With Ulysses and Bear, Drafts forms a trio of apps that have gone further than most in adopting an approach designed to provide their users with as much flexibility as possible when creating shortcuts. The second creates materials sheets, a concept added last year, which associates ancillary materials with a document you are creating. The first is the ability to add images to a sheet. Ulysses adds two new actions across all platforms too. The app also uses a system of group and sheet identifiers that allow users to grab specific items and manipulate them with Shortcuts. Ulysses makes good use of parameters to give users the flexibility to add content like images and keywords to a sheet. The complete list of actions available on the Mac includes: In fact, Ulysses’ Shortcuts support is so extensive it wasn’t possible to capture it all in a single screenshot. Ulysses is one of the Mac’s premier text editors, so I was glad to see it add extensive support for Shortcuts. It’s early days for Shortcuts on the Mac, and I’m sure we’ll see even more of our favorite apps jump on board, which we’ll continue to cover here and for Club MacStories members.

Some of these will be familiar if you’ve used these apps’ counterparts on the iPhone or iPad, but many are brand new to any platform, while others are Mac-exclusive. To get you started, I’ve rounded up some of the most interesting Shortcuts integrations I’ve found so far. Apple added a lot of built-in system actions that it brought over from Automator, with which you can build some interesting shortcuts, but the diversity of options has grown exponentially with the release of updated third-party apps. That’s especially true now because there is a long list of third-party apps that have added support for Shortcuts on the Mac. If you go into it with reasonable expectations, start off simple, and are patient, there’s a lot that can be accomplished. There’s an excellent mix of apps built with everything from AppKit and Mac Catalyst, as well as apps available on and off the Mac App Store.Īs I explained in my Monterey review, Shortcuts is still rough around the edges, but that’s not to say its unusable.

That’s reflected in the first wave of apps I’ve tried that support Shortcuts.

One of the strengths of Shortcuts on the Mac is that it isn’t limited by the way an app is built.

Apple mac shortcuts cheat sheet