More on Siri Shortcuts Coming to the Mac
A couple of interesting posts about Siri Shortcuts coming to the Mac, Dr. Drang hopes there’s a way to interact with shell scripts:
The people who built Unix understood the value of passing information back and forth between processes, and they gave that ability not just to C programmers but also to regular users through pipes, redirection, and shell scripting. The NeXT developers who built the Mac’s current OS maintained that tradition and extended it from the command line to GUI apps by hooking into AppleScript and Apple Events with osascript and do shell script.
Jason Snell is similarly most concerned about working with shell scripts:
The ability to run scripts is really Automator’s killer feature.
He also expresses concern over lack of clarity in Apple’s automation strategy:
Automation on the Mac is in danger of becoming a real mess. Automator and AppleScript haven’t changed much over time, and probably won’t ever be able to control Marzipan apps. Bringing over Shortcuts as the macOS automation tool of the future sounds good to me, but if it’s limited to Marzipan apps only, things get weird. The Mac would end up with two entirely different classes of apps, each with their own automation system, both walled off from the other.
It’s telling that both Snell and Drang are primarily concerned with interacting with shell scripts. In Siri Shortcuts current counterpart on the Mac, Automator, shell scripting are a small feature in a complicated application, but I’d guess it’s by far its most used feature. I get the impression Apple is disappointed with how Automator turned out—inferred from their lack of investment in it—but I’m not exactly sure what Apple thinks is going to be different about Siri Shortcuts? The only notable difference seems to be that Siri Shortcuts uses URL schemes for some integrations, which as I noted, has some basic flaws.