SSPai Shares Three Apple Shortcuts Automations to Ease Back-to-School Life

The first shortcut is a motion-activated alarm. After an alarm is dismissed or postponed, it uses the "Get Physical Activity" action to check whether the iPhone is still stationary. If it is, the shortcut assumes the user is still in bed and adds more alarms labeled "Wake up," repeating until motion is detected. This prevents turning off all alarms while lying in bed. The article notes that, in a dormitory, users should disable the alarm sound and keep only vibration to avoid waking roommates.

The second shortcut calculates the current academic week. Users first set a fixed course start date. By using the "Get duration between dates" action, the shortcut measures how many days have passed and converts it into a week number. Because different schools may define teaching weeks differently, the formula can be adjusted to match local rules.

The third and most detailed section describes automatic homework collection through email. A mail automation filters messages with relevant subject names, saves attachments into a specified "Homework" folder, and counts the files. When the count equals the class size, the shortcut can compress the folder and notify the user. It could even send the compressed archive to the teacher, but the article says the automatic send-mail action currently has a bug, so users must tap send manually. Lock-screen phones may also cause the mail form to fail, so the author suggests removing automatic sending from the automation and running a separate command.

The article also warns that Shortcuts automations are not perfectly reliable. If the folder contains, for example, 29 files for a class of 30, it might simply mean one attachment was not saved because of a failed run. Thus, when the file count approaches the class size, the shortcut should re-check the number of emails and compare it with the number of saved files. If they differ, missing attachments can be re-saved with overwrite enabled. A known bug garbles Chinese filenames when re-saving compressed files, so a fallback is to find which student's file failed and handle it manually. If the counts match, the workflow can still identify who has not submitted by comparing each name in a text list of classmates against filenames in the folder. For missing students, it can send WeChat reminders. Since the "send WeChat message" action requires a contact, phone number, or email, the author provides a workaround: force-convert the text to a phone-number type before passing it to the action.

Additionally, the article highlights a setup issue for users on iOS versions before 27. In those versions, automations and shortcuts were separate, and when an automation provides input such as an email attachment, the shortcut must be configured first as a blank file, then attached to the automation, and then the "Get Input from Shortcut" action can be correctly set to receive the attachment. Without this order, the shortcut may not accept the automation's output.