Tricks With Your Phone

Tricks With Your Phone www.marckerstein.
com
Tricks With Your Phone

Hello!
I am Marc. I’m a magician and app developer in London, England. I’ve
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developed a few iPhone apps for magicians including one called “WikiTest”
and one called “Earworm”.
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Thank you for buying this PDF. Over the next few virtual pages, I’ll be
teaching you a few new tricks that you’ll be able to do with your iPhone.
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And more importantly, I’ll even teach you how to make your own.
Intro gm
Every year since the release of the App Store in 2008, Apple has allowed
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developers to join the iPhone Beta Software program. Developers who sign
up can download pre-release versions of iOS (or, “betas”). Each beta lets
developers test and develop their apps on the next version of iOS before
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it gets released for all users, giving them some extra time to catch any
issues with their software that may have appeared. As with all beta
software, bugs and glitches often plague the early versions, sometimes
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making phones unusable for a few months. As Apple themselves write on the
beta program’s FAQ page:
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“Install the beta software only on non-production devices that are not
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business critical. We strongly recommend installing on a secondary system

or device.”
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Betas have given my phone a number of issues over the years, including
being temporarily unable to make or receive phone calls, having apps and
folders randomly disappear from the home screen, being generally laggy,
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randomly freezing or restarting itself, and even totally unreadable text

across the entire iOS (which made upgrading to the next beta where the
issue was fixed incredibly difficult!)
Each year I promise myself not to install the beta of the next version of
iOS on my personal phone, but, perhaps stupidly, I always end up doing
so.
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Tricks With Your Phone www.marckerstein.com
However, every once in a while, the beta includes a new feature which
turns out to be incredibly useful, making many of the inevitable pre-
release software woes a little more tolerable.
I think this is one of those years. Over the past 3 months, I’ve been
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beta testing early versions of iOS 12 in anticipation of its release.
With it, comes a new app called “Shortcuts”.
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Shortcuts is Apple’s automation app for iOS 12. It can work with Siri,
Safari, its own widget and more, and lets the user build and run
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automated workflows. As a simple example: with just a tap of a widget,
you can quickly download a YouTube video, convert part of it to an
animated gif, and send it to a friend. Or, say you’re late to a party.
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You can simply tell Siri “I’m late” and have Shortcuts automatically:
1. Determine where you are.

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2. Look up where your scheduled event is.
3. Calculate the travel time between the two (12 minutes, for example).
4. Look up the organiser of the event (let’s say this person is “Ryan”).
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5. Get Ryan’s phone number.

6. Compose and automatically send the message to Ryan’s phone number:
“Hi Ryan - I’m running behind by 12 minutes. I’ll see you there!”
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Here’s a little peek at how this shortcut might appear in the Shortcuts
app:
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Do take some time to look through the above workflow. Even this
relatively simple task takes up a large amount of screen space. It first
obtains the required information (with actions titled “Find Calendar
Events Where”, “Find Contacts Where”, “Get Travel Time”), sets everything
required for the reveal as variables (with the “Set Variable” actions),
and then finally composes a message with the information populated.
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Don’t worry if you don’t fully understand all of this just yet - that’s
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what this PDF is for!
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I hope it’s obvious by now that this could all be used for the benefit of
magic. With the ever increasing popularity of digital magic, apps are
enabling magicians to perform pretty great effects using just their
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phones. We also exploit little iOS quirks or even mathematical principles
(such as “TOXIC”) for tricks, too. However, with iOS 12 and the Shortcuts
app, we now have the ability to create custom scripts on our phones to
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automatically send messages, we can program different responses for Siri
to dictate based on what we ask, we can have our phone automatically
download photos or create images and instantly send them to a spectator.
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We can even override standard Siri commands so they apparently do one

thing but secretly do something else, and much more. All of this allows
us to create and perform a huge number of new effects that take advantage
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of Apple’s new, free app.
Over the course of this PDF, I’ll be detailing some tricks that use the
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Shortcuts app that I think are noteworthy. I’ll give you the actual
shortcuts that are used in each case, so you don’t have to build them
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yourselves, though I hope I’ll also be giving you the knowledge and
inspiration to create your own. For those who are interested in doing
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such things, I’ve created a Facebook Group

(https://www.facebook.com/groups/732918907055403/) for all to share their
magic-related shortcuts, the best of which will be featured (and of
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course, credited) on my Shortcuts site (https://marc.ph/shortcuts).
Anyway. Download the Shortcuts app from the following link and let’s get
started.
https://marc.ph/shortcuts 
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Website Tricks
Shortcuts can be called from webpages, where they can read or modify
their content, which is incredibly useful. (Any modifications to the site
are temporary until closing that tab, and are only local to your own
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device. Don’t expect to be able to modify the news for the entire planet,
or something, for example).
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When performing magic with phones, I tend to favour effects that use the
spectator’s phone where possible, and the apps I sell pretty much all
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adhere to that philosophy. However, if you have a note, photo or a phone
number on your phone that the spectator obviously wouldn’t have on
theirs, then using your own phone makes sense. And so long as it feels
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casual and there’s no implication that the phone is doing the work, I
think it’s reasonable to use your own phone if it offers the path of
least resistance to the content your trick requires. Navigating to a
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website from your bookmarks to show someone a photo or some text is far
more straightforward than finding out the web address on your own phone
and then dictating it to your spectator. It’s probably worth thinking
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about these things when creating your own shortcuts, too.

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Setup
To setup the ability to call a shortcut from Safari, do the following:
1. Tap Safari’s “action button” (the bottom middle icon, as shown below).
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Two or three rows of icons will appear.

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2. Scroll across the bottom row of icons all the way to the right to
reveal the option “More”.
3. In the list that appears, find “Shortcuts” and make sure the switch is
turned on. If “Shortcuts” doesn’t appear, double check that you
installed the app on your phone (as per the previous page).
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4. Use the drag handle on the right of the switch to drag the Shortcuts
option to the top of the list.
5. Press “Done”.
6. Swipe the bottom row of icons back to the beginning. The Shortcuts
option should now be first.
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To use the Shortcuts Safari action, tap the same middle icon from any
webpage. Then tap “Shortcuts” and you’ll see the list of shortcuts that
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are compatible with Safari.
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Impromptu Book Test With Any Website
The Effect:
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Have your friend take your phone, open Safari, and navigate to any
website - perhaps one where they usually read the news.
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You explain how you can read and remember things really fast. To
demonstrate, you take the phone for a few seconds and start
scrolling through the page, murmuring to yourself as you do.
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“Done!” you proudly say. “Here - just think of any one of the words
on the page, and lock the phone as soon as you have one. Make it a
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longer word so it’s harder for me to get.”
They do so. You ask “Roughly where on the page was the word?” They
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tell you. “Hmm… there were quite a few words there. What letter did
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yours start with?” Let’s say they say “P”.
“I see. That section was definitely something about politics.

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That’s not the word, though. I think your word is ‘Presidential’.

No, it’s ‘President!’”
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Naturally, your spectator collapses with amazement as you are

indeed correct.
The Method:
“JavaScript”, for those who don’t know, is a programming language
that’s often used on the web. Wikipedia describes it as “one of the
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three core technologies of the World Wide Web”. Almost all websites
use it to add or modify content or functionality. Luckily for us,
one can also execute JavaScript code on a webpage locally to change
things as we see fit.
Shortcuts lets us run JavaScript very easily. To prepare, grab the
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“Book test” shortcut from my Shortcuts site
(https://marc.ph/shortcuts).
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The shortcut uses JavaScript to replace all 6 or longer-letter
words on the page with one of 26 force words, depending on the
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letter it originally started with. Therefore, if you know the first
letter of your spectator’s thought-of word, you’ll know the word
they’re thinking of (with thanks to U.F. Grant and Ted Karmilovich
for this principle).
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In performance, proceed with the effect as written. When taking the

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phone from your spectator, begin scrolling up and down as if you’re

apparently learning the page. As soon as the screen is out of your
spectator’s sight, tap Safari’s “action button” (as shown a couple
of pages back) and then tap “Shortcuts”, followed by the “Book
test” shortcut.
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When doing this the first time, you may receive a prompt. If so,
tap “Yes” or “OK”. The webpage will then have all of its long words
replaced with one of the following 26 words:
Word Word
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Assignment Nightmare
Behind Original
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Controversial President
Desperate Quantum
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Eventually Revealed
Foundation Surprising
Growth
Happiness
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Understanding
Inside Vacancies
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Jurisdiction Weather
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Kingdom Xenophobic
Living Yourself
Million Zombie
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(Almost all of these words were generated by statistical analysis

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of recent news articles to see which words came up most regularly

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for each letter of the alphabet.)
You’ll need to learn these 26 words for the trick. I tried to make
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a phrase out of them to help you, but it’s awful, so if you happen
to figure one out, let me know and I’ll include it on the site. You
could also make a crib in your notes app and multitask to that,
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though learning the words would still probably be best.
Anyway. At a quick glance, the webpage should still look fairly

normal, though this will of course depend on the site that you’re
on. Either way, when having the spectator think of a word, don’t
let them linger and put time pressure on them so that they don’t
read too much of the text. The specific instruction to “just think
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of a word” will help - you want to rush them a little bit, but not
to the point that it feels suspicious.
Don’t worry too much here though; since the short words are not
replaced, many words on the page will still relate to the article
in question, making the page still appear regular at a brief
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glance.
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As in the effect, you ask where on the page the word was. This
serves only the premise - the word will be one of the 26 force
words regardless, but it makes sense for you to ask this in order
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to tell them the word, as you apparently memorised the page.
The rest is easy. You get the first letter, and as each word starts
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with a different letter of the alphabet, you’ll therefore know the
thought-of word.
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Notes:
- Some webpages use JavaScript to load content on their pages as you
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scroll them, giving the illusion that they load faster than they do
(a design pattern called “lazy loading”). The shortcut, however,
only affects content that’s already been loaded on the page. So,
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when scrolling up and down as you’re “learning” the page, make sure
to actually scroll as far down the page as you can first before
running the shortcut to ensure that it does change every word on
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the page.
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- Instead of performing this as a memory feat, you could present it

as a mind-reading effect. Once you learn the first letter (by
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simply asking or otherwise), you can reveal the word in any manner
you like.
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- To clean up, just refresh the page, and all text will revert back
to normal.
- Do be aware that whilst all loaded text on the page will change,
text that is rendered in images won’t be modified by this shortcut.
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- If you prefer, you could secretly run the shortcut on the page when
apparently navigating the site. Then, open a new tab in Safari and
load the same site again. You’ll now have two tabs open; one with
all of its text replaced (the non-active tab) and the other with
the normal text (the current tab). Show the normal text version to
the spectator as described and then, when apparently memorising the
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page, tap and hold the bottom right “tabs” button and then tap
“Close This Tab”, causing it to switch to the force page to have a
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word selected. Again, to clean up, just refresh the page.
- And lastly, this is essentially a “lite” version of my WikiTest
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app. WikiTest lets you perform an extensive version of this type of
trick with a few extra bits of method. It has extra features and
subtleties, it uses Wikipedia and the spectator’s phone rather than
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your own. If you like the idea of this kind of trick, I reckon
you’ll like WikiTest. It’s good, I think.
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(Download WikiTest here: https://marc.ph/apps/wikitest).
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Bonus Tricks & Making Your Own

Whilst the above book test effect uses JavaScript, I don’t expect you to
start learning and writing JavaScript code for effects like this. (Though
if you do, you could create a great deal of awesome tricks!)
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However, as described earlier, the Shortcuts app makes it easy to drag
and drop modular actions into a list to do various other tasks that don’t
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require any coding knowledge.
Apple have published an incredibly thorough guide on how to make your own
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shortcuts. The guide is available here:
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios
I’d thoroughly recommend reading through it, or at the very least,
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familiarising yourself with the “Shortcuts at a glance” section as well
as the “How do shortcuts work?” page to understand exactly how the
Shortcuts app works and what actions are available to use.
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Over the rest of this PDF, I’ll talk about different ways shortcuts can
be invoked (rather than just from Safari) and show you a couple of
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effects that are possible as a result. In each case I’ll show you how
I’ve built the shortcuts technically, and give you ideas and methods for
you to use when building your own.
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Siri
In some tricks involving Siri, Siri will take the credit for the effect.
Of course, I don’t expect your spectator to believe that Siri can
actually read minds, but given the tricks remain methodologically strong,
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your spectator will still be fooled. (These are therefore somewhat
“Jerxonian” in nature, as it’ll often still be you who gets the credit
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for the trick. More info from The Jerx at
http://www.thejerx.com/blog/2018/8/9/gardyloo-69).
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Alongside the Shortcuts app, Apple are providing new settings in iOS 12
that modify Siri. Third party apps can now also bring more functionality
and personalisation to Siri, meaning that everyone’s Siri will soon be
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capable of different things, too… so hey, maybe a demonstration of mind-
reading is one of them.
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(It’s at least worth bearing in mind that it’s now certainly reasonable
for your Siri to respond differently to someone else’s!)
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Siri Knows Your Card
The Effect:
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Have your spectator (let’s call him “George”) take a face-up deck
of cards and openly select one he feels drawn to.
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You then take out your phone as you tell George that Siri has been
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learning to figure out what card someone’s likely to choose. You

have George ask Siri “What card did I pick?”
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Siri responds:
“Is that George? Hmm… Let me think… Based on your interaction with
Marc over the last year, I’d imagine you’d select a black card.
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I’ll finish analysing your messages and I’ll send you what I’m
thinking. Check your phone shortly.”
A few seconds later, George receives a message on his phone which

reads:
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“Hey George, it’s Marc’s Siri here. I’m not completely sure, but
it’s either the two of clubs or the two of spades. Probably the two
of clubs.”
The Method:
Firstly, go and grab my WebFX app if you don’t already have it by
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tapping here: (https://marc.ph/apps/webfx) or searching for “WebFX”
on the App Store. I’ve temporarily made it free, so no excuses.
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Put simply, the app allows you to secretly input a playing card
into your phone which appears in a photo on the spectator’s phone.
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You’re going to repurpose that method for this effect.
Set up an account within the app, and take a note of your chosen
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username. You’ll also need to download the “Siri Card Message”
shortcut from my site over at https://marc.ph/shortcuts.
When importing the shortcut, you’ll initially be asked for your
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WebFX username, your first name, and then the contact of the person
you’ll be performing this to. (You’ll need them in your contacts
anyway as you’ll be messaging them, so do make sure you have their
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number saved first. Be sure also to change this contact to your new
spectator each time you perform. More on that soon).
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You’ll also need to record a Siri phrase to trigger the shortcut.

You can do this by tapping the top right icon in the shortcut, and
then tapping “Siri Phrase”:
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Here, you can record the phrase that will cause this shortcut to be
called. In this case we’re using “What card did I pick”.
Now you’re ready to perform the effect. Have WebFX opened to the
“Perform” screen with the basic input open (or if you paid for the
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upgrade, any of the built in inputs. My favourite is “Card Swipe”).
Have your iPhone in your pocket with the screen facing outwards.
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Proceed with the effect as described above and input the selected
card into the app by placing your finger in your pocket and tapping
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the screen.
(WebFX’s instructions explain the basic input method in more
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detail, but in short: you’ll first input the value into the screen
by tapping the screen, followed by a swipe, and then input the suit
by tapping. The seven of diamonds, for instance, would be 7 taps
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for the value, a swipe across the screen for “of”, and then 4 taps
for “diamonds”. The “card swipe” input is a little more efficient
for higher cards, but all input methods essentially do the same
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job).
And that’s pretty much all of the method taken care of. The
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shortcut deals with the rest: it stores the card’s colour and the
name of its mate, then automatically messages your spectator. You
can now proceed with the effect as described: Take out your phone
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and hold down the Siri button as you have your spectator ask “What
card did I pick?”. Siri will then respond and send the necessary
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message.
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Notes:
- Do not have the spectator name the card out loud. Even though we’re
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not using voice recognition for the method, the fact that Siri is
involved in the presentation will give the spectator a plausible
method for the effect. (This is even the case when you’re not using
Siri in a digital trick - it’s best to anticipate and avoid any
feasible methods where possible).
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- If you have a card selected from a marked deck of cards, you can
perform the effect seemingly without knowing the card and just have
Siri reveal it. I suspect this would be stronger. Or use a stacked
deck, if you prefer.
- If you like, you could skip Siri’s response and just have your
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spectator say “Send me my playing card”. Siri will simply respond,
“Done!” or sometimes, “Okay!”, and your spectator will receive a
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message saying, “Probably the two of hearts” (or whatever you’d
like the response to be).
- If you ask Siri to “pick a card,” it’ll respond with a random
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playing card - your spectator can try it on their phone too. You
could create your own shortcut and override the phrase “pick a
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card” to have Siri instead name a pre-determined force card, or
even whichever card you last input into WebFX.
- To hide the superfluous text that appears on screen when running a

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shortcut, touch and hold the screen and drag your finger up
slightly to keep Siri scrolled up a little bit. Or, use the phone
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with the screen facing downwards when talking to Siri.
- Note that you should press and hold the Siri button to begin
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talking to Siri. Using “Hey Siri” to invoke Siri sometimes causes

it to say “Running your shortcut” first.
- Similarly, Siri may say “Shortcuts says” or similar before the

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output. (The presence of this has fluctuated in the betas, and so

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it might disappear in future iOS 12 updates too). If it comes up,

don’t worry - here’s a workaround I’ve been using. It is a little
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known fact that iPhones have three different volume levels; one for
the ringtone and alert volume, one for Siri, and one for all other
sounds (including music). Before performing, ask Siri a question.
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When Siri responds, turn the Siri volume down to minimum using the
volume button on the side. In performance, when speaking to Siri,
wait a second and turn the volume back up, silencing the first few
words from the response. If you find it difficult to get the timing
right here, it may be useful to add extra words at the beginning of
Siri’s response to give yourself a little more time to do so.
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- Also, you can press the home or side button to cut off the “Done”
or “Okay!” that Siri says at the end, unless it makes sense for her
to do so. You can also add a “Wait” command at the end to have Siri
pause here - I do this in the next trick.
- Finally, to quickly set up the shortcut for a new spectator, you
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can tap “Customise Shortcut…” in the same shortcut menu that you
used to setup the Siri command in the first place.
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Technical detail:
- This shortcut begins by retrieving the first name and phone number
from your contact of choice. It then looks at what card you last
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set in WebFX (action: “Get Contents of URL”) and then sets this to
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a variable “longCard” which gets used in the reveals.
- There are two reveals; one in the “Text” action and one in the
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“Send Message” action. In both of these, the variables set over the
course of the effect are used for either Siri to dictate or for the
message that gets sent to the spectator.
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- To get your last set card from WebFX in your own effects, you can
replicate the “URL”, “Get Contents of URL”, “Set Variable” and “Get
Dictionary Value” actions to your own shortcuts. You could then
have Siri read the card aloud in your own tricks, or perhaps have
it messaged, emailed or tweeted to your spectator. Or maybe your
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phone does a Google Image search with this information, or uploads

an image to Instagram, or whatever else you can think of. 
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Siri Knows Your Coin Tosses
I sure am proud of my imaginative titles.
The Effect:
You explain that Siri can respond to the command, “flip a coin,
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please,” and will give you a random result of a coin toss. You
demonstrate this a couple of times.
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“However,” you say, “computers are really bad at picking random
numbers.”
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Perhaps you bring up this article
(https://marckerstein.com/r/shortcuts/article), as you explain:
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“The tiny variations of conditions in a real coin toss are
practically impossible for a computer to emulate. And so I’ve
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figured out what they’ve done: our phones already know so much
about us that it’s in fact easier for Siri to gather information
from its environment than it is to generate a truly random coin
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toss. Here, let me show you.”

You ask your spectator to take out a coin, and to toss it three
times. Let’s say it lands on tails, then tails again, and then
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heads.
You ask Siri: “Toss three coins.”

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Siri replies: “Sure. It’s tails, tails again, and then heads.”
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The Method:
The method here uses multiple outs depending on how you phrase the
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command that you ask Siri.
Somewhat annoyingly, the Shortcuts app currently allows only one

phrase per shortcut, and the shortcut can’t change depending on
what words were spoken. Perhaps this will change in the future. Who
knows? After all, iOS 12 is still very new.
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With this in mind, I’m using 8 shortcuts with 8 different phrases

to generate the result.
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I like the idea of using 3 coin tosses; whilst it’s quite simple
for someone to calculate there are only 8 permutations of flipping
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3 coins in order, conceptually I’ve always thought that it feels

like there should be more. So it’s a good premise to demonstrate
the idea of setting up multiple shortcuts for a single effect, but
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without having to create an unwieldily number of outs.

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My 8 phrases are in the format:

(Flip/Toss) (some/three) coins (, please).
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(H/T) (H/T) (T)

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The “please” is either said or is omitted depending on the outcome

of the final toss. For example you might say: “Toss some coins.”
Or, maybe “Flip three coins, please.”
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All 8 phrases feel quite natural, I think. Download the 8 shortcuts

from my Shortcuts page (https://marc.ph/shortcuts), and set up the
Siri phrases as before.
Here’s a handy way of remembering these:
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For the first two tosses, if you use the word beginning with “T”,
you get a tail.
The last one is a little different, but I remember it like this:

the phrases “please” and “thank you” are examples of good manners,
and “thank you” also begins with a “T”, therefore adding “please”
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results in a tail, and omitting it results in a heads.
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So, your spectator flips the coin three times. You note that the
result is HHT, for example, and so you ask Siri:
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“Flip some coins, please.”
And Siri responds:
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“Sure. It’s heads, heads again, and then tails.”
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Notes:
- As before, you could use this as a force rather than a revelation,
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using Siri’s seemingly random coin tosses for another effect.
- I intentionally say “please” when first demonstrating with one coin

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to help normalise the word if I say it again when we use three.
- I wouldn’t repeat this immediately, but if you want to, take a

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little time to say the words you’re going to use when speaking to
Siri before actually doing so. If you’ve recently said to Siri
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“toss some coins, please” and the spectator has now flipped tails,
tails, heads, you might start saying how impressive it is that Siri
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can get all three coins, before you then say “toss three coins.”
- In the same way that marked cards could strengthen the “Siri knows
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your card” trick, Hugo Shelley’s wonderful “Sixth Sense” could help
mask the method even more - you’d know the phrase to say to Siri
despite apparently never knowing the orientation of the coins.
Technical detail:
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- These shortcuts aren’t too technical, each consisting of only 3

actions. No real logic is applied; the text that’s set in the
shortcut gets spoken, and a 10 second delay action is set at the
end to prevent Siri from immediately saying “Done” (giving you time
to exit Siri).
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- Please do take this example and run with it. You can use multiple
outs with Siri for as many voice commands you’re willing to set.
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Playing cards is an obvious choice (perhaps using their stack
numbers in the Siri phrases), but a choice of cities, movies,
songs, food, animals and more could benefit from this kind of
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shortcut. And instead of having Siri verbally respond, perhaps Siri
could save a particular photo to your library depending on what you
say. More on that in the following trick.
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The Shortcuts Widget

So far, we’ve covered using the action button in Safari to activate a
shortcut, as well as using Siri. In this section, we’ll use a third way -
the Shortcuts widget.
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Setup
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To set up your Shortcuts widget:
1. From the lock screen, swipe the clock to the right to get to your
widgets.
ail
2. Scroll all the way to the bottom and tap the “Edit” button.
3. Again, scroll to the bottom, and tap the green “+” icon next to
“Shortcuts”.
very top. Tap “Done”.

gm
4. Scroll up to find “Shortcuts” higher in the list, and drag it to the
5. Find the widget at the top. At the top right of the widget, tap “Show
@
More”.
6. At the bottom of the widget, tap “Customise in Shortcuts”.
7. From this screen, you can choose the shortcuts that will be visible in
i89
the Shortcuts widget.

v ish
ba
kit
an
It’s perhaps worth removing any shortcuts that you don’t want to call
from the widget to avoid clutter.
22
To use the Shortcuts widget, swipe down from the very top of your screen
in any app to bring up the lock screen’s Notification Centre (if you’re
already on the lock screen, skip this step). Swipe the clock to the right
to bring up the widgets, and your chosen shortcuts will appear on the
Shortcuts widget. To change which shortcuts appear in this widget at any
time, follow steps 5-7 on the previous page.
m
Now you’ll be able to run these shortcuts with just one tap.
.co
Initialed Card Prediction
ail
The Effect:
As in the Siri card effect, you begin by having your spectator
openly select a playing card. gm
You tell her that earlier today, you predicted she’d take exactly
@
that card. You were so sure, in fact, that you wrote her initials
on it ahead of time and took a photo of that card.
i89
You take out your phone and open the Photos app. The last picture
taken is of her selected card with their initials drawn on in
Sharpie:
v ish
ba
kit
an
The Method:
Again, we’re using my free WebFX app (https://marc.ph/apps/webfx)
as we did in “Siri Knows Your Card”. Go ahead and read that one if
23
you haven’t already, since this one shares multiple similarities in

its method.
You’ll need the “Card Initial Image” shortcut from my Shortcuts

site (https://marc.ph/shortcuts). As before, when setting up the
shortcut, you’ll automatically be asked some questions. Tell the
m
shortcut your WebFX username, as well as the initials of the
spectator you’ll be performing to. (This can be changed at any time
.co
by tapping the “Customise Shortcut…” button as described in the
notes in the “Siri Knows Your Card” trick.)
ail
When the card is selected and revealed, the phone remains in your
pocket with the WebFX app open, allowing you to input the selection
as before. When you take your phone out, instead of invoking Siri,
gm
you’ll swipe down from the very top of the screen to bring back
your lock screen’s Notification Centre. You’ll then swipe the clock
at the top to the right, revealing the Shortcuts Widget. (If you
@
don’t see the widget, follow the instructions on the previous
couple of pages under “Setup”.)
i89
It’s from this widget that you open your Photos app by tapping on
the shortcut. It’ll take a second and then open the Photos app
where the last image will be a photo of the selected card with
ish
their initials written on.
In terms of technical method: the widget takes the image for

v
whatever card you last input into WebFX and stores it. It then
tells the server to create a transparent image with the entered
ba
initials in the correct perspective. Finally, it overlays one on

top of the other and saves it to your photos.
kit
an
Notes:
- Do not make reference to the colour of the Sharpie that will be
used. If a black card is chosen, the shortcut automatically uses
red Sharpie ink to make sure the initials are visible. Conversely,
should a red card be chosen, the ink will be black.
24
- Whilst I think I’d prefer to ask Siri to open my photos instead of

tapping the screen, calling this action via a Siri shortcut
currently doesn’t produce the image. It’s unclear as to why at this
stage, but should this be fixed in future (which I assume it
will!), I’ll update y’all in the Facebook Group (https://
www.facebook.com/groups/732918907055403/). But still, I certainly
m
don’t mind opening the Photos app via the widget for the effect -
it only takes a second and tapping your phone’s screen is still a
.co
reasonable way to open Photos.
ail
Technical detail:
- Again, we’re grabbing the WebFX card like we did before. We’re also
using an “overlay” image created depending on the initials given to
gm
the app, and using the “Overlay Image” shortcut to put one image
over the other. You can use this same set of actions to put an
overlay over any image at all - just make sure the perspective
@
matches!
- Saving the output image to the Photos app makes for a great reveal.
i89
However, I quite like the idea of the photo appearing earlier in

your photos instead of being the most recent one. The Shortcuts app
sadly can’t save a photo with an earlier date than the time it gets
ish
saved. However, you could perhaps have the shortcut first save the
card photo, then copy the last 20 photos before it, and save those
as duplicates to your photos again afterwards. The clean up is a
v
little bit of extra work as you’ll have a duplicate set of 20

photos, but it will look like you took the prediction photo earlier
ba
in the day. This would work especially well if you’ve taken photos
over the day with your spectator. The prediction photo would appear
kit
in your Photos before you took any of those, making it really feel
like it was taken in advance. 
an
25
Finally
You now have a few new neat tricks that you can do at a moment’s notice
using your phone. I sure hope you like them.
m
With magic that uses digital stuff, I find it very useful to stay
somewhat ahead of the curve. With the recent release of iOS 12 and the
.co
accompanying Shortcuts app, we’re only scratching the surface of what new
effects are possible.
ail
As well as describing these tricks, I hope that over this PDF I’ve
inspired you to use the extraordinarily powerful Shortcuts app to create
your own shortcuts for whatever you can imagine.
Food for thought:

gm
- Have a spectator name any colour, and when asking Siri what colour
@
they chose, your room changes to the selected colour (using the
Philips Hue bulbs and the “Run a Home Scene” action).
i89
- Similarly, have a really easy method to The Jerx’s “The Light House”
effect. At one point, pretend to ask Siri “How’s the weather?” to
ish
quickly change the lights to the selections. (https://

www.thejerx.com/blog/2015/8/20/field-report-the-light-house)
- Cue an accomplice: Create a shortcut that messages an accomplice by

v
setting the shortcut’s Siri phrase to something innocuous like,

ba
“Remind me to take out the trash.”
- Always know what Siri will say when you roll a dice (the last digit
kit
of the current time when you ask, perhaps).

an
- Create a digital version of a colour prediction. Tell Siri to “Show

me my last photo” to reveal a photo of a person wearing the same
clothes as your spectator.
I’ve linked to them a bunch of times, but my Shortcuts site is here:

https://marc.ph/shortcuts and the Facebook group is here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/732918907055403/
26
A big thank you goes to the following people:
- UF Grant & Ted Karmilovich - Andy @ http://thejerx.com

For the incredible long word For his help and support
principle in the book test. with this PDF.
m
- Ryan Tricks - George Hage
For the inspiration to write For helping and being a good
.co
this PDF in the first place. test subject for the tricks.
- Stephen Long
ail
For his meticulous proof
reading and notes.
gm
And if you liked this PDF, you may enjoy some of my apps. They’re all
available from https://marc.ph/apps
@
Earworm
i89
Predict a thought-of song on a borrowed phone.

ish
WikiTest
A modern book test that uses a borrowed smartphone.
v
ba
Xeno
Reveal what a spectator is merely thinking of.
kit
BioSwap
Predict a thought in your social media bio.
an
WebFX
Predict a thought of playing card online.
CardTrack
Determine a selected card from a shuffled deck.
27

Tricks With Your Phone

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Tricks With Your Phone

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Tricks With Your Phone www.marckerstein.

Tricks With Your Phone

I am Marc. I’m a magician and app developer in London, England. I’ve

business critical. We strongly recommend installing on a secondary system

randomly freezing or restarting itself, and even totally unreadable text

1. Determine where you are.

5. Get Ryan’s phone number.

We can even override standard Siri commands so they apparently do one

of Apple’s new, free app.

such things, I’ve created a Facebook Group

course, credited) on my Shortcuts site (https://marc.ph/shortcuts).

about these things when creating your own shortcuts, too.

Two or three rows of icons will appear.

longer word so it’s harder for me to get.”

yours start with?” Let’s say they say “P”.

“I see. That section was definitely something about politics.

That’s not the word, though. I think your word is ‘Presidential’.

Naturally, your spectator collapses with amazement as you are

Shortcuts lets us run JavaScript very easily. To prepare, grab the

In performance, proceed with the effect as written. When taking the

phone from your spectator, begin scrolling up and down as if you’re

(Almost all of these words were generated by statistical analysis

of recent news articles to see which words came up most regularly

for each letter of the alphabet.)

though learning the words would still probably be best.

Anyway. At a quick glance, the webpage should still look fairly

- Instead of performing this as a memory feat, you could present it

- And lastly, this is essentially a “lite” version of my WikiTest

Bonus Tricks & Making Your Own

Siri Knows Your Card

learning to figure out what card someone’s likely to choose. You

A few seconds later, George receives a message on his phone which

You’ll also need to record a Siri phrase to trigger the shortcut.

(WebFX’s instructions explain the basic input method in more

- If you ask Siri to “pick a card,” it’ll respond with a random

- To hide the superfluous text that appears on screen when running a

with the screen facing downwards when talking to Siri.

talking to Siri. Using “Hey Siri” to invoke Siri sometimes causes

- Similarly, Siri may say “Shortcuts says” or similar before the

output. (The presence of this has fluctuated in the betas, and so

it might disappear in future iOS 12 updates too). If it comes up,

- Finally, to quickly set up the shortcut for a new spectator, you

a variable “longCard” which gets used in the reveals.

phone does a Google Image search with this information, or uploads

Siri Knows Your Coin Tosses

I sure am proud of my imaginative titles.

toss. Here, let me show you.”

You ask Siri: “Toss three coins.”

command that you ask Siri.

Somewhat annoyingly, the Shortcuts app currently allows only one

With this in mind, I’m using 8 shortcuts with 8 different phrases

3 coins in order, conceptually I’ve always thought that it feels

without having to create an unwieldily number of outs.

My 8 phrases are in the format:

(H/T) (H/T) (T)

The “please” is either said or is omitted depending on the outcome

All 8 phrases feel quite natural, I think. Download the 8 shortcuts

Here’s a handy way of remembering these:

The last one is a little different, but I remember it like this:

And Siri responds:

using Siri’s seemingly random coin tosses for another effect.

- I intentionally say “please” when first demonstrating with one coin

to help normalise the word if I say it again when we use three.

- I wouldn’t repeat this immediately, but if you want to, take a