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iOS Today 738: Notes Apps Showdown
00:46:09
Cheatsheet, Freeform, Notion, & more
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- [00:00]
Micah Sargent
Coming up on iOS today, Rosemary Orchard, and I, Micah Sargent, take some notes apps and make them compete with each other. Stay tuned.
- [00:11]
Unknown
Podcasts you love from people you trust.
- [00:15]
Micah Sargent
This is Twit. This is iOS Today, episode 738 with Rosemary Orchard and me, Micah Sargent. Recorded Tuesday, February 4, 2025, for Thursday, February 6, 2025. Notes Apps Showdown. Hello, and welcome to another episode of iOS today. I am one of your hosts. My name is Micah Sargent, and I.
- [00:45]
Rosemary Orchard
Am another one of your hosts, Rosemary Orchard. And I am really happy that when I suggested this topic to Micah, going through some notes apps and giving things a little bit of a showdown, that he was like, yeah, that's a good idea. Let's talk about this, because we all have little things that we need to note down here and there. You know, I have some of my little, little favorites, like the one I was using this weekend called Cheat Sheet, which is a great little app. That's my iPad. This is a great app for just popping up things like your hotel room number and writing those down and things like that. So, yeah, there's. There's all sorts of things, though I wouldn't necessarily. I don't know. Maika, would you call Cheat Sheet a notes application? Or would you say it's more of a reference app?
- [01:30]
Micah Sargent
It's like a notes utility or something? Yeah, it's not quite a full app, so to speak. It's great for syncing little bits of data between devices. But, yeah, you don't really take full notes in it. Right. And it doesn't have a lot of the features that kind of make a notes app. I think what makes a notes app, which is being able to format text a little bit and being able to, you know, make. Make some. Some level of. Of utility, some level of. Of feature that kind of takes what would just be plain text and helps you to kind of. I don't know that Cheat Sheet is necessarily for that, but it is certainly an augmentation to your notes app, for sure.
- [02:13]
Rosemary Orchard
Yeah. So I'm just going to kind of go a little rogue and talk about Cheat Sheet for a second because it does have some formatting options. But the reason why I like Cheat Sheet is it's great for, like, just noting down, hey, hotel room was like, for this weekend. I've just come back from a trip. I was in room 106, and that was on floor one, and that was, you know, and so just being able to note that down and then being able to say, hey, you know what I'm going to do I am going to add a little widget to my home screen screen and just pop that in there because sometimes you do just want like a virtual sticky note. And so I can pop that in there and then I can see select a particular folder, for example. Or I could add a different kind of widget and I'll just scroll down and show everyone all the options for Cheat Sheet. So that's the lists and then there's an action widget and then there's a little solo widget. And so if I select a solo widget, I can select my cheat. And there we go. So I've now got my hotel room and now I can even just make that bigger if I wanted to, if I had lots of information in there. So that can be quite nice for, you know, various things at, you know, particular times of the year or something where you don't want to be opening apps all the time. But, you know, the, the main Notes app that I think most people know and love and want to be using a lot, or at least end up using a lot, just because it's one of those defaults is Notes. And Notes has had some really great improvements in iOS 18 with things like Math Notes. Uh, so, you know, in Math Notes, you can create a new Math Note and then you can actually go ahead. Oops, that was writing tools. And you can, you can write out, you know, your equations. So one plus one equals. And then it should come up with. There we go, two. It's even written it in my handwriting. Um, now hopefully I could get to one plus one equals two by myself. But the advantage of Math Notes is you don't necessarily have to now say, I was in a math class and my buddy Maika is also in that math class. And we decide that what we're going to do is we're going to do collaborative note taking, which just to point out some folks, this is not cheating. This is actually really smart. It's working together where you take notes at the same time and then somebody can add a comment that says, I didn't understand this, and somebody else can pop in and respond with, you know, try explaining it further so that you all get a complete, not transcript of your class, but you get a collective notes collection from your class or classes. So what you can do is you can of course find endnote, but what I was trying to do is tap on the share sheet and then I could tap on this little share and send that over to Micah and then add him to that note or something else I could do If I wanted to, would be to create a new folder of shared notes. And I'll put that as with Micah, just so that I remember this for later. And then in my shared notes with Micah, I can actually share a whole folder and send that whole folder over to Micah, so Micah can create other notes in there himself. And then I'll get to see those as well. And you can share these with a group of people, which is really nice. Some Eagle Eye faults might have spotted that. I have a wish list in my Notes folders. Yeah, that is Wish Lists, Family wish lists, where we all put our wish lists in there. And yeah, it means that everybody's got access to all of the wishes that anybody might like. So if there's gifts that need to be purchased, well, if you had something that you particularly wanted, my family tends to write that down and share that. So Notes has a whole bunch of formatting options, which is, you know, fairly simple, but it's. It's not overly simple. So you've got the option to format things as a title, headings, subheadings, and so on. You can have checklists. So if you wanted to, then you can have multiple items. And then you can even have it so that when you check things off in the options, then it will give you the ability to have things automatically move to the bottom, should you. To do that, which is always nice there. You can now put tables in, which is very nice. So if you need things, if you want attachments, you can add an attachment, including recording audio. So going back to those shared class notes I was talking about earlier, if you're sitting in a class, the professor's talking, somebody, preferably somebody sitting close to the front, if you're doing this collaboratively, can record the audio, and then you can play back the audio, and you can see the notes appear in real time with the trans. With the audio that's being recorded. And the. That could be a transcript. You can also do things like attach files. So if you've got your slides from a class or, you know, a picture of a receipt that when you're on a business trip, for example, then you've got all those options, and you can add little drawings in there as well. So I could try to add maybe a little heart. No, I'm not the world's best artist, and I'm doing this with my finger on my iPhone, so give me a little credit for that, please. And then you also have writing tools, so you can have it do things like proofreading and rewriting and make making Something more friendly or professional or concise, transforming things into tables, etc, using Apple Intelligence. If you have Apple Intelligence and you would like to do that. And yeah, Notes is just a really great little app. It's got lots of shortcut support, it's got widget support, it's got sharing support. There's so much inside of it that it's just really, it's a very solid basic app to have on your iPhone or iPad.
- [07:37]
Micah Sargent
Yeah, I think that the Notes app is kind of a great introductory app for people for sure that if you have not kind of dug into the power of note taking and what you can do with it, you start with the Notes app and then what I often see is people end up going to other apps after that, the, you know, ones that are more tailored. So you kind of learn your archetype almost of what the Notes app needs to be for you and then you can kind of branch out from there. But some people don't need to ever leave the Notes app. And that built in collaboration and integration that Apple offers I think really, of course makes it stand out as an option.
- [08:19]
Rosemary Orchard
Yes, absolutely. But if you find Notes is perhaps a little too linear for you, it's very top down. So you put something, you put something underneath it or above it and there's not really the option of just doodling and floating things and kind of starting from more of a drawing perspective then another great Apple app that you could look at for this is freeform. And Freeform starts as just a canvas. Now I am on my iPad and I've got my Apple Pencil Pro here. And so I can actually just start by drawing something or writing. And then I will try and draw a slightly better picture of a heart that looks exactly the same as the one I just drew. But it's okay. I will double tap to switch to my eraser because that is a feature on the Apple Pencil and Apple Pencil Pro and try again. Maybe if I do something in red, maybe, maybe a little highlighter, maybe that's what I need to try and make this heart a little bit cuter. There we go. Add a little shading as well. So, you know, I've done some writing, I've done some drawing, I can add some shapes. So there's various animals here. I could add a chicken for example. Maybe if I'll go into nature and grab a leaf and pop that over here and then if I tap on that, then I can actually go ahead and I'm gonna change that to a nice green color. Obviously that's a Nice one for Micah. That's probably something that might make him feel a little better. Um, and I can actually, you know, do some text formatting on this, which doesn't quite make sense, but if I had text on it, that would make more sense. I can add a little text block, so I can type words in here and so on and so forth. I can add images. But what you're hopefully seeing if you're watching the video is that this is just Freeform. I just stick anything anywhere, hence the name. I can even add stickers from my, you know, from messages. So I've added my little. I'm on my way out. And, you know, this is infinite canvas, more or less. You know, you can scroll massively again. You can share this with somebody else if you wanted to. So I can set it to collaborate or send a copy. And, you know, I've also got the ability to just tap in the top right and add another note, which is very nice. I can change my zoom level in the bottom left and there is a nice little zoom to fit content opt as well. So if you've got things that are kind of like spread out and, you know, maybe if I were to zoom in down here and I'm like, whoa, okay. But I, I need to see everything, then I can zoom to fit the content or if I selected something, then I can zoom to fit that. Now I can also add connectors to things. Oops, that is not how you use a connector. So that I can, you know, connect things up if I wanted to, which is quite nice. So there we go. I can now draw a little line between those two. Um, and I can also change the. The dots on the background. It starts with a sort of dot grid pattern and then with the icon in the bottom right hand corner, I can turn that off, which is nice. So, yeah, I can add scenes so that I can jump to a particular area of the board, which is quite nice that if I wanted to start out with, say, this here, then I can do that and then I can, you know, progress to the next one. So I'll just drag that one up. And this can be really nice for presenting or exporting as a PDF, for example, if you are creating some sort presentation or similar so that you can do that and you can rename your scenes or print them or do a lot of things with them. And yeah, Freeform is just a really lovely application that is kind of. It's. It, you know, is announced and everyone was like, ooh, interesting. And then I've just not really heard anything about it. And it's one of those things I feel like you love it or you hate it. I personally have always struggled with something like Microsoft OneNote because that canvas just gets wider and wider and wider. I used to see people taking notes at university and they'd start and they'd have their text would be this wide and then they'd add another section and their text would be this wide which would then shrink down the previous section to this wide and they couldn't read it. And it was always a little weird. So I've always had an interesting relationship with Infinite Canvases, but for something that is drawing based, where also you can add scans of items, you can add links, you can insert files, you can use Image Playground and so on, it's pretty nice. And I feel like it works, you know, very well when that is the application that I need.
- [12:47]
Micah Sargent
Yeah, I also sort of got very excited about Freeform in the beginning. Thought it was a really cool app. I like, I thought, I liked the idea of a collaborative kind of canvas workspace that two, you know, that two or more people could use and I just end up not. It doesn't work for me as much as I would expect it to. I've always wanted a sort of digital scrapbooking app, but then I go and use them and then I realize, no, actually maybe I don't want that. And freeform kind of falls into that, that category. And I also think that that app works best as a collaborative tool. And it is, you know, you're not always going to get that opportunity to use it as such. And of course in part we had heard that it was being developed to kind of show off some of the features of the Apple Vision Pro and you know, how it would work with that. So there are other things kind of, I think playing against it in some ways that make it not my go to choice for a notes app for sure, but an option if you ever need it. And I think again, there have been a couple of times where. There have been a couple of times where I was planning something with a family member and this was the perfect place to do it because we could both be in two different places and kind of drop our ideas together and make what was kind of like a mood board, so to speak. So it can be good for that.
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Rosemary Orchard
Yes, I've used it before for doing things like room planning when I was planning on changing the layout of my office for that. I have to say I'm very nerdy. I usually start with pages because it's really easy to create a scaled down plan of your room and the pieces of furniture as boxes and so on and pages. And then I exported them all as images and so on and dragged them into freeform was just sort of moving them around and seeing and it was quite nice to sort of play with it like that. It was very floating and flexible, which was quite good actually, because otherwise I'd find that I'd be snapping the edges of two pieces of furniture together in pages. And guess what? In real life, you can't actually necessarily butt those two pieces of furniture up together quite like that. You kind of need a little bit of space in between them for them to, you know, breathe and the fact that one's not perfectly straight or your floor is not perfectly straight. So yeah, that's definitely something where Freeform excels for sure. Absolutely, yeah. Another great application I wanted to mention is Bear. Now Bear is a lovely little markdown application. So Markdown is where you write and you use a hash at the beginning of a line to indicate that's a header or two hashes to indicate this is a second level header, three to indicate it's a third level header. And asterisks are underscores to make things bold and, and so on and so forth. So it's a plain text based language which is great for being able to write and then take your. Your notes elsewhere if you would like. And so be has a lovely little sort of getting started section once you open the app and including some lovely little drawings which I think is very cute. I love the way that they have artistically drawn their bear and included that. So yeah, it, it walks you through getting started and so on. And what I, what I really like about this is in particular on iPhone, but on iPad as well if you're using a digital keyboard is they have these custom keyboards which can allow you to insert things that you may forget how to do. So for example, you might forget how to do an underscore in Markdown. So Bear is actually free to download. It does have an in app subscription option, but if you don't need it to sync, you can just use it on one device. And what I quite like about it for people who are less of a with Markdown is the fact that it kind of hides some of the markdown off to one side. So you know, I when I'm in the heading I see over on the left there's a little paragraph icon with a one inside of it. But then when I move away from the heading I no longer see that. And if I add a heading 2 then I see that in there as well. And then I can try bold and if I use my keyboard shortcuts then it will, you, you know, for command B for bold, command I for italic and so on. Then it will make words bold italic for me as I go. It's just quite nice. It's pretty, um, but it's not so pretty that it's a weird application to, to use in that it kind of obscures the, the notes that you've taken. And you can use this for all sor. Um, you know, there's the ability to link things together. It has tags as well, which I should have mentioned that Notes also has tags but you can nest tags in Bear. So if I wanted to then I could actually look. Oh, there's also statistics, which is not what I was trying to do. What I was trying to do was open the tags. So I can see here on the left under Bear there's also a welcome tag and I can specifically see the things that are tagged with Bear versus tagged with welcome, which is very nice. And yeah, it's just got a lot of very nice features and they've been working really hard on making this, you know, a very simple looking application that has a lot of power behind it. And I think that that is always something that is quite nice, you know, knowing that there's power there but not necessarily having it shoved in your face, which is a little bit of a contrast to our next application. But before I move to Obsidian, is there anything you wanted to mention about Bear Mica?
- [18:11]
Micah Sargent
No, actually Bear is one of those that so many people around me really like and I always end up redownloading it and I never, never go to it. It's, I know a popular, popular app for the people who do use it. But yeah, I don't, I don't have much to say about Bear. I do have something to say about Obsidian. So I'm curious to hear how you are using it, if you are.
- [18:34]
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- [20:05]
Rosemary Orchard
Yeah, so I am using Obsidian. I use it a lot. I have sort of my own personal wiki in there. So for example, I have a note here about a Raspbian Python virtual environment which may make no sense to you, but that's okay, it doesn't need to. What makes sense to me is the fact that I have my notes here and I can see them. They're easy to find. I have the option to see all of my files over on the left and even to search for things and so on. But what I really love about Obsidian, which is something you don't get in most applications, is there are community plugins. And just to be very clear, if you're looking at the screen you're going hang on a second, what? This is an iPad application, but I can go and get more community plugins and download and install them and add them. So I have a bunch of them that you can see here. I've got Iconize, I've got Calendar, I've got a Data view, I've got Templater, I've got Advanced tables, all sorts of things. And I personally love the fact that I can have a really powerful customized to my personal wants and needs note taking application on my iPhone, on my iPad and on my Mac and everything syncs between the two, including those plugins because this again is markdown based. But I love the way that I can link this note to that note and so on and so forth. And it's completely free as well, especially if you choose to sync all of your notes via icloud. You can pay for Obsidian sync as an optional subscription, but you know, you can't just use the whole app and a whole bunch of community plugins and official plugins for free, which is really nice. And they've got themes and all sorts of things.
- [21:40]
Micah Sargent
Yeah, Obsidian is, I think, definitely more on the nerdy side. And I mean that in the best way. It's fully tinkerable. You can, you can set it up just how you want it, you can add all of those different toolkits and extensions and, and at its heart, it is kind of letting you create a networked, a networked group of information. And so you can do all sorts of things. Like maybe every day you write down the things that you learned, the things that you did that day, and being able to link those back to other days where you worked on a project or be reminded of a word that you learned. I think that's what is really cool about Obsidian and, and the simplicity of the base system and then building onto it to make it exactly what you want is what sets Obsidian apart for me as a really cool note taking app. But the next one is easily one of the most powerful apps I think that you'll ever get on your device. And I know people can make magic with Drafts.
- [22:59]
Rosemary Orchard
Yes. So Drafts is a place for drafting notes. And the idea is that you don't necessarily have to leave your notes in Drafts, but when you open Drafts, the idea is that every time you open Drafts, which it would be better if I opened my iPad, then you get a new blank draft. So I personally have a little bit of an issue. If, say I open Safari and I see the thing I was looking at earlier, I'm going to forget what it was that I was going to open Safari and search for. I have that same problem with Notes. So if I open my Notes application and I see the thing that I was going to write down earlier, I will get distracted by that thing and not remember the new thing I was going to write down, which is very problematic. And Drafts has a customizable option for changing when you create a new draft. So if, for example, in my case I haven't touched the application in 60 seconds seconds, then it will create a new draft for me. And so after 60 seconds, I look back and I go, aha. Okay, great. I've got a nice blank space in which I can write things. Now I am using Drafts Pro, but Drafts is also available as a free application with a whole bunch of features, but it has tags, so I can tag things, I can flag things, I have actions. So over here I'VE got an entire set of actions related to packing, including I can create. Create basic packing lists and so on. I've got some things for work. I've got various things for, for example, iOS today where I can clean up iOS today feedback. So if people send in emails, I paste that in here and I run this little magic command. And if somebody spells Micah with a C instead of a K, which happens every once in a while, then it gets corrected. And don't worry, folks, I get it. It's. Especially if you're only listening to us, it's hard to know all these things. So I have something that just magically tidies up all of these things for me and it iOS today tag to the note. And you know, I just, I. I really like this. You know, I've got things filtered over here on the left at the moment future so I can see. I've got information about the new sofa that I'm looking at my wish list for my next car. You know, there are things that I would like. I want a flat boot or trunk, a heated steering wheel, adaptive cruise control. And I'm just writing these down because this isn't really a thing that I need to, you know, file anywhere in particular. It's just kind of floating around until I get to the point where I'm actually considering going shopping for a new car, which probably won't be for a while. U new sofa. It's more of an idea than something that I'm actually going to go purchase. So I've ordered some fabric samples and I've made a note of, you know, the sofa and various things like that so that I can decide when I get there in the future what I would like. But the actions, which are on the right on my screen at the moment and also across the bottom above the keyboard, are what makes Drafts so powerful. And there is an entire action directory that you can see a load of actions in. So I will just pop that open a second because I'm sure folks will be intrigued. So that's everything for Drafts is at getdrafts.com including a link to the action directory. But it has all of the actions available there and it's loading very slowly on my Internet connection because of course I am also hosting iOS today, so I will have to leave that for now. But yeah, yeah, it's. It's just so powerful. It's got themes as well, so I've made mine a little bit more purple. But maybe you don't love purple because you're not me and you know what, as much as I hate to say it, that's okay. I'll let you not love Purple. But you can get custom themes and so on as well. So I can choose from a variety of themes that I might have installed. And again, there's a get theme section where I can go over and get themes. Ah, here we go. So here are the actions. I wonder if there's a list of how many actions. No, but there's 48 pages of actions, and I would say there's a good 25 to 30 actions per page. So there's quite a few actions available. You know, there's themes that you can get. Not so many themes, but still quite a few. And it's, you know, if you want to get nerdy, you can go ahead and create these or you can just download something that somebody else has made and enjoy the fact that Drafts is a lovely application and in particular the widgets. I use the widgets heavily, especially on my iPhone, including I have a little button in one of them which just has a clipboard. And so I tap it, it pastes whatever is on my clipboard into a new draft and then in my case, it also adds a few extra lines afterwards. And then I can just type whatever it is that I wanted to type related to that URL, which makes my life so much easier.
- [27:31]
Micah Sargent
Nice. Yes, Drafts is incredibly, incredibly, excuse me, powerful and full featured. And it's one of those apps where I always encourage people to try it out and do your best to not feel overwhelmed by it. Give yourself some time to understand it and get used to it, and then I think you'll be well on your way to, you know, figuring out how to use it for you. You know, the place where text starts is pretty cool. Last in our list today is, I think, one of the darlings among the note taking landscape. It's one that I think really took off and helped to birth a. This sounds kind of big, but in some ways did help to kind of inspire the creation of many a note taking app that had these different feature sets, these different toolkits built in for organizing past just having plain text, for having graphs and charts and. And documents that link to other documents. And that, of course is Notion.
- [28:51]
Rosemary Orchard
Yes, Notion is a fabulous application which is web based and has great apps for iPhone and iPad as well. And you can install it on the Mac. But the powerful thing about Notion is that anything can be anything. And so I've just created a new page here and I'm scrolling down the new page And I could add a database as a table or board, a list, a timeline, a calendar or gallery. It's situated, suggesting I could create a wiki and then it's got other options like for life I could create a reading list, a habit tracker, track job applications, create a life wiki. As a student, maybe I want the Cornell notes system where you have a list or a section over on the left hand side for your key points that you call out. And then on the right hand side you have your main notes or a grade calculator, project management, vision and strategy board, that sort of thing. There's design, engineering, marketing, hr, sales and even support sections. So you can create something that really, you know, speaks to whatever it is that you're trying to do to get you started. Or you can start with a blank option. So I'm going to go with a little travel planner because I love me some travel. And so I've created a travel planner. I just tapped on it and it's come up with the option. I can see the template. So I can see clothes, toiletries, electronics. Yep. So don't forget your laptop. Ebook. Yep. Don't want to forget your ebook reader. And then I can see a little schedule in here. There's a map, there's a photo wall. So it looks like this template is going from San Francisco to new. Well that's okay. I will use that template. So I tap on that and it will take a little moment to process and then it adds this as a template into my notion. So I didn't have to sit down and create all of this and figure out how to do all the layout and everything. I can just add things and I can say hey, as well as jeans, I kind of want to pack a skirt. So I want a skirt and a scarf because I always travel with a scarf. Toiletries as well as a toothbrush and deodorant and sunscreen. I need toothpaste. That is something that I can say consider somewhat of a non negotiable. I'm going to change this from ebook to ebook reader and also add a battery pack to keep my devices charged on the go. There we go. So I've added that and now I can tap oh open on the departing flight and I can make some changes here. So for example, I might want to actually put this into 2025 and I'm going to travel on. I have decided the 4th of November 2024. I probably won't be departing from from San Francisco, but I could be departing from London in the uk. And notes carry on only because maybe I'm trying to do this a little bit cheaper. But then once I've changed that, then I can see that, you know, these notes that I've made on that departing flight page, which is a subpage in Notion, have come back. And this is where that power really, you know, comes into play. Because if I go into this little calendar view and I move forward to November 2025, then it was showing up just now and now it's hiding from me because I hit the Today button, of course. But yeah, I can have all of the data that I like displayed in a whole bunch of different ways and I can just sit down and write, or I can make something more powerful, or I can steal something more powerful somebody else's made and adapt it to be what I need. Which is where I think Notion really, really wins.
- [32:14]
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- [33:15]
Favorite startup's growth curve, T Mobile's coverage keeps scaling because T Mobile helps keep you connected from the heart of Portland to right where you are on America's largest 5G network switch. Now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off at the $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch up to 4 lines of your virtual prepaid card last 15 days qualified unlock device credit service port in 90 plus days device knowledgeable carrier and timely redemption Required card is no cash access. It expires in six months.
- [33:45]
Micah Sargent
There are lots of note taking apps out there. These are some of the ones that we feel are quite powerful and also I think in many cases, easy to use. If there is a notes app that you use that you feel bears mentioning, please do write in iostodaywit TV to let us know about it. We'd love to hear about the apps that you're using for taking notes. I have a brief bit of news before we move into the Feedback and Shortcuts Corner segment. Apple, as of this morning, has launched a new app. This morning, as we record this on Tuesday, February 4, has launched a new app called Invites or Apple Invites. And it is an app that lets you create and send invites to events to basically anyone. It works for the person who's receiving the invite can visit the invite on the web, can use the app itself, but has multiple ways to do that. You do need an iCloud plus subscription in order to create invites. What is cool about this invites app and what I think sets it apart is it's an RSVP app that has built in integrations for a shared photo album so that automatically people who have been to the event can upload photos that they took at the event to this invite, which I think is really cool because it means that, that you know, those photos that you took and that other people took can all be seen together. It has weather information, location information. It also integrates with Apple Music, so if people have an Apple Music subscription, they can contribute to a playlist for the event. It ties in with Apple intelligence as well. So you can create custom images for your background for these invites. And you also have the ability to use, of course, the writing tools to kind of rewrite any of the text that you're doing for the invites. It's interesting because I just heard about this, that Apple was working on this and I was telling my significant other about it and then this morning the app came out and I thought, oh wow, I did not realize it was going to be just right after that that we saw it. So that is available in the App Store. Again, you do need an ICLOUD subscription to create invites, but you do not need it to receive invites and RSVP to invites and interact with invites. And so that is why or that is an app that you can again get for free. ICloud plus subscriptions do start as low as 99 cents a month, so you could kind of join in without needing to spend too much to do this. There are lots of third party RSVP apps and services out there. One of the main concerns that I've always had about them is handing over not just my contact information, but the contact information of friends and family and not knowing precisely where that's going or how it's being used. So being able to have all of that in the Invites app, I think is good because we know about Apple's commitment to privacy and security. So having that all kind of in one place is pretty neat. Rosemary, you're showing us a little, little bit of it.
- [37:24]
Rosemary Orchard
Yeah, so I just popped it open and I've thrown in a tour of London for 26 April, because that seemed like a sensible thing to do. I tapped edit background and then it gave me a whole bunch of ones to choose from, some based on emoji, some photographic ones, and then some color ones. And so under the emoji I went and I picked a little travel one. I popped in the date. I've selected a location, which I did set to the city of London. You know, I've not been super specific with an address. You can see that it's hosted by me. And I've added a little description. Come and tour London. And that's automatically added weather. So this time of the year, temperature ranges from 6 to 14 degrees. That is Celsius, I should note, not Fahrenheit. And then I can add my shared album and a shared playlist, even if I wanted to. And then when I preview that, I can see what it looks like and then I can tap next and then actually start preparing it and send it off to say, for example, Micah, though I think it's a little short notice for that. I can also tap to invite individuals instead of just sending it with messages or mail. And also there's the option to approve guests. So, for example, just because Micah gets a link and clicks approve, does that mean that he's okay to come? I mean, in Micah's case, absolutely. But in other cases, maybe not. And you do want a final approval over the guest list. So that's quite a nice feature to have as a thing that you can do. So, yeah. And now I have this and I can actually go into the event settings on it, just to be clear. Just to be clear. And I duplicate it, cancel it, or I will actually delete it because this is not a real event that I created. But yeah, it seems quite simple and fun to do. I can imagine this being great for kids birthday parties.
- [39:09]
Micah Sargent
Absolutely, yeah. And I have received different RSVPs in the past, invites or whatever you want to call them with third party tools, and I was always kind of dubious. So I like this. I think this is especially the encouragement to Share photos from the event. That's what I think is the killer feature, so to speak. All right, let us move on. Oh, I'm going to have an episode of Hands On Mac that is a little walkthrough of the Apple Invites app. So if you haven't yet, check out Hands On Mac because that episode will be out soon. All right, let's move on to feedback. Rosemary, you're going to read our feedback in your shortcuts corner this week.
- [39:55]
Rosemary Orchard
I am indeed. So our first question comes in from Chuck who says, hi, my camera is me. Hi, Chuck. I use the Driving Focus Mobile driving and I have it set to only allow text updates from my wife and son. And it works great if they text me directly. But if their name is on a group chat, then those messages get displayed. Is there a way to disallow those messages and only allow direct messages from my wife or son to go through? Thanks from Chuck. And this is something I have spent a little bit of time, you know, messing with this mica and I think unfortunately the only way around this is to actually go to a group chat and then actually to hide the alerts on it, at least the time being, which is annoying because then you have to go back and unhide the alert afterwards, which is, you know, maybe not exactly what you wanted.
- [40:44]
Micah Sargent
That's unfortunate. I think it makes sense overall just to lay the base to say this is a person that gets to communicate with me no matter what. And you think about other situations where maybe you have an older parent who, who is used to just communicating in the family group chat and doesn't know necessarily about opening up a different chat and communicating directly. You want to make sure that that person is able to get in touch with you whenever you set that setting that says this person can kind of break through. So I get why Apple doesn't have that kind of toggle and that specific filter, but maybe that's something that Apple could look at adding in the future, is something that says, you know, hear from this person in one on one conversations or something along those lines, as opposed to just getting bits and pieces of a group rolling group chat. That would be rather annoying, Chuck. So, yeah, it's unfortunate that's not easily addressed.
- [41:52]
Rosemary Orchard
Yeah, yeah. And just to be clear, the driving focus mode under settings, Focus driving is a little special. So I'm in that right now and you can see I've got a couple of people listed as being able to get through, but I don't have my usual focus mode filters and things like that. There's not a whole lot of settings available in the driving Focus mode, so that is something to bear in mind. Apple has purposely added extra limits to the driving Focus mode, I presume to with regulations around the world as much as is possible. But yeah, it does make it a little bit more difficult for customizing these things. But unfortunately there is mode setting for turn off notifications which yeah, I definitely wish that there was an option, but that's not always a possibility.
- [42:39]
Micah Sargent
All right, and we've got another piece of feedback from a familiar name.
- [42:44]
Rosemary Orchard
Yeah, this is a piece of feedback from Rosemary. No, not me. This is Rosemarie from Victoria, Australia and Rosemary says hi Rosemary and Micah, many thanks for a great show from which I learned so much. Thank you Rosemary. I'm glad you enjoy it. So Rosemary continues. I like to listen to ebooks via the spoken Content feature in Accessibility. However, at the end of each chapter the reading stops and I need to stop what I'm doing and set the next chapter going with Amazon's Assistive Reader feature. The reading is continuous. That's great for Kindle books. However, there are many other non Kindle ebooks that I would like to listen to if I could have continuous reading reading and not have to stop start these ebooks. These are ebooks that don't have an audible or audiobook option available. Hoping you provide a shortcut to do this. Thank you. Kind regards, Rosemary for Victoria, Australia now this is an interesting one because depending on what it is, so particularly you know, if it's things like articles from the web and so on, then you can create a PDF from those and there's actually a really great Kindle feature where you can send to Kindle. So this is available on iOS using the share sheet. So if you use the share sheet and then you scroll along with the little app icons, you can see the Kindle app and you can send to Kindle that way. Or there's the option to send Kindle by email. So depending on where you're getting your books, Rosemarie, if they don't have Digital Rights Management attached to them, then you may be able to email them to your your Kindle account, which is something you can do. And we'll pop a link in the show notes as to how to do that. But it supports PDF, Microsoft Word documents, text documents, rich text documents, HTML, and even supports, believe it or not, PNGs, GIFs, JPEGs, BMP files, and ePub files as well. And this is, you know, quite a powerful way of getting things into the Kindle app. And I think realistically the best way to do this is probably going to be to use the technology that we know already does this because I spent a little bit of time experimenting with shortcuts and I have to say while I can kind of make it work, it is not going to be pretty and it is going to mean that you just have to have a shortcut running for the entire time that you're listening to a book and that that shortcut is just going to have to like sit there on your screen, which in particular on an iPhone is not a great option. I don't think that that is a very nice way of doing things. But I did want to take this as an opportunity to ask if you can us know where are you getting these ebooks from if you're not able to get them from Amazon directly? Because I presume if you can because of that great assistive reader feature, then you are doing that. And also to ask other listeners to the show, do you have any recommendations for Rosemarie on how to get the spoken content accessibility feature to continue between chapters? Because this is a bit of a tricky one, but I would love to make it so that Rosemary can listen to all books or content that they would like to.
- [45:59]
Micah Sargent
We're putting out the call to try to figure it out. Yeah, that I completely understand. In fact, there have been times where a book series that I'm listening to on Audible has been created by an author who is publishing just the text of the ongoing story elsewhere and not wanting to wait for the audiobook to release. I have used kind of a text to speech functionality to continue with the reading. It's of course not as good, anywhere near as good as having the audiobook, but I respect it and understand why you would try to make this work for you. So listeners, if you out there have done something like this and you figured it out, figured out the solution, let us know. That is going to bring us to the end of this episode of iOS today. Thank you for bearing with me. I know I've got a weak voice today, but we will be back soon in rare form and best form. If you would like to get ad free versions of all of our shows, you can join Club twit at Twit TV. Club Twit it's just $7 a month and for a limited time we are offering a free two week trial of Club Twit. So now's the time to check it out and make sure you know that you are part of the fun. On top of getting ad free versions of all of our shows. You'll also gain access to the Twit plus bonus feed that has extra content we won't find you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show. After the show, special Club Twitt events get published there. Access to the Members Only Discord Server, which is a fun place to go to chat with our fellow Club Twit members and those of us here at Twit. Uh, and that warm fuzzy feeling knowing that you're helping us continue to bring this to you. If you're watching live and are a member of the club already, then you are hearing this. And so I want to remind you about TWiT TV Club TWiT slash referral where you can go to refer your friends to the club and earn free months of Club Twit Rosemary Orchard if people would like to follow you online and check out all the great work you're doing, where should they go today?
- [48:10]
Rosemary Orchard
So well, the best place to go is rosemary.com which has got links to apps, books, podcasts and more, and of course all the social media sites as well. Plus, you can find me hanging out in the Club Twit Discord either while we're recording the live show or in the iOS today discussion area after the show, where folks tend to enjoy posting feedback for various episodes that they've been watching and listening to recently. What about you, Micah?
- [48:36]
Micah Sargent
Nice. You can find me at Micah Sargent on many a social media network, or you can head to Chihuahua Coffee that's C H I H U A H u a Coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Be sure to catch my other shows on the network, including Tech News Weekly, Hands On Mac and Hands On Tech and we'll be back with another episode next week. Bye.