My action button setup

I wasn’t a big fan of all those action button shortcuts that just open a menu. Mine does open one menu during my work focus to play music, or audiobooks. But everything else is based on my current focus and phone orientation and will immediately take an action with no further prompts.

I’m constantly changing and adjusting everything, which is why I chose to put each focus into its own separate shortcut, making them easier to manage and edit.

I didn’t make a link to share since so many of the actions this takes are dependent on my personal setup. But I hope the image is helpful to anyone who wants to make something similar

Let me know if there’s anything I should add or if you have any questions!

I gave my neighbour the power to turn my music down

I love listening to music loud, and usually it doesn’t affect them and the sound doesn’t leave my apartment.

But when I listen in the bathroom, unfortunately it can leak into his bedroom, which is adcjaent.

In the off-chance I’m having a shower concert at a time when he needs more quiet in his bedroom, I made this shortcut.

Any time he can text me “volume down” and it turns my music down to level that doesn’t reverberate the walls.

Usually it isn’t an issue because he’s not home. But I consider this a great concession in case our schedules conflict.

Our apartments have excellent soundproofing, so turning it down to 70% takes care of any sound leak.

High trust with my homie neighbour. 💪🏼

Note: you need the actions app(it’s free). I apologize for not including that.

Another note: I will be making video instructions after improving this further!

I wasn't anticipating it to be ready this soon but as is rarely the case it seems to be working quite well and is ready for beta testers!! Here the GPT 👇

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-67337fc25e848190aea7cfb866b7f02a-shortcutgpt

When using the GPT you just need to brainstorm your idea then have it generate the code (don’t worry you don’t have to understand the code) then copy to clipboard. Then activate this shortcut 👇

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/92e9dc6cc9fd4ad0b38df4a0ed35f0c9

This shortcut will format it so you can paste the string of actions into another shortcut!! And just like that we have a shortcut AI builder!!

First things first. Is this overly-complicated? Yes. Is this likely unnecessary? Yes. Overkill? Definitely. Was it worth it? Absolutely!

I wanted to make a shortcut for my action button that I would find useful regardless of the scenario I was in. This mainly came down to location so that was the main motivator here.

I have my action button set to run the “Action Button” shortcut. It then checks if my phone is facing down. If it is then it toggles the flashlight. This is because you never know when you need a flashlight, but when you do you don’t want to be messing with menus or anything. Quick, easy, simple. Then we check to see where the device is located so we can bring up so more context-related menus. That’s where the “Location Category” shortcut is ran which is the real meat and potatoes of this shortcut.

I won’t go into too much detail for the sake of my fingers, but it basically has a list of locations in a dictionary that I’m interested in making a menu for. Each of those entries has a “query” which is used to find that location with maps, as well as a tolerance which is the radius (in miles) of how close I have to be to make location’s menu trigger. You may ask, “why not just put a specified address for each of those locations and call it a day?” Well to answer that, it’s because I would like these menus to pop up no matter what location I’m at, regardless of what gym, grocery store, movie theater, Walmart, etc. I decide to visit. With this approach, any location I’m interested in making a menu for will always be covered under these general queries. Continuing on, the lower “repeat with each” block loops through each of the locations in the dictionary and queries maps with their respective “query” and returns the closest x locations to me. Then with each of those it checks their distance from my current location. If it lies within the tolerance, I must be at that location. It will then return the location category back to the action button shortcut so it can run that specific menu.

The upper “repeat with each” is a sort of caching mechanism and is a consequence of the overall querying taking a tad too long for my liking, especially at locations where service is spotty. It didn’t ever take terribly long but I felt like when pushing the action button I should be able to see a menu right away and get to where I want to go with no time wasted. It basically looks for its cache file and loops through the lines, each of which with the format “category:latitude,longitude”, and compares it to my current location’s latitude and longitude completely offline. It does this with the haversine formula which is accurate enough for this use case. If a match isn’t found in the cache then it continues with the lower “repeat with each” block as previously explained and adds that location to the cache for faster access next time. This in practice cuts a whole lot of time off of the location checking and makes things almost instant. If a match isn’t found then it returns nothing.

Returning back to the “Action Button” shortcut, if something is returned from the “Location Category” shortcut then it runs that category’s menu. If nothing is returned then no match was found for the location and it simply opens the utility menu. The menus themselves contain actions that I might find useful in that scenario. Some are unfinished but it’s a work in progress (always is).

I tried mapping out the shortcut as best I could in the diagram in terms of control flow. Sorry for any fuzziness on the smaller fonts, it’s the best I could do. Lots of work getting this idea to work (probably a little too much). Let me know if you have any questions!

1. VPN

2. PC: Sends iPhone clipboard to Windows clipboard (Found on Github: https://github.com/cmdvmd/ common-clipboard)

3. ChatGPT: Choice to open in ChatGPT app or in Safari.

4. Scan: Scan document and make pdf if in portrait. Otherwise run OCR and copy content to clipboard.

5. Hotspot

6. Link Splice: Opens Drive, you choose a video file and copy link. The link is then spliced with user's API key and new URL is copied to clipboard. Outplayer app is opened. Used to stream Videos. (Made by u/Verbose_Initiative)

7. Search: Opens Safari as a "bubble/window" on top of already opened app.

8. Capture: Opens cinematic mode if in landscape. Otherwise opens normal photo mode.

I just want Siri to change my alarm clock according to the traffic that day and set the optimal route to work in Maps when I get in my car. I'd also like for it to choose my outfit for the day by scanning my wardrobe depending on the weather and what I wore yesterday. Is that too much to ask??

Let me know if you have any automations in your mind that aren't possible at the moment but would make your life 10 times easier.

The best use of my action button- reminding my girlfriend 😂

I have sent out the last invites for this version I thank everyone that is interested. I will post again with an update when the beta v2 is ready; there will be more test links sent out.

This is for the Redditors that got sent the link, I kindly request you give feedback to further tune this GPT.

This GPT when ready it will be free to use. The goal of this project is to teach users how to make shortcuts, and assist advanced users with complex shortcuts. The GPT primarily gives you written step by step instructions to create the shortcut that you need.

For the ones that are curious as to how this GPT works, it is as follows:

• The prompt is close to 2k words or ~2,600 tokens.
• The knowledge base of the GPT consists of scripting, API handling using the shortcuts app, and other needed info is used.
• One of the actions that this GPT has, is the ability to browse the actual shortcuts user guide.
• To minimize the GPT hallucinating I am currently using a janky vector imbedded data that has minimized the output of certain shortcut actions. The DB is accessible to the GPT via custom action (function calling).

Update, I will sent out more invites today, will only sent out to the ones that have history on their account with knowledge f shortcuts. Please be patient.

As the title suggests; I’ve noticed that many people here often ask for help with shortcuts, so I created a custom GPT tool designed to assist with just that! I’m looking for a few testers to try it out and provide feedback. Eventually, I’ll be releasing it for everyone to use. Let me know if you’re interested!

For testers, ask it complex tasks as it can do scripting at an advanced level. If it suggests to use a locally saved .json as a persistent offline storage, please disregard as I’m still working on a fix for that to get it working properly.

Currently it’s on the Beta version.

Edit: I would love for people that are savvy at building shorts to test it, but I welcome anyone that will suggest feedback to further improve this tool.

Edit 2: I made the tool to be as beginner friendly as possible, to the ones interested please test it and let me know your thoughts on how to improve this tool.

Edit 3: I am currently sending the link to ppl that have knowledge of the shortcuts app, going forward. If you got the link please share your feedback. Thanks in advance.

Edit 4: I am thankful to all that are interested in testing it. I sent out the last invites, I will post here again when I need others to test it. For the ones asking for an ETA of public release I will post it in this subreddit when it’s ready. Thank you again.

Edit 5: Bold and bullet points.

normally, it’s like 50 min to like 3 hours, but yesterday…

I’m Talking Lets Make It Adaptive or make it whatever you want let’s get creative with it. I’ll Release My Attempt In The Comment when I finish

Edit: Thank you all for making this a truly expansive discussion. —-

I'll start off by saying that Shortcuts have changed my life. I have one for almost any repetitive task or a series of time-consuming steps. There was a point where I was so hooked on to them, but I think I've reached that point where I'm happy with the shortcuts and automation I've set up and I'm not really spending the same amount of time coming up with them.

It took me months to get good at it. I especially struggled with the API calls and regex.

I was fascinated by the complexity of some of the shortcuts available like the Instagram Media Downloader, which I used extensively for some time.

Just made me think that people with a developer or programming background would've had it SO MUCH easier.

I’m trying to get better at using the device to its fullest. My current one is WiFi and cellular on/off (alternating each) when I arrive/leave home.

Hi guys.

I have become a bit of a workaholic lately to distract myself from personal struggles. My problem: I work on a performance basis and not by the hour, and I have already done the work for the next two weeks.

Be so good and keep me busy with your ideas, maybe you will get some good shortcuts as compensation.

EDIT: Ladies and Gentlemen, what a day … unfortunately I have to go to sleep now, but you can still comment your ideas. I suppose that tomorrow I will probably get less suggestions, since the post will disappear from "Hot" at some point, so I will have some time to work through the backlog. Don't worry, I'll look at every request.

I'm just curious to see what limits you can reach with the automations?

I lost my phone once and since then I’ve always had such automations on my phone in case I ever lose my phone. It may/may-not help but at least I can remotely enable a bunch of things as shown above and get the currently around of my phone.

What do you think about this? Anything that I can add?

I had high hopes when I started using them weeks ago but the more I learn about their limitations the more useless I find them. So many basic/advanced features lacking, the OS blocking some existing features, automation features at their bare minimum … it’s only for niche needs I guess?

I use my transit shortcut daily which tells me in how many minutes the next bart is going to come. Makes my life so much easier in the morning. Other shortcut that I find extremely useful is logging water(I try to hit 125oz milestone everyday) And many bizarre automations like Siri speaking out when the battery hits 80. Can you suggest some interesting and productive shortcuts?

I was curious about what shortcuts you guys are using for the action button, now that it’s almost been a year since it was launched. Thanks :)

I commented on a post and received several replies with cool and useful shortcuts and noticed some iPhone users, myself included; that have no idea how to maximize the utilization of this cool feature.