Updating Shared Shortcuts
No actual concept of versioning or upgrades for shared shortcuts. Sharing shortcuts happens via weird iCloud URLs rather than being an actual aspect of the system. So to update a shortcut, do you just add it again? No indication of what that will do before you press the button. Will it error out? Will it create a duplicate? Will it update/replace the existing one?
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Of course this Playmobil-ass UI doesn’t show anything that would be remotely useful for serious people. Imagine wanting to sort your shortcuts by date or see the last modification date, like some rocket scientist.
Needless to say, there’s no version control or diffing, either. There’s so much stuff that apps can get for free if they use the file system instead of opaque storage. Bypassing it in the name of simplicity makes some things easier but blocks a long tail of possibilities—as well as basic stuff like sorting, if the app doesn’t provide it.
Previously:
Apple Shortcuts is such a mess that I’ve actually implemented my own backup system for my shortcuts. That way, if anything goes wrong — and it has several times in the past — I have a weekly backup that I can restore from.
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You also can't share a Shortcut without iCloud. How does anyone use this trash?
I feel like we're living in a time just after the fall of the Roman Empire, where people look back and say, how could people possibly do this?
We had such a rich, powerful computing environment at one time. And it's just devolving.
Yeah. I've tried Shortcuts out, made a few for things that were _very_ useful and otherwise avoid it.
I'm a long-time AppleScript coder. I've written many hundreds of useful things, including a fairly extensive library of code used by fellow FileMaker developers to work with FileMaker clipboard objects.
And yet, Shortcuts is too much work for too little benefit, most of the time. Think about that! I wrestle with AppleScript's weirdnesses, and generally end up with something worth my time.
Shortcuts? No thank you, until they overhaul it into something useful. Maybe Apple Intelligence will make the initial creating useful, and maybe even updating your _own_ Shortcut, but I'm going to assume the sharing aspect will still be pretty much useless.
"We had such a rich, powerful computing environment at one time. And it's just devolving."
It's been distressing to see it happen. I want to go back to when computers peaked. Maybe when everything involved with modern computing including the internet finally becomes so awful that there's no point in engaging with it anymore, I'll just roll back to macOS 10.9 or something and be back in my rich, powerful computing environment.
I think the core issue is that file systems did not really evolve. We are mostly standing still on the level of Unix file organization - but we also see that this doesn't work well for many use cases. Just look at all the custom hacks iCloud Drive or Dropbox do to preserve file identity across devices or to do versioning.
We currently life with files as the lowest common deniminator for open data exchange - and a bizarre closed world of cloud and shoebox solutions on the other side.
