Launching Shortcuts from a web page

Today I learnt a new trick (thanks Jorge Bastida!): how to launch a Shortcut on iOS or macOS from a link on a web page.

Jorge is using that to open the native timer app from his (pretty cool) recipe site, fork.club. But the possibilities are endless.

How it works

It‘s pretty easy:

  1. Create a shortcut in Shortcuts.app and give it a nice name (I’m going to pick ‘Good Morning’, because this shortcut will speak ‘Good morning’ when run)

    Image

  2. Add a link on your web page that triggers the shortcut:

    <a href="shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=Good%20Morning">Good Morning</a>

  3. Click the link, and enjoy the beautiful voice of your computer speaking.

Getting fancy

You can pass arguments to your Shortcut. In my case, instead of speaking a hardcoded ‘Good morning’, my shortcut could receive the text to be spoken with a link like this:

<a href="shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=Good%20Morning&input=text&text=Good%20Morning,%20my%20friend!">Good Morning</a>

We need to change the shortcut a bit to accept the new input:

Image

Moving forward

For all the details about this feature, check out Apple‘s documentation:

Have a nice day!