How to Create Custom Data Dashboards and Automated Wallpapers with Shortcuts and Charty

If you want to turn your iPhone into a personalized data dashboard or automate your daily routines, Shortcuts is your best friend. With the help of a third-party app called Charty, you can build beautiful widgets, track your habits, and even generate dynamic wallpapers that update every morning. Let's look at how to set all this up.

What you'll need

Before diving into the automations, make sure you have the right tools ready to go.

• An iPhone running iOS 26 or later.
• The Shortcuts app installed.
• Charty updated to version 2.0. The app is free to try, and the premium version unlocks advanced styling for $1 a month or $10 a year.

Step 1: Building simple charts from health data

Logging your daily habits is great, but visualizing them is where the real value lies. You can create a Shortcut that asks for your current weight or daily water intake and instantly generates a chart.

1. Add the Log Health Sample action to prompt for your daily number.
2. Use the Find Health Samples action to pull your data from the last 90 days.
3. Add the Create chart action from Charty.
4. Use Add Ring series or Style series to customize how the data looks.
5. Add the Export action to output the chart as an image.

You can display this exported image as a widget directly on your home screen. It gives you a perfect at-a-glance view of your trends without opening a separate app.

Step 2: Designing a custom progress dashboard

Charty really shines when you build custom ring dashboards. A great example is a "Year's Progress" or "Life Progress" tracker. This visualizes exactly how much of the year, month, or even your life has passed.

1. Start with a date calculation. Use actions to get the days between a specific date, like January 1st, and the current date.
2. Add the Create new chart action and set a custom ID like yearProgress. If you toggle on Replace if needed, the chart will overwrite itself every time the Shortcut runs instead of creating duplicates.
3. Use the Add Ring series action for each data point you want to track. You might add one ring for the year, one for the month, and one for the day.
4. Drop in the Style series action. Here you can apply exact hex codes for your colors, toggle on a gradient, and choose whether to display a walking symbol inside the ring.

Once your Shortcut creates the chart, you can easily pull it into a Charty widget on your screen.

Step 3: Turning your charts into dynamic wallpapers

Having a widget is nice. Having your data baked directly into a beautiful, randomly updating lock screen wallpaper is even better.

1. At the end of your progress chart Shortcut, add an action to get an image from a URL. You can point this to a folder of your favorite wallpapers.
2. Use the Resize Image action to ensure the chart perfectly fits your screen dimensions.
3. Add the Overlay Image action to place your newly generated Charty ring on top of the downloaded wallpaper background.
4. Finally, use the Set Wallpaper action. Apply it to your Lock Screen and Home Screen.
5. Make sure to toggle off Show Preview. This allows the automation to run silently in the background.

Set this Shortcut to run every morning via the Automations tab. You will wake up to a fresh wallpaper featuring your updated progress rings.

Expanding automations with Make

Shortcuts is incredibly powerful on your device, but sometimes you need to connect to outside services. That is where a cloud automation platform like Make comes in. Make lets you trigger complex workflows across thousands of apps directly from a Shortcut.

Instead of building a massive, slow Shortcut to process images, you can handle it in the cloud. You just add a Get contents of URL action in your Shortcut and point it to a custom Make webhook.

For example, you can create a Shortcut that grabs your recent screenshots and sends them to Make. Make then uses AI to intelligently rename the files based on what is in the image, and automatically uploads them to a specific folder in your Google Drive. Make processes this in the background, keeping your iPhone fast and free to do other things.

A sneak peek at iOS 27 automations

If you are testing the iOS 27 developer beta, automations are getting a massive upgrade. The standout feature is the new When I get a notification trigger.

You can now kick off a Shortcut the moment a specific app sends you a push notification. For example, if you use a battery monitoring app, you can trigger a Shortcut the second it alerts you about a low battery. You could then use a web request to send that battery status to your iPad or Mac.

iOS 27 also introduces the Get on-screen action. This action pulls context directly from whatever is visible on your screen right now. If you are looking at a list of Reminders, you can run a Shortcut that grabs those visible tasks, lets you pick one from a menu, and instantly reschedules it.

Quick wins: Maps and sports shortcuts

Beyond dashboards, Shortcuts can fix a lot of daily friction. Here are a few quick routing and lifestyle workflows you can set up right now.

• Multi-stop calendar routing: Create a Shortcut that pulls all your calendar events for the day, extracts the locations, and builds a multi-stop driving route in Apple Maps. It is perfect for errand days or delivery routes.
• Swap Apple Maps for Google or Waze: If you prefer searching for places in Apple Maps but navigating in Waze, you can fix that via the Share Sheet. Build a Shortcut that takes your current Apple Maps location and passes the coordinates directly into a new route in Waze or Google Maps.
• AI sports recaps: You can use an API to pull yesterday's scores and feed them into an AI action. The Shortcut will output a clean, bulleted summary of the games you missed, right on your screen.

That is a wrap

Shortcuts has evolved from a simple scripting tool into a full-blown operating system customization engine. Whether you are building highly specific data dashboards with Charty, offloading heavy tasks to Make, or fixing navigation quirks, a little bit of setup goes a long way. Take a few minutes to build one of these workflows today and see how much time it saves you tomorrow.