shares the song I'm currently listening to in Apple Music to Mastodon. I use iA Writer for my work notes, and another shortcut creates a new note with today's date with wiki links to yesterday's and tomorrow's notes. (I use that one with Keyboard Maestro: if I'm in iA Writer and press F2, it opens that note (or creates it if it didn't already exist)). One runs on a cron job and copies any new links I've added to GoodLinks to my Pocket account so that it'll sync to my Kobo. Here's one that runs a custom sorting script on my OmniFocus projects. This one dims my office lights; I use Keyboard Maestro (again) to link it to one of the buttons on my Stream Deck.

Basically, for me it's the equivalent of shell scripting for GUI apps. I wouldn't want to write a whole app with it, but for quick and dirty automation jobs it's terrific.

I have tons that solve small annoyances or paper over things I forget. As an example, I listen to an audiobook in audible many nights to sleep, but I often forget to set the sleep timer. Very annoying to have to scrub back hours to find the last thing you remember. I have a shortcut that activates when my iphone is in sleep focus that automatically sets the audible sleep timer for me. It's a little thing, but it's a great quality of life improvement and eliminates my need to think about sleep timers.

Some of my favorite Shortcuts do things like:

- toggle the white point setting on or off to warm and dim the display for nighttime,

- present a menu that makes and displays QR codes for my contact (from vCard text), Wifi info, and more,

- turn off Wifi and cellular at the same time (this one's on my homescreen),

- upload a .torrent file to qBittorrent's watch folder via SSH.

I use Shortcuts at work, too, like sharing a Wifi network with visitors - easier than fiddling with settings and they can take a picture of the QR code to share with others in their party.

My favorite and most handy Shortcut took a picture of an order form, OCRed it, applied a regex to find the order #, and finally showed a QR code I could scan with my scanner; This was at a job where customers would come to pick up, and would often have their order email on their phone or as a printout. The Shortcut meant I could snap the photo first thing and then chit-chat in the time it took the Shortcut to run, instead of them passing their phone to me or reading out the number.

Shortcuts is one of the things that keeps me on iOS.

I've got a few handy Shortcuts.

• Turn off a particular smart plug

I use this in an automation that runs on my iPad. That automation is set to run when the battery charge goes above 80%.

My iPad charger is plugged into that smart plug, so this effectively gives me the 80% charge limit option that so far Apple has only added to the settings for iPhone 15 and 16, iPad Pro (M4), and iPad Air (M2). My iPad is a plain iPad.

• A series of shortcuts to control my Denon A/V receiver.

My receiver is from 2012, long before voice control was available. It does have network control (and serial port control). I've got a script on an RPi that can use the network control to change inputs, mute/unmute, and change the volume.

I've got shortcuts for mute, unmute, various volume levels, and getting the current settings for input, mute, and volume. They work by using the Shortcut action "Run script over SSH" to invoke the script on the RPi.

I've got an Amazon Echo Dot next to the Denon, with the line out of the Dot connection to one of the Denon analog inputs. When line out is connected to a Dot the internal speaker is disabled, which makes that Dot useless for things like checking the weather or timers unless the corresponding Denon input is selected, so I've got the mic on the Dot disabled and use an Echo Show in the same room for all those things. The Dot's job is strictly to supply input to the Denon.

So let's say I want to listen to some music. I can say "<Apple>, Denon Dot" to switch the input to the Dot. (I'm writing "<Apple>" instead of Apple's phrase to trigger their voice assistant so if anyone ever happens to run this through text to speech it will be less annoying. Similar for Amazon's voice assistant).

Then I can say "<Amazon>, on Dot listen to Classical KING FM on Dot" and the echo Show will start the Dot streaming KING FM to the Denon. (It is only actually necessary to say "on Dot" once, but which of the two is necessary occasionally changes, and it is easier to just say it twice).

• Open the "OTP Auth" app.

That's the app I use for TOTP codes on my iPhone. It supports Apple Watch, but asking Apple's voice assistant on the watch to "open OTP Auth" isn't reliable (maybe...[1]). My first choice alternative to voice would be a widget in the Smart Stack but OTP Auth does not have one.

Shortcuts can be put in the Smart Stack. Hence, a Shortcut on the watch that simply launches OTP Auth.

[1] I say maybe because that is based on my old Series 4 watch. I recently upgraded to a Series 10. That has on-device Siri, and I've noticed that is way better. It did not occur to me to check of "open OTP Auth" is reliable.