Shortcuts for Mac OS Monterey and iOS

Mac and iOS Shortcut on Mac and iOS

Hello there this is Dave Allen I’m good and geeky and today we are looking at the Shortcuts application on both the Mac and on iOS. With Mac OS Monterey we now have Shortcuts available on the Mac and as you might imagine it’s not going to work the same on both platforms. The Mac can do things the iPad can’t and the other way round also. There’s no Applescript, shell scripts and similar in iOS. The shortcuts will synchronise across iCloud so you’ll see shortcuts in iOS which will only work on the Mac and also vice versa. How do we deal with this?

One way to deal with this would be to put all of your Mac shortcuts into a folder which is labelled Mac and have everything else in other folders. This will only work well to a point and might not be so good when you have created lots of Mac Shortcuts. You’ll have some shortcuts which will work okay no problem on both platforms, so where do you put those? I suppose you could duplicate them but that’s probably not very good idea. If you want to make changes later you’ll have to make the changes in two places. You don’t really want to make another folder called cross-platform. This could make things more difficult when you’re looking for shortcuts you want to run on either side of the divide.

Another possibility would be to just not worry about it at all. There will be occasions when you try to run a shortcut and it will fail. It will be the point when you remember it’s a shortcut which is meant for the other platform. Some people will find this annoying and some people won’t be too bothered at all. This will be affected by where you tend to run your shortcuts. If you are running shortcuts equally on both platforms then you might need to do something about this. Do you get annoyed by little things like that? Do you prefer stuff to be spot on correct and do what they are supposed to at first attempt? I like things to be right and I could get miffed when a process doesn’t work as I expected it to.

The other possible way to sort this out would be to make shortcuts which will run equally on either platform. Use applications where the developer has made it work just the same where ever you start the shortcut. It will limit what you can automate in your computing universe. There are more cross platform apps available now and it will get better in time.

Not all apps achieve platform proper cross compatibility when you have actions from the same application which work differently depending on whether you’re using a Mac or your iPhone or iPad. As time goes by the developers of the Mac applications that are also on iOS will aim for parity. We can never really know how long that is going to take a developer to get to that point. Obviously a platf ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07pZEjfJbyU