Mistakes to avoid

Keep an eye out for these potential snags

MAKING MISTAKES WITH shortcuts is easy, especially when you’re starting out. It’s part of learning how to use Shortcuts in the first place. You can test a workflow by pressing the Play button in the bottom–right corner when creating a shortcut, and if something doesn’t work it will be highlighted in red. Likewise, if you test a shortcut outside the Shortcuts app and it does not go as expected, you will see an error notification explaining what the problem is.

CHECK YOUR VARIABLES

Be sure to check whether your shortcut is complete. For example, if you have one that scans for trending GIFs and saves them to a folder, have you remembered to add the save action? Likewise, check you are asking Shortcuts to get the correct input for your variables. Magic Variables are helpful here as they show you the available variables that have been generated in your workflow. Then you just need to tap the one you want.

The Shortcuts library contains several similarly named actions that do slightly different things, such as the “Get URLs from input,” “Get Contents of URL,” and “Get Component of URL” actions, all of which sound like they do roughly the same thing. If you’re not sure, tap the “i” button next to an action for a description of what it does.

Avoid downloading shortcuts from the web unless you’re certain they’re safe. By default, Shortcuts will not let you open workflows from untrusted sources. While that means you can’t open shortcuts from friends or from your backups, it also prevents malicious actors from compromising your device. To allow untrusted shortcuts, open Settings > Shortcuts and switch on Allow Untrusted Shortcuts. You should carefully consider whether you should do this, however, given the amount of power shortcuts are able to muster.