Wednesday, January 8, 2020

LaunchCuts

Federico Viticci:

Like the aforementioned Shortcuts utilities, LaunchCuts was born of its developer’s frustration with the lack of folders in Shortcuts – a basic feature that is still bafflingly absent from the app in 2020.

[…]

LaunchCuts can only read data from your local Shortcuts library by running an additional helper shortcut inside the Shortcuts app. This shortcut is based on an advanced technique that uses the native, Apple-developed ‘Get My Shortcuts’ action to generate a list of all your installed shortcuts and extract metadata from each. I’m oversimplifying what the LaunchCuts Helper does, but, essentially, the shortcut scans the entire contents of the Shortcuts app and parses details such as the names of your shortcuts, their colors and glyphs, whether you’re using them as widgets or action extensions in the share sheet, and even the contents of certain actions contained inside them (more on this later).

[…]

There are caveats to this approach. In addition to being dependent on a technique that Apple may easily close off in the future (see footnote above), it means you’ll need to run the LaunchCuts Helper shortcut manually and periodically to give the LaunchCuts app a fresh database with your latest shortcuts and modifications to existing ones.

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