Shortcuts blew me away when I saw what you could do. I assumed based on the demo that it was pretty limited, but you can set variables, loop, execute remote SSH commands, call into APIs, execute Python, etc. And it comes with API access to send iMessages/read contacts/etc. The fact that it's so much easier to write an automation "script" or shortcut than swift code is huge!

The System 7 OS on Macs introduced AppleScript[1] which offered a similar set of features (but designed for the 90s).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript

AppleScript is still around, as part of OSA, which now includes JavaScript support.

This had been possible with iOS before. It was this workflow app (https://workflow.is/) which app bought to integrate more natively in iOS

Sadly with some crazy UX changes - tapping on an action used to open it but now it runs it (which has caused me a few misfires already!) Plus the "pick an action from the list" is now a scroll-up pane rather than a scroll-sideways pane making it horribly more clunky to find what you're after.

I was interested until I saw the article is broken up into 17 pages, and the first page was entirely fluff.

A little inside baseball, but MacStories also doesn't get paid for "pageviews", it's just an easier way to navigate a MASSIVE review.

While they do have some inline advertising, it's all worked out ahead of publishing.

For reference: https://www.macstories.net/advertise/

It's 42250 words long. Each page has a different subject, and breaking up saves your bandwidth since you don't have to load the entire thing at once.

Thanks for the link. This is a pretty insightfull and detailed review. Definitely worth the read.

Seconded. The depth and insight of the coverage reminded me of the Siracusa MacOS reviews that Ars posted years ago.

In case you want to vote it up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18006605