John Voorhees, writing on Club MacStories (subscription required):
Nearly three years ago, I wrote AppleScript: Shortcuts Bridge or Crutch?, questioning whether accessing AppleScript via Shortcuts on the Mac was a feature to be celebrated or a red flag, fearing that Apple would use the integration to postpone or never release many of the system-level actions that were missing from Shortcuts’ debut on the Mac.
As I put it then, “if Shortcuts is to become the default way to automate tasks on the Mac, there needs to be steady, yearly progress to make macOS and its default system apps as Shortcuts-friendly as possible. There’s a role for AppleScript to play in Shortcuts that won’t go away anytime soon, but not as a way to fill the potholes left by missing Shortcuts actions.”
Shortcuts’ progress on the Mac has been anything but steady and yearly.
A few days ago, while writing my Podcast Notes update, I realized that I had (inadvertently?) created an automation that begins with a Stream Deck keypress that executes a Keyboard Maestro macro that kicks off a JavaScript script in Audio Hijack that runs an AppleScript applet that executes a Shortcuts shortcut. In recent days I’ve also edited shortcuts that run Python and AppleScript scripts, including some where the shortcut is really nothing more than a Mac UI-friendly wrapper around a bare script, much in the same way you can use Automator as a simple wrapper around AppleScript scripts.
That all these things are possible on the Mac is amazing, and it’s a testament to how flexible and powerful the Mac can be. But it also says something quite profound about how little progress Apple has made with Shortcuts on the Mac (or in general) in the last few years. (And of course, all these workarounds fail on iOS entirely.)
Maybe the drive toward App Intents will help make Shortcuts more powerful and less reliant on tools like AppleScript, Keyboard Maestro, and the rest. But even that isn’t enough, since the Shortcuts app is way too rickety and limited. Just the other day, Dan Moren said to me, “I was working on a shortcut and I needed an if-else-if statement,” and we both began laughing because conditionals are just so bad in Shortcuts.
Apple gave itself a lot of leeway by declaring that Shortcuts was the “beginning of a years-long process” to make Shortcuts the “future of automation on the Mac.” But that was almost four years ago. There’s not a lot of leeway left for me to give.
