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The Custom Shortcuts section of PCalc’s Siri shortcuts setting remains the most compelling part of all, though. For example, PCalc suggested I add ‘Convert X from US Dollar (USD) to Euro (EUR) in category Currency.’ Tapping the entry under Do gives me the chance to tweak each of the parameters in the action, including the input source, currencies, and category. Doing so opens the Add to Siri interface where you can now type a phrase that will trigger the action via Siri instead of speaking it and customize the action by tapping the action in the ‘Do’ section.

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The result is a huge win for Shortcuts that will pay even more significant dividends with more complex shortcuts.Īctions and Siri shortcuts available from within PCalc.įar more powerful than merely adding a predefined action to Shortcuts though is tapping the plus button next to a Recent Activities entry. Scanning through PCalc’s Convert Value actions in the shortcut, it’s immediately apparent what they do. Not only are there fewer steps, but the entire shortcut is vastly easier to read. What’s remarkable is that even with this relatively simple shortcut, the reduction in complexity is striking. Parameters have the benefit of making actions more readable by non-programmers and have the advantage of keeping related parts of a shortcut’s logic together. So, picking Currency reduces your choices to the many currencies the app supports, while choosing length will only display units of length, for example. After the conversion category is chosen, the parameters for the two units are limited to what’s available for that category. In PCalc’s Convert Value action, the conversion category parameter lists all 19 types of conversions that are possible in PCalc. The other thing that allows the shortcut to be simplified is action parameters. In contrast, iOS and iPadOS 13 allow us to dispense with the clipboard steps and variables. Second, the shortcut had to assign each value to a variable so it would be available to display the results in the alert. First, there’s a lot of copying to and from the clipboard, which was necessary with iOS 12 for apps that wanted to perform actions on data. If you look at Federico’s original shortcut, you’ll notice two things about it. In total, the shortcut uses twelve actions, many of which involve moving data on and off the clipboard.įederico’s original PCalc Currencies shortcut. The final step displays the results using each of the three currency variables. Next, the shortcut uses PCalc’s conversion action to calculate the US Dollar equivalent, store it in a separate variable, and then do the same for pounds. The first step is to pass the number of Euros to the shortcut from the system clipboard and then create a variable to store that value.

The shortcut coverts Euros to US Dollars and British Pounds.

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iOS and iPadOS 13 free PCalc of that constraint, and with the addition of parameter support and the conversational Siri shortcuts coming in iOS and iPadOS 13.1, PCalc’s automation features are vastly more powerful.įederico’s review of PCalc 3.8 featured a shortcut called PCalc Currencies, which is a terrific example of what a PCalc-based shortcut looked like in iOS 12. However, iOS 12 required PCalc to rely on the system clipboard as a means of passing inputs to calculations and then outputting the results, which added complexity to shortcuts that used PCalc actions. Last year when Siri shortcuts debuted on iOS 12, developer James Thomson added one of the first and best implementations for creating custom shortcuts with his calculator app PCalc.