Making Shortcuts More Accessible

We're back with another episode of App Stories. Today's show is brought to you by Pillow, Source Graph, Instabug, and Memberful. I'm John Voorhees and with me is Federico Vittici. Hey Federico. Hello John, how are you? I'm doing all right. I remembered my name. Uh which is good because last week during our our daily episodes I was getting a little befuddled when we had Mike on. And that's that's because it's just been a long it was, you know, it was a long week, a lot going on and a lot of recording. But uh I'm feeling a little bit back to myself now already. So that's good. I've been getting a little more sleep. Good. That's that's great news. Yeah. You know what? I I thought today since we we spent last week every single day talking about a different topic that we discovered during WWC. We did, you know, our keynote overview, some of our first reactions. We talked about things like shortcuts and the Mac and Mac OS and some of the new things coming to the iPad. But today I thought maybe it would be a good time to step back and look at the big picture and talk a little bit about what this all means and kind of where where things, where it's coming from, but also where it's going. And before we go into the actual features of the various OSs, I thought it would be interesting just to talk a little bit about WWDC itself because you know we've had two years of uh online WWE W D C and this year's was also online but for the first time in a while we had an in-person component, which was, you know, developers had the ability to enter a lottery and get invited to come out to Cupertino to see the keynote and participate in a bunch of other activities. Media were invited. And of course, there were a lot of employees around the entire week as well. And I'm here in Cupertino for it, and I gotta say, it was fantastic. I absolutely loved the experience. It was very different from past. years On the other hand, it was also it was also just wonderful to see people. You know, it's one of those things that I know you and I have talked about this a lot that, you know, as good as the online component is, and Apple does a very good job with the sessions and the labs and the digital lounges and all those things, you can't really replace the ability to run into someone and talk to them about their app. And for us, as people who cover those apps, that's really important. But it's also important, I think, for developers to be able to pick each other's brains and also meet face to face, whether it's you know planned and scheduled or serendipitous with the people who work at Apple, the engineers who are building the OSs and give them feedback directly. I mean, I know I mean I've been providing feedback to talking to a lot of developers about their apps, but I've also been giving feedback to like Apple PR because I actually got to meet a lot of these people that you and I deal with on and off throughout the year. And it was really nice just to kind of put a face with a name. They are real people. They are real people, and they really want to know what you think. Especially a lot of them wanted to know what everyone thought about the event itself. And the one thing that I I first of all, I think I'm convinced that this is going forward going to be on the on Apple's campus. I think it gives them a lot of control. Yeah. I think it gives them a lot of control over the event itself. I can tell you the food's better. Uh they don't have to worry about uh the things but the but you know that they've got to go if there's more that they need to do to be able if they go that route, there's more that they're gonna need to do because parking's a problem because there's not, you know, it's designed for the employees. It's not designed for a lot of outsiders coming in all at once. Unless you were there on Apple's campus for a particular reason, for an event, you couldn't like just really just kind of hang out. Right. There was no there's no like central location just to run into people. There there was I mean a lot of the events were designed to create that atmosphere where you would go and maybe you know developers were getting a tour of the fitness center or something. And that really ended up being, I mean, it was a nice tour, but at the same time, I think it was more kind of a social opportunity for people to run into each other and chat and then make plans for later. I think those were all really good and were super well done and um helped bring everybody together but there was no kind of home base that where you could spend some un I guess unstructured time just chatting with people. And I would like I mean I guess I would it would be nice if that could exist um either on campus, adjacent to campus, or something like that. And I do think too that I kinda I think Apple should build a hotel, Federico. That's I'm just gonna say it. Wow. Okay . Because when you're in San Jose, you know, there's a Marriott right next to the convention center, there's what used to be the Fairmont that we've stayed at in the past, a bunch of big hotels and the lobbies of those hotels end up being a meeting place for people. And that doesn't that out in Cupertino, there aren't many hotels nearby right in the immediate area of the campus. There are, you know, there's scattered around various towns. And I know a lot of people ended up staying then in San Jose anyway. And uh I I think it would be nice. I mean, they've got this big developer center out there now. They you know a lot of companies have financed hotels and things near their corporate campuses in the past. I think they should uh build a hotel and have a a nice Apple style hotel for everybody to kind of gather at. I think it would be pretty cool. That is not why I expected this conversation was going. Um well I think it's a fascinating idea because from a distance I can tell based also on what you told me that the socializing time is what's been really lacking from this WWDC because like as you mentioned, you can just walk around Apple Park, it's their office, it's their campus. You can just, you know, it's not like San Jose where you go to the convention center and it's a convention center, so people can just you know sit down in the hallway if they want to and they can go outside and they can leave and they can walk around and you bump into people. You can just bump into people at Apple Park, I suppose, because they don't let you walk around and roam around freely. So unless they institute some kind of non employee zone at Apple Park where people can just hang around and be there all the time, you know, Cupertino doesn't strike me as is there even a downtown Cupertino with I have no idea because all I see is like the suburbs. Well it is very much a suburb and they have what they call Main Street Cupertino, but it's really kind of a manufactured artificial downtown in the sense that it's it's really a shopping mall with little thoroughfares through it that that's outdoors. Um and it's nice. There's a lot of nice shops and restaurants there, but it's not like what uh I think you're thinking of. It's not a true downtown in that sense. And it's fairly close by. Like it's I think it's less than a mile away, maybe a kilometer or so, you know. But but it's uh but it is a bit of a hike. And uh it it it wa I went over there I think it was Sunday I went over there and I did re you know meet up with a couple of people at a Phil's coffee shop that day. That's where I saw Lachlan Campbell, who's one of our mods in the Discord for Club Mac stories. And that was nice, but there were I there were my sense, at least this was Sunday, so maybe it was too early in the week, but my sense was there weren't a lot of WWC people there. A lot of people on Sunday gravitated to the visitor center. And I initially did that, but the parking lot of that building is very small and there was a line like 10 cars long to even get into the parking lot, let alone find a spot. So I ended up abandoning that. That's kind of what I mean. There's like not a there's not space for a crowd that size to gather in a con venient way, which is is too bad. And and just to give you an idea of kind of like the way my week would go, is that, you know, there's a lot of people in the media who we know, like all our our buddies at at Relay, for instance, who I ran into in the media holding area before the keynote and we chatted and caught up, but we were all on different schedules. We had briefings at different times, tours at different times. And so other than for you know a short time before the keynote, there wasn't a lot of time to really sit down and and chat with any of those people. Unless, you know, we schedule and we did get later in the week when things quieted down, we got together and and chatted and caught up, but it was a lot harder because people were going in different directions all the time. And I was like and and you know, I was commuting from Mountain View. They were commuting from San Jose and places like that. And it was just it was very logistically difficult in the first few days when the lot was going on. 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We'll see what happens next year, but for sure I will make plans months in advance because at this point I know that there's going to be an in-person component again. So we'll be scheduling I I will be making some reservation, I guess reservations I guess in January and February. I wanna talk about the lock screen in terms of like big picture themes. Because it's obvious that the lock screen is gonna be one of the areas of focus. Uh you know, no pun intended. Uh this year in iOS. Uh well, I would have said in iPad OS too, but not really in iPad OS, just in i OS. I think the lock screen will be the sort of take two from Apple on what they did two years ago with the home screen. I think you know Apple saw the success of widgets on the home screen and and personalization and customization on the home screen. And I think they're gonna they're doing even more on that front with lock screen and widgets on the lock screen in iOS 16. If anything, I think they're actually doing more when it comes to personalization and making the lock screen not just more useful throughout the day, but also more unique and aesthetically tailored to you. So there's really two things to talk about here. First of all, is the functional part. So the widgets. I think these widgets are interesting because they're they are unlike widgets on the home screen. They are basically uh complications. In fact, complications in watch was nine are now based on the same tech that powers uh widgets on the lock screen on the iPhone. So widget kit is now the same foundation for building complications on the watch and locks lock screen widgets on on iOS 16. And you can even tell from the design , right? These are small compact widgets that you can, if you're a developer, there's three different sizes that you can design these uh widgets as. Uh, there's an inline style, which is the super compact one that sits above the clock next to the date string. And this, you know, there's a examples of this include maybe like a short uh string, an icon for the current temperature, right? That's an inline widget uh there's also the uh circ uh circular uh widgets these are very reminiscent of complications like the circular style complications that you've seen on the watch. This can be your activity rings or a circle with the current temperature, like min max temperature throughout the day. Uh and then there's the rectangular widgets, which is you know, these are the slightly bigger ones. They are wider, and they fit more information. But basically, the design is essentially the same one seen on the watch, with the exception, I guess, that these widgets cannot be multicolor. Complications on the watch can be multicol or, they cannot be multicolor on the iPhone. I am really curious to see what developer adoption looks like here. I think it's gonna be massive. I think so too. Just like home screen widgets were massive in iO S 14. Uh, if you're a developer, you want to there's really two main features to that that you're gonna be busy, you know, spending time with this summer: lock screen widgets, and if you make an iPad app, making sure there isn't a single iPad feature, but broadly speaking, is making sure you have a modern iPad app, which we can talk about later. So this lock screen widgets, I am really optimistic about. And I kind of wanna wanna hear from you what you think about like um the potential to customize and make the lock screen more useful with these widgets. Oh I think it's fantastic. I've I've only just begun playing with this. I actually put uh the beta on my phone this last night, right uh right not long before we recorded this. And I right now I've got a a calendar widget, I've got the activities rings, and I've got the temperature. And I, you know, with the it's got the current temperature as well as the high and low. And it's I just like it a lot. I I want more font choices, for instance, for the time. I noticed that. Uh there's only like I think six choices, but there's a lot of wallpaper choices, and they're all really nice ones. I'm I'm uh really partial to the gradients, although I've been testing out the weather one, which I just sent you a screenshot of. And I think of these things, I guess the things that I like the best are the widgets themselves and the fact that I can hide my notifications by swiping down. Oh my gosh, I love that so much, Federico. Yes, it's really nice. Because you know, you look at your I I didn't realize how often I look at my lock screen, but not really to look at the notifications and the bail the ability to swipe those down and have them away and gone is fantastic. Now I can tap on my phone, see what the current temperature is or something like that, or my next appointment without having to also get distracted and maybe get lost inside my notifications because they're just happened to be there, you know, because they will they will pop back up if something new comes in so you can see what's new. But if nothing new has come in, they can be hidden down below and there's be a number that'll show you how many things are sitting down there if you haven't cleared them out. And then if you have your, I have my phone on do not disturb while we're recording. And so it'll indicate down there that I'm on do not disturb. And then just a number for the the notific Yeah. Yeah, and that's gonna be even better once we have an always on lock screen on the iPhone 14 Pro. Yes, it's it's obvious that these they're bringing widgets to the lock screen this year because uh you know there's gonna be a hardware feature that really you know it's gonna make him a lot more useful so you will be able to glance at widgets without actually tapping your lock screen. Right. Do you think the fact that the widgets are monochrome is because of the way the technology is going to work on the always. Yeah, I think so too. I think so. because you're not going to necessarily have clashing colors of different kinds of widgets once you have a bunch of third party ones available. But I really expect it's more so an issue of yeah, maybe this is going to be like a grayscale always on screen when it when it dims down and is only refreshing maybe once a second or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, developers will be I'm sure there will be updates to the widget key technology once the always on lock screen comes to the iPhone, but I suppose it's gonna be similar to how you can refresh your complications if you have an always on uh watch face on the watch. And it's nice that I saw developers like underscore David Smith and you know the he makes the excellent widget Smith and he was able to get a widget smith version for iOS sixteen and the lock screen up and running in just a few hours and you know same with yeah same with Joe Rabar. I saw that he had he had a timer he won going very quickly. Man the current timer widget is gonna be the first one that I install as soon as I have it. In fact, I will say that I kinda wish I had two rows of widgets underneath the clock because there's already Yeah, it's gonna be hard to pick. I think especially I mean right now, even before we have the third party widgets, there's quite a few in here already for from Apple. So you have a lot of things to pick from and I've just picked a a few that um are ones that I look at a lot, but I know that those are g some of those are gonna get pushed off as soon as I have some some of my favorite uh third party apps on my f you know, with widgets too. This episode of App Stories is brought to you by SourceGraph. So you've hired a brilliant developer. That's great, but now you have to get them onboarded. If your company is growing, onboarding new developers will be a common occurrence, but it's a big undertaking every single time. One of the biggest challenges for new hires is to get up to speed with the project that their new team is working on. This can be tricky if the code bases your developers are working on are already large. Thankfully, SourceGraph makes it easy to move fast, even in those big code bases. Developers know that knowledge is most useful when it's findable. 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Again, that's about .sourcegraft.com to find out why some of the biggest tech companies in the world use Source Graph and to see what it can do for yours. Or just click on the link in the show notes to let them know you heard about it from us. Our thanks to SourceGraph for their support of the show. Federico, I think that our conversation about widgets and the lock screen really points to something even broader, which is there is just a lot of user customization available in iOS and iPad OS sixteen. And that's something you and I have been talking about for a long time. Really ever since widgets debuted a couple of years ago. And we were quite disappointed last year that it wasn't extended to other parts of the OS. But I think, you know, the the theory, of course, is that it's kind of too late by the time Apple sees what people are doing with their phones once iOS 14 debuted. So it may have taken a little longer for them to kind of pick up and run with the customization stuff, but they've really done a fantastic job. I mean, one of the ones that jumps to my mind right away is the fact that on the iPad now you'll be able to customize the toolbars in your apps to put up there the functionality that's most important to you. Yeah, uh I think it's really important to stress out here how Apple is tackling customization on two fronts. There's the visual customization and the functional customization. Uh the visual one, I mean, it's obvious on the home screen. Uh it's even more obvious on the lock screen just because of this uh the these uh design features that Apple is introducing with 16, right? I mean they're literally doing like a font picker and a color picker, they have default options for colors, but you can actually use the system wide color picker as well. So you can use any color you want. And they have this gallery of wallpapers. They have collections, they have you know stuff like the Pride wallpapers, the Unity wallpapers, but then you can obviously pick your photos as well and any image you can pick, and you or you can design a gradient using like a color gradient using the Apple provided tools. And this wallpaper picker this was this was actually in a story that I published last week, but this wallpaper picker you can also use on the home screen. If you go into settings wallpaper in the settings app on your iPhone, and you select the home screen preview, you get a subset of the same features seen on the lock screen. So that allows you to have, for example, different wallpapers, right? Between the home screen and the lock screen. But you can, and they're even adding new options, like for example, if you pick a wallp aper on the home screen that has a texture and if that texture sort of uh makes it hard to read the text labels of the app icon names there's a blur option built in. For years we used like third party apps to blur wallpaper images. Now it's just a toggle in settings. So that that all that visual customization is really well done and I'm really impressed by Apple for doing this. But the functional customization is equally important. We see this. This is just straight off of app stories, basically, right? Previous episodes of App Stories. We got all the things we wanted to get, a lot more filters uh for creating smart lists in reminders, uh a bunch of new options for creating smart folders in notes, and we even got uh the ability to customize toolbars on the iPad. And Apple did a bunch of sessions about this. Uh but they have effectively completely redesigned how uh we call it the title bar, it's actually called the navigation bar. There's now three different styles of navigation bars on iPad. And you can see examples of these new modes. One is called the navigator mode, and the other I think is called the browser mode. Uh files, for example, uses it, Safari uses it. Basically, the idea is by freeing up space in the navigation bar at the top, by having this free space in the center of the navigation bar, now you can make that empty space more use ful by putting in toolbar icons for features that are useful to you. Apple gives you some by default, but you can actually go in there and modify those default options. Yeah, you can you can see hints of this des ign going back to some of the uh changes to the Mac from even two, three years ago where things were kind of pushed off to the side and there was room opened up in the center. There's that's a whole conversation we're gonna have in a little bit, but there they're echoes of this sort of thing all over the place. And I think despite being a little disappointed last year about the fact that cus that there wasn't further customization brought to widgets themselves on the home screen, we did have that inkling of hope that was left there by reminders and notes and the tagging and and filtering and so forth. And it was just it was a t somewhat tentative first step, especially in an app like Notes , but it's been extended quite a bit this year. And that same sort of functionality can be found throughout the OS, which is which is fantastic to me. I mean it makes it makes your iPhone and your and your iPad especially much more powerful if you're if you're using this to try to get work done. I I am of course a bit disappointed that this functional customization, as of beta one, so things may change, but that so far it has n't extended to keyboard shortcuts, right? Yeah, I know. Because one of the great features, for example, of shortcuts for Mac or just any app launcher on Mac OS is the ability to define your own hot keys for launching apps or launching shortcuts system-wide. And so that that flavor of functional customization still not there in iPad OS. True, true. I would say though that this is like if if I were going about this and prioritizing how I was going to do customization on these OSs, I would have done it this way too, just because those visual elements are the ones that most people are going to use. You and I w are dying for keyboard shortcuts and hotkeys and all, but and and I would love to see that come, but I I think if you're prioritizing things and you can't do it all, I would definitely have waited on those, even though as much as I want them personally . This episode of App Stories is brought to you by Instabug. Building mobile apps presents some challenges. Plus, bugs, crashes, and performance issues can be a nightmare for developers. 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Join over 25,000 top mobile developers around the world who use Instabug to ship high quality apps. Go to try.instabug.com slash app stories today. Again, that URL so they know you came from the show is try.instabug .com slash app stories. Our thanks to Instabug for their support of the show. All right, Federico, you I I've got to talk to you about my very favorite top ic that I've been I've been talking about and writing about since twenty eighteen when we first saw Craig Frederigi's sneak peek of Matt Catalyst. And I have always felt and I feel kind of I'm gonna take a victory lap, Federico, because I f I feel like there was a lot of skepticism about where the relationship between the Mac and the iPad was going. And rightly so, I guess, in 2018-2019, because this has been a multi-year journey that has been done in fits and starts sometimes more on one platform than the other. And I think we're really getting to the point where there is a good, healthy relationship between the iPad and the Mac. And by that I mean, you know, we had to, and a lot of this started with the Mac, because there was more work to be done on the Mac, frankly. I mean, the the Mac Mac OS had to my mind kind of stagnated. It was it worked fine. It was a mature system. It didn't have to change. But the Mac was kind of stuck in the mud in those days, both from a hardware and a software standpoint. The the Mac app store was a very sleepy place. And the iPad was having its own struggles as trying to find its its identity because it was kind of you know, it was conceived a little too much like a giant iPhone. And it's taken a very long time for it to break free from that stereotype and become its own device. And what I think Apple has done very well . And they're not finished, but we can kind of see the contours of it much more clearly now is realign the Mac and the iPad so that they are part of a continuum. They're still their own independent devices that uh one you know one is better at some things than the other is but there's a famili familiarity there that makes it easier for users to move between one and the other which I think is important because it helps bring more software to the Mac, it helps bring more power user features to the iPad, and it just makes for an overall nicer experience. Now, well, I'll I'll talk about system preferences in a little bit, I guess i i think i think it's funny that people are howling about system preferences because you could have seen this coming like years ago at this point i mean why would you have two things called two different things yeah between iOS and the Mac . And they they're still not, they don't look the same still, but I think they do a much better job of being uh making it easy. Maybe it's just a great example of where we're going, is that it makes it easier for someone who came from the iPhone or the iP ad to adopt the Mac. And you know, that I guess that's always been hard for someone who's like, well, why does the Mac have to change? Because the Mac , you know, the Mac we know how to use the Mac. And that's true. There are a lot of people who do , but I feel as though uh the Mac is in a much better place where it is a more part of the team of all the hardware products. And a big part of the that being on that team is having a way to work with those devices that is similar and that comes down to the OSs. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And and when it comes to iPad, I maybe it's just it's too early to tell about I have this thought that I haven't been able to really stop thinking about for the past week is that I feel like at this WWDC, for the first time ever, maybe , I felt like the Apple's story for the iPad was the most clear and direct that I've heard from them in years. I feel like they have finally accepted the nature of the iPad, and they actually like Craig Federighi, they just said it loud and clear: the iPad is the most versatile computer we have, and that to me sounds like Apple saying, okay , we we are ready to accept that this is not just a tablet. It can be it is a tablet and it can be used in tablet mode. There have been hints of Apple sort of progressively opening up to the idea of well this is a tablet, but it can also be sp a laptop and so we can design certain UI elements to adapt based on your conte xt. But this year they're really going all in with this narrative, right? And so you see stuff like, for example, stage manager, obviously, with brand new multitasking modes, but also external display integration. So the idea of this is a computer that you know follows you around. If you imagine this line, this whole spectrum of experiences. It can be a tablet, you can use it with touch and a pencil, and then it can be a laptop and you put it in the magic keyboard, or you connect accessories, or it can be a desktop workstation where you put it on a stand or still in the magic keyboard, and then you connect the display, and it becomes this sort of desktop environment with multiple windows and an external display and you can mix and match all the time. You can touch the screen on the iPad but also have windows on the external display and use the pointer. But this is also reflected in it in a bunch of other smaller features that maybe in isolation they don't mean much, but when you consider the sort of the holistic narrative here, I think they really matter. And I'll give you a couple of examples. One of them is the new is the copy and paste menu. And you may say, well what about the copy and paste menu? Well, in IPRS sixteen, the copy and paste menu changes bas ed on your input. If you use your finger, if you use touch and you select text, you get the standard copy and paste menu. You know, the the the row pop-up. The whole pop-up with the row of of buttons. Uh it's got a new look, but it's still the same design. If you use the pointer though, that menu is now a context menu with key buttons at the top. This is a new design element this year, uh, followed by a list of other actions. So this is uh I would say one of the most used and most important UI elements like copying and pasting text, like everybody does that. And now that element changes based on your input. And there's another thing that I would like to point out here. They really sped up inter uh interactions with context menus. So uh when you uh right click or you know when you perform they call it a secondary click when you perform a secondary click with the pointer uh you get context menus and those are faster than before. But what they've done this year is if that menu as a sub-menu, meaning you hover over an item in a menu that contains additional options, that menu no longer op ens vertically like covering the first menu. It opens to the side. So it's like so it's like a a macOS contextual menu. And that's super fast to use the, performance has been really increased. And this is another example of Apple saying, okay, this computer is unlike everything else that we do, because it can be a bunch of things. How do we optimize for this bunch of different contexts by putting in the work and making sure that for each interaction, for each input method, we got that covered. And so when they mention the desktop class story at WW DC it's not just about bringing features right it's bringing features yes from mac os to ipad os but also making sure that the nature of the iPad is not revolutionized. In fact, they are sort of celebrating the nature of the iPad by saying you can keep using this as a tablet uh with the magic keyboard with an external trackpad. We don't care. We are optimizing for each of those scenarios. Yeah, that's a really good point. And and you know, I feel like you're right, the iPad story isn't all the way there or over yet. But you know, that's the same as is true for the Mac as well. And I think, you know, last year with with iPad OS, we were a little disappointed because there weren't the the story, the narrative wasn't really pushed forward very much. And this year it has been. And I think that was that was that was absolutely necessary and key to the whole overall story. I I you know that's what I was hoping would would be the case because I looked at it and I thought, well, you know, they've really been kind focused on the Mac and getting the Mac where it needs to be, especially with the new Apple Silicon uh hardware. And so now it's time to focus back on the iPad. And hopefully, just like we've seen with these new technologies like Swift UI and Mac Catalyst, allow ing Apple to bring forward system apps in tandem and on the same schedule, the OSs will get there as well and they'll they'll kind of work together instead of across purposes as they m maybe have in the past at some times . This episode of App Stories is brought to you by Memberful. Memberful is the easiest way to sell memberships to your audience that's used by the biggest creators on the web. Memberful handles all the hard stuff so you can focus on what you do best while earning revenue quickly. 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Our thanks to memberful for their support of the show And lastly, John, I think in terms of big picture ideas, and again, we will cover this again throughout the summer. We got our work cut out for us here. We do. But I think another uh the the final uh aspect of WWDC that I would like to point out is how Apple is making shortcuts more accessible. I had a thread on Twitter a few days ago talking about this. About this feature that at first I didn't get. Um I made fun of the name and I think you know the name is funny. Uh this feature called App Shortcuts. Yeah. The shortcuts team, it's not the best ones when it comes to naming things, but you know, uh app shortcuts. On the surface, you may think, well, short apps have been able to provide shortcuts with actions and and you know pre-made shortcuts forever so what what's the big deal here and the big deal is that in iOS and iper S16 new users new shortcuts users will be able to start using shortcuts and taking advantage of shortcuts with no setup necessary. This is what's different this year. Before, it used to be that if you opened the shortcuts app and you were new to the app, it would be empty. There would be nothing in it. Over the years, Apple added a folder called starter shortcuts. And they revamped the gallery and they revamped sharing. But even those starter shortcuts, uh, they were the same for everybody. They were not really optimized to you. So maybe you opened the shortcuts app, saw the starter shortcuts, and thought, I don't know, these are useless to me. I d I have no use for this. If you want to start using shortcuts, you would have to do the work yourself, either by creating a shortcut manually or by adding a shortcut to Siri. You remember the add to Siri button that we've seen, you know, for the past few years, uh, to add those Siri shortcuts, as they call them, from apps to Siri. Uh developers would have to donate those shortcuts to the system, but then it was always up to the user to say, Yeah, I guess I want to use this with shortcuts. But as you know, you know, friction is the enemy of adoption in this case, and that's why a ton of people never bothered to add those shortcuts to the shortcuts app. So how do you make shortcuts more approachable? How do you make sure that users open shortcuts and from an onboarding perspective, there is immediate value to be taken out of that. And the answer is, I'm sorry, developers, but the answer is by letting developers do the work up front. That's essentially the answer in iOS and iPod i 16 with app shortcuts. App shortcuts are one action shortcuts built by developers, bundled inside the apps, and and this is the key aspect here. These shortcuts are ready to use. No need to donate them to the system. No need for the user to say add this to Siri. The moment you download an app that contains app shortcuts from the App Store, those shortcuts are ready to use. You can invoke them via Siri immediately. You will find them in spotlight searches. You will find them in windown or focus. So if you want to run a shortcut, they are ready to use. But there's more. If you you know, let's imagine September comes, you update to iOS 16, a bunch of your existing apps update for iOS 16 as well, and they support app shortcuts. You open the shortcuts app again, it will not be empty anymore. You will see all of the shortcuts that all of the app shortcuts that are provided by the apps you already use. And this solves two key problems here. First, these shortcuts are personalized to you because they're based on the apps that you have installed on your device. So obviously they're likely gonna be useful to you because they're based on the apps that you already use. And second, uh, they completely remove the friction of doing any work. You open the shortcuts app, they are organized for you. There's a category named App Shortcuts. Uh so the shortcuts app will no longer be empty and you will be and you will have this multiple paths of discovery, whether it's Spotlight or Siri or the Shortcuts app or other places throughout the US. Yeah, that's what that's what I was gonna emphasize is that the discoverability is so much better because the problem with add to Siri was that usually developers would rightly so, I think, bury it in settings only because there was no good place to really put it in the UI. And and you'd have to really dig around a lot of times to find those things. Yeah. And obviously these are real shortcuts, right? So um you can use them as they are and developers can customize them with parameters. They can offer up to ten app shortcuts per app. So think about this carefully. You have 10 shortcuts you can bundle with your app in iOS 16. But these are real shortcuts. Meaning, if you later want to customize one of these shortcuts, or if you want to add actions to it, you can. And they're just ready by default for you, but you can always go in there and customize them. So I think uh that you know Apple tried a bunch of things over the years to make shortcuts more accessible, more intuitive to use. But you they needed to figure out a solution to make sure that you can start using something without doing the work up front. Imagine if before being able to use uh Safari, you would have to, I don't know, kind of design a part of the browser. Like that that doesn't make sense, right? Yeah you need to be able to start using something immediately. And that's what they've done here. So I'm really curious to see how this goes. Yeah, I I am too. They've also made it very easy to add these to Siri. So you've got the actual physical shortcut buttons in that in that you know that app's particular folder in this new section of shortcuts, but you also have an option to add it to Siri so that you can use it as a sh uh as a you know Siri shortcut , right? The thing is they they are already enabled for Siri, but what they have done is they have moved from having the add to Siri button to having what they call a Siri tip button. Meaning. Yeah, that's what that's what I was talking about. So this is a standard UI element that developers can embed in their apps. Uh but basically it says, hey, this feature is actually already a shortcut that is already installed and you can already use and uh you can decide clever. Yeah, you can decide when to show these Siri tips and the user can dismiss them. Yeah, it's um I think it's better. Essentially they're going from a system where you needed to do the work up front to an uh I wanna I kind of want to call it an opt-out system, but the idea is all of this is already pre-installed for you and ready to use. You don't need to do any configuration up front anymore. Right. And it's got its own little onboarding in a way with that tip so that you can kind of understand what it's what it means and what it does and then get rid of it once you're comfortable with it. Yep. All right, Federico. Well that's a good episode. It's been quite a week. Uh you and I have are gonna be spending a lot of time coming up uh over the next number of weeks digging in even deeper, talking about this more over the summer, and stay tuned for our summer OS preview series because we're going to be organizing and kicking that off not too long from now. So keep an eye out on Mac Stories and on App Stories for that as well. I want to thank our four sponsors for this episode. That's Pillow, SourceGraph, Instabug, and Memberful. You can subscribe to App Stories Plus by just going to App Stories.plus where you'll get longer episodes that are ad-free and early. We did something really special during WWC for App Stories Plus subscribers. We recorded live in our Club Mac Stories Plus Discord. So if you're a Club premiere member and you're subscribing both to App Stories Plus and the club, you got to listen to those live and ask questions, which was kind of cool. You can find me and Federico over at maxstories.net. Federico is at Fetici on Twitter and In stagram. That's V-I-T-I-C-C-I. And I'm at John Voorhees. J-O-H-N-V-D-O-R-H-W S. Talk to you next week, Federico. Ciao, John .