I’ve played Pokémon since 1998, but there are still some types of Pokémon I’m never quite sure how to battle. If I’m battling a fire 🔥 Pokémon it’s pretty obvious– use water 💧! But what about a dark type?

I wish I could ask Siri for all my Pokémon battle on-the-go type matchup needs. Sadly, if you ask her, she directs you to a web search. And who has time for that?

But now I can create my own Siri commands with Glitch and the new iOS Shortcuts app. Well, new-ish; the Shortcuts app is really just a new version of Workflow, an automation app created in 2014. Apple bought it in 2017. With the rename, it also gets something Workflow didn’t have: Siri integration.

Each Shortcut is almost like a little spell 🧙🏼‍♀️ you can cast to do a task. You build Shortcuts from “Actions” such as:

• Creating an image 🌠
• Rearranging text 📝
• Tweeting 📢🐦
• Add an event to your calendar 📆
• And recording video (which can come in handy for serious stuff, like getting pulled over by the police!)

It’s a little like programming because you can use stuff from one Action and pass it to another. For example, taking the title of a calendar event and tweeting it. Or taking two images and making one image out of them.

Where Glitch comes in is as a handy tool for:

• Advanced processing of data grabbed by a Shortcut Action.
• Capturing data from somewhere else to use in your shortcut.

Together, iOS Shortcuts and Glitch are a powerful duo. We’ll show you some examples of what people have already created using Shortcuts and Glitch. Then I’ll walk you through, step-by-step, an example Glitch-powered Shortcut that you can remix to create your own.

Glitch-Powered Shortcuts 👋🏽

We got inspired by these two nifty Glitch projects:

Chapel Pews ⛪️

If you uninstall the News App on your iOS device, every time you visit an apple.news link it will be broken 😭

Luckily you can open it with the Chapel Pews shortcut by Ashur. It passes the URL to Glitch, then Glitch tries to find the link to the HTML article. If it finds it, it will redirect you to the article. If it doesn’t, it will show a nifty error page that will tell you how to reinstall news.

TV Airtime 📺

When is “Game of Thrones” on next? This Shortcut by WilsonSmith asks you what show you want to know about, then passes it Glitch. Then the Glitch application grabs some data from Nextair.tv to tell you when it’s on next! Nice!

Creating our Super Effective Shortcut ⚡️

But how does it all work? Well, the secret is that you can pass text from Shortcuts to Glitch by adding it to the end of the Glitch app URL.

For example

super-effective.glitch.me/DATA

For my shortcut, I want it to take a Pokémon type and pass it to the Glitch app, so it would be

super-effective.glitch.me/TYPE-OF-POKEMON

I get the Pokémon type by adding the Action “dictate text.” This means Siri asks me what type I want to know about, then Shortcuts can use whatever I say in Shortcuts Actions.

Now let’s tell it to use the results and put them at the end of the URL of my Glitch app. To do that let’s use the “URL” Action.

And guess what’s an option to put at the end of the URL? The text we just collected from our “dictate text” Action.

And finally, grab the contents of our fancy ✨ new URL with the “Get Contents of URL” Action.

This is how we pass it to Glitch. How? Well, my app was created from “New Project” → Node Express. So it’s built off of Express.

Express is a “web framework.” What’s important to us is it can serve our website and do our things based on the “route” at the end of the URL.

For example

super-effective.glitch.me/dark

Passes “dark” to our Glitch application. ” What is it going to do with it? It’s going to query the PokéAPI. Yes, there’s an API for Pokémon! It started as a simple weekend project, but now it has almost everything you could ever want to know about Pokémon. Not just Pokémon, but berries, items, and of course what we need: type matchup info. Check out the results for “dark” to see the type of data we’ll be working with.

I called the API using “pokedex-promise-v2”, a nice little tool that allows me to query the PokéAPI with just a few lines of code.

let P = new Pokedex();
P.getTypeByName(type)

Once it gets back the data, I use plain Javascript to take the data and turn it into a sentence that Siri can say.

Now, back to our Shortcut. Let’s add the “Speak Text” Action and “add to Siri” which means when we say “Super Effective” to Siri, it will trigger our new shortcut.

It will then ask me what ‘type’ I need to know about. Once I tell it, the Glitch app does its thing. Finally, Siri tells me what types of Pokémon are super effective against Dark!

📣“fighting, bug and fairy are super effective against dark.”📣

Of course you can use the PokéAPI in Shortcuts without Glitch if you want, but that requires building a much more complicated Shortcut. I also like that I can use my Glitch app as a plain old-fashioned website or tool for other devices like Alexa.

Want to create your own Glitch-powered iOS Shortcuts? Well, our Super Effective app is remixable 🎤🎶! Just click “remix” and start coding. Here are some ideas:

• Want to know what types of Pokémon are effective against a specific Pokémon like Snorlax? Use Shortcuts to get a Pokémon name and then use the PokéAPI in Glitch to find out what type are effective against it.
• Use Shortcuts to pass a food name to Glitch. Then Query an API like Nutritionix or the USDA to get information about it on the go.
• Want to go super fancy? Create your own API in Glitch to use with Shortcuts!

We can’t wait to see what you create!

Creating Super Effective iOS Shortcuts with Glitch was originally published in Glitch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last month Twitter started buzzing with anger about a Katie Roiphe piece in Harper’s potentially outing the creator of the “Shitty Media Men” list. I had to Google her because I’d never heard of her before. The results page sprawled with bylines from The New York Times, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Esquire.

I’m a member of a private Facebook group for women writers and I see these publications in many of their “pitching dream publications” lists. That’s lists of places they pitch their writing to in the hope of one day getting an article there. Pitching is a process where you send out your articles and article ideas to editors, who receive so many pitches they will probably never even see yours. You keep trying anyway.

But I’m sorry Sarah from Kentucky. Or Samantha from Arizona. You could write as well as Herman Melville and the odds of you getting into Harper’s is as likely as winning the lottery.

I’ll tell you why. Just look at the “images” tab from my Google search on Katie Roiphe. A lot of the pictures are from society pages. These are publications or sections that have professional photos from fancy events that you and I aren’t invited to. Like charity galas that only invite people who are famous or who pay $250+ a ticket.

Sarah from Kentucky is one of 10,000 pitch emails the Harper’s editor gets. It’s a lot easier to get the attention of the Harper’s Editor if you’re across the room from them at a party. Katie Roiphe lives in NYC, she’s upper class. Her parents were notable people. She went to an Ivy League school. That doesn’t make her a better writer, but that gives her unparalleled access to the gate keepers of writing.

It’s a form of industry-wide nepotism that favors upper class white people from big expensive cities. Once you’re part of that, you can do almost anything and never have to worry about the consequences. For example, see the number of these people who have plagiarism scandals and are back to the prestige bylines within months.

David Sirota on Twitter

Amazing stat: 54 percent of all "national" journalism job openings are in NY or DC (and yet some people still somehow wonder why so many Americans in the heartland think the media does not reflect their concerns, values, perspective and/or interests) https://t.co/lWg2s19toX

Roiphe didn’t even have to pitch. Harper’s asked her to write the piece.

It’s no wonder so many writers are looking outside that world and publishing on places where there are no gate keepers.

Like Medium.

But there is an element of snobbery against Medium among establishment editors and writers. Anyone can publish in Medium. Most pieces are unedited. That means there are of course bad pieces. But Medium is also home to a lot of great writing, even if a lot of it doesn’t have the polish an editor would give it.

Sarah Jones on Twitter

Actually, my important male friends are good!" It's a Medium post in fancier clothes

I think Medium is a step in the right direction for the industry. A place where a writer from anywhere can get their pieces out there and maybe even get paid for them. It’s a shame they face an obstacle when they can’t use them as clips when pitching for fear of facing snobbery.

Katie Roiphe has been publishing the same reactionary schtick for over a decade now. And establishment publications keep hiring her over and over. I find it hard to believe that she’s the best person for the job. The same subject has been covered on Medium better by a more interesting and diverse group of voices. Katie Roiphe’s article in Harper’s seems stale in comparison.

They didn’t even have to be dishonest to sources the way Katie Roiphe did:

Roiphe had emailed me to ask if I wanted to comment for a Harper’s story she was writing on the “feminist moment.” She did not say that she knew I had created the spreadsheet.

And Roiphe did that because she can. Because she knows she can do anything and still have those sweet bylines.

EverywhereAllTheTime on Twitter

White women having their (shitty) #AzizAnsari takes pubbed in NYT and the Atlantic over WOC's better ones in Medium + indie sites is telling

It’s telling that there is more stigma for Medium posts then there is for industry nepotism. I think it should be the other way around.

Unless you live until a rock, you’ve probably seen it on social media: someone’s selfie paired with a painting matched to their face. It’s from the Google Arts & Culture app. I downloaded it and was excited to try it for myself.

Kumail Nanjiani on Twitter

Hey this one ain't so bad.

But I couldn’t find it. The app was full of stuff but these selfie feature was nowhere to be seen. A quick search took me to this article, where I learned I was possibly Gen X and/or dense

Google's Free App Analyzes Your Selfie and Then Finds Your Doppelganger in Museum Portraits

Alas, some disgruntled users (probably Gen X-ers and Baby Boomers) are giving the Google Arts & Culture app (iPhone-Android) one-star reviews, based on their inability to find the only feature for which they downloaded it.

I followed their directions to no avail.

Until I realized my problem wasn’t my age or ability to find things, but the fact I was in Chicago.

See the feature is location limited. And it seems like that means a lot of major coastal cities like New York City have it, but Chicago does not.

And the fact that so few journalists are in the Midwest has lead to condescending articles blaming users.

This is very sad. In the Midwest we do not have art so Google should have tried testing it here. Maybe we could have learned a bit about an art or two? It would also make sense to test a big feature in a smaller market. I do not have much art experience due to living in the Midwest, but I used to work in software and this is usually how we tested things.

Instead, the app just ends up making us feel left out and there it’s only for coastal. We Midwesterners tend to be a bit insecure.

Well Google, I hope you will deign to someday let us use this feature. I went to NYC once and I thought art seemed pretty cool. I think my fellow Midwesterners who have never been outside our corn rich plains might also appreciate it.

IN all seriousness, comment with what state you’re in if you can’t use the app. A friend has a theory that is possibly has to do with biometric privacy laws though I think it’s just testing.