One of the most interesting rumors before WWDC was that Shortcuts might be coming to the Mac, which of course raises all kinds of questions re the future of automation on macOS.

WWDC came and went, and while Shortcuts got some huuge upgrades in iOS 13 (like a new conversational editor, and third-party actions with inputs and outputs), Shortcuts did not come to the Mac.

…or did it?

Turns out, Catalyst on macOS Catalina includes all the Shortcuts frameworks, including all the ones necessary to bring up almost its entire UI. So I built a dummy app that does just that, which you can find on GitHub.

This test harness isn't really useful for anything except to explore the idea of Shortcuts on the Mac, how it would fit in to the system, and who would want such a product. But it does make for a fun demo 😄

Shortcuts is a consumer product, a brand unto its own; I think there are many of us who are building libraries of Shortcuts on iOS who would love a way to bring them to the Mac, and many iOS apps coming to the Mac via Catalyst, that will likely never adopt AppleScript (even though that's indeed possible for Catalyst apps), that could benefit from it.

Let's hope that the Shortcuts team finds the time in their very busy taking-over-the-world schedule to bring Shortcuts to macOS — submit feedback and make sure they know it's important to you, too!

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