In the course of reading Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths and related titles, a few of the books make many, passing references to various Earths of DC’s Multiverse — Justice League Incarnate and Dark Crisis: The Big Bang in Tales From Dark Crisis are two of those.
I’m a sucker for looking these up — figuring out what Earth it is, gleaning all the little nuances and the origins of the characters and so on. I’ve been using the excellent DC Database Fandom site to do it — here’s their entry on Earth-32, for instance.
It didn’t take me long to notice that their “Earth” entries have for the most part the same URL with different numbers appended. And as an avowed macOS and iOS Shortcuts app fan, when I see a serial URL like this, that says “Shortcuts!” to me.
The shortcut is not particularly complex, making it a good starter shortcut if you’ve never used the Shortcuts app before. The concept is simple enough that I’m sure this could be translated to Tasker for Android or a basic JavaScript bookmarklet if you needed to.
1. Ask for Input
I have this set to “Ask for Number” with the prompt “Which Earth?”
2. Open URLs
The open parameter here is https://dc.fandom.com/
3. Stop and Output
For testing purposes I have a “Stop and Output” block here that outputs the URL, but you hardly need it.
That’s it! With your favorite device in one hand and your favorite Multiverse-spanning comic in the other, you’ve got all you need to keep from getting confused if continuity changes under you again. Enjoy!
I love the promise and potential of iOS / MacOS Shortcuts, and as a devout Apple user, I've wanted badly to figure out what to do with Shortcuts. But I can't figure out what Shortcuts can do for me that Siri can't do it more intuitively (for me).
ReplyDeleteIt's probably a longer post on a different blog, but I'd love to hear some of your other practical Shortcuts you use regularly.
I use Shortcuts constantly — I don't think it's an exaggeration to say I use a shortcut almost every time I open my phone. And yet I don't use Siri all that much and don't necessarily find Siri intuative, so I'm interested to hear some of what you use Siri for, too.
DeleteTo give one example of my Shortcuts use, when I get in my car, I have a shortcut that I run from a home screen widget that connects my phone to my car Bluetooth, turns my Wi-Fi off (since I'm away from Wi-Fi in my car) and sets my Focus Mode to a custom driving mode (specific lock screen, specific home screen, etc.). Those are three things I think I could do individually with Siri, but I can do them with just the press of one button with Shortcuts, and I think I could also trigger that shortcut by saying the name of it to Siri, too.
And then something like the shortcut in this post, again I think I could trigger it with Siri once I made it in Shortcuts (Siri would ask me which Earth and then would open the URL) but there's no way I could get Siri to open that custom URL without setting it up first in Shortcuts. Does that make sense?