Building a Handy Shortcut For Easy Access To iPhone Functions

You can build a simple Shortcut to access the things you use your iPhone for the most. Then you can use back tap, a Home screen icon or Siri to activate it and choose the function. Great for productivity or for helping someone who needs easier access to some things.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can setup super fast access to the most common things that you do with your iPhone.
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Now when you do a particular task on your iPhone often you can use the Shortcuts App to kind of automate that and make it a little bit easier to do that task. Perhaps even more powerful than that you can create a shortcut that will allow you to access several different things so you can have easy access to the most common things that you do. 
So let's start by going into the Shortcuts App here and I'm going to create a new shortcut and I'm going to Add An Action. The action I'm going to look for here is Menu. You want to pick Choose From Menu. This will create a prompt where it will ask you to make a choice. You could specify as many things as you want. So let's first put the name of the menu. Now let's change the first choice here from default1 to something like this. So the first item here will be to make a quick phone call. Let's make the second item a quick text message. Now to add a third item I can click here and then add that one as well.  I'm going to add a whole bunch of useful things here without worrying about exactly how they're going to be implemented. So now I've created a whole bunch of things here. I haven't actually set this up to do anything yet. But now I've got a Menu and you could see here at the top it lists all the items and I can Edit them. I can even rearrange them very easily. Then below it has each one repeated here. The idea is I could put actions in between each one of these to actually get the job done. 
But right now let's name this and let's call this Quick Functions. You're going to want to name this something that can't be confused with the name of an App or another thing your iPhone does because we may use Siri to actually trigger this. Then when we test this out we can see what this looks like. I'm going to tap here at the bottom right and you could see it puts up this big menu here and I can choose one of these things. It doesn't do anything right now. So let's code each one of these. First let's do the Call. I can type Call and choose Call right here and then it's going to put it all the way at the bottom. What I want to do is drag it up and put it in its proper place in the Menu. That would be right here after Call and the Name. Then I can tap here and select from my Contacts who to call. Now this should work. If I Play it and then choose Call Mark it should place the call. I'm using a test iPhone here so it's not going to actually place the call but it normally would just start ringing. 
Now the nest one is going to be for Messaging. So let's search for Message and choose Send Message. But this time instead of just tapping it to select and having it being put at the bottom I'm going to Tap and Hold and Drag. You could see I get back into the main list of actions here and I can drop it where I want. Now I can type the message and then choose the recipient. You can type it or press the Plus button there. Choose. You could also add multiple recipients with this Plus button here. But you're going to also want to tap this and if Show When Run is selected it will actually open the Messages App. Put that message in the conversation you're having with that person. But then it's up to you to send it. If you turn this Off though then it will just send it instantly. 
Now for the next one let's use Take A Photo and there's actually something called Take A Photo. We'll select that. We'll drop that in here. You could select how many photos to take. Which camera to use and you could tap here and also have it show Camera Preview. With this On it will just take you to the Camera App and you're ready to take a photo. That might be what you want. You could turn it Off and it would just take the photo right there. 
You could have it Play a Playlist. So search for Music and then we'll select Play Music. Drag that in. I'll select here Playlists. There's that Playlist. I'll tap this button right here. Now it adds it. You could see it says that. I could tap right here and choose my Shuffle options. Let's have Shuffle Songs turned On. Now it will instantly shuffle that Playlist.
The next one is Open An App. I just chose Weather App. Maybe it could be something more like Instagram or something like that. So we'll search for Open. There's Open An App. I can drag that into place. I have to choose the App.
Bluetooth settings is a little trickier. You can get to Settings by typing a special URL. So let's go in here and search for URL. Use that one. You would think that's for opening up a webpage but there are special URL's you can use to access different parts of the Settings app. I did a video on this before. So the one for Bluetooth is this. But you could also have it go to a regular website. I'll use Show Webpage and this time I'll just type in a regular URL. But how about if you want to show some local content. Well, you can go directly to a Note. So let's do that. This is actually going to take two steps. Because first you want to find the Note. So we'll do this here. Find All Notes. Add a filter and we'll say the Filter is the Name Contains and we know that this is called Project. Then we're going to also look for Show Notes. Put that right underneath so it will find a note with that name and then show it. 
You do the same thing with Files. So we can choose File and then just this and we can actually tap here then select a file. Here is one called Info. This could be anything. A pdf or whatever. Even an image. So select that and then we'll use QuickLook and put that right underneath. So it's going to QuickLook whatever file you specify there. We can do the same thing for a photo here. So I'm going to look for File again. Select a photo instead. Then use the same QuickLook underneath that. 
So now let's test it out. Let's try one like the Bluetooth settings one. You can see it takes us right to the Bluetooth settings in the Settings app. But what we really need to do now is get easier access to this because we don't want to go into the Shortcuts App and then run it each time.
So there are a few things we can do to setup easy access. First let's setup a good icon. We can tap here. We can choose a color that we want. We can choose a GIF that we want. Maybe this one. Then we can go here and say Add To Home Screen. Then we can customize it a little bit more before adding it to the Home Screen. Now we'll see it here. We can just activate the entire thing by tapping there and then the Menu appears. So now we can very easily access anyone of these by just tapping it. You can see now it it playing that Playlist. 
But there are a couple of other things we can do. One idea I like is go into Settings and then under Accessibility go to Touch and then down at the bottom go to Back Tap. Setup for Double Tap that shortcut. So you have to go down to the bottom here and you'll see Shortcuts and there you see the one you just created. There's Quick Functions. Now we can go and anytime we want just tap twice on the back, like that, and we can see it appears. 
But in Accessibility in that same spot you can also setup Assistive Touch which is what I'm using here to show the Pointer. But you can customize the top level menu. There's usually a custom one right there already and you can select for that custom one you can select your shortcut. So you probably know of this Assistive Touch dot here that I can move around on the screen. If you tap it it brings up that menu there. But now you've got Quick Functions as one of the items there. So if you're already using that that's another way to get to this pretty fast.  
But another thing you could do is simply use Siri to access this. Just use the name that you called it. Quick Functions. Now you see it comes up and I can choose one of these things. So let's say I want to go to the webpage here. What's even better than that is you can continue to talk to activate it. Watch what happens. (Gary says) Quick Functions. Show Info File. You can see how it does it instantly. Now even better than that you can provide Siri with some alternatives. So, let's go back into the Shortcuts App here. Then if I choose one of these, like Show Info File, I can choose a synonym and I can add that right here. So now it doesn't seem to visually change anything. It still says Show Info File. But, I can just say Info. Quick Functions, Info. Of course you can also set Siri here to listen so you don't actually have to press the side button even to get to these items. 
So this is just a sample here of the different things you can do. You can continue to add these. You can rearrange them and rename them very easily. You can add several webpages, several different files here. Of course, a lot of these can be done with Siri or with their own shortcut. But it's remembering how exactly to access them that's the problem. Just knowing that you've got this one place to go and it's going to show you a list, say, of the top ten things that you're always doing on your iPhone, could make life a lot easier. You may also be able to use this to help somebody out with difficulty accessing a lot of functions on their iPhone. You could just set this up. Show them how to activate this Quick Functions list and then they could just select the one that they want to do. It would be great for setting up an iPhone for a young child or an older adult that has trouble using the iPhone. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 8 Responses to “Building a Handy Shortcut For Easy Access To iPhone Functions”

Bernd

2 years ago

Hi Gary, thank you for this, I like the idea very much. Can I ask whether I can choose a contact number for the person I would like to call (in this case, there is a home and mobile number, both are starred as important to me, the home number is coincidentally my own, but always the home number is chosen automatically, not the mobile number which I would want)? I have moved the order of the numbers as mobile first, but no luck. Looking forward to your comment(s). Bernd.

Gary Rosenzweig

Bernd: It should choose based on the order. But I haven't done any extensive testing or anything. Experiment and play around. What happens if you rearrange the numbers and remove and add it back to the Shortcut? What happens if you create a special contact just for use in the Shortcut? What happens if you remove the other number from the Contact, add it to the Shortcut, and then put the other numbers back? Work with it and see what you get in different situations.

Thanks, Gary. Deleting the shortcut action, removing the unwanted number, re-adding the shortcut action sorted it, and then re-adding the unwanted number after the re-adding the shortcut had no bearing on this, so it all works. I don't know your relationship to Apple, I'm just a mere beginner user, but this should be a suggestion to them that out of >1 numbers the correct should be chosen. Will it have more umph if you suggest this, or shall I try?

Bernd: Use https://www.apple.com/feedback/ I have no special connection to Apple at all.

Fred

Nice video Gary. I noticed that the message function greys out the ability to add emojis or photos, kind of odd. I really hope they continue to improve this app. I use Keyboard Maestro and Alfred for some automation, but I can't seem to find a Mac solution that does it all.

Bob

Thanks for this very informative tip.
I've been using the "assistive touch" bubble
for quite a while.
Now I'll add this shortcut technique
as one or more of the entries.

custom touch on iphone shortcut

i want to send good morning message with gif through i message everyday with gif image so for that i am able to attach gif inside the iMessage with recipient name but as the iMessage contain image/gif so it wont send without letting me confirm the input so how to make it possible. just to be sure that i have turned off the show me run so it should automatically send but its not. Just to make sure i am talking about GIF image search not typical good morning text message so please help in this.

(unnamed person): No, if there is no option for removing the confirmation there is nothing you can do.

Comments Closed.

Building a Handy Shortcut For Easy Access To iPhone Functions

Comments: 8 Responses to “Building a Handy Shortcut For Easy Access To iPhone Functions”

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