Cherri – programming language that compiles to an Apple Shortuct

by mihau • 4 months ago

355 72 4 months ago

I’m interested to understand how this is different than Jelly; they seem to be similar. Same for Scriptable. I’ve been looking at this to hand over to Claude to build Shortcuts, something which has a terrible development experience.

Barbing• 4 months ago

You’ll have challenges with this too but you can get something by working with the three top labs’ models. Tried on Arena.ai and sent any errors back (in a personal effort to further iOS accessibility, but I digress).

Wonderful project, thank you Cherri!

alin234• 4 months ago

You can definitely have Claude work with cherri files.

Jelly was a confusing experience for me, with JellyCuts becoming closed source and focusing on advertising, then Open-Jellycore branching out but not actually keeping up with the latest shortcut actions.

Cherri has almost every action you can find in the Shortcuts app, easy to use, and easy to create Shortcuts that can accept input and output so that they can be automated or scripted further.

chrisaiv3• 4 months ago

Main difference is language style.

Cherri feels like your writing Go.

Jelly feels like your writing JavaScript / Swift.

aaronbrethorst• 4 months ago

Adjacently, does anyone know of a Terraform-like syntax for creating GitHub Actions YML files?

RulerOf2• 4 months ago

I'm sure the UX would suck, but you could use hcl2json[0] and then transform that to YAML.

[0] https://github.com/tmccombs/hcl2json

hmartin• 4 months ago

Could you explain more about how the signing setup works?

(That's what held me back most for spending more effort on shortcuts.)

yg1112• 4 months ago

From the repo, it signs natively on macOS and falls back to a cloud signing server (shortcut-signing-server). That fallback matters -- without macOS you would have to reverse-engineer Apple signing format yourself, and it changes across iOS versions. The hosted signing server is really what makes the whole cross-platform toolchain viable.

mmastrac• 4 months ago

I wonder if https://crates.io/crates/apple-codesign is sufficient to codesign these. Apple usually re-uses these sort of things.

chrisaiv3• 4 months ago

The signing server is hosted by https://routinehub.co/

They offer an API if you’d prefer not to manage signing yourself.

simquat2• 4 months ago

Looks quite cool and I'd like to give a try. What is the main use case for compiling code to shortcuts? I ask because I'm working on a tool[0] that in a way does the opposite.

[0] https://breadboards.io

0x4573• 4 months ago

What you're doing is visual programming. On its own there isn't anything wrong with it. However, specifically with Shortcuts it's not very pleasant for anything complex.

I had a full garden automation running on shortcuts, but it was extreme hard to maintain and improve due to "editor" being so bare bones.

simquat2• 4 months ago

Thanks for sharing. By the editor being bare bones do you mean some missing feature might change your mind about using it, or do you find the text-based editor much more comfortable?

alin234• 4 months ago

I've just used this extensively to build 200 Shortcuts for my event-based automation app on macOS [0], because some actions you simply can't do without Shortcuts: changing Focus Mode, toggling Accessibility functions like Color Filters, accessing the Private Cloud Compute model etc.

I also wrote about how Claude was able to basically learn the language from scratch and write those fully compilable Shortcuts for me [1] because it was mind boggling to me that an LLM can do that. Curiously, this is becoming more and more normal in my mind.

[0] https://lowtechguys.com/crank

[1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/how-good-is-claude-really/#che...

6thbit• 4 months ago

Yeah having this opens up the LLM assisting path to build shortcuts. Which is great! Maintaining them by hand is not

TarqDirtyToMe• 4 months ago

Cool to hear Claude was able to learn it. I was planning on leveraging it in a future version of this project I was hacking on that lets you execute shortcut actions as tools (without creating actual shortcuts): https://tarq.net/posts/action-relay-shortcut-actions-mcp/

alsetmusic• 4 months ago

Well, that’s a domain that has caught my attention so I’ll give this more weight (ltg). I recall novel Mac apps that weren’t quite right for me but seemed thoughtful.

MetalSnake• 4 months ago

When you say Claude learned it. That's in the current context window it is able to do that, right? Or is there a more permanent way to make it learn something?

junkblocker• 4 months ago

You ask it to read the docs or site and create a 'skill' out of it.

bjord• 4 months ago

are you certain that it wasn't included in the training data?

I saw someone do this awhile ago with a low resource language (I think it might've been Abkhaz?) with seemingly-incredible results, and eventually everyone came to understood that, even though it wasn't officially supported, Abkhaz materials had been in the training data

_doctor_love2• 4 months ago

Very cool! IMHO Apple Shortcuts will finally get the love they're due in the age of AI.

lemontheme• 4 months ago

Cool! As a professional programmer few things consistently succeed in making me feel inept like trying to build an Apple Shortcut

zimpenfish2• 4 months ago

I felt really smart after I made a fancy Shortcut that did complex playlist generation based on rules and whatnots.

Of course, adding music to a playlist broke a couple of updates down the line and, as far as I'm aware, still doesn't work properly several years later.

(I moved to Marvis Pro[0] because it has reasonably complex smart playlists that just about mimic what I was doing with my generator except they're transient and not saved as mine were. Win some, lose some.)

[0] No link, sorry, because it'd either be iOS App Store or ad-laden bloat sites "reviewing" it. https://www.reddit.com/r/MarvisApp/ might be worth a read though.

mulmen• 4 months ago

This is what prevents me from putting any effort in to shortcuts. I have zero confidence in Apple respecting my time by committing to compatibility or even just not breaking things. The constant feature churn from new PM’s tearing down Chesterton’s fence to make way for their own career ambitions makes Apple user hostile.

1bpp• 4 months ago

It feels actively hostile to programmers sometimes

vjvjvjvjghv2• 4 months ago

Not just sometimes. Pretty much always.

reflexco• 4 months ago

I always suspected there's a step in Apple's software design process that goes like this:

- Is the app convenient to use for power users? Then careful, you must have mindlessly went with what's intuitive for you, but what's actually intuitive for normal people is, has to be, different. Go back and find (or invent if you must), the "naturally" intuitive design.

vjvjvjvjghv2• 4 months ago

AppleScript was just a little weird but I could get my head around it. Shortcuts just doesn’t make sense. Even the simplest things are hard to do and the scripts are totally unmaintainable. I don’t know why Apple is doing this.

x187463• 4 months ago

I got my first MacOS device, a Macbook Air, recently and was annoyed to find the toggle for 'natural scrolling' is unified between the trackpad and the mouse. I use the macbook docked 90% of the time. So, I asked ChatGPT if there was a way to script toggling the natural scrolling setting. ChatGPT immediately produced a working script and the instructions to create the Shortcut and assign it to a keyboard shortcut. Now I can press Ctrl-Shift-S and toggle natural scrolling.

Even as a programmer, I would have never spent the time necessary to learn the relevant scripting language for this task. I've got other things to do. But ChatGPT knew exactly what to do and now to implement the task, even on the newest version of MacOS.

hbn• 4 months ago

There exists free tools that fix that behaviour too (Apple hasn't seemed to care because if you buy a mouse from them, it scrolls with a touch sensor so natural scrolling feels correct. And I do happen to be one of the few people who likes the Magic Mouse)

Defman• 4 months ago

As an alternative to a script, I can suggest Mos[1], which i've been using for 6 years I think. This is the first app I install on a fresh MacOS because I'm also using my MacBook while it's docked.

[1] https://github.com/Caldis/Mos

RationPhantoms• 4 months ago

Still confused on why there is no social component of this? What is the best place to find examples of actual useful Apple Shortcuts?

doc_ick• 4 months ago

Probably Reddit.

zimpenfish2• 4 months ago

Specifically https://www.reddit.com/r/shortcuts/ since it appears to be the last one standing.

wlesieutre• 4 months ago

A lot of examples from Federico Viticci / MacStories (scroll down past the Automation Academy ad)

https://www.macstories.net/shortcuts/

nunez• 4 months ago

/r/Shortcuts is your best bet.

chrisaiv3• 4 months ago

This has everything. https://routinehub.co/

mwkaufma• 4 months ago

"shortuct"

tech234a• 4 months ago

Apple had the same typo at WWDC 2018: https://devdude.me/blimg/wwdc18Keynote/shortcutsApp.png

kbd• 4 months ago

What can you do on a Mac with Shortcuts vs AppleScript vs Hammerspoon?

alin234• 4 months ago

There are some things that are only available in Shortcuts because Apple gave the app entitlements to communicate with parts of the system that an AppleScript or other apps can't. Things like setting/getting the Focus Mode, changing some system settings like Airdrop Receiving, Color Filters, Background Sounds etc.

Also some apps export Shortcut actions that can run in-app code: for example my Lunar app has an action that can help fixing arrangement when monitors flip around [1]

It's much easier to implement a struct for a Shortcut, than exporting AppleScript sdef files or creating IPC command-line tools, so a lot of apps take this route for code that needs access to the memory of the running app.

[1] https://lunar.fyi/shortcuts#fix-monitor-arrangement

_doctor_love2• 4 months ago

I didn't realize you were the Lunar guy! I freaking love your apps! Thank you for making good and useful software.

Being able to adjust my monitor brightness during the pandemic actively changed my quality of life for the better (I was in a small SF apartment).

Ragingweb• 4 months ago

I built a small app to follow my infant son's feedings and diaper changes. Simply used the shortcuts get content of url to call the API rest endpoints. This is much better !

subhro2• 4 months ago

Is this vibe coded? The README at least looks very LLM-ish.

woadwarrior01• 4 months ago

It's been around for a long time. It's from well before vibe-coding was a thing. I first saw it ~3 years ago.

subhro2• 4 months ago

oh okay. I had no idea and was lazy to check the commit logs.

duskwuff• 4 months ago

While it's not in quite the same product category, a name change might be in order; this is uncomfortably close to CHERI (cf. https://cheri-alliance.org/).

0x4573• 4 months ago

Should we rename fruit as well just in case?

caycep• 4 months ago

whither AppleScript?

wiether• 4 months ago

Oh boy!

Creating/maintaining Shortcuts is such a pain!

Having to do it on a small iPhone screen with a touchscreen keyboard, through a no-code interface...

I want an actual text editor, I want to version things with git...

It feels like with Cherri I'll finally be able to actually do things!

Thanks!

pseudosavant• 4 months ago

This makes me want to spend some time with Codex just to figure out something fun to do with Shortcuts!

wateralien• 4 months ago

I'm guessing that if Apple can get it right with the next LLM based Siri, generating or editing Shortcuts may get easier anyway.

greggsy• 4 months ago

It does seem like the logical automation platform to prepare repeatable tasks that the end user might want to do.

The permissions and secure app integration models are all there, and it’s reasonably stable.

It was always puzzling why there was never an exportable scripting language, just shareable links. I think I ended up sharing screen shots with Claude last time I wanted to troubleshoot something.

lynndotpy2• 4 months ago

The biggest problem IMO is the loooooooong animation delay built into every UI interaction. It's so hard to get into a flow state or even maintain a train of thought when you have to wait for everything on the screen to stop sliding, wiggling, wobbling, jiggling, refracting, distorting, and flashing.

allthetime• 4 months ago

I’m guessing you might know already, but just in case you don’t, “reduce motion” in the accessibility settings menu is essential to productivity and sanity.

gigatexal• 4 months ago

I wish Apple hadn’t gone with shortcuts. Instead I wish they’d given us a proper sdk for iOS and macOS as a Python module.

Python is so easy to pick up they could have given it a low code drag and drop front end but for us who can code why not a proper language ?

gverrilla• 4 months ago

typo in title: "Shortuct" instead of "Shortcut" - is this how we're gonna distinguish from llm? /s

wwalexander• 4 months ago

I take it this only supports Apple’s built-in actions, and doesn’t plug into the broader AppIntents system? AppIntents includes a packaging concept, would be cool to see if this could use third-party AppIntents in a similar way to how scientific Python uses C modules for performance critical sections.

Pakvothe• 4 months ago

Love this approach of compiling a readable language to a platform-specific format. Same pattern works well for i18n. Write in one language, compile/translate to the target formats automatically. The developer experience of writing real code instead of clicking through a GUI (Shortcuts app in this case) is always the right bet for power users

swiftcoder• 4 months ago

Cherri (pronounced cherry)

Why would you spell it like that if you don't want me to pronounce it chéri/sherry?

naikrovek3• 4 months ago

Why would you spell it like that if you don't want me to pronounce it chéri/sherry?

Because that's a way to spell it without changing the pronounciation in the US. Also, in the extremely unlikely event that it becomes very popular, in the US you can't trademark a dictionary word, it must be something unique.

actionfromafar• 4 months ago

Like Windows?

bocchi• 4 months ago

Apple?

qubex• 4 months ago

Of course what we need is a native IDE that runs on an iPhone and produces executable scripts…

Cherri – programming language that compiles to an Apple Shortuct

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