apps together in ways the app designers never anticipated helps harness the power of computers to make our lives easier. Even people who aren’t comfortable with building automation systems themselves can benefit from work created by others. User automation makes computing devices more powerful and their users more efficient.
The Mac is currently at the start of a pretty dramatic transition. This year, the platform will be flooded with apps that are based on the iOS app development system, UIKit, using a system that everyone calls Marzipan because Apple hasn’t given it a name. (My guess is that Apple won’t brand it at all, and will just call it “UIKit for macOS.”
Part of this transition affects user automation. macOS has a bunch of different system-level user automation technologies of various ages, but none of them work with iOS and Apple has shown no intention of changing that now. AppleEvents, AppleScript, and Automator already feel like legacy technologies that are maintained minimally to keep up compatibility, but they don’t feel like the future.
For years, iOS seemed to be a wasteland of user automation, but determined app developers discovered ways their apps could interact, most notably by embedding data in URLs—yep, the same strings of text you use to visit webpages—and passing them back and forth. Apple seemingly endorsed this technique when it bought Workflow, a popular third-party iOS automation app, and renamed it Shortcuts last summer. At the same time, Apple connected iOS automation to Siri through a feature called Siri Shortcuts, which fits right into existing systems already used by developers.
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