iOS Shortcuts for journalists
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 story file 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.
The lede
Three things that stop costing you the afternoon
No feature tour. What changes between the interview and the filed copy.
Without Grape
The quote is on a recording you have not had time to transcribe.
The story you dropped in March is in a folder you no longer open.
The documents are in four apps and the copy is in a fifth.
With Grape
The quote is text before you are back at the desk
Record on the phone, get the transcript in the note, and pull the line you need straight into the draft.
Reopen a story you dropped in March
Ask your notes what you had on a subject and get the answer with the note attached.
Keep the background in the same place as the copy
Documents, PDFs, links and your own notes sit in one folder rather than four apps.
On the job
What that looks like for journalists
Three points in a story where the app saves the hour.
In the field
Record, tag the note with the story slug, and move on to the next call.
Back at the desk
Read the transcript, mark the usable quotes and draft in the same note.
Six months later
Search the archive by what happened rather than what you named the file.
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.
Questions
Questions Before You Install It
The rest of them live in the help center.
- How protected are my notes and sources?
- Grape keeps everything in a local database on your device unless you switch sync on. It is not a secure comms tool and it makes no legal claim about source protection, so treat it the way you would treat any notebook you carry.
- How accurate is transcription?
- Good enough to work from and to search, not good enough to publish without checking. Always listen back before you quote.
- 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.
File the story the same day.
Transcripts, background, quotes and the thread you have been pulling for months, all searchable by meaning while the deadline is still hours away.
macOS
Windows
Linux
iPhone
Android