Transcript:

Okay, so let's start our adventure into Shortcuts, taking a look at the user interface of the application on the Mac. 

On the left side, you've got a view showing you various directories of your shortcuts. The top is a gallery, where you can download shortcuts, and we've got a separate video for that coming up. Then you've got a listing of your shortcuts. 

The All Shortcuts view shows you all the shortcuts you have installed. You can see here I've got 408 on my Mac, which is quite a few, but I like shortcuts. 

Quick Actions is a special directory where you can have quick action shortcuts that are used with the Finder. We're going to talk about that later, too. 

You also have Menu Bar shortcuts, where you can put them right in the menu bar. And you can see here I've got the menu bar application here. 

Then underneath that, I've got a folder directory here to organize my shortcuts. For instance, there's my widget shortcuts. And if you go through these additional folders, I've got my shortcuts organized by folder. And I find folders very useful as you get deeper into shortcuts. It's an excellent way to keep track of things without getting overwhelmed. When you don't want to just look at 408 shortcuts every time you open the application, you're much better going into specific folders. This is a relatively new feature that they added in the last couple of years to Shortcuts, and it really makes a huge difference. 

So once you're in the application, you've got the folder directory showing here at the top. The + (plus) button allows you to add a new shortcut. If I hit the plus button, you can see just pops open a new shortcut. And that's a whole other user interface. You've got the shortcut name here, which I could type in. You've got the sharing options. We're going to cover that as well. You've got the ability to run the shortcut. You've got this Action Library button here. For instance, if I just double-click on this action, it shows up on the Action List. And you can search by category or by application for that. And then next to that, you've got the Shortcut Details. And this is the stuff that lets you do a bunch of options with Shortcuts, and I want to get into this deeper once you have a better understanding of the application. But in summary, like, if you want to put a shortcut in the menu bar up here, all you have to do is click this button. They've got tabs here for Details, Privacy, and Setup. And I'm going to cover all of that in separate videos as we go through the course. So that's the new shortcut button and what you get. 

You can organize these by this icon view or by a list view if you want. And that's just your own personal preference. 

And finally, there's a Search bar. So if I type Personal, you can see it searches through Personal. It's only going to search the directory you're in. So if you're looking for a shortcut, and you've got a big list like me, this helps. Like if I just type omnifocus, you can see there's a bunch of them I have for OmniFocus. 

The interface overall of Shortcuts is fairly simple. You know, you just got to learn that you can find your shortcuts on the left side of the screen and build them on the right side of the screen. The trick with Shortcuts, really, is learning all these actions once you start making new shortcuts, and we're going to spend a lot of time in this course teaching you those. But as I said, the interface really is not that difficult to master. Now you know how it works. We're going to start digging into the details with the next video.