I read through an Apple press release to get some idea of changes being made to the Shortcuts app in Tahoe, and I’ve included a few excerpts below. My main interest is greater support for macOS apps (like Mail), but I guess I’ll have to wait to see if that happens. The ability to run a shortcut by way of an app’s menu bar is interesting, as is the ability to run a shortcut when some action is taken.
Shortcuts get even more powerful with intelligent actions and the ability to now tap directly into Apple Intelligence models to automate complex tasks.
Users can also run shortcuts and perform actions from the menu bar in the app they’re currently working in, all without lifting their hands off the keyboard.
Shortcuts get more intelligent: A whole new class of intelligent actions lets users create shortcuts that are more powerful than ever, including summarizing text with Writing Tools and creating images with Image Playground. And now users will be able to tap directly into Apple Intelligence models, either on-device or with Private Cloud Compute, to generate responses that feed into the rest of their shortcut, maintaining the privacy of information used… Additionally, users can now run shortcuts automatically on macOS, such as at a specific time of day, or when taking a specific action like saving a file to a folder or connecting a display.
It also appears that shortcuts can be run by way of Spotlight, and a MacRumors article describes this as follows:
macOS Tahoe also allows users to build shortcuts and run them directly from Spotlight. These shortcuts can also be assigned to Quick Keys, enabling rapid execution of custom workflows. Spotlight is contextually aware when launching shortcuts, so users can apply them directly to the document or content they are working on
The macmost site contains an interesting video on macOS Tahoe (here), and it includes a discussion of the new automation feature of the Shortcuts app. To view existing or create new automations, you simply click on Automation in the sidebar. Some of the automation triggers are time of day, alarm stopped, email or message received from a person, Wi-Fi network joined, a particular app opened or closed, sleep mode enabled, external drive connected, a file added to a particular folder (my favorite), and a particular file modified. The following is a screenshot from the macmost review:
Forgive what might be a silly question, but does anyone know if these changes mean we will be able to do more stuff with AppleScript? Or is this only for shortcuts?
I don’t have macOS Tahoe installed on my computer, but I’ve watched a lot of videos, and there appear to be three significant changes that pertain to to the Shortcuts app. They are automation; running a shortcut by way of Spotlight; and shortcut actions that implement Apple Intelligence. As you are probably aware, you can run an AppleScript by way of a shortcut, but otherwise none of these changes would appear applicable to AppleScripts. Hopefully, someone who has installed Tahoe will provide some first-hand information.
BTW, an article on the Apple Insider site (here) indicates that the AI actions in the first developer beta are as shown below. It would seem likely that additional actions will be made available in later betas.
Doesn’t sound like any substantive changes in controlling apps, just access to the AI stuff, though the automation triggers coming over from iOS are certainly welcome.
Shortcuts is still a far cry from AppleScript, and it doesn’t help that they run verrrrry slowly on my Mac Studio. That seems to be an issue with my user profile (migrated from Intel), since they run OK with a fresh user account. But I really don’t wanna go through setting everything up from scratch.
Maybe I’ll figure out where the problem is by the time they replace Shortcuts with something else…
I would generally agree that AppleScript has better support for apps, although there are notable exceptions like the Maps app and System Settings. However, this is only a temporary advantage, because Apple is actively adding new features and actions to the Shortcuts app, while letting AppleScript die a slow death by neglect. More importantly for me, basic AppleScript is unable or only has a limited ability to perform simple tasks like manipulating PDF files; recursively getting files of a particular type from a large folder; getting text with OCR; matching text with regular expressions; calculating and formatting the result of number operations; filtering and sorting various objects; utilizing a JSON; and much more. When it comes to performing useful work, the Shortcuts app is easily the match of AppleScript, IMO.
