this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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Why does Automator still exist, when Shortcuts could have replaced it entirely? (thelemmy.club)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by DJDarren@thelemmy.club to c/apple_enthusiast@lemmy.world
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First up, I realise that Automator does so much more than Shortcuts. But my question is: why?

I have a couple of spreadsheets that I want to be reminded of once a week so I can keep an eye on the dates they contain. My stupid ADHD brain is likely to forget to check them, and a reminder is only as useful as whether I'm able to act on it at that moment in time. So I've set up an automation to open them up at a specific time. Given that Shortcuts on macOS doesn't support automations (as far as I can tell), the only way to do this is;

  • Create a shortcut that will open the documents I need to open.

  • Create an automator application that uses a bash script to open the shortcut.

  • Create a calendar entry where the alert is set to open the automator app.

So I guess I want to know why Shortcuts (for macOS) can't run automations, why Calendar can't open Shortcuts, and why Shortcuts didn't subsume everything that Automator can do? Who at Apple thought it was perfectly right and proper to have to distinct and powerful apps essentially offering the same functions, but that neither of them fully encompass the abilities of the other?

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[–] DJDarren@thelemmy.club 4 points 7 months ago

Shortcuts comes from the iOS world

I think this might well be the answer to my question. Shortcuts for Mac feels almost like an afterthought, as if they've just adapted the iPad version to run on macOS, but they've stripped out automations ability presumably because it wasn't compatible with the OS. As a result, we've got two apps that do more or less the same thing, but one is better suited to the complexity of macOS while the other is content carrying out basic tasks.