Ask HN: Any way to program Siri Shortcuts in iOS 12 besides drag-and-drop?
The Shortcuts app in iOS 12 seems really powerful, comparable to a minimal weakly-typed scripting language. So I'm wondering whether there is an AppleScript-like way to program it, instead of dragging and dropping those blocks.
If not, will anyone be interested in some sort of tool that converts source code (in, say, a subset of Python or Bash) to Shortcuts program?
I just did some sleuthing and it looks like you can create a shortcut using XML. :)
You can reverse engineer the format by creating an iCloud link to a shortcut. There's a JSON payload that that the shortcut permalink page requests. That payload contains a link to a binary plist which can be translated into XML (`plistutil -i shortcut.plist`).
Here's one I just generated that expands shortened URLs: https://gist.github.com/dlo/1217af3b86f363faf578aa23408c19ef
After you write your shortcut, encode it in binary plist format (using plistutil), and then upload that blob to a URL. Use the following scheme to import it into Shortcuts.app:
Hope this helps!Thanks, that's really cool!
I just started working on this library, maybe it can be helpful :)
https://github.com/alexander-akhmetov/python-shortcuts
Scriptable by Simon B. Støvring https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scriptable/id1405459188?mt
Cool, thanks! This one does have deep integration with Shortcuts.
It looks like if you buy pythonista ($10!) you can execute python scripts.
Thanks! I think Shortcuts has access to some lower-level system configs/functions which Pythonista doesn't have. Also, although Shortcuts can invoke a Pythonista script, control won't automatically return to Shortcuts after the script is executed. So I'm looking for a way to do everything within Shortcuts.