Micah Sargent (9:15)

Yes, yes.

Rosemary Orchard (9:15)

They will do random things and they will almost certainly never do what you expected them to do, like print, because that, that would be logical or hell.

Micah Sargent (9:26)

Yeah, if they printed then, I mean what, what, what troubleshooting would I be able to do? I would just like everything would just work. And that's not fun.

Rosemary Orchard (9:35)

Yeah, exactly. And you know, we always like a little bit of fun and some surprises in our lives, but maybe, maybe not that one. So you know, that, that is, you know, I've used the Canon app as the example there, but you know, obviously if you've got a HP printer, the Canon app's not going to get you very far. But the HP app that'll work. And yeah, I, I highly recommend having it downloaded because it's very useful for troubleshooting things. And also, as a pro tip, if you have a printer that sometimes doesn't show up for AirPrint, try printing through the printer's app and at that point that will be able to communicate it with it. It'll send it something called a wake on LAN package, which basically goes over the network and goes, hello, wakey wakey. And the printer goes, oh, I wasn't asleep, it's fine. But for some reason Airprint doesn't always do that and I'm not 100% certain why. It's probably down to a variety of network settings and how AirPrint works and all sorts of things. But yeah, if your printer is not showing up and you know it's on, you can always try the, the printing app. But say you want to try and print something and you know you're trying to print, but it's a funny paper size. Okay, so I have my little example here. I wish they were two different colors, but I didn't. Oh, wait, there we go. So say for example, this orange fix it putty is regular paper size. Obviously it's not, but we're going to use that as an example. And I'm trying to print something and like, it doesn't fit on the piece of paper. Now you can rotate things in the regular print settings, but you know, it's still getting pretty close to the borders. And some printers can get a bit funny when you're a bit too close to the borders. And so for that I would recommend scaling it down. Now, when you go to print something, I am just going to open up a PDF here. Here's one I made earlier. Thank you, Scanner Pro. And then you can say, hey, print. And then that. That does give you the option of changing things like your paper size and also rotating it. So you can put like two pages, two sheets on a page, or print it as a booklet, etc. Things like that. But. And from there there's also the Share option and that share then gives you a PDF. So if you don't have something that's a PDF and you need to turn into a PDF, then you can tap on the share button at the top of the share sheet. But if you want to print something and scale it down, okay, so that it fits just a little bit smaller inside the sheet, then PDF Expert, the free version, you don't need to sign in with an account, you can skip all that. You don't need to Pay for anything extra. No subscription. Just download the app, skip all the things. There's literally a skip button or an X button on every page. And then when you go to print from here, there's a scaling option. And this is honestly one of those things that you don't need 90% of the time, but when you need it, trying to find it, because most apps don't support that scaling feature in the print sheet is so frustrating. But once you, once you know that it exists and it exists in PDF Expert, I'm sure other apps use it have it as well, then you can scale it down. So I'm just going to scale onto a 50% size and then that would be obviously half the size in the middle of my piece of paper. Um, and yeah, that, that is how you can scale something down for printing. Because I don't know about you, Micah, but especially if something's colorful, I don't want to be printing right to the edge. It makes the edges of the paper all wavy and it's just not necessary.

Micah Sargent (13:15)

Alrighty. I look, that's. It can be kind of complicated trying to figure out exactly what you're going to do when it comes to, to printing and getting something to print exactly as you to. And as you point out on iOS with its built in print functionality, there's a lot, there are a lot of kind of hidden options. And I've also found it to be the experience that Even if your AirPrint situation works out and it gets in touch with the printer, sometimes it takes a minute for the printer to load what it is able to do. And so then you go back and then you can see in the print dialog, oh, wow. I actually have the option to do this, this and this where I didn't think I did before. What all of that has resulted in is for this household. Even though airprint is set up, my significant other just sends me, can you print this? I take care of it because too many times it's turned out poorly for him as he just tried to use the Airprint dialog. So yeah, I completely respect and understand that. It can be kind of difficult trying to figure out what, what to do with AirPrint. Even though I have to say, overall, I remain impressed with what airprint is able to do. And oftentimes it comes down to how an individual printer and its individual firmware and the company's decisions have impacted how AirPrint can work. I have one printer that I had to go find a very, very buried setting that was some quote unquote security Setting where you push a button on the printer itself to confirm that yes, the airprint print I just sent should be printed. No, I don't want that turned on. I need that setting off because I just want to be able to air print to this device. So it can be kind of complicated figuring that out. And if you know, you, you are struggling with airprint, sometimes going into the individual, as Rosemary pointed out, app can be very helpful to figure out what's up and why it's not working. It's expect. All right, what's next?

Rosemary Orchard (15:31)

Wizardling in the chat has just mentioned they have a laser printer and I also have a laser printer. And just like wizardling mine, honestly, it just always works. I have a feeling it's because it's made for business people and for them time is money. But if anybody is looking to replace a printer at some point, it is well worth considering a laser printer. You can get color ones. I honestly find I can print in black and white 99% of the time and it's totally fine. So, yeah, have to have to recommend laser printers because, you know, it doesn't matter what paper I throw in there, it just produces a piece of paper which is also, it's nice and warm. So I always recommend that experience when you, when you pick it up, it's like, oh, nice warm paper. But yeah. So speaking of paper, I discovered recently, not recently, I rediscovered recently, America doesn't use standard international paper sizes. And I was trying to figure out as one does, because apparently I don't have a lot to do in my free time time, how big is our paper compared to American's paper? And of course, I didn't do something as simple as Google it because that would have made more sense. So instead I pulled open pcalc because pcalc, as well as being a calculator application, is actually also a conversion application. It's got things like functions that you can save in it to repeat again and again. So if you have to, you know, run numbers through a formula or calculation lots of times at work, then you can, you know, save those into PCALC and use those. But one of the things I use PCALC for so frequently is just conversions. So I've written 297 here. 297 millimeters is the height of a standard a four piece of paper in pretty much everywhere in the world except for America. So if I were trying to convert that, I tap the A to B button at the top. Now, I've already been doing some conversions, so I was already in length, but you've got conversions for angles, area, bytes. So that's like gigabytes, megabytes, terabytes, petabytes, et cetera. Cooking, which would include things like temperatures, but also cups, ounces, pints. Yes, there's different pints and fluid ounces for the UK versus the US of course, US and UK tablespoons also different, as are the teaspoons, because why would we have standards? But yes, you can convert things like currency. Now, this is not a currency converter, so it doesn't have all the currencies, and these are based on the euro currency. But either way you can convert things like density, energy, electric vehicle efficiency, all sorts of things. But in this particular case, I want to convert length and I'm going to start with millimeters. And now I can see that 297 is 29.7 centimeters. Whoa. Turns out decimalization really useful. You just move at a small point by one to go from milli to centi. But in inches, this is 11.69 inches. So that 9 by 11 is a standard letter sheet. Right, for us, Mica, if I'm remembering correctly, or was that legal?

Micah Sargent (18:48)

8 and a half by 11 is.

Rosemary Orchard (18:49)

Letter 8 and a half by 11. Okay, so yeah, we're not that off, but yeah, it's over eleven and a half. So yeah, but I can also see in nanometers or it's 0.32 yards. So the length of a standard piece of paper is 0.32 yards. So about a third of a yard, which, you know, that's just a random, fun piece of information. So peakalc is for more than just two plus two equals four or four times six. Because, you know, we all know the meaning of life, the universe and everything else, but sometimes you need to do a little bit more with your numbers than just straight addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc. Etc. Absolutely, yes. However, sometimes and only sometimes, perhaps you actually need to do a little bit more with your numbers than just that, which is to actually go ahead and write things down in a way that you can figure them out. So, for example, I have been looking at rearranging my offline office. Now, I know the length of my office and I know the length of certain items in my office. So for example, I could write 1, 800 and I'll just switch back to the regular calculator millimeters desk, for example, and then I could write 45cm and then I'll just add drawers. And now at the bottom I happen to have a nice Little running total, which tells me 225cm is the total here. And this is Solver S O U L V E R. Now Solver is part of a setapp. If you have a setup subscription that you are using on iPhone, then you can get it through that. But it's also available on the Mac. It is such a great app for writing things down with annotations and calculating them. So if I needed to say, oh, actually no, this one kind of like gets inset so it's minus 45. I don't quite know how my drawers would subtract from the length of my desk, but let's pretend that they do. In this particular case I can just write a negative and then it will figure it out. And then, you know, if instead of this I were doing something else. So for example, I was visiting Mica so I could put flights down and let's say that I got really cheap flights for reasons unknown to the world economy at the moment. And maybe I could even get a really great deal on a hotel and I could get the hotel for, I don't know, say for example, 700. I am just making up prices here. I can now see my total price in dollars because that's the last currency I used. Solver is honestly just such a great app for scribbling things down to work out the back of the envelope maths. That's what I use it for. And I have to say I highly recommend it for that.

Micah Sargent (21:57)

Solver is amazing and nothing comes close. Even iOS and Mac OS and iPadOS adding some of, of the basic features into the Notes app. It doesn't even scratch the surface of what Solver is able to do. Solver sort of thinks, I think, how the mind thinks and operates in that space, which makes it so much more than just a calculator. It's very, very cool. It's one of those tools that I recommend everybody at least try because I think you'll find, oh, wow, wow, this is going to be so useful to me in so many different ways. Just any sort of back of the napkin, back of the envelope math that you're trying to do. And then of course it can get more complicated from there if you need it to. I just, I really, I can't speak highly enough of that application and I know that the next one on the list, the final option on the list here is one that Rosemary can never speak highly enough about because it's a great application.

Rosemary Orchard (23:07)

It is such a great application and I am going to attempt to limit myself here because if you wanted me to, I could probably talk for a good month on drafts. And Drafts is honestly one of those applications I find myself using. I'm guesstimating here 30 times a day for just all sorts of things. And one of the ways I commonly use drafts is through the widgets. And so I am adding a widget to my home screen here and I'm just going to tap on it to customize it. So I was already already in jiggle mode on the home screen. I'd already added a widget and I'm just gonna replace the dictate for a new with clipboard because this is one of the things that I often do. Like I'll copy something and I'll be like, oh yeah, no, I just need to like paste that somewhere where I can find it again. Or you know, you can have go to your last draft and you could even have appending so you could append to an existing draft, for example, and, and so on. And so there are all of things that you could do with drafts, which is just really cool. You can usually trickle through the widgets. Now, folks with an eagle eye who are zooming in on the video mega Rose, you have 1931 items in drafts to which I'll go, yes, I do. These are like my digital post it notes. However they are searchable so I can go back and find them. And unlike a real post it note, for me these don't just become, you know, a decoration on my monitor which gets ignored after about five minutes because I can see it and I know it's there and therefore it doesn't exist anymore. But what happens often is I'll be working and I'll pay, I'll copy something and I'll go, right, I need to remember this to come back to it later. Or ah, yeah, I wanted to look at this film but I don't have time now because I will get sucked down a rabbit hole. So I just create a quick note and I throw it in drafts. And this is honestly really, really useful for me. Or one of the things I do all the time is I share a link from something into drafts. This can be really helpful if you are like sharing a link from Safari, say for example, you found something on Amazon, you've opened it up and you want to share that link with somebody. That link is going to be about 20 furlongs long. Thank you chat room for the unit suggestion. I don't know how big a furlong is, But I'm guessing 20 of them is pretty long and everything from the word ref onwards in an Amazon URL is just tracking junk which tells Amazon how you got to that link so you can delete it. Now I personally, because I'm a nerd like that, created a custom action in drafts to clean up those links. But you don't have to do that. You could just share what it is from Amazon or from the webs or from Safari to Drafts and then at that point it allows you to clean up the link. And here's the best part. You don't actually have to create a draft. You can clean it up by seeing it there and then copy and then send it off to wherever you actually want it to go to. And this is one of the things I just love about drafts. Like it's a really great place for just working on text, just cleaning things up a bit, doing various things with it. And it does have fabulous extensions like tags and all of those things that you can use if you want to, but there is zero obligation to do it and it is free to use as well. There is an optional in app subscription which I believe starts at $30 a year. However, it is just genuinely one of my most used apps. You know, I, I probably use it 20, 30 times a day. So for me, assuming that I paid a dollar every time it I feel like I'm getting a very, very good deal.

Micah Sargent (26:55)

Yeah, it's get again. This is another just go get it, try it out. I think you'll be impressed and surprised. That is going to bring us to the end of the picks for daily utility apps. I'm sure there are apps that some of you are using out there every day that you think are fantastic. You can always reach out to us iostodaywit TV to tell us about the apps you use and love. Let us move on to the news. The news is all right. I wanted to mention a report coming from, you guessed it, Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, who is talking about the plans for iPad OS coming up. We know now that Apple is. Well, it's been reported at least that Apple is set to do quite the overhaul on its various operating systems at WWDC this year, which is now right around the corner corner. And we have heard that this will be the largest visual update we've seen in a very, very, very long time. Along with that, Gurman reports that Apple is going to make ipados even more like macOS than it currently is. He says, quote, I'm told that this year's upgrade will focus on productivity, multitasking and app Window management with an eye on the device operating more like a Mac. It's been a long time coming with iPad power users pleading with Apple to make the tablet more powerful. Interestingly this morning, as I saw the reports of this news, I saw a reply from friend of the show, friend of the network, Renee Ritchie, who said that this, well, let me, I'm paraphrasing here, but essentially said this is kind of a mistake. Says that in this case it seems like Apple is listening to the tech reviewer landscape instead of the people who buy iPads more. The people who more likely are the people buying iPads, which is the sort of non prosumer, but the consumer that just wants this tablet device to be their little gaming system or their little media watcher or whatever it happens to be. And continuing to make the iPad more complicated is a mistake that is born out of sort of a reaction to the critiques of a smaller but louder group. And I wanted to hear your thoughts on that. Rosemary.

Rosemary Orchard (29:42)

Yes, I have actually just found it because I saw the same thing from Rene earlier and the exact quote is giving them the faster horses they keep asking for. And obviously, you know, this is, you know, implying the thing that's often attributed to Henry Ford, which is if we'd asked them what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses, which he actually never said. But you know, the, the point is the customer doesn't know always what they want. And I see this right now actually with the iPad, with the Discord app, actually, because I'm often in Discord checking on the iOS today forum because, you know, we put up a post for every episode and sometimes people have got questions that they pop in there as well, which is lovely. And I use my iPad with Stage Manager and a magic keyboard which has a trackpad in it. And it's very obvious to me that this is not a combination that ever gets tested with the Discord application because all of the targets are off. So when you move the trackpad on iOS, it's supposed to sort of snap it to a button if you're like near a button. Okay. So if the button is here and my, my, my mouse moves like quite close to it, then it should just sort of snap it and highlight that button and what happens is something near it that doesn't exist gets snapped and highlighted and then I'm unable to move the, the pointer to tap on the thing and I have to use my finger instead. And I feel like this is a really obvious symptom of the fact that there's now, now too many different ways to use an iPad and it's not obvious to the user. And also I also find as somebody who owns both 11 inch iPad Pro and an iPad mini, the fact that I don't have stage pressure on the iPad mini, like I get it because it's 7.9 inches but also it's really confusing for me switching between the two. And it's one of these things where it's like I would love it to be more powerful and for me to be able to do more things that I could do from my Mac on my iPad. But is that what the iPad is for? Like that is the question. And Apple are the one that have to try and decide that like are they okay with sabotaging max sales by selling iPads, Is that what they trying to do? Or is the iPad a thing that should exist in its own category? And in their ideal world there is the space for an Apple watch, an iPhone, an iPad, a Mac, an Apple TV and a HomePod in everybody's life because none of them them do the exact same thing the exact same way. And at the end of the day it is down to user preference. You know my mum vast majority of the time is using an iPad air with a keyboard and she loves it. But every so often she pulls out a Mac because that is the better tool for the job and it works just the way that she's expecting. Because there are certain things which are big screen problems versus other things which are little screen problems. Like I'm happy looking at my bank statement or checking my transactions in the bank app on my phone. That's not something my dad would ever do. But the iPad is one of those things where it's in this awkward in between category where it's a digital photo frame and it's a computer and it can do a lot of things and every so often it just feels like it can't quite do enough. But the way to solve it, not quite being able to do enough. I'm not sure it's making it more Mac. Like I don't know what it is. Like maybe allowing us to dual boot it with Mac OS and ipados is the solution. So the nerds can happen both because let's face it, the hardware in it is more than powerful enough. It is the same hardware as what's in Macs. But I guess we'll have to wait and see what Apple decide to do and then we can critique it whether or not it's good enough. And as always we will provide commentary on whether we're happy with it or not. And somebody will always say, well, they should have done X because there's always something that they haven't done.

Micah Sargent (33:35)

Absolutely. And that's what keeps us doing what we do. All right, that brings us to the end of this episode of iOS today. All that is left is to say thank you for tuning in to this week's episode. We will of course be back next week. If you would like to be part of a fun, exclusive and enjoyable venture, can I invite you to join Club twit at Twitter TV club twit when you join the club. $7 a month. And by the way, we have reintroduced the yearly option. Yes, you can join Club Twit annually. Then you will gain access to ad free versions of all of our shows. You will gain access to the Twit plus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else, and access to the members only Discord Server, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow club Twitter members. And also those of us here at TWiT. We would love to see you in the club and have you hanging out, having a blast. You'll be able to tune in and share your thoughts tomorrow for my show, Micah's Crafting Corner and also have access to that back catalog of stuff that comes by the Twit plus bonus feed. So if you have yet to join the club, now's the time. With that two week free trial, you can see if it's for you and we can't wait to see you there. Rosemary Orchard if people would like to follow you online and check out all the great work you're doing, where should they go to do so?

Rosemary Orchard (35:06)

Well, the best place to go is rosemary orchard.com which has got links to all the things, apps, books, podcasts, you name it, it's there. And it's got links to all the social media sites sites. But you can also find me on Discord in the Club Twit server where we do have the iOS a day forum that I mentioned earlier with a thread for every episode. And you can create your own too. And also sometimes, you know, folks join us in the live chat if they happen to be around while we're recording, which is always fabulous when they are able to do so. What about you Micah? Where can folks find you?

Micah Sargent (35:35)

If you're looking to follow me online, I'm ikasargent on many a social media network. Or you can head to Chihuahua Coffee, that's C H I H U a h a Coffee where I'VE got links to the places I'm most active online. Thank you so much for being here with us this week. And again, we'll see you next week for another episode of iOS today. Bye.