An Introduction To Shortcuts Automation In macOS Tahoe

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Shortcuts Automation. 

So a new feature in the Shortcuts App in macOS Tahoe is the ability to add automation. This means you can have shortcuts that are triggered by actions or events. The way to set this up is to go to the Shortcuts App. Then look in the left sidebar here for Automation. You can go there and create an automation using the Plus button at the top right. You can also just go to File and New Automation. So the first thing you need to do is set the Trigger for this shortcut. So there is a lot of them here. For instance, the easiest one to understand is Time of Day. Select that, go to Next and you can see you can set it for a specific time of day of Sunrise or Sunset. You can have it repeat daily, weekly, or monthly. If you choose like weekly you can choose the days of the week here. Or monthly you can have it starting on a certain day of the month. 

You can also have it triggered when an alarm from the Clock App goes off. If you look here you can have it when it goes Off, when you Snooze it, or when you Stop the Alarm. You can choose the alarm by name. So you have a specific alarm that triggers an automation and then you can change that alarm and turn it On or turn it Off as you like. 

But there are also a lot of Events here that can happen that can trigger an automation. For instance, when you get an email or a message from a specific person with text in the subject, something in a folder changes, when something in a file changes. When you connect or disconnect an external drive. Also when Wi-Fi is connected or disconnected and the same for a BlueTooth device. You can also have an event trigger when a display is connect or disconnects, when Stage Manager is turned On or Off, when an app is launched or quit. You can also have it triggered when you simply turn On or Off a Focus Mode. So, for instance, Do Not Disturb you can have that when it is turned On and when it is turned Off, both, and have the actions run then. 

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So as a very simple example let's use the App Trigger here. Let's say that when a certain app, let's choose it here and I'm going to search for it, and I'm going to say Keynote. When Keynote is opened then run after confirmation, not immediately, but you'll get a notification and you can choose to run it or not. Then what we're going to have happen is when Keynote is opened we're going to create a new shortcut here with this button, like that, and then we're going to add some Actions to it. One of the things I want to have happen when I launch Keynote is I want some apps quit, so they are not running and I don't accidentally switch to them while I'm giving a presentation. So I'm going to look for App here and then I'm going to choose Quit App and the app I'm going to choose in this case is Mail. I'm going to add that. I'm going to add another one. Quit App and choose Messages. Have that one quit as well. Also, when I start a presentation I sometimes forget to set the Focus Mode to Do Not Disturb. So I'm going to search for Focus here and say set Focus to turn and I'll use Do Not Disturb but I can use another Focus Mode if I want, turn it On, and then I can set it to Until Turned Off or a specific time. or try to leave this location, or Ask Each Time which one I want. So I'll actually do Ask Each Time. Then I'll Close it here. Now notice I've got Messages and Mail running and also notice I'm not using any particular Focus Mode right now. But I'm going to launch Keynote. When I do you can see I get this notification here asking me if I want to run this shortcut. Yes I Do. I then get prompted because remember I had it Ask Me When I Want to Turn Off  the Do Not Disturb Mode. So I'll say, I'll do it until I turn it off. Done. Notice that Messages and Mail Quit and now I have Do Not Disturb turned On. 

So now I have a handy way to setup my Mac when I'm about to give a presentation. If I was just working on the presentation I could have chosen Not to Run it but just Dismiss the notification instead. 

Now, let's go back into Shortcuts and see how you Edit this. If you go to Automation here you'll see it and you can select it and if you double click it will take you into the Shortcut itself. So, I can now change which Apps are Quit. Maybe I can remove one of these or add another Quit or some other action. If you need to change the automation trigger itself then instead of double clicking here, Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on a trackpad here. Then go to Edit, Automation. Now you can change which app this is triggered by or maybe change it to from run after confirmation or just run immediately. 

Let's look at some other examples. So I'll start a New Automation here and I'll go down to these Focus Modes. Let's say that when I turn on my Studying Focus Mode I wanted to do certain things and just run it immediately like that. It gives me some suggestions here. For instance, Set Volume. I'll take that first suggestion and I'll use it. It's going to start a new Shortcut here and it is going to have that Action in there. Let's go and say, no I want it to go all the way down to 10% and then in addition to that maybe I can also have it Quit an app, like maybe Safari, then I can add whatever else I want here. Now this will trigger when I switch to the Studying Focus Mode. I've got my Sound and set it to halfway, like that. I've got Safari running here. So if I go and switch to Studying you can see Safari Quits. If I check the Volume you can see that is volume is automatically been set to 10%. 

Now if you're on a MacBook you may notice there are more triggers. That's because you've got a battery and you can connect and disconnect power to your MacBook, something you can't do on my Mac Studio. So here on a MacBook if I go and setup an automation you can see I've got battery level and I can have something trigger when it reaches a specific Battery Level Rises Above, Falls Below and so on. I also can set it for when the charger connects or is disconnected. A common problem you may run in to, for instance, is sometimes with MagSafe you accidentally disconnect the charger and then you don't realize it but your MacBook is now loosing power. So, you can set it up like this, that when the power is disconnected, run immediately, and we'll take this first suggestion right here. Have it speak text. This is a handy little action because you can have it say whatever you want. So you can say, you know, power disconnected. You can click here and then you can turn off wait until finish. You don't need the shortcut to pause. You just need it to send the text to audio. Then you can do rate, pitch, language, and set it to the voice. So I've got a lot of voices here but I'm going to use the Siri voice right here. So now if I pull the MagSafe cord off of my MacBook it will run, (power disconnected.)

Here's another example that involves receiving a message. So, when you use this you can set a sender or just leave it blank for any sender. Then I'm going to have it When It Contains something in the text. So just a bit of text like that. Have it run immediately. Then I'm just going to have it do kind of the same thing as before, Adding a Speak Action here. So Speak Text. I just want it to speak the actual message out loud. So the way to do that is here where you have text I'm going to Control Click, two-finger click or right click, Inset Shortcut Input. Shortcut Input is an object it's this message object. You want to get a specific piece of information from the message. To do that, what you need to do is make sure you've deselected the text there. So select something else so it is not selected. Then double click here and then you get this Shortcut Input Selector here. What I want to use here is the content of the message. So now when I choose that you can see this changes to Content. You can see now I can set the Voice and all of that. I'll turn off wait until finished. Now it lets test it out. Notice I don't have the Messages App running. So let's get this message sent from a different account and the message will come and should speak this particular message because the words good news appear in the content. Good news everyone. 

So the idea here is maybe you get text messages from some sort of automated system, like maybe you sell products on some sort of online market place. You get a text message every time you make a sale. You could have this triggered by text that's always in those messages. 

Let's take a look at one more example. This one, I'm going to have triggered when a folder changes contents. Which folder? Well, let's choose the Downloads Folder. When the contents of the Downloads Folder change because a file is added to it, then we're going to run something immediately. What are we going to run? Well, we're going to create a new shortcut here and you can see it receives the folder change summary as input. So, we can use this data for something. Like, for instance, figuring out what file was just added to the Downloads Folder. Then do something with it. 

So here's my Downloads Folder. It is empty right now. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add a folder inside the Downloads Folder, called PDFs. The idea is that whenever a PDF is added to the Downloads Folder, because I downloaded it say in Safari, it is moved into this PDF folder in here. This PDF file could be in your Documents Folder or somewhere else. I'm just going to put it in the Downloads Folder so we can see it easily and it acts kind of as organization for the Downloads Folder. So, let's go and get the Folder Input, which should be the file that was added. Look for an Action to move that file. Here it is. So I can double click on it and it says Move the File to what....... So first let's set what file to move. I'm going to not click here because it is going to ask me to specify a file. Instead I'm going to Control Click, right click, or two-finger click and change this to Shortcut Input. But remember Shortcut Input is an object so what we want to do here is Click it once and then look and see here that the object is actually the folder change summary. Information about what's been changed. Instead, let's go and select Added Files. So this should be a list of added files. So this gives us a clue there might be more than one. So what we're going to do is we're going to Escape out of that and Delete this and instead use Repeat, and say Repeat with Each. So Repeat with the items here. I'm going to click there and say Shortcut Input, Click again and then say, Added Files like that. Now it is going to Repeat through all of the added files for the Input. So now it is going to repeat through all the added files. Now we want to check to see if each item is a PDF. So I'm going to look for IF here and I'm going to add IF here. If condition if and I'm going to change this to the file extension. So the file extension of the repeated item is and then set that to PDF. If it is a PDF now we'll use Move and we'll say Move File, Move the Repeat Item to what? Well, we're going to set it to that PDF folder there. 

So now with this setup anytime a file is downloaded here that is a PDF the Shortcut should trigger and move it into this folder. Let's test that out by going to this page here at MacMost and there is actually a download here for a keyboard shortcut to PDF. Let's click on that and download it. You can see it appeared there briefly in the Downloads Folder and then it went into this PDFs folder here. Look at it in List View and we can see it right there. 

So I'm just scratching the surface here. There are lots of different triggers that you can use and there are a ton of different Actions you can take with the input from those triggers. You can play around and experiment more with Shortcuts to see how these automations can help you. Hope you found this useful.Thanks for watching.