This week I’m traveling for Thanksgiving, and I’m using this MacBook Pro review unit before I have to send it back to Apple1.

One of the things I had forgotten in the years where I largely traveled only with an iPad is the frustration of having my home Mac and travel Mac out of sync. These days, it’s less of an issue thanks to syncing services—for instance, all my podcast templates are in Dropbox, and all my BBEdit preferences are in iCloud.

But as I’ve written about here repeatedly, I also rely on a bunch of Automator workflows, saved as Services, to get work done. And those don’t sync, so every time I opened my MacBook Air or this MacBook Pro, I’d find myself running into some Service or other that I didn’t have access to. I could do the work manually, or see if I had archived a copy on a cloud service, or if I was really desperate I could dig into my Time Machine backups on my server at home and see if I could pull the files out.

But on this trip, I realized that there’s another solution. I recently built a bunch of cross-platform shortcuts and a new Shortcuts version of an old AppleScript tool of mine.…