![]() You’ll only open the Toolbox Pro app itself to read documentation for each action, download examples created by developer Alex Hay, and tweak a few settings. Toolbox Pro is different: the app itself is merely a container of actions, which you can use in the Shortcuts app as part of your custom shortcuts. In most apps, Shortcuts actions are seen as a nice plus to the core in-app experience – another type of extension that, akin to widgets and share sheet actions, lets an app better integrate with the rest of the system. ![]() As someone who, among other topics, covers Shortcuts for a living, it’s been an exciting season in terms of developer adoption and new potential use cases for the app. We’ve seen some terrific examples of this technology over the past few months: from Drafts’ text and workspace actions and Streaks’ deep integration with parameters to Reeder’s recent embrace of shortcuts to save and retrieve articles, Apple has allowed developers to run free with their shortcut implementations. With parameters, third-party apps can bring their functionalities and content into Shortcuts they can be integrated with Shortcuts’ default actions and, even better, they can be connected to actions from other third-party apps via the editor as well. With parameters, app shortcuts are no longer fixed actions: they can be customized by the user to perform different commands, allowing for greater flexibility than iOS 12’s Siri shortcuts and a more secure model than Shortcuts’ old x-callback-URL actions. Parameters are the Shortcuts API I’ve long argued Apple needed to move past URL schemes: they are variables that can pass dynamic input to an app through a shortcut the app can perform the selected action in the background (without launching), and, unlike in iOS 12, pass back results to the Shortcuts app or Siri. Here’s how I described parameters in September: ![]() After having used Toolbox Pro for the past couple of months, not only is the app a clever idea well suited for Shortcuts’ parameter framework, but it’s also a must-have for anyone who relies on Shortcuts on a daily basis. With his debut app Toolbox Pro, released today on the App Store, developer Alex Hay has taken this idea to its logical conclusion: Toolbox Pro is a new kind of “headless” app – a utility whose sole purpose is to complement and extend Apple’s Shortcuts app with over 50 new actions, providing a native implementation of functionalities that Apple hasn’t brought to Shortcuts yet. ![]() When I covered the updated Shortcuts app in my iOS and iPadOS 13 review earlier this year, I argued how, thanks to parameters, Shortcuts actions provided by third-party apps could become native features of the Shortcuts app. ![]()
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