Toolbox Pro for Shortcuts 4+

RIP Alex Hay. You will be missed

Toolbox Pro has been an invaluable tool to so many Shortcuts users. Sadly the developer, Alex Hay, recently lost his battle with cancer and passed away. TBH until I heard of his passing through a story on MacStories I didn’t even know who the developer of Toolbox Pro was. It was a good reminder to me that many of the apps I use and rely every single day aren’t made by some billion dollar big corporation but by real people who have a family, go through life issues like everyone else and most aren’t making a ton of $$ developing the apps we depend on. Alex and his family’s struggles were even bigger than many of us will ever face. So before you write a review or a feedback email ripping a developer try to remember they’re a person. We’re all imperfect and some people may be going through a major life issue that you’re unaware of.

Toolbox Pro made Shortcuts so much better by including actions that Apple either forgot to include or simply wouldn’t include. It would be nice if Apple would buy Toolbox Pro from Alex’s family. It wouldn’t bring him back or make their loss any easier but it would help them during a time where they may be struggling financially. Apple in return would improve Shortcuts, make users happy and show their support for the developer community.

Rest in peace Alex. You will be missed by many.

Awesome

This app has so many amazing functions, but my favorite is the Global Variable tool. If you’ve used shortcuts much at all, you’ve almost certainly had a moment when you wish that a shortcut could have some kind of memory. To know if it’s been run that day, or to remember a piece of information that changes. A score for a game, a simple tally, and countless other uses. Well that’s exactly what Global variable does.

Beyond that, toolbox pro has lots of great functions that shortcuts can’t normally do, and even more functions that you could pull off in the shortcuts app, but that would be so cumbersome that they’re not worth it. But in Toolbox Pro, it’s right there, and works just the way it says.

Seriously, if you like shortcuts at all, download this.

"Is audio playing" is bizarre

I downloaded this app so that I could disable my morning alarm in case I was already awake and listening to music. I set up this flow (literal text input shown between caret quotes) Get clipboard -> Set variable <saved clipboard> to Clipboard; Is audio playing?; Wait to return; Get clipboard -> Set variable <is audio playing> to Clipboard -> Copy <saved clipboard> to clipboard -> If clipboard is <"true"> { Exit shortcut with Clipboard } otherwise { /* play my alarm */ }; I had to make sure to use the double quotes when testing the clipboard value, which was not clear from the instructions and nearly caused me to leave a one star review until I was able to guess the correct format. The "is audio playing?" action takes a very long time to return (nearly a minute!). It also wipes out whatever may have been on my clipboard previously, which forced me to jump through hoops to preserve the clipboard state as shown above. I suspect there is also a race condition in the event that I use the clipboard while the action is executing (which, again, is not a short amount of time). It would be much better to return a boolean or at least write to one of Toolbox Pros global variables. Three stars because it technically works and meets my needs, but very surprising and disappointing in the details. Finally, ZERO STARS to Apple for mangling the linefeeds and other whitespace in this review, making technical feedback extremely challenging.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for the detailed review.

It definitely shouldn’t take as long as that to get a result - it should be instant.

It looks like I missed updating the documentation on this tool (sorry) but it should now return the result directly in Shortcuts without having to open the Toolbox Pro app and use the clipboard.