DECEMBER 2019 MACWORLD 59A basic Home
Automation
queries for
the local
temperature
and turns on
a fan if it’s a
warm day.interactive via Siri. You can trigger a
Shortcut automation with your voice,
answer a few questions, and have the
automation change how it behaves based
on your answers.
TRIGGERS CHANGE THE GAME
But as of Tuesday, the Shortcuts game has
been changed even further thanks to the
addition of the new Automation tab. This
tab actually contains two different kinds of
automations, Personal and Home.
Home automations aren’t new—
they’re the kind of basic automations
you’ve been able to create in the Home
app for a while now. In iOS 12 these
weren’t particularly sophisticated, but it
still allowed a decent level of complexity.
For example, in iOS 12 I built a HomeKit
automation that turned on a bunch of
lights in my house when my smart lock
detected a late-night arrival of a member
of my household. It means I could pull
into the driveway after coming home from
a late-night flight, and my indoor and
outdoor entryway lights would switch on.
In iOS 13, Home automations can still
be that simple—in fact, you’ll see all of
those same automations in the Automation
tab within Shortcuts. But they’ve been
augmented by a new option, Convert To
Shortcut. When you choose this option,
you can move beyond changing the status
of HomeKit items to performing other tasks
using Shortcuts.
In a couple of minutes I created a
Shortcut that turns off a bunch of my
HomeKit devices at 4 p.m., but if the
outdoor temperature is above 80, turns on
the ceiling fan in my bedroom. These
automations run even if you’re not home,
via whatever device you’re using as a
HomeKit hub—either an Apple TV or an
iPad. As a result, you’re limited in what you
can do, but I could still build a home
automation that queried one web service
and then, depending on what it found,
triggered a different web service. So
there’s still a lot of complexity possible.