Unauthoritative Pronouncements

Here’s another “Joe complains about Shortcuts” post for you. Last time I complained about not being able to reverse a list. This time I’m complaining about how Shortcuts handles time zones. I know time zones are the bane of every programmer’s existence, but I’m not going to give the Shortcuts team a break because they have all the time zone data, they just implemented it in the worst way they could think of.

First, let’s talk briefly about the part that’s not Shortcuts so you can understand where it will slot in.

I automated part of the Python script that generates my blog to do so without me having to log in over SSH and run the script myself. More on that in a future post. This was so I could write posts on-the-go. Here I am, posting al fresco, from my iPhone. The thing is, I wanted it to generate the date and time that I include in the YAML front matter of my blog.

Here’s an example of the YAML, a yample, if you will:

Title: [Title Here] Date: 2025-03-30 14:55:00 Author: joe-steel Category: text

It’s not a wild date and time format. It’s ISO 8601, and the system is expects it localized to my home time zone, which is in Los Angeles. That can either be PDT or PST, and it’s handled flawlessly by Python’s pytz library without any fiddly intervention from me. I want to be able to write the time out myself by hand if I so choose, and have the time and date be recognizable for me.

Shortcuts can generate the current date and time from the Date action. It can even be formatted to ISO8601 with the Format Date actions built-in “ISO8601” setting. Except there’s one teeny tiny issue: There is no way to get the current time in Los Angeles.

The Convert Time Zone action can only convert from cities in the predefined list of cities that are either capitals, or important cities. It doesn’t understand named time zones, like PST or PDT. So if you thought you were going to be clever about this by using the named time zone from the Format Date’s “Z” output then you’re going to be disappointed. It’ll say EST or EDT and there’s nothing you can do with that information at all in Convert Time Zone.

Who cares about named time zones, amirite? Picking cities is way better. Except, Convert Time Zone can’t understand or interpret just any city either. For example: If I was in Orlando, that is not in the list or preprogrammed cities, and can’t be used, but Miami, New York, Washington D.C., etc can be used. You can’t feed it Orlando as text input or anything. It will fail.

This is extremely unhelpful.

To get around this I used Date which was fed to Format Date, that was set to just get the GMT offset from the current time date-time output with “Z” and then regex (shudders) to get only the hour. That gets multiplied by -1, and fed to Adjust Date which adjusts the original Date object to remove the offset. I now have a date-time object with no offset.

I knew “Los Angeles” was in my previous list of cities so I could now use a Convert Time Zone action to convert to Los Angeles but I couldn’t pick “London” - it has it’s own time shenanigans, and there’s no Greenwich, or GMT. I asked Gemini which city has no offset, and it’s Accra, Ghana.

Save that little nugget for your next trivial pursuit game. Now that it was converted by math to GMT I could convert by “user friendly” Convert Time Zone from Accra to Los Angeles and then format the output any way I liked.

More like Apple Longcuts, amirite?

When I posted about all this on Mastodon, Elliot Shank pointed out that there was no need to use Accra because GMT was an ancient relic and I should be using UTC. There is, in the list of cities, UTC. Sure, when you search GMT it should probably return UTC, but that’s probably incredibly difficult to implement in a search function.

However, all that I got from that was that I could change Accra to UTC. I still needed to do all the rest of this bologna to get the current time in Los Angeles. So… my complaint stands.

Stephen Robles had another suggestion to use a web site’s api, but it’s just another approach that uses as many round-rect blocks of user-friendly time wasting as mine.

Am I asking for too much? Am I reaching for the stars here? Shortcuts is our only first-party automation platform on iOS, and only cross-platform one that can work on all of Apple’s platforms and it’s still lacking in the basics. You can’t find anything you’re looking for, and because of its nature you can’t easily find help.

Shortcuts has the thin veneer of user-friendliness applied to it, but under that it’s not just unfriendly many things simply aren’t possible and there’s no way of knowing. You just have to build a thing and grope around for anything that seems remotely applicable. I can’t believe the future of automation is tied to App Intents which are tied to Shortcuts and Siri. How will any of that help when Shortcuts can’t get the basics right?