58 MACWORLD DECEMBER 2019
iOSCENTRAL iOS 13 SHORTCUTSusers, Tuesday’s release grants access to
a major Shortcuts upgrade that will make
it easier to create and edit automations
on iPadOS.
FIRST, THE BIG UPDATE
iPadOS 13.1 is the entryway to all of the
new features that arrived last week on the
iPhone in iOS 13.0. This includes some
great additions to Shortcuts (go.macworld.
com/13sh), most notably a revamping of
how each individual item in a shortcut
accesses previous items.
Shortcuts automations work like a flow
chart, with items cascading downward,
every lower item acting on the previous
one. That simple view could be helpful, but
it also made performing tasks that have to
act on different kinds of information
unwieldy. There was a lot of setting of
variables and getting of variables in order
to put the right information in the right
place at the right time—and all those
additional items made Shortcuts
automations hard to read.
In iOS 13, items in a Shortcuts
automation are like sentences, complete
with subjects and objects, so it’s always
clear what data an item is acting upon.
Single items end up containing phrases
like “get contents of items from RSS
feed”—a complete thought that makes it
clear that it’s the RSS feed that’s being
acted on. My Shortcuts automations are
clearer and simpler because of it.
Another big step forward with iOS 13 is
that individual apps can now choose how
to pass information in and out of Shortcuts.
In the past, app developers had invented
clever workarounds to pass data, either
involving putting that data on the clipboard
or embedding it in a URL. Now there’s an
official, Apple-sanctioned method of
moving around data and letting Shortcuts
automations specify exactly what they
want from an app. As apps update to
support this new format, automations will
become vastly more powerful.
Finally, Shortcuts can now be fullyShortcuts
items now
more clearly
define what
data is being
acted on.