Micah Sargent (6:41)

The next app where we'll take a look at in just a moment. But I do want to take a quick break to remind you all about the wonderful Club Twit at Twitter TV Club Twit. When you join the club at Twitter TV Club Twit, you out there can become a member by using that little QR code in the top corner or heading to Switch TV club TWiT joining $10 a month, $120 a year gets you access to some pretty awesome. First and foremost, you gain access to ad free content across the entire network. You also gain access to our wonderful feeds. We have special feeds, all sorts of custom feeds for you, including a feed that has our coverage of live tech news events. We also have a feed that has our our behind the scenes moments before the show, after the show. And we also have a feed that has our special club Twit shows like My Crafting Corner, Stacy's Book Club and so much more. If all of that sounds good to you, great. If it seems like you want more, well, good news is I've got more for you.

Rosemary Orchard (7:53)

Haha.

Micah Sargent (7:54)

Yes. Because you will also get an invite to join our Discord, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow club Twitters and those of us here at TWiT. So don't walk, run to Twitter TV club TWiT to check it out. And we look forward to seeing you there as well because we love having you. You know, it's nice to hop in from time to time and see new people joining the club. There's a special channel where we can see those new folks. So let me shout out a welcome to Mochuchua to Frenzied Peon, which is a fantastic name to Martin Bishop and to John Iticus. We appreciate you being part of the festivities. All right, let's head back to the show with even more. We are talking this week about apps that have either migrated from other platforms or to other platforms that work well for us. And one app that I want to talk about is one that I have used for a while. And it's funny because there are so many other options out there, but for some reason this little tool got stuck in my sort of muscle memory and it has never left. And I'm happy about it because it works how I need it to. This is an app called Tot. It's a tiny text editor and you can find it at Tot Rocks. This little app which has both the Tot for Mac and then the Tot Pocket, get it like Hot Pocket for your phone, will let you take notes and have them sync between devices. Now, the cool thing about Tot as this sort of little text companion is that you can do some basic customization with your text. But more importantly, the main thing about it is it's just kind of a place to drop off some text and then pick it up wherever you need to. So again, it syncs between your Mac and your phone, just like the Notes app, just like if you were to use a text edit document that you pulled up in the Files app. It's honestly, and I mean this with all the kindness of my heart, it's not special, but it works for me and it works for me for what I need it to do. And that is simply for. For it to sync just little bits of text between my different devices. And so every week for the podcast that I do on Wednesdays with Dan Moran, I or every other week, I should say, when I am in charge of bringing guests on, I have a little bit of text saved in here that has the link to the spreadsheet and the link to be able to hop on the call and that is all that is required. And I just pull it from, from Tot and drop it elsewhere. And you know, as I said, there are hundreds of other apps out there that it could be. So it's so funny to me that this is the one or it's not funny to me. I'm surprised with myself that I have stuck with this for so long. But I think that that speaks to the quality of this app. And so, yes, consider checking out Tot and knowing that you have this ability to on one dev, kind of drop your notes and then pick them up very easily, very clearly, very simply on that other device. I should also mention that this app is made by Icon Factory or the Icon Factory, which is a fantastic company. No, I think it is just Icon Factory, which is a fantastic company that is not only a design company, but also makes a few apps like Todt. So that is my suggestion for one of the cool apps that you can use to to kind of keep your stuff synced between your two devices or between your multiple devices. Rosemary, what's next on your list?

Rosemary Orchard (12:31)

So next on my list is drafts, because much like Micah, I often need to just dump some text down somewhere. It might be that I got an email and the link in it is just not working or something. And so I want to put it in nap that can actually recognize links. It might be that I just need to, I don't know, jot down the measurements of a blind for the front bedroom. You know, because that is one of the notes that I have right here. It just says front bedroom blind drop 95 cm, widths 170 cm. And believe it or not, I've actually ordered that blind, so I can now delete that. But I've been using drafts for years for all sorts of things. Now the thing that I like About Drafts is there are actions where I can do things like say, hey, I want to sort this draft like content. So I've written a list of things and I just want to want it sorted, please, which is great. And there's many different options here, so I can say, hey, I want to just sort the list items in here. I would like to send the contents of this draft as a message to someone. So, for example, I could send this to Micah. Wouldn't be particularly helpful because Micah probably measures things in inches, not centimeters, and doesn't have the same front bedroom as I do, therefore doesn't need the same blind information. But you never know if he was buying my house, maybe, but he's not. So, yeah, there's. There's all sorts of things that you can do with drafts. And one of the reasons why I love drafts is there is a community of nerds around drafts. Now, you don't have to be a software developer or a programmer of any kind to write and create your own drafts actions, because these nerds have created so many drafts actions and custom themes and all sorts for you that you can just use those if you want to use drafts. Beyond how the basic drafts works, one of the ways I do use drafts a lot is when my phone goes into driving focus mode, it changes my watch face. My watch face then has a drafts button on it. So I'm actually using the extra large text watch face with the single complication, which is just drafts. So I tap on that and then I can just dictate something into my watch so I don't have to do like the hey, Siri thing or anything. And quite frankly, I can just pick it up and I can just bonk my nose to my watch without, like, doing anything else if I need to. And that is just a really great way. Where I'm at traffic lights go, oh, I must remember that I need to buy a chocolate syrup. And then I can write that down. And then when I get to wherever I'm going, I do just quickly have a look at the drafts that I've dictated while I'm dry, while I've been driving and go, oh, yeah, this is a thing. Cool. I'm going to put that in the right place. Because drafts is not necessarily designed for a place to be where text lives. It can be a place where text lives, but it's the place where text starts. That's the original idea behind drafts of, I just want to write this down and then I can send it as a message, as an email. I can Put it into reminders, whatever. And that for me is what I do a lot with Drafts. I also use it for ephemeral things. So for example, a packing list. I will probably not use that same packing list again. So I have a default packing list which I generate using a series of actions and drafts and I sort them and do all sorts of things like that. And then when I'm done, it's gone, it's fine and it'll, you know, I can recreate it later. But Drafts has got all sorts of things like tagging and, you know, things like that if you want to get fancy with it. Or you can keep it really simple and just have it as a stack of digital post it notes that comes around everywhere. It's on your watch, it's on the iPhone, it's on the iPad. And the most recent addition to all of that was the Mac, which I still find myself being impressed at Drafts on Mac because Agile Tortoise, the creator behind Drafts, you know, is an excellent developer. But Drafts for Mac just continually makes me go, oh, this feels really good in the best way possible.

Micah Sargent (16:32)

All right, moving right along here, there are some other options whenever it comes to being able to kind of again, move between one platform to another and be able to have a similar experience. And I think this next one is a darling in the community and is certainly one that I encourage people to at least check out. I often find myself using this app when I am trying to go to a website and something just isn't working on the website and I'm going, okay, there's got to be something going on in Safari that's causing this to not work. And when I do that, I know that I need to find a different sort of rendering option and at the same time do my best to avoid Chrome when possible. And so where do we turn, Rosemary, if. If Safari is just not doing it for us and we need another place to go and browse the web?

Rosemary Orchard (17:39)

Well, in my case, Micah, that's Firefox. And one of the reasons why I like Firefox, unfortunately I can't use it like this anymore because of the changes security policy at work. But one of the ways I like to do it was actually I had Firefox signed into my work Firefox account so I'd have access to my open tabs and my browser bookmarks and things like that so that I could actually use Firefox on my phone and just quickly check on that thing that I had forgotten to finish off at work after work or something. Like that. And Firefox is just a great browser. I have a recipe for Cuban prawn pasta open here in it. Just to show you folks, it's a web browser, it works. I like it. But yeah, it, it's got a bit of a different layout to Safari. So the plus button, you know, is a different place here you can see tabs a little bit differently. It's got private, it's got sync and all of those things as well. There are some other things in here so you could explicitly navigate to the desktop site. You can do that in Safari as well. I find that it tends to if, if something's not working in Safari, it sometimes work in Firefox Mobile, but then if I switch to the desktop mode, it will work. And then there's also things like being able to explicitly say, hey, turn on website dark mode for me please. Like, you know, force it. Save this as a PDF. You can do that through Safari. It's just a little bit more hidden and, you know, all of those things that you might want to use. And if you're using Firefox as your desktop browser, you should try Firefox as your mobile browser too, because they are designed to sync together. They are a very nice combination. And now browsers have become first class citizens on iOS, so you can set them as a default. There's no reason not to try it at the very least. And I personally do really enjoy Firefox.

Micah Sargent (19:30)

Also a big fan of Firefox. I think this is where I will mention that if you have to, if Safari is failing you, if Firefox is failing you, you can also turn to Chrome. It is, I have found for people who like Chrome, they've had a really good experience using chrome between their iOS, iPadOS and macOS devices. Google does do a good job of keeping these apps updated and taking advantage of new platform options when they come. And so I do appreciate the kind of functionality that you can get from Chrome, even on an Apple device. Gasp. Before we head into the rest of the show, I would love it if we could round things off with a little bit of silly, a little bit of fun, a little bit of. I won't even say what that word is. It gives too much of a hint. Rosemary, what's your final pick here?

Rosemary Orchard (20:35)

Well, we've got to extend the festivities, Micah, with festivities, because festivities started on the Mac and the idea of the Mac app was to add like sparkling twinkle three lights to your menu bar for the festive season, whatever kind of festival you might be celebrating or you know, just getting around the winter blues. You can add festivities to your Mac. And last year it came out on iOS as well. I'm not going to bother opening the app because there's not a huge amount that I can actually show you for configuration, but basically you can add fun little widgets with, with pretty Christmas lights or, you know, sparkling fairy lights to them. And I, and, and much more. Honestly, the, the app is so great, I 100% recommend checking it out. And yeah, it's, it's just, it's a little bit of a silly gimmick, but in the best way that a silly gimmick can exist because it's just a lovely app. So, yeah, 10 out of 10 to Simon stovering for creating the the app, first of all for Mac and the second of all for iOS and bringing it out last year, because it definitely has a place on my phone seasonally at any rate. And I'm sure at some point I will end up just leaving it on that 365 days a year or 366 days in Leap years.

Micah Sargent (21:53)

All right, now this is the time where I remind you that if you have any apps that you like to use that you feel are great apps from other platforms, you can always email us. IowaD WWIT TV is how you get in touch. Those are some of the apps that we have used that we think are great. And we will move to the news in just a moment. But first, this episode of iOS today, brought to you by NetSuite. Every business I know, they're all asking the same question, how do we make AI work for us? Honestly, the possibilities are endless. And, well, guessing is too risky. But sitting on the sidelines is also not an option. Because one thing is almost certain, your competitors are already making their move. So no more waiting. With NetSuite by Oracle, you can put AI to work today. See, NetSuite is the number one AI Cloud ERP trusted by more than 43,000 businesses. It's a unified suite that brings your financials, inventory, commerce, HR and CRM into a single source of truth. That connected data is what makes your AI smarter. So it doesn't just guess. It knows. It's intelligently automating routine tasks. It delivers actionable insights. It helps you cut costs and make fast AI AI powered decisions with confidence. Plus, you've got total flexibility. And now with NetSuite AI connector, love this. You can use the AI of your choice to connect to your actual business data and ask every question you ever had from key customers to cash on hand to inventory trends, plus automate those tiresome manual processes. Let's see your competitor do that. This isn't another bolted on tool. It's AI built into the system that runs your business. Whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you stay ahead of the pack if your revenues are at least in the seven figures. Get NetSuite's free business guide demystifying AI at netsuite.com iOS the guide is free to you at netsuite.comios netsuite.comios and of course, we thank NetSuite for sponsoring this week's episode of iOS today. All right, we are back from the break, joined by the wonderful Rosemary Orchard for Today's episode of iOS Today, I wanted to mention that Apple has officially announced wwdc. The Worldwide Developers Conference will be returning the week of June 8th. As many of you know, the WWDC event kicks off every year with a keynote. And during that keynote we learn about Apple's plans for its platform. Very exciting stuff. This is our opportunity to see what Apple is going to bring to the table in terms of its next versions of iOS, iPados, etc. Rosemary, obviously we always get excited around this time. Is there anything right now that you are particularly looking for or is it simply just a matter of, hey, let's see what they do?

Rosemary Orchard (25:14)

What I'm actually looking for is something that is, it's one of those sort of like discrete clues. So years and years ago, Apple came out with basically a layout system. So it would be like, hey, instead of positioning this button exactly 2 pixels to the right and 2 pixels down from the top left hand side of the screen, place it in the top left hand side of the screen with a buffer, blah, blah, blah. And basically what they were doing is they were trying to suggest that you use their layout framework to make your life easy. And so a bunch of developers hopped on board, a bunch of developers didn't and just continued doing things the way that they wanted to do things, which was fair enough. And then, then a while later, Apple came out with different sizes of iPads and it was like, ah, cool. Actually, no, it was split screen. That was what they came out. They came out with split screen, which meant that instead of having the whole 9 inches of iPad screen, you had half of it. But also your app went from landscape to portrait. And people that had used the app layout stuff, they didn't get it completely for free, but it was a lot easier for them to update to using that new layout than it was for the people that had continued to say, hey, put it exactly over here, put this exactly over here, and so on and so forth instead of using relative measurements essentially. And what I'm looking for is something like that that gives us more of a hint for an iPhone fold because I have a feeling that, I mean, I'm sure they're playing with one internally and I'm sure they've got a whole bunch of, you know, ways to, to get software working and so on and so forth. But I'm really interested to see, you know, how they can try to make things take advantage of that. If that is a thing that comes. I don't know if it will happen. But yeah, I'm looking for anything that kind of gives us a clue as to what the next hardware is going to be because I think we're all really excited about the idea of an iPhone fold. I don't know if I'd like it in reality, but I'm certainly interested in the idea of it.

Micah Sargent (27:16)

I am interested in seeing, in seeing Apple's latest sort of commentary on its AI offerings frankly, to see where the company is headed and how it positions itself and what the plan is over time. And I think that that's something that we've been kind of, of wanting to see for a while now and we'll have to see if this is the time for it to do so and you know, perhaps follow up on what was at one point a very heavily marketed and advertised set of features that no longer seem to be part of the, that seem to be center front of mind for these, for, for the developers. So that will be fun in any case, that is the news. And now it is time for us to head into what? Oh, I think, yeah, I, I can hear the music. It's time for shortcuts. Correct. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Shortcuts Corner, the part of the show where you write in with your shortcuts requests. And Rosemary Orchard, our shortcuts expert, provides a response. John has written in and had this to say, is there a way to be prompted to start one of two workouts when I leave home? For example, when I leave home my Apple watch will ask me whether to start a walk or a bicycle ride. John. So essentially a location based automation that, or maybe location based. There are many ways to pull this off that will give John the option to start one of two workouts. Can it be done? Let's check in with Rosemary.

Rosemary Orchard (29:30)

So the answer to this is yes, it can be done. And there's a Number of different ways to do this. I'm going to start by just showing folks the. The easy way on the iPhone with no additional apps, because that is, most of the time, what people actually want. Now, the downside of this is it won't actually ping the Apple Watch. So you'd have to get out your phone to actually do this. But we'll get to that part in a minute. So what we're going to do here is we're going to. In the Shortcuts app, there's an automation tab, and then you tap on the plus at the top, and then you can say, hey, when I leave. And then you can specify with a time range. So if you say, hey, I don't want it to pop up. If I leave after 11pm that's fine. And I'm just gonna choose a location. So I'm gonna choose that lovely Apple Store as a nice option. And then this is the part that deviates from what I normally tell people. You don't want this to run immediately because this is gonna require you to interact with your phone, because you're gonna have to choose what kind of workout it is. So we're gonna say run after confirmation. And then I'm gonna create a new shortcut, and I'm just going to use a menu action. And I am specifically using a menu action because we need a choice of what to do. So we are going to put in a walk, and then I'll just put in bike ride. Oh, road. We're not talking microphones here. We're talking cycling. And then we want to start a workout. And here we go. So what we can do is we can do start workout. Oh, shortcuts has just crashed on me. That's unusual. This is my fault for running. This is my fault for running beta software. It does occasionally happen. There we go. I can just pop back in and continue editing. So let's try adding this again. And start workout. There we go. So you need to make sure that it gets access to all of this. So you could turn that on. And then I'm just going to duplicate that a second. And. And then I will tweak this to say. Okay, so our first option is walking. So there should be outdoor walk. There we go. And then there should be cycling. Is it under outdoor cycling? Outdoor cycle. There we go. And I've chosen to start these with an open goal because you don't necessarily want to limit yourself to something like a duration of 15 minutes. So I have just set it up like that, and that's it. So now whenever I leave that particular Apple store, it's going to ask me to run my shortcut. And then when I tap on it, then it will ask me to choose what the, what I want to do. Do I want to walk or bike ride? And then I can. It will start one of those two automatically based on what I choose. Now the advantage of doing it this way is if you don't want to start a workout, it's really simple. You just, just don't interact with it at all. Now personally, I found and had to borrow a bicycle to test this, that if you just start walking or start cycling or yeah, either of those. The Apple Watch is smart enough that after a little while it picks up on it and says, hey, it seems like you're doing this. Would you like to start a workout and accurately backtracks it to when you start it? So you may actually find this is not necessary. But if you do want this and you specifically want it to pop up a notification on your Apple Watch, that is where this is going to get a bit trickier because what you're going to need to do is you're going to need to create a shortcut which mimics everything that I've got here. But then you're going to need to do the automation and instead use something like Push cut and a get contents of URL action to specifically ping your Apple Watch with the notification, which can then run the shortcut. And the Apple Watch is a little bit tricky. I've been messing around with this for a chunk of yesterday and today trying to get this to work. And sometimes it works, sometimes it didn't. And this is not down to push cut or I tried pushover. I tried a number of things. It's not down to anything in particular. It's down to the limitations of the Apple Watch and shortcuts on the Apple Watch. Shortcuts on the Apple Watch is awkward. If I just put this shortcut on my Apple Watch and run it manually, it works. But then I have to do something else with the location. So when I leave my home, I have to like turn off the focus mode and therefore use that focus mode as the trigger to change my watch face. And it, it gets messy in all sorts of ways. So I hope, John, you're comfortable pulling your, your iPhone out of your pocket so that you can just tap on a couple of things and then your workout will get started. But this is how I would do it.

Depop Advertiser (34:13)

Your little one grew three inches overnight. Adorable. Also expensive. Sell their pint sized pieces on Depop and list them in minutes with no selling fees because somewhere a dad refuses to pay full price for the clothes his kids will outgrow tomorrow and he's ready to buy your son's entire wardrobe right now. Consider your future growth Bird budget secured. Start selling on Depop where taste recognizes taste. Payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. See website for details.

Rosemary Orchard (34:43)

K Pop demon hunters, Saja Boy's breakfast meal and Hunt Trick's meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

Micah Sargent (34:57)

It is an honor to share.

Rosemary Orchard (34:59)

No, it's our honor.

Micah Sargent (35:01)

It is our large honor.

Rosemary Orchard (35:03)

No really stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side

Micah Sargent (35:11)

and participate in McDonald's. While supplies last

Lowe's Advertiser (35:15)

Spring fest is happening now at Lowe's, keep the spotlight on your yard with stay green premium 2 cubic foot mulch. 5 bags for $10. Plus when you want more help indoors, get up to 40% off. Select major appliances that help you supercharge your chores. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's, valid to 422 while supplies last. Selection varies by location. Seeloes.com for details. Mulch offer excludes Alaska and Hawaii.

Micah Sargent (35:44)

All righty folks. That brings us nearly to the end of this episode of iOS today, but that means it's time for us to share our app caps. These are the apps or gadgets that we're using now or have been using for some time that we think are great and want to share with all of you. I'll go first. I I won't be able to show you this because it's in use right now, but we'll be able to show you, excuse me, the product page for Akara's presence sensor. Now Akara has made several different presence sensors over time and I've been very impressed with the with the way that Akara does presence detection because they have figured out a way to combine both the sort of standard infrared that we've had for a long time where it's looking for body warmth, or rather the difference in warmth between a body and the rest of the room and millimeter wave radar. And I've had in the past an Aqara presence sensor that was just MM wave. And then Aqara came out with this multi sensor. And the great thing about it is it just works better so you get more. You get more, it gets more data, and it can use that data to better determine if someone is in the room. I have one set up in my office such that when I open the door to my office, it detects that I have come in and it, you know, makes adjustments to the lighting based on the time of day. But the most important part is that it does not turn anything off unless I am actually truly out of the room. And that's, I think, what makes the Aqara, especially these multisensors, so great is that they can rely on multiple means of input to determine if a person has truly left a space. And so right now, Apple is selling the Aqara presence multisensor for just under $50. And it is a fantastic little dev. If you are looking for a way to track presence in a room, this is one way to. One good way to make that happen. All right, Rosemary, tell us about your app cap this week.

Rosemary Orchard (38:09)

Well, now we are all officially in summertime in the northern hemisphere. I can't take responsibility for the southern hemisphere or the whole, you know, actual clocks changing thing. If your country doesn't change clocks, it might still be spring for you, it might still be autumn. It doesn't matter. It is time for us to, you know, have an different reason for getting outside. And one of my reasons for this is Pokemon Go. So, yeah, it's one of those things where it's kind of silly. I'm not gonna go into too much detail on here because if I spend too much time on the map, then it's gonna cheer Fox exactly where I am. But, yeah, it's. It's great. There are routes that you can follow. You can be trying to catch Pokemons or poke Juice, as they sometimes get called, going around. There are places that you can go to showcase your Pokemon. So you can enter your Pokemon into compet competitions. You can battle with your Pokemon and the game is free. There are in app purchases that you can buy to, you know, get extra things, you know, pokeballs and things like that if you want to. But honestly, just by getting out and about and spinning pokestops and, you know, catching Pokemon and so on, there's a lot you can do. There's so many challenges and it's just great fun. I love it. I've really been enjoying it. And of course, you know, if there are any kids in your family who don't yet have their own devices, it can be quite good to be like, oh, hey, shall we see if we can hatch this egg and you walk over here, It's a like 2km to hatch an egg, for example, or there's different lengths for different eggs. So, you know, you can go on a little walk together as a group and try and hatch an egg and then see what it is. And if you don't like it, well, you can just walk home and hatch another egg on the way. So, yeah, I, I really enjoy it. It's great fun and I'm learning a lot about Pokemon, which is not something I ever really thought I would do, but it's a lot of fun, fun. So I highly recommend it. It's a great way to get outside and enjoy the world that is out there, especially as over here, it's springtime.

Micah Sargent (40:10)

All right, well, folks, that is that we have reached the end of this episode of iOS today. All that's left is to say goodbye to you all. And of course, thank you so much for being here with us today. We will be back next week with another episode. If you have questions for us. IowaDataTV is how you get in touch Rosemary Orch. If people would like to follow you and stay up to date with the work that you do, where should they go to do so?

Rosemary Orchard (40:38)

Well, the best place to go is rosemaryorcher.com which has got links to all of my apps, books and all the other places that you can find me online, including social media. So apart from of course, the Club Discord because there's people chatting in there right now. We had a little brief diversion earlier to chat about baking, which was great fun. And yeah, there's all sorts going on and I really enjoyed seeing what questions people have. I think one of them we're actually going to turn into a full episode in not too distant in future. Micah, where can folks find you if

Micah Sargent (41:06)

you're looking to get in touch with me? You can find me ikasargent 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. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Goodbye, everyone and we will see you again next week. If you enjoyed this, well, there's something else you might like if you want the big picture on what's happening happening in tech. Subscribe to this Week in Tech. Leo Laporte and the panel bring you the stories shaping the industry. Every Sunday,

Blinds.com Advertiser (41:48)

The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. @blinds.com We've spent 30 years making it surprising, surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs. We've covered over 25 million windows and have 50,000 five star reviews to prove we deliver. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals, free samples, zero pressure right now. Get up to 45% off site wide plus get a free professional measure@blinds.com rules and restrictions apply.