I just can't grasp shortcuts

There, that is about as much "5 y/o speak" as I am comfortable with.
Having said that, this guide may be of some use to you:
https://www.makeuseof.com/mastering-the-ios-shortcuts-app/#:~:text=Just%20type%20a%20keyword%20or,Shortcut%2C%20depending%20on%20what%20appears.

Hi,

I'd be happy to hel, I do quite a lot with shortcuts.

There are some bugs that make it somewhatt difficult to make complex shortcuts with VoiceOver at the moment, but I'm happy to help you try if you can be a little more spisific with what you're trying to create.

Hi Louise, I too used to struggle with that and eventually just deleted the app. But I will look at the link Brian sent and maybe try to use them again.

I've written shortcuts before. Not easy using Voiceover, but possible if one is patient.

Recently, a number of my shortcuts are no longer working since I installed iOS 17. They were working fine for years but now just throw off cryptic errors like "problem with shortcut". REallyReally? What kind of feedback is that? Not very helpful.

Anyway, I figured that no one is going to fix the shortcuts that went bad with the install of iOS 17 unless I did. so I hopped in there and decided to give it a try.

Wow, I haven't gotten anything to work sanely in when trying to create shortcuts in the shortcuts app in iOS 17!

Yes, I can add actions. Sometimes I can even edit text fields associated with the action. Then I tried to edit the "text" or "condition" fields of the "If" action, and no luck at all. I could swipe down to move between "text" and "condition", but trying to activate it with a single finger double tap did nothing.

Don't know if this is Voiceover acting inappropriately with the Shortcuts ap, or just that when items are activated and new information is displayed on the screen it shows up in an unexpected place. Perhaps what we really need is a manual for making Shortcuts using Voiceover. Don't know if that exists but I'll look at the documentation again that someone posted in this thread.

--Pete

There’s a lot in this thread, but I’ll at least try to help.

First, I wouldn’t actually delete the app. Even if you never write your own Shortcuts, developers in the last few years have created things called app Shortcuts, and they add a lot of features to Siri and spotlight without you doing anything. They’re particularly trying to surface those in Spotlight this year, so it’s probably worth having around.

Anyway, couple of technical things. The only machine I have on iOS 17 is my iPad Pro, so I can’t really walk you through the interface on a phone, which for me is an ancient iPhone 7 on 15. But I can give a couple of tips. Yes, right now Shortcuts is a mess. A lot of the Voiceover bugs might well be just general bugs, since if you read the mainstream Shortcuts coverage most power user Shortcuts people are complaining as well. The first thing I’d suggest when using VO to write Shortcuts is, turn off group navigation mode and use flat. I honestly don’t know if it’s improved at all since 16 but I at least find Shortcuts almost incomprehensible using that mode. Things like editing if statements and such seem to work fine for me, so try that first.

Also, drag and drop at least in 16 and from what I could see in 17 is a bit of a mess too. If you have to move actions around, you might have to use copy action, delete the action, then paste it where you want it.

Ok, shortcuts like you’re 5. Basically, it’s a way to take actions you might perform in an app and do them without opening the app. The trick is that, it’s the developer of the app that decides what those things are. This is true of AppleScript on the Mac as well, BTW.
So the first thing you need to do for something like add a task to a list in Todoist is open the app and have a look in your list of Shortcuts and see if Todoest has already created one for you under app Shortcuts. If it has, triple tap or double-tap and hold and there should be an “add to Home Screen” option. Select that, and job done.

The next thing to try is, create a new a shortcut and look under actions. Select app actions and go through them and see if Todoist is there. If it is, double tap on it and see if it’s got a create task or create todo action or something If it does, you should be able to create a Shortcut. The basic idea of Shortcuts is that every action has an output that gets sent to the next action. So in this case you need to give Todoist the information it needs to create the task. I don’t know what that is, but you can probably just use “ask for input” which is under the scripts category in Shortcuts. Make sure it’s asking for text, then add the add task/todo whatever action you just found. Again, add that to your home screen and you’re done.

If the app developer *hasn’t* given you an action though, it gets messy. For most apps, that’s pretty much where things end. You can write to developer requesting they add support for Shortcuts, but otherwise you’re mostly sunk. In the case of Todoist, there might actually be a way to do this, since it’s a web app and I *think* has its own programming interface, so I’d try searching for a shortcut someone else has written for this.

This is already stupidly long, but feel free to ask me more stuff and let me know if any of this rambling mess helped, ☺️.

I am the one who has a question.
Trying to make a shortcut based on the function if.
However, as soon as I click on the conditions setting, the shortcuts app crashes.
Do you have such a bug?

I will also confirm the opinion that I had a lot of shortcuts, but I have the impression that even the simplest ones do not want to work or work very lumsy.

Hi,

Todoist has extensive support for Apple shortcuts!

Playing with it somewhat, I managed to do a few things:

1. Create a shortcut that prompts me for task name and time from the home screen;

2. Create a shortcut that, each Thursday at 9 am, adds a todo for me to take the bins out at 8:30 pm. The todo changes automatically depending on what bin is supposed to be out that week.

Todoist isn't my usual todo app, so I'm probably missing some functionality, but for the basic create a task from a homescreen shortcut, I can do 1 of a few things:

1. Record a step-by-step screen recording and link it here;
2. Write up a guide on how to do it;
3. Walk you through it some other way.

Let me know what works best for you!

Yes, I can confirm. running iOS 17.03 on my iPhone 15 pro, trying to activate the "condition" option in the "If" action crashes the Shortcuts app.

Incredible, and I thought it was just me.

I haven't had a chance to write to Apple Accessibility about it. Perhaps I should, but I already write to them about enough stuff already. I always get polite responses about issues being passed off to the right people, and that seems to be the end of it.

--Pete

Thomas did a podcast series on shortcuts quite some time ago.