If you’ve followed me for a while, you will already know my love of iOS automation. I am not Chris Lawley level of obsessed, but anything to make my daily life easier and I am all in! Shortcuts (and before that Workflow) is by far my favourite app for doing this, but the real beauty of Shortcuts is all the apps it plugs into. Almost everything on your home-screen can be automated, and a whole lot more. New app Charty is aiming to remove the hassle of creating graphs and charts, and launches today.

This is one of those apps that at first you dismiss, but when actually looking around the app you realise just how helpful it can be. That’s because developer Rodrigo Araújo has thought about almost every aspect of the app. Building on the success of his first app ChartStat he aims to make it easy for everyone to visualise any kind of data.

There are 27 examples already included in the app ready to be imported into Shortcuts. These powerful Shortcuts can plot data you probably already have on your phone but don’t really look at that often. Displaying them in any of the available 5 different types – bar, line, scatter, pie and donut.

From there it is amazingly easy to create powerful algorithms that process and create your visualisations from inside Shortcuts. The really great things is that now you can begin to not only collect and store data using Shortcuts, but also combine it with utilities such as DataJar to build really powerful tools.

I have been using this quite a bit to plot out my heart rate changes over time, and my distance cycled due to my attempt to get fitter. The graphs in Apple Health are very restrictive so I am over the moon this app makes it easy for me to compare and highlight fitness issues. The graphs are amazingly customisable so I see exactly what I am exporting. I can then send these wherever I like to save and refer back to later.

In my limited use the app has already proved really helpful. Everyone should give it a go just for the amazing alternative icons. With that said I expect to see Matt Birchler really putting this to work over the next few weeks — he loves a graph!

Charty is available now for free with 4 Shortcut actions available — New Chart, Add Series To Chart, Delete Chart and Get Information From All Chart. You can upgrade the app for a one off payment of $4.99 to get extra shortcuts actions as well as a whole load of extras, but if you purchase this within the first month of release it will only be $2.99.