This App Allows You to Create Automations That Your Mac Doesn’t Usually Support
To create automations using Apple’s Shortcuts app on your Mac , you depend on Apple support for various actions. While Shortcuts supports many useful actions, there are some that the app doesn’t yet have, such as clearing all notifications or quitting all apps. If you’re looking to add a few more useful actions to your Mac’s automation, consider Shortcutie ($6), a powerful shortcuts extension that lets you do things Apple doesn’t yet support.
Shortcutie itself does not have an interface. Once installed, all of its actions will appear in Apple’s Shortcuts app on your Mac. To access them, install the app, open Shortcuts, and select Shortcut from the Apps tab in the right pane. The app requires accessibility permissions to function, which is necessary because the strict macOS sandbox rules prevent apps from performing many of the actions that the app supports. (Note: Only grant this permission to apps you trust, like Shortcutie.) Once granted access, you’ll find useful new tools in Shortcuts, such as changing your default browser , clearing all notifications, hiding all windows, quitting all apps, and checking whether your screen is being recorded, mirrored, or shared.
macOS supports all of these actions, but they are not available in Shortcuts, preventing you from creating automation routines for these actions. If you have Shortcutie, you can add these triggers to your shortcuts and perform complex automation that your Mac doesn’t otherwise support. Don’t forget that the Shortcuts app appears in the menu bar, and you can also run automations directly from the menu bar. This can make certain actions, like the dreaded “clear all notifications,” much faster and easier. If you combine this app with Shortery , which lets you run Mac automations based on various triggers, you can automate almost anything.
Without Shortcutie, you can open Action Center and clear notifications, but macOS doesn’t always display a Clear All button, forcing you to clear notifications one by one. Using Shortcutie, I set up a simple automation and can now clear all alerts in two clicks. Likewise, quitting all apps is quite easy with the help of the action added by this app. You usually don’t need to do this, but if your Mac has slowed down due to a memory leak or high ambient temperature, Shortcutie’s Close All Apps action offers a one-click method to reduce the load on your computer. Here are some more useful actions from the application:
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Empty trash
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Remove all disks
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Clear recent lists (from menu)
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Set grayscale mode
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Show/hide desktop widgets
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Get the URL and title of the active browser tab
At the time of writing, Shortcutie supports 29 actions, and developer Sindre Sorhus has promised to add more. The biggest concern is that Shortcutie uses private APIs to access these actions, and they can change at any time. The developer has promised to monitor these changes and maintain the app, but this leaves the app vulnerable to loss of functionality. Regular updates should fix any issues that may arise in the future, but it’s something to keep in mind.
However, I’m not worried, knowing the developer: Sorhus has created over 50 apps and utilities for Mac and iPhone (Lifehacker has covered many of them ), so I expect he will continue to update Shortcutie.