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Ask HN: Any way to program Siri Shortcuts in iOS 12 besides drag-and-drop?

14 points by yangl1996 ↗ HN
The Shortcuts app in iOS 12 seems really powerful, comparable to a minimal weakly-typed scripting language. So I'm wondering whether there is an AppleScript-like way to program it, instead of dragging and dropping those blocks.

If not, will anyone be interested in some sort of tool that converts source code (in, say, a subset of Python or Bash) to Shortcuts program?

7 comments

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theli0nheart
I just did some sleuthing and it looks like you can create a shortcut using XML. :)

You can reverse engineer the format by creating an iCloud link to a shortcut. There's a JSON payload that that the shortcut permalink page requests. That payload contains a link to a binary plist which can be translated into XML (`plistutil -i shortcut.plist`).

Here's one I just generated that expands shortened URLs: https://gist.github.com/dlo/1217af3b86f363faf578aa23408c19ef

After you write your shortcut, encode it in binary plist format (using plistutil), and then upload that blob to a URL. Use the following scheme to import it into Shortcuts.app:

    workflow://import-workflow/?name=URL20%Expander&url=encodedUrl
Hope this helps!
earenndil
It looks like if you buy pythonista ($10!) you can execute python scripts.
yangl1996
Thanks! I think Shortcuts has access to some lower-level system configs/functions which Pythonista doesn't have. Also, although Shortcuts can invoke a Pythonista script, control won't automatically return to Shortcuts after the script is executed. So I'm looking for a way to do everything within Shortcuts.