The iPhone Feature EVERYONE Should Be Using!

the shortcuts app is an app that comes pre-installed on all iPhones and today I'm going to show you my favorite way to use this app creating shortcut menus is so useful and I use it all the time this could be a great place to start if you're new to shortcuts if you have an iPhone you should be using this feature and stick around because I've got a new super cool way to trigger these shortcuts that I want to show you at the end of this video Let's Go sponsored by bang case yo what's up guys my name is Shane and here on this channel we focus on building an easy apple Home Smart Home and one of the ways that I control my smart home is through personal shortcuts more specifically choose from menu shortcuts I use these all the time if you're a regular viewer of the channel you may have seen me utilizing some of these types of shortcuts in past videos I do get asked about it often so I figured we'd make a video this is again my favorite way to use shortcuts for smart home stuff but also really just for any shortcuts I think creating and using these choose from menu shortcuts is one of the easiest ways to use shortcuts and like I said if you're brand new to this it is a great starting place the concept is very simple in the shortcuts app you use the choose from menu action to create a prompt with selectable items you can add add and remove items and for each item you add you have a section below where you can add other shortcut actions that will take place when that item is selected and of course these here can be as simple or as complex as you want so here's one you can check out might have seen this on my new GOI floor lamp video this is my studio scene shortcut and this is just a choose from menu shortcut that I have added to my home screen it asked me which smart home scene I want to set with a simple menu super basic but I love this because it allows me to integrate my GOI floor lamp Pro and the white noise audio effects into my scenes and stuff like that easily accessible that's not something that I can do in the Apple home app alone so this has been great here's another one that I use all the time it's given me some options for my narwhal Robot vacuum since the Narwhal app supports series shortcuts I can utilize the vacuum actions here in my menu these are very simple examples but even very Advanced shortcuts can take advantage of the choose from menu action here's a really cool example called home studio it's all about controlling your hom pods this one lets you do a number of things with your homepods and music and podcast and it's using the choose from menu actions as the main way to navigate throughout the shortcut notice how the developer has even created a back button in the menu really cool this was downloaded from routine Hub which is a great source for downloadable shortcuts by the way I'll put a link to this shortcut routine Hub and everything else we discuss Down Below in the description and one of my favorite ones because it's just super useful to me personally is one that I set up for my action button so this just gives me a quick menu of things that I like to do regularly usually around the house so this way I don't have to search through screens and apps and things like that every time I want to do one of these things the all lights out turns out all my lights I can arm the security system or start my truck snap a receipt will open up my Quickbooks app so I can quickly snap a receipt the grill option will turn on my patio string lights and open my Weber Connect app these are all things that I do often and having that menu especially accessible right there from the action button just allows me you know to do all these things much e easier and faster that's why I think using something like this choose from menu uh action or shortcut can be useful for anybody no matter what it is that you do just pick the things that you like to do or need to do regularly and add those to your menu to create something like this just create a new shortcut in the shortcuts app we're going to look for our choose from menu action uh you could search for it up here or it should be under uh scripting I think choose from menu right there you can put anything you want as your prompt all right and now below we see these are our actions uh it comes with one and two so we can just type anything we want here and then you'll see below uh this is where we'll fill in the actions that we want to actually happen so this first one we're just going to say all lights out I'm going to do some of the actions that I showed you from uh my favorite shortcuts that I use all the time uh just as a demonstration next one Let's do let's say turn Studio green change all the lights and stuff in the studio maybe uh play some audio on the speaker or something like that and then for this third one we're going to do um we'll do the grilling time and for this one we'll do like turn on the back patio lights and open up the Weber app like I mentioned earlier you see once I added those up here we have the stuff uh the different options down here and it shows end of menu right there so now you can put anything you want up here in these so the first one is all lights out so that is just a homekit scene that I'm going to do so I'm going to look for the home app and lots of uh there we go I got a few homes Smart Homes but I'm looking for Watley Resort control Watley Resort that's what I'm looking for just going to place it down here I'm just going to drag it up there under all lights out we're going to set the scene and accessories this is just a scene that I've already created right there all lights out there we go that menu option is done so I can test this and go ahead and see what it looks like choose an action all lights out turn Studio green grilling time I'm going to stop because I don't want to turn out the lights right now for turn Studio green I'm actually going to use a shortcut that was already created so this is how you'll kind of utilize shortcuts uh from other apps so like the goie app lets you create shortcuts including some of the scenes and different lighting effects and audio effects and stuff like that so we need to First Look for run shortcut so this is going to actually run another shortcut right there pull this under there now we can tap for the shortcut we want to run all right so set studio green that's a shortcut that actually includes uh the goie lamp and the audio effects that'll make it sound like birds chirping and stuff on the goie speaker and it'll change some of the lamps and stuff in here uh so again that was created using the goie app and lastly we're going to uh we're going to look for the home action again to control the lights in the home but we're also going to open up another app so uh control watly Resort move this under grilling time we're going to look for my back porch lights the string lights on the back porch let's see right here the Nan Leaf string lights we're going to turn those on we can even pick the color if we want but that'll be good as is all right next we want to open up and the app we're going to look for is Weber because this is what I use when I'm grilling on the back porch open we Weber connect and boom it's really that easy now I can go through I can pick one of my options one thing I like to do which is kind of makes it a little more fun I feel like is put little emojis next to these so uh for this I can put like you know all lights out maybe put a moon you know uh right here maybe I'll put a four leaf clover over here over here I'll put a little steak for grilling time done and now if I run that it looks like this uh so it just makes it a little cooler to look at I feel like to add any of these um of course we can change the name of the shortcut right here so I'm just going to call this test menu and then to add this to your home screen all you do is tap right there add the home screen and then it'll add the icon to your home screen you can rename it like I just did and you can also choose the icon here if you want it to show up differently on you know your home screen it'll use this icon right here but that's how you would add it to your home screen and if you want to see my favorite new way to trigger my shortcuts like these check this out this is the new bang case and it's the first iPhone case that gives you a fully programed aable button similar to the action button that comes on the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro but better since I can program this button to do anything with a single press a double press and a long press this includes running any of your shortcuts and not to men just how cool this transparent design looks I mean just look at how cool this thing is the case itself connects to your iPhone via Bluetooth and then in your accessibility settings you can configure your single press double press and long press the battery for the case should last 30 days on a single charge and when it's time to recharge you just use this neat little magnetic cable no need to remove the phone or anything like that the case will retail for $50 us but right now you can actually get an early bird pricing on Kickstarter there's a link to this down below in the description check it out while you still can I've been absolutely loving this thing using on my phone every day to trigger shortcuts and and stuff they even have a bang case wallpaper that you can download which gives you a little symbol to show where the bang button is they've also created a shortcuts Playbook with downloadable shortcuts that will work great for the bang case I'll put a link to that down below and of course you can also use any of your other choose for menu shortcuts like we discussed here today for your bang button thanks again to bit moolap for sponsoring today's video and for making just a such a cool awesome iPhone case that works with shortcuts I don't think I've been this excited about an iPhone case in a long time I hope this video was helpful in showing you one of my favorite ways to use series shortcuts if you want to see some other useful shortcut ideas check out this video right over here where we go a little bit deeper into creating shortcuts thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Shane Whatley

Views: 16,316

Keywords: homekit, Apple Homekit, smart home, homekit apple, homekit devices, homekit smart home, affordable homekit, affordable homekit devices, home automation, smarthome

Id: CjF40wurKZE

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2024