The Shortcuts app for Mac is missing one of the iPhone's best features: Automations. The Mac app Shortery bridges the gap.

Shortcuts on the iPhone offers an Automations tab, which lets you launch shortcuts automatically when certain things happen. For example, you can disable your alarms when you leave the house (a feature I use to disable my cat's food alarm when I'm away). The Automations tab is missing on the Mac, however, which is odd because Shortcuts' predecessor, Automator, offered some of this functionality. For example, you could use Folder Actions to trigger an automation when a file was added to a folder. That solution still works because Automator still exists, but it's understandable that you might prefer Shortcuts at this point. It's clearly the automation tool that Apple is pouring resources into at the moment.

That’s where Shortery comes in. This application is free, but offers extremely limited features: the full version costs $10. With this application, you can set custom rules to trigger shortcuts. There are 17 different categories of triggers, such as when the contents of a folder change or when it’s a certain time of day.

You can set up rules and choose a shortcut to launch when these triggers occur. For example, let's say you want documents to print when they're added to a certain folder. First, you create a simple shortcut that prints a document to your default printer. Then, you set up an automation in Shortery that runs that automation whenever a new PDF is added to that folder.