Apple Shortcuts is falling into "the automation gap"

by Jason Snell 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 ... Read full article.