Thursday, August 18, 2022

Suggested Shortcuts Improvements

Matthew Cassinelli:

Today, Apple released updates to their iWork suite of apps that adds actions in Shortcuts for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote on macOS, bringing powerful first-party actions that Mac users can take advantage to automate their work[…]

[…]

One oddity worth mentioning is that the “Add Row” action requires Numbers to physically open the spreadsheet and insert the data, just like it does on iOS – Apple should make this action work in the background without opening the app, otherwise it creates an inconsistent experience with every other action in Shortcuts that doesn’t require opening the app to insert data.

Matthew Cassinelli:

One piece of low-hanging fruit that Apple could grab onto to improve the onboarding experience is to do an overhaul of the quality of action descriptions in the app.

[…]

Secondly, the flow of information throughout the Shortcuts app is still very confusing and not immediately obvious for new or even intermediate users. […] Apple should implement a step-through mode like the one implemented in their Swift Playgrounds app, which allows users who are learning coding basics to see what’s happening in between each step.

[…]

Many of the categories in the Shortcuts gallery haven’t been curated recently — I literally programmed them myself when I worked at Workflow — and there are many more examples including third-party apps from the App Store that could show people the power of Shortcuts beyond simple use cases.

Previously:

Comments RSS · Twitter

Leave a Comment