I just spent an hour and a half talking Shortcuts with Federico Viticci, which means I walked away with about six new projects and zero free time. Federico runs MacStories and knows more about Shortcuts than just about anyone, so he was the person to talk to now that WWDC is behind us. We dug into Describe a Shortcut, Apple’s new natural-language way to build automations, and where it shines versus where it falls apart. Federico even explained the adapter Apple trained to make it work, which is exactly the kind of nerdy detail that makes this show fun for me. We also covered the rest of the iOS 27 Shortcuts updates, including Else If support, new automation triggers, and built-in data storage that finally brings global variables to Shortcuts. Then Federico walked us through his coder era, including Shortcuts Playground 2.0 and the local model he trained on a Mac Studio to generate shortcuts from scratch. My to-do list grew three sizes during this one. Worth it.

Episode Links

• Shortcuts Playground (MacStories)
• Shortcuts Playground on GitHub
• Between Seasons: Ten Years of WWDC
• Data Jar
• Apple Frames
• Mole
• CleanShot X
• Monologue
• Raycast
• Termius
• Denim
• Lettera
• Plex
• Tailscale
• Screens
• Downie
• Transloader

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