My love affair with Apple’s Shortcuts took a bit of a hit during the transition to iOS 13, but my fascination with this on-device development environment has been rekindled thanks to a new app called ToolBox Pro.

ToolBox Pro is a free iOS/iPadOS app that adds powerful new actions to Apple Shortcuts. An in-app purchase unlocks even more functionality. For the definitive write-up on this amazing app, see Federico Vitici’s exhaustive review on MacStories.

What I love about Shortcuts is that it lets me make genuinely useful tools that probably couldn’t sustain the overhead and/or dubious business model of being actual apps. I’ve shared a few of these free Shortcuts at the Prolost Store, and today I’m adding two new ones that take advantage of free features in ToolBox Pro.

Burst Slice

Burst Slice converts a photo burst from the iPhone/iPad camera into a tiled panorama. You control the size of the “slices,” which frames to use, and even the start and end crop of the slices.

I created Burst Slice before ToolBox Pro was available, but the experience wasn’t great, because Shortcuts can’t show you an image and a menu at the same time. ToolBoxPro allowed me to create a simple, visual interface to adjust the many parameters of this fun and useful tool.

Pano Man

Pano Man creates tiled panoramas for Instagram that can include multiple images. It uses that same visual UI functionality to give you pushbutton control over the padding, spacing, and cropping of the tiles.

I hope you find these tools useful. I welcome any feedback on them, and am always happy to see examples of them in use!