iOS Shortcuts for developers
Automate your notes with iOS Shortcuts
Press, tap or ask Siri. The note is saved.
Grape adds eight actions to the Shortcuts app on iPhone and iPad. A note joins a pile of runbooks and notes from an automation, the Action button or Siri without opening the app, and one press opens Grape on a recording, a scan or a blank page.
1Two actions in Shortcuts
2It runs at nine every night
3The answer joins your journal
Create Note, Add to Note and Save Web Page run in the background, without opening Grape
Open Note, Write New Note, Record Voice Note, Scan Document and Start Handwriting open the app on the job
Start them from an automation, a home screen icon, the Action button, Back Tap or Siri
Comes with Pro and Lifetime, on iPhone and iPad
A note without opening the app
Create Note takes text, a title, a folder and photos, PDFs or recordings, and saves them while you stay where you are.
Add to the note you keep
Add to Note puts text or files at the end or the top of a note you pick: a journal, a log, a shopping list.
Keep a page by its address
Save Web Page files the whole article, or just the title, a summary and the link, in the folder you name.
Straight to the job
Record Voice Note, Scan Document and Start Handwriting open Grape with the recorder, the scanner or the page already up.
It runs on its own
Tie any of them to a time of day, an alarm, a Focus, a place or an NFC tag, and it happens without a tap.
Waiting in Grape
What a shortcut saves is in your library the next time you open Grape, and with sync on, on your other devices too.
// results
Three bugs in the workflow, closed
No feature tour. What changes when your runbooks can be queried instead of grepped.
1.
You fixed this bug in March and are debugging it again from scratch.
Stop solving the same bug twice
Describe the symptom in search and get the note where you already worked it out.
2.
The decision lives in a Slack thread that scrolled away.
Keep decisions where you can defend them
Ask what you decided about a service and get the note, the date and the reasoning.
3.
The AI tool wants your notes on its server, and you want them on disk.
Point the AI at your own stack
Bring your own key, or run a local model through Ollama, and keep the workspace on disk.
// usage
What that looks like for developers
Three points in a sprint where the tool earns its slot.
Debugging
Write the symptom, the theory and the fix in one note, with the log you kept attached.
Architecture review
Record the conversation and keep the decision log next to the diagram.
New project
Keep the setup steps in a runbook that actually gets found again.
Examples
Nine Shortcuts to Start With
Each is a few actions in the Shortcuts app, and Show me how plays every step on an iPhone. The ones that save run in the background, and what they save is in Grape the next time you open it.
Every night at 9 PM
A line in your journal every night
At nine the phone asks how the day went, and the answer goes on the end of one long Journal note, a day at a time.
Ask for Text with How was today?
Add Provided Input to Journal
Action button
Record with one press
Point the Action button at Record Voice Note and one press opens Grape on a new note with the recorder already running.
Record Voice Note
Back Tap
Keep what you copied
Copy a line in any app, double tap the back of the phone, and it joins your Quotes note. Back Tap is in Settings, under Accessibility and Touch.
Get Clipboard
Add Clipboard to Quotes
Siri
Speak a note to Siri
Name the shortcut Quick note and say it to Siri. What you say next becomes a new note in Inbox, without touching the phone.
Dictate text
Create note with Dictated Text in Inbox
Weekdays at 8 AM
The day on your calendar, ready for notes
Every working morning a note in Meetings lists the events of the day, one to a line, so the notes for each have somewhere to go.
Find Calendar Events where Start Date is today
Create note with Calendar Events in Meetings
Every day at 7 AM
Morning reading from your feeds
The newest posts from a blog you follow are saved to Reading as links with a summary. Choose Article instead to keep the whole text.
Get 5 items from the feed address
Repeat with each item in Items from RSS Feed
Save Repeat Item as Link in Reading
Alarm is stopped
Morning pages when the alarm stops
Stop the alarm and Grape is open on a blank note in Morning pages, so the first thing you do with the phone is write.
Write a new note in Morning pages
Study Focus turns on
A handwriting page for study time
Turn on a Study Focus on the iPad and Grape opens on a fresh page of ruled paper, ready for the pencil.
Start Handwriting
NFC tag
A sticker on the paper tray
Touch the phone to an NFC sticker on the in tray and the scanner opens on a new note, so receipts and letters stop piling up.
Scan Document
The rest of the app
What Else Grape Does
Every part of the app is built around the same idea: keep what you write, and hand it back when you need it.
// faq
Questions Before You Install It
The rest of them live in the help center.
- Can I run the AI locally?
- Yes. Grape connects to Ollama and LM Studio as well as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, DeepSeek, Grok and OpenRouter, and you can add any OpenAI compatible endpoint yourself.
- How does it handle technical notes?
- Inline code, tables, checklists, Markdown paste that keeps formatting, and export back out to Markdown when you want the note somewhere else.
- What is Grape, in one paragraph?
- Grape is a note app for Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone and Android with AI built into the middle of it rather than bolted on the side. You write, record and collect things the normal way, and then you can search by meaning, ask questions about your own notes, and turn any note into a summary, a set of flashcards, a quiz or a mind map.
- What makes it different from other note apps?
- Most note apps treat AI as an extra panel. In Grape the agent works on your workspace: it can read, create, edit, move, tag and delete notes, and every answer points back to the note it came from. Semantic search, voice transcription, flashcards, quizzes, mind maps and the drawing canvas all live inside the editor rather than in separate tools.
- Where do my notes actually live?
- On your device, in a local database, and you can choose where that file sits. Nothing needs to leave your machine for the app to work. If you turn on sync with a Sync or Pro plan, your notes are also stored in the cloud so your devices can stay in step. On Lifetime they sync through your own Dropbox or Google Drive instead, and Grape never sees them.
- Do I need an account to use it?
- No. Download the app and start writing. You only need an account for the paid plans, which is where cross device sync and built in AI come in.
Find it next time it breaks.
Runbooks, architecture decisions and the fix you worked out at midnight, in a local library you can search by meaning and keep offline.