Bookends Siri Shortcuts Forum

[Serge]

Bookends for iOS now supports Siri Shortcuts. This feature requires iOS 14+ and requires Pro Features Yearly in-app purchase. More information about current shortcuts can be found here:
https://www.sonnysoftware.com/bookendso ... shortcuts/

Please add your questions or suggestions about Siri Shortcuts in this forum thread.

[iandol]

Hi Serge & Jon,

Now that Monterey also supports shortcuts, do you have a plan for extending shortcut support on iOS to desktop?

[Jon]

I haven't had a chance to look into how Siri Shortcuts works in Monterey yet, but of course I'm curious, and I'll see if it's something that would benefit Bookends Mac users. We have AppleEvent support, which is more robust than Siri Shortcuts, so I don't think it's a pressing issue.

Jon
Sonny Software

[iandol]

Yeah, I think Desktop Shortcuts is just something that is a bit "easier" to use for non-technical users who may be scared by writing code...

[Jon]

What Siri Shortcuts would you think are useful? In my admittedly cursory look at some video tutorials, it looks like they're mostly intended for lightweight interactions with the UI. I'm not seeing anything (so far) where I think it would be useful in Bookends. But I'm willing to be enlightened.

Jon
Sonny Software

[iandol]

From my perspective I suppose the idea is the actions (much like the Applescript interface does now) should integrate Bookends into another workflow, like selecting text in another app then pushing it to Bookends and/or getting a result from Bookends (like a formatted ref) to send to another app in the shortcut chain of actions.

• The most straight forward is to take some selected text and (via the share sheet or other method to activate) send it to quick add. This is a one-way action, nothing is returned. As it seems actions can "match" text using regex and send the matches along the chain I wonder if you could select a big chunk of text and then match only DOIs and then send each to a quick add action? This is currently a pain to do all in applescript (which is lousy at flexible text manipulation IMO), and currently would be best handled by writing e.g. python/ruby and then triggering applescript to run quick add...
• The same would go for doing a search. Looking at the iOS documentation https://www.sonnysoftware.com/bookendso ... shortcuts/ -- you shoud be able to receive a search term and then iterate through a list of results (much like applescript).
• Also from the iOS shortcuts an action to convert a reference to a formatted result which could be returned to other tools along the chain.

This is a pretty low priority thing, I suspect the number of people that are migrated to Monterey and need automation but cannot run Applescript somehow are pretty low. Here is a list of other apps and the sorts of actions they are providing. I do have Pixelmator Pro and its shortcuts are genuinely useful and an improvement over what we previously had with automator. Some of the other apps shortcut actions seems quite light... https://www.macstories.net/news/shortcu ... egrations/

[somelinguist]

An additional helpful Shortcut action would be Quick Add.

As a use case, I’ve been working on a Shortcut that accepts any selected text from any app and then queries the CrossRef REST api to try to find a DOI. Right now I can copy the output DOI to the clipboard and then open Bookends for iOS and do the Quick Add myself by pasting it in, but if there were a Shortcut action, it would eliminate one extra manual step.

The function of the shortcut is similar to the Citation Lookup functionality of the Highlights app.

[somelinguist]

Here is an initial version of the CrossREf shortcut I mentioned: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/9cf338 ... 8057b34a93

For now, it accepts text from any app. The text is expected to be in a format that could be use to find a DOI, such as:

Croft, William. 2022. Morphosyntax: constructions of the world’s languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

It queries the CrossRef REST api with the inputted text, then shows a popup with the top 5 results. The user can select a result to copy its DOI to the clipboard.

Screenshot 2023-04-14 at 4.25.06 PM.png (248.12 KiB) Viewed 144052 times

Setup:
There are two setup questions when installing the shortcut: The web address and email address to add to the query headers so it will be executed in CrossRef's 'polite' pool (see https://api.crossref.org/swagger-ui/index.html)

Other notes:
1. Because the query is dependent on CrossRef's api, the queries can vary significantly in the time it takes to return. Often I've found it to be quite slow, but it eventually does return.
2. The formatting of the results shown in the popup is sometimes not quite right.