by Jason Snell
Automating my blog posts with Shortcuts… on the Mac
Last month I wrote about how I’ve been building automations on iOS that were hard to replicate on macOS, and why that led me to believe the Mac needed to adopt Shortcuts:
The more I use Shortcuts, the more I realize that in many ways, user automation on iOS has outpaced automation on the Mac. Let me give you an example: On iOS I built a shortcut to grab the contents of selected text in Safari and open the results in a text editor—converted to Markdown, with the title of the page set as the title and its URL set as a link. It’s not remotely the most complicated shortcut I’ve built, but it’s great—and has saved me a lot of time while improving the quality of my link posts. (Copying and pasting text from Safari straight into a text editor strips out hyperlinks and formatting; converting the rich HTML to Markdown brings them along.)
On Monday Apple announced that macOS Monterey would support Shortcuts. I installed the first beta version of Monterey last night and decided, just for kicks, to try to run the shortcut that I use to post stories directly into WordPress from my iOS text editor—but from BBEdit. I checked the box in Shortcuts to offer it as a macOS Service. I switched to BBEdit, selected my story, and chose the posting shortcut from the Services menu.
And it worked. The first time. With not a single change to the shortcut.
This is going to be fun.