Beginner's Guide to Siri Shortcuts - Part 1: Your First Shortcut

welcome everybody to tech craft this is Rob and in today's video we'll be going back to basics with part 1 of my step-by-step beginner's guide to Irish shortcuts let's go today's video is part one of a six-part series aimed at viewers who want to learn how to build great iOS shortcuts no prior experience with shortcuts is needed an absolutely no prior experience of computer programming is required at all in this first part we'll take a look at the shortcuts app in detail and we'll build our very first shortcut in parts 2 & 3 we'll take a look at two of the most critical concepts in the shortcuts app variables and data types if you can master those two concepts you're really equipped to build some great shortcuts part 4 we'll learn how to use scripting features like loops and if statements so that you can make your shortcuts react to user input and we'll see how best to get that input from your users in part 5 we'll learn how to share your shortcuts with the wider community and also how to find great third-party shortcuts there's a huge community of shortcuts developers and this can be a great way of finding shortcuts to solve your tasks but also finding shortcuts to help you improve your own skills and then in the final part part 6 I'll show you my own personal tips that I've gained from over 20 years of experience as a professional software developer these tips will help you make shortcuts that are fast that are easy to understand and easy to maintain if this sounds like your kind of series don't forget to subscribe and don't forget to hit that bell so you don't miss out on future installments of the series without any further ado let's dive in so let's start at the very beginning by answering the two important questions what is iOS shortcuts and why should I use it shortcuts is a free app available from Apple that allows you to automate repetitive tasks on your iPhone iPad or Apple home device now shortcuts isn't installed by default on your device so you will need to download it from the App Store but it is a totally free download any time you find yourself doing a repetitive task that task is a candidate for being turned into a shortcut apps that you install on your device can supply little snippets of functionality called actions and then you link these actions together in the shortcuts app to accomplish the particular task you need before we dive into building our first shortcut let's just take a quick tour of the shortcuts user interface to make sure we fully understand where everything is and what everything does so the main screen of shortcuts has these three tab buttons along the bottom here my shortcuts automation and the gallery so the my shortcuts tab shows all the shortcuts that you have created or installed to your device don't worry if yours doesn't look like this obviously I've already built a fair few shortcuts the Edit button up here allows us to click and delete any of these shortcuts and the little plus icon up here is how we create new ones the automation tab allows us to create shortcuts that trigger our particular times of the day based on our location based on the presence of Bluetooth devices a whole bunch of interesting things now this particular functionality isn't particularly well defined yet so we'll not be covering it in this series at all if you are interested in seeing this content in the future just throw a comment down below and the gallery tab is like a mini App Store for shortcuts these are all shortcuts that Apple has kind of pre verified and you can download it to use on your device so maybe I want to install this create meeting notes shortcut I can click on the plus icon here and scroll down I can see what actions it does and as you get more familiar with shortcuts you'll be able to understand all of this and then finally I can click add shortcut and add this one to my device I'll go back to my main screen here you'll see that the creating shortcuts now so let's now create our very first shortcut it's a tradition in computer programming that the first shortcut you create is one that displays hello world on the screen so we're going to create a shortcut that will display hello world in a notification let's see how that works so back in the shortcuts app I'm gonna click the plus icon up here and represented with the user interface for creating a shortcut the name of the shortcut is here this is called new shortcut right now but we'll change that shortly down the side here you can find some suggested actions that you might want I find this to be mostly useless to be honest in the apps section here I can see all the apps that are installed and each of these apps has contries is some kind of passion that can be used in a shortcut so for example I have bare installed I click on bear you can see that it has a bunch of shortcut option one of which is create bear note the other seven sections here contain all the built-in actions from the shortcuts app and we're going to use a few of these in a second browsing around in these sections can get quite tedious once you get familiar with shortcuts so there's a search box up here and if I wants to bring up that create bear notes actually I can do so by searching for it do you recommend that you spend a little bit of time browsing around both the built-in action set and the actions that come with your apps really understanding what actions are available is key to be able to build great shortcuts so we're gonna start by adding a simple action which will show a notification and there is actually a show notification action which I've done in the search bar here but I could just as easily have gone into scripting here scroll down until we get to the notification section which is all where the bottom and then see the show notification option it's here you can see now why I prefer to use the search I'm gonna just click on that and it brings in the action into my shortcut list here and it's prefilled the text that will be shown this little slot here with the text hello world so now we can just run this we can run this in two ways from within the shortcuts app we can either press the play button down here or if you have a keyboard attached to your device you can press command + R and then notice up here is our little notification saying hello world so that's our very first shortcut so I want to refine this shortcut a little bit now by prompting the user for the text to show in that notification let's see how we do that there is a built-in ask for import action in the shortcuts app and you actually see that is already here in the same notification section that we pulled the notification option in from and rather than click to add I'm actually going to drag this in and make sure it comes in here the actions in this shortcut will execute in order top to bottom so it's very important that we have that ask action before the show action because we need to ask the input before we actually display the notification this little gray box here that kind of faded out question in there show that we have a slot for this action that needs some input in it so I'm gonna say that my question is what shall I say and I'm gonna run this now and see what happens so now we've got our prompt box and I'm gonna type in a message hello there this time click OK and the shortcut run but we still get hello world in the notification now this is probably obvious why we still have this building here we need to get the output of this ask for input action into that slot on the show notification action there we can do that really easily I'm going to long press on this I'm gonna select magic variable now what's happening here is there's a magic little variable here and we'll talk a lot more about variables in part two but for now this is just a little name for the output of this option I'm gonna click on that and you'll notice that there's a line here now that stitches these two actions together just to signify that the output from this is becoming the input to this so now if we run this shortcut I'm gonna say don't forget to subscribe we now get that message in our notification obviously it's not very convenient to have to run this shortcut from within the shortcuts app itself thankfully there are three options for saving the shortcut and running it from somewhere else we can save it to the home screen and run it from the home screen we can save it to the widget and we can save it to the share sheet if you don't know what the widget is it is this cool thing on the home screen here you've got a lot of different widget controls in here but there is a shortcut to one and all your shortcuts that you want to show in the widget will show here for easy access the share sheet is the little icon up here that appears in apps like Safari and when you click on it you get this cool widget and you can scroll down and at the bottom here you'll see all the shortcuts that you've chosen to appear in the share sheet we'll see a lot more about the share sheet in part 2 for now let's return to shortcuts and save this shortcut to our widget onto our home screen so I'm back in the shortcuts up with our shortcut I'm what I'm going to do is hit the next button up here I'm gonna give this name notify done and there's a notification down there I'm actually gonna drag it up to the top candy open my mouth under here my finger leave it there this just means it will appear right at the beginning of my widget so if I go to my home screen now you can see there is my notify shortcut I can click on it to run it and we can just say hello okay brilliant now what I want to do is add this to the homescreen how do we do that well what I'm going to do is come back into the shortcuts up click on these three dots to bring up the Edit screen for that shortcut again and click on these three dots to bring up the shortcut properties now notice that shirring widget is selected by default showing sure she is not selected and we again will look at that in part two and what I'm going to do is click Add to Home screen and it's gonna go on the home screen looking like this but before I do that what I actually want to do is change that icon so I'm gonna click on the icon here I choose this nice blue and in this glyph tab I can choose an icon which is obviously the obvious word there I may choose this person click done and now when I go to add to homescreen I have this cool icon it's gonna be call notify and let's click up if I go back to my home screen now you can see that there is the shortcut on the home screen with available to run I'm gonna click on that they just bring me back into shortcuts ready to run so there we go in this video we've learned our way around the shortcuts app we've built our very first shortcut we've seen how to make that shortcut available from the widget and from the home screen next week we're gonna dive deeper into the topic of variables so we'll see how to create shortcuts that appear in the share sheet that accepts input and also how to just build more complex workflows that handle a lot more data hope you found this video useful if so please do hit like do hit subscribe and don't just hit subscribe but hit the bell as well so you don't miss out on any future parts of this series thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Tech Craft

Views: 184,176

Keywords: siri shortcuts for beginners, siri shortcuts, siri shortcuts tutorial, shortcuts walkthrough, how to use siri shortcuts, getting started with siri shortcuts, shortcuts app for beginners, siri shortcuts ios 13 tutorial, how to use shortcuts, shortcuts app, shortcuts tutorial, shortcuts, siri, apple shortcuts, iphone 11, ios13 shortcuts

Id: o0pvvKovwhU

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 01 2019