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iOS Today 812: Calculators on Your Phone
00:53:33
From Unit Conversions to Math Notes on iOS!
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- [00:01]
Host/Announcer
This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more@accenture.com Spotify Coming up on iOS
- [00:31]
Micah Sargent
today, Rosemary Orchard and I, Micah Sargent, talk about calculating. Well, calculators that do the calculating. Stay tuned for this episode of iOS today.
- [00:44]
Rosemary Orchard
Podcasts you love from people you trust.
- [00:49]
Micah Sargent
This is twit. This is iOS Today episode 812 with Rosemary Orchard and me, Micah Sargent. Recorded Tuesday, July 14, 2026 for Thursday, July 23, 2026. Calculators on your phone. Hello and welcome to iOS Today. This is the show where we talk all things iOS, iPados, WatchOS, and all the other OSes. It's the various platforms. I say my allergies are really getting to me and then I try to do high notes. This is the show where we help you make the most of your devices by teaching you about features and settings and apps that you can use to make it even better. I am one of your hosts. My name is Micah Sargent and to
- [01:42]
Rosemary Orchard
add to that, I am Rosemary Orchard. So Micah plus Rosemary equals iOS today.
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Micah Sargent
Oh my goodness. I love it. And we will multiply the value of this show today. Okay, so we wanted to take some time to talk about the various calculators that are available to you because of course there is the built in calculator. I think it was back when of course Apple shipped the original iPhone, there was a calculator that came on the phone. The iPad however, went 17 years. I believe it was that.
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Rosemary Orchard
That.
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Micah Sargent
It's hard to believe that that there have even been 17 years. But in. Well, yeah. Is that. Is that correct? Yeah, 1710. Or maybe it's.
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Rosemary Orchard
Does that I get lost. Honestly.
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Micah Sargent
You know what, the calculator. It was a long time. It was 2024. So let's see. I can actually do some math on my calculator. 2024 -2007 equals 17. That's right. 17 years ago, or rather 17 years. The iPad did not have a calculator and finally got one. An iPad with iOS 20. Because the calculator has gone through various changes over time. And with iOS 26, one of the complaints that people had about the iOS calculator of before was that it didn't have the. They got Rid of the little AC button, that CAC button. IOS 18 replaced it with a backspace key. And even the Atlantic wrote an article about how it was annoying that it didn't have the CAC button. Well, don't you worry. IOS 26 of course, added it back. But what I love is that right to the left of it is a little delete key. So C will clear your current string of numbers, AC clears everything, and then that delete key, of course, will kind of delete character by character. Also in iOS 26, the mode switcher changed. So it used to be a little icon in the bottom. It has now been moved to the top right of the screen where you can change the mode by tapping on it between basic scientific math notes and convert along with that, let's kind of talk about some of the basic features. The first thing to understand is that actually before iOS 18, if you were in portrait mode, it would cap the digits at 9. Now I can keep typing those digits keep on keeping on. So, you know, so let's see. 785-621-4369, times 582-37-412 equals. Boom. A huge, huge number. So you can see here that we've got the. Actually, let me go back to typing out a number that just kind of goes off the screen. If you move your finger along there, then you can scroll to see the full number. And look, that delete key works as we expect. It's deleting character by character by character. If you type in a number and you multiply, tapping and holding on that number lets you copy it. And so then you can Also, let's see, minus 25 equals. And if you tap and hold on any of the values, you're able to actually copy those as well. Past calculators are able to be past calculations rather are able to be seen in the recents area. So you can tap on that little calculator and see, or rather the history in the top left corner and see the different calculations that have been run. So I did, in May, I did 0.88 times 8.5 to get 7.48, for example. Don't remember what that was about, but it's there. And you can always go back and copy those results if you need them again. So that's kind of the basic calculator and of course being able to access history. But as I mentioned, this is not just a simple calculator. It also does have scientific mode. With scientific mode, if we switch in the top right corner, remember that's where the mode switcher is, we can go to scientific mode. Holy moly. This suddenly becomes a lot more complicated. Complicated algebraic, exponential, logarithmic, trigonometric functions, all there. I'm not going to go into all the things that you can do with this because it's been a long time since I took math classes, so I don't quite remember the things I could do. But I think one of the best parts about this and I think practical daily use math is the conversion area. So if we tap on, convert. Oops. And change it to basic again, you can see that we have values here. Inches at the top, meters at the bottom. But I could change this to. Let's see, we've got energies like calories or the btu. British thermal unit. We've got angles, we've got area. Let's see, do we have. I was hoping. Oh look, gigabytes, petabytes, terabytes. I was hoping we would have. There we go. Temperature so that we can change between Celsius and Fahrenheit when Rosemary is talking about the temperature there and back. Now with this you can use conversions in both basic and scientific modes and There are about 105 currencies you can convert between about 110 measurements that you can convert between angle and area and pressure and temperature and time and volume. And what's great is that it doesn't need you to type in values. Basically if you type in a value and you switch between different things, it will just keep those values and do those conversions automatically. So anything that you've already entered will convert automatically. And you can also use operators. So I could do 8,963 degrees Celsius, minus 2,300 degrees Celsius and hit equal. I see the value up top, but it also is doing the conversion at the bottom to show me what that temperature is in Fahrenheit and then tapping on either of these will let you change the value 12,000. That's interesting that the Kelvin and does that make sense? Is that a bug? Are Kelvin and Fahrenheit that closely related? I didn't think that was the case. Anyway, somebody that knows more about Kelvin have to let me know. It's really nice though when we're doing like currency convers because it does keep things updated. So if I want to see right now. Let's see, let's do a value for. Oh, I don't know, let's go with. And it uses Yahoo. Finance for this. Let's go with yen as the currency to the Euro. Sure. So if I have. I wanted to switch it so that it's Euro up top, but I guess. Oh, there we go. 2,000 Euro. That's equal to 3. About. About 371,000 Yen, for example. Now, along with the conversion ability, you may have noticed that if we hit that mode option in the top right corner, we also have a category called Math Notes. And Math Notes is a different kind of. Different kind of set of features. It's a little bit like a calculator meets a Notes app, because you can type an equation and have that solved in place. So let me create a new math note here, and we'll do 2x plus 3 equals 12. Okay, that should have. In theory, that's supposed to give me. Well, I guess I haven't given a value for X, have I? But. No, but the value for X should be figured out. Is it because it's the. It might be because I made that the heading of the Note. Let's see, 2x3 12. Why is that not working? All right, you know what? It's supposed to. Let me just. I'll give a value for X. Okay. And let's see if it does it. Then instead of two x plus, let's just do X equals seven. Okay, you know what? The point is, this is supposed to work. You should note that I am running beta software, and so it's very likely that that is playing against it. But when you type in the equal sign, it is supposed to solve it in place. And so you could do dinner equals 57, movies equals 24, and then you could do dinner plus movies, and it will total them. So if you were doing bills, for example, you could do bill splitting. This way, if you wanted to do Y X squared, you can create a graph and actually have it charted right there in the notes. And what's great is that Math Notes lives in both apps, so it's actually in the Notes app, but it's also in the calculator, as you're seeing here. So both places all there. So you can start one from calculators, mode switcher, or use it in any note in the Notes app. And again, it works from both sides. On your iPad, you're actually able to hand write equations with your Apple pencil, and it will solve them. And what's kind of neat is it tries to mimic your handwriting, and so it will actually show you the results in its estimation of your handwriting. So those are some of the ways that you can use the Math Notes feature for this. Now, there aren't many. I Will say there aren't many settings for the calculator. If you head into the settings app and look at the options, it's pretty much just language preferences and Siri and search features on your iPad. You can do, of course, split view, you can do stage manager to have math kind of pulled up alongside, for example, near the numbers app or something like that. And of course you can touch, you can tap to copy, but you can also touch and hold it to bring over your results as well. So that is a look at the built in calculator app that over the course of time has become more powerful, but has also become what people expect a calculator to be in terms of having some of those original ideas of what we know a calculator to be. The C and the AC, for example, those being brought back, but now being able to do those conversions right there, know that these things are updated in real time. Having all of that packed in. A lot of people think the calculator is just there to run basic calculations. No, it is an incredibly powerful app and I will say for myself, I'm rather guilty of just. I mean, it's not a bad thing. But I do often just swipe down from the home screen and use the calculating functions in Spotlight because typically I'm running super simple calculations, you know, 80 minus 43 or something. And so I. Or you know, 46 divided by five. And I don't need to open up the calculator app for that. So bear in mind that you can use Spotlight to run calculations, but if you want to keep track of those calculations, because when I looked in the history there a lot of the calculations that I do regularly, those aren't showing up in the history. So if you want to keep track of those calculations, if you want to work between your notes app and the calculator app, then you do need to use the actual app itself. So that is a look at the wonderful calculator app from Apple, which of course is installed by default and is available in the App Store if you've somehow deleted it from your phone or iPad. All right, moving right along, Rosemary, would you care to tell us about the better calculator?
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Rosemary Orchard
All right, so I'm going to tell you folks about Peacock. Now. I am going to mention as an honorable mention, before I dive into peakalc, there is also Peak Lite, because James Thompson, the fabulous developer of peakalc and one of the two people behind TLS Systems, actually does offer a completely free version of this that you can download and play around with but of course it doesn't have as many awesome settings, but trust me, it will still do six times equals 42. Because I am in the beta program and every single time James releases a new version, I just run in there and make sure that the state of the universe is still the constant that we need it to be. So this is the basic peak ALC layout and one of the things that I love about PCALC is the number of settings. So I'm going to come back to the calculators one which is right at the top in a moment because I think that you should understand the number of settings that you can have to understand why you might want different calculators. So you can change the number of decimal places that you want and you can also change it to scientific, engineering, accounting or fractions as well. You can turn on reverse polish notation which is where the operators follow the operands. Yes, I've got the Wikipedia page for that in front of me just in case I mess that up. You can have multiple memories, you can have thousands separators, you can show ticker tape, which is amazing. So Now I've done six times seven and I do 42 divided by six. And I can see the history of what I've done there, which is pretty awesome. I can change the theme, there are many, many colors. I can change the digits. I can actually change the display as well. So I can see, say, see how, set how many lines I would like to see. I can have labels on the lines. I can show more info. There's lots and lots of options here. If I go into every single option in the display, we will be here until well about six months time. Now then we get to layouts. So at the moment I have the classic PCALT layout. There is a default layout, which don't get me wrong, I do love. And there's an engineering layout. So if you're doing engineering that might be more useful to you. There's the PCALT layout. If you came from peak out light, there's a programming layout for people who are, you know, more into it, computer programming, easier for that. There's a retro layout, there is a tape layout. But then just in case you're like, I don't know, like this basic layout that seems pretty good. But there's one button I'm missing here. There's one button I'm missing. I asked James and this is actually his favorite feature. You tap and hold on a button, you can start editing and you can change the layout. And so if you want the five button for some reason, don't ask me why, to be half the height, you can do that. Why would you do that? I don't know why you would do that, but you can change the layout of the, the app. So, for example, if you keep hitting backspace and clear really, really often by accident, then maybe you want to, like, move them and stick them off somewhere and then you can, you know, go ahead and add another button in here and you can specify what you want that to do. So, you know, yeah, there, there's, there's lots of options here and honestly, I find it pretty great. If you double tap on it, then you can insert, you know, a custom button name and all sorts of things, make it do whatever you want. So if there's a particular formula that you need to reuse again and again, well, I mean, that button may not be the way to do it, but actually, you know, you can. I'm just going to reset that layout because otherwise I'm going to be confused as heck later when I come back into pcalc. That is also what I've done before. I turned on RPN and was very confused for about 3 days until I realized what I'd done. But you can specify different horizontal and vertical layouts. And then also there's a whole bunch of app icons. So there's all these beautiful colors. There's light one, stark ones, minimalist ones, metal ones, and then there's this section called Spectra. And I know it's not Pride Month anymore, but it's always Pride Month in our hearts here. And all of these. Well, all of these, yes, I believe all these are for various different Pride flags. Now, they're not called that just in case somebody picks up your phone and goes messing around and dives into the peacock settings to try and figure out what on earth is this color set. But also very important, none of this data is stored anywhere. So, like, there are no statistics about how many people are using the pool icon or the, or the Helms icon and things like that, which, you know, that's very important to James. I do know that there are, of course, a bunch of shortcuts for this as well. So you can do all sorts of things in shortcuts. But what you can also do is you can have a new calculator. So I might have a new calculator and call it Mica. And then what I can do with the Mica one is I can have a whole different theme. I can change the layout so I can have Multiple different calculators. So depending on which hat I'm wearing, maybe if you're studying something that's heavy in Mathematics University, you might find that in certain classes you need the sin, the cars and the 10 all the time. And there's another class where you need logs all the time so you can have custom layouts for those classes and switch between them. And one of those calculators can have RPN on or the other one might not. Whatever it is you need, I honestly think that this is just a fabulous, you know, way to do things. It's also really useful to have multiple calculators because you can switch between like, okay, I'm in the middle of doing this calculation, but actually I need to go back and rework this over here. So I'm going to switch to a second calculator, I'm going to rework that bit over there, make sure that my mathematics is correct here, my calculations are correct, and now I can take the output of that, go back to the first calculator, input it and keep going. And honestly, yeah, I love Peacock. It's one of those things that when somebody is passionate about something and passionate about making a really good app, it shows. And yeah, I mean, who doesn't love having a green calculator or a purple calculator or, you know, whatever kind of calculator you love and need? I, yeah, I find I'm using Peacock for all sorts of things. It has a bunch of functions that aren't that I haven't shown you. So I will actually just change my layout one moment and I will go to the default layout. It has conversions so much like the regular calculator app, it can convert things. Peacock's been doing this for a really long time, I should say. So. For example, if you wanted to convert 5. Oh, maybe not force, maybe fuel and miles per gallon liter into miles per gallon uk, you'd actually find out that it's closest was just over 6 miles per gallon in the UK. Yeah, it's got all sorts of really cool features hidden in here. There's, yeah, everything that you could possibly need at a calculator app. And of course, if there's a fancy new feature, James will be working on it. The about screen got so big with all of the exciting things that he was trying and playing with that it's become its own application. So if you want to just have a game made by a calculator app about by pcalc, if you need dice, which aren't in pcalc, there's Dice by pcalc. But pcalc is the best calculator app that I constantly use all the time. So yeah, I highly Recommend it. It's $999 to download it and buy it on the iPhone. So it's not going to break the bank either. But it's going to have a whole bunch of features for you.
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Micah Sargent
Absolutely. After pcalc. The other one that I wanted to talk about today is an app called Solver S O U L V E R and it's basically math notes before math notes and so much more powerful than math notes. It's a notepad calc so you can type plain sentences. It works like my brain works. You can type plain sentences in. You can mix words and numbers and then you get these kind of live results in a column. You don't have to worry about an equal button. You don't have to worry about hitting enter to get the result to show up. And really it's made for the practical math. So budgets and tips and trips and time zones, it's not not a scientific calculator sort of situation. There is a for the the latest version of Solver Solver 4, there's a one time non subscription purchase of $59 on the app Store. It'll give you because Solver just switched over to a universal app situation with the fourth version and you get that across Mac, iPhone and iPad. It ends up being 20% more affordable because they were sold separately per platform. You can also though, if you just need the iPhone version, purchase it for just 15 bucks. And it also is on set app. I just wanted to mention some of the places that you could get this because it is a little confusing how it's set up at first but they do give you a huge 60 day no commitment trial. So let's kind of start with some basics for Solver. I'll switch over here to my phone and you can see the basics basic sort of view of Solver, especially on a phone. I frankly feel like it's a little bit crowded on an iPad. It's even better though. So let's do we're going to do something simple. $19 for breakfast plus $22 for the Uber. And you can see that down at the bottom boom. 41 is the total. It ignores all of the text. It shows that the numbers, they show up in blue. In my case the dollar sign shows up in magenta. And you may notice that I didn't follow my own convention of adding the dollar sign before 22 and yet it still was able to do that. So it's. It's really great. Because what I like about this is. Remember earlier when I showed you my calculator app and I hit that history button and I went back and I looked and I said, I don't remember doing these weird little 8.41 times 0.88 calculations. What are those about? I look at this and I go, oh, that's right. When we had breakfast and we took an Uber to the event. I can see what's going on here and what's great too. We can change these. So instead of 22. Oh, I forgot that we did. We had a good. We put a. We gave a tip. And so it was actually $30 for the Uber total. So then it becomes $49. Nice. Percentages are really nice. Because think about something like this. If the bill was $120 and I know I want to give a 30% tip, I can just type in 120 plus 30% and get the answer here of 156 as opposed to 120 plus 30, which of course is $150. So it's on the fly. Changing from what at first seems like, oh, is he doing a currency value? No, he's doing a percentage. You can also do something like. Because percentages get a little confus for me, I'll be honest. So let's do 30% of 700, for example. And that's how I think about it. What is 30% of 700? Yeah, in this case, it's 210. And then what if I have a. You know, I'm hoping that I can use this coupon that I have for 25% off. And I. And look, I'm typing in 25% off. So I'm not saying I'm not about to type in a value and then say -25%. I'm saying 25% off of. And let's say the total bill was $85. So I can see. Oops, I forgot to write off off. And look at that for people who are listening. I changed the word of to off, and it instantly changed the value to let me know what I'm actually trying to ask. So very easy to see that it is following the way that you likely think about numbers and talk about numbers with other people. Let's go ahead and of course do our standard Fun currency conversions. So €100 in. Whoops. US dollars, $114.34. And you can pin favorites with currency unit conversions. So let's. Of course, we've got to do. So let's see, what's the temperature? Right now it is 69 degrees Fahrenheit outside. And we want to change that to celsius. That's about 21 degrees. Celsius is my current temperature here. And then you can also do. And I love this. This is so cool. Let's say you get a quote for a job that you're going to do. I don't know what work you're doing. Let's just say that you get told that you're going to get paid $30 a day and you are doing this job for the next year. I can do $30 slash. So that's per day. And I could type per instead. And then watch this, I'll say is what per year? And it actually updates the value to $10,957.28 per year right there. Oh, I love that. But it also tells me If I'm spending $30 a day on something, even if I. Let's just. Let's just say I spend $5 a day on coffee. What is that per year? Well, that's $1,826.21 per year. Don't want to think about it. And then you can also do something like this. $20 a day plus three. Whoops. Not. Not times. $20 a day plus $300 a week. And it tells me that that is $440 per week. We can also do date and time math. And so let's say that this is big too. I think a lot of people I know, I struggle with date math. Somebody says, hey, three weeks from now, we need to get together. So I say June 12th plus three weeks. And it tells me, okay, that's going to be July 3rd. Oh, no, that's already happened. I'm late to this. I can also do times, as in specific times. So 7:45am 4:30pm That's 8 hours and 45 minutes between those two times. I can also just do a quick time in London, 5.48pm currently where roundabout where Rosemary is, I think. And then also I could do four days from now. But then I do comma, day of the week on January 24, 1984 was of course, a Tuesday. So, you know, we could just do this day of the Week on January 24, 1984. Turns out that was a Tuesday. Isn't that cool? You can also do trip planning. So if you mark a line with like a date and a Time as a time point. So you, you actually will tap and hold on it. And then it will show that as a date and time. And so, for example, you could say your flight has an 8:35am departure time. That's a time point. And then you do your kind of prep steps and it will tell you, okay, you need to be up at this time if you want to make your flight. So you can say, you know, I know that my flight's at this time, and this takes me 45 minutes. This takes me this minute. This takes me. It will say, okay, here's the time that you need in order to do that. It's specifically a new feature that is trip planning or newer feature that is specific to trip planning. You can also declare variables. So let me start a new sheet. I could say rent equals, let's just say $4,000. Utilities equals, I don't know, $200. Wouldn't that be nice? And then you could combine those together. So I could say rent plus utilities, and it will give me that full value there as well. And then, of course, changing any of those is very easy to do. So you can easily switch between, you know, that value of rent to something different depending on what you have. And you can also tap on, if you select a variable, it will show you the value in the little menu that pops up. Up too. It's very easy to do. You can also tap the empty cell under your last line to add a subtotal. So if you're kind of doing a budget line by line, then you are able to do that as well to kind of keep things going. And then swiping left and right will let you switch between keyboards. So I've got the scientific keyboard and then your normal text keyboard, so I can type in numbers. And if you hold keys on the number pad, whoops, then you can get certain values. So I've got K, M and G here. I've got percentage of as a percentage of, percentage off. As a percentage off. I've got values for, or I've got the pound sign, commas, colons, etc. So there are all sorts of little tools that I can access depending on which of the keyboards that I'm using. You just look for the three dots in the top right corner of that key and then you know that that is one that will let you do that. So really cool stuff. There are subscriptions that you can get that will add even more. So for example, weather, if you were to type in, if you were to have the feature, I don't have this on. But if I were to say weather in Portland and I had the subscription, then it would give me live. Updating weather Stock prices can be added. There's also a knowledge assistant that uses Wolfram Alpha. So these are special kind of things that like the length of a cheetah and you type in equals question mark and it will use WolframAlpha to pull that value and be able to show that as well. Love being able to think in the way that I think and use this app to do the calculations that I need to do. It's a really neat app and one that I have for the longest time I had it and felt like it was something that I would use but didn't use. It finally started to use again and said what have I been doing this whole time? Solver is so fantastic. So that is my app or that is. That is the next app. Let us move along to your next pick, Rosemary.
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Rosemary Orchard
My next pick. Micah is also my last pick and it is the open bracket not boring, close bracket calculator not boring. Make a whole bunch of apps. They make weather, calendar, all sorts of things and their intention is just simple but good simple apps. And this calculator is one of them. It pretty much does exactly what you can see here. There are some settings that you can get to or I could get to just now and I'm currently unable to see. But you can do things like, you know, change numbers. So for example, there is a backspace. So I can go back and I could Change that to 7 times 8. I can hit equals. I can go wait a second, I got this wrong. Something you can do. You can tap back into any number in your calculation. So I can Change this to 6 times 7 and then he cools and it will recalculate and come out as 42. Woo. It, you know, it's got your positives and your negatives. It does have a couple of settings. Not a huge number. It does not support brackets or parentheses as they're sometimes called. It is literally just exactly what you see here. But this can also just be a really great way of, you know, especially if you've got younger children who are just learning how to use calculators and so on. Physical calculators, I don't actually own one anymore. And so if I was was trying to share a calculator with somebody who was just learning, this is the app that I would open to give it give to them. It's free. There is a 14.99 in app purchase for lifetime of the app. There's also a subscription to get all the not boring apps, but I have played with this app for multiple days and I don't. I've not found a need to subscribe other than or to buy the lifetime other than to get the themes and things like that. And honestly, I quite like the basic theme as it is. It's not boring, but it is boring, but in a good way. So yeah, I recommend the not boring calculator if you would like that one.
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Micah Sargent
Awesome. Awesome. So that's a look at some of the calculator apps available in the app store. There are of course many, many more and hopefully one of them caught your eye today. If there is an app that you use that we didn't mention, you can always email us. IowaD WWIT TV is how you get touch. We'd love to hear from you. Moving along, let's head into the news segment because I don't know if you've heard, but public betas are here. Rosemary, what's the difference between a developer beta and a public beta? And if we have people tuning in for the first time who maybe have heard the word beta but aren't quite sure what it means other than maybe that fish that you used to buy at grocery stores that looked really sad and was in a small little plastic container, can you tell us, I don't know. Are they called betta fish in your neck of the woods or is that okay, that's good to know.
- [38:24]
Rosemary Orchard
Yeah, yeah, Betta fish are a thing. I don't keep them in a small tank, folks. Fish need filtration and things like that. If you're going to get a fish, you got to look after it. And similarly, if you're going to beta any software, you need to look after it and your data. There we go. I made that work somehow. Yeah. My kid throws me the weirdest hook sometimes I'm just got to figure out how to work with them. But that's fine because I love it. It's a good challenge. But essentially what it is is Apple's OS 27. So that's iOS 27, iPad, OS 27, HomePod, OS 27, TVOS 27, Mac, OS 27, Vision, OS 27. All of those will come out in September for the new iPhones. However, there is a period of time where you can test it over the summer and there's a developer beta round and a public beta around now. The developers are expected slash really strongly told by Apple. And I know there are a number of folks who don't do this to have a dedicated device for testing because the developer betas in particular could include extra logging. Things may just straight up not work. You noticed, you may have noticed earlier in the show when Maika was playing with math notes in the calculator, something wasn't working there. This is something that can happen with any beta software at all. But in particular, it's more likely to happen with the developer beta because the developers get the beta. And so as we record this, the developers have had the beta of iOS and iOS and everything for about a month. We're on our third version of it and then as we go to the public beta, the developer beta comes out, out and essentially it's a cool. We're gonna throw this at people and see if everything gets set on fire. Cool. We didn't hear any wildfire reports. It's not like the entirety of everybody using this is cause having severe issues. There's nothing majorly wrong with it that we didn't find internally. We're gonna roll this out to the public beta. But with any betas, you do have to be aware, you need to back up your data, carry an extra charger with you because there will be logging and background processes running that maybe won't be running in the release version and things like that. So it is basically you are volunteering to be a software guinea pig. You can roll your device back. However, some data that you have upgraded may or may not be lost. It may just disappear until the new release comes out. Yeah, there's always the possibility of things not going perfectly smoothly. And as I mentioned, carry a battery pack with you. This is the anchor one. I picked this as my app cap on a recent episode. I have two of them here. There's another one in my house. But yeah, there are things that could go wrong. You can also get cool new features and learn about things before other people. And so if you are the person in your family who everybody is going to ask to update their phone when September rolls around, then maybe you do want to install the bet and have a good play with it. But just because it's come out right now does not mean you need to do that. You could wait until the end of August and then download it and play with it for a week before or, or two weeks even potentially before it comes out to everybody and probably with a lot less heartache because there are definitely some things I've noticed recently not working. I file feedback on it, which is your responsibility if you're testing it. But yeah, developer Betas and public betas, very, very similar, but, but slightly different. And yes, if you're going to run the developer beta, please have a backup device and if you're running any beta, please backup your data.
- [42:15]
Micah Sargent
There you go. I know that this is a great opportunity, of course, for not only people to check out the public betas, but it also of course means that we have the opportunity a little bit more to talk about the next version of iOS. I know we've gotten some feedback in the past that but when we lean too heavily into the new OS before it's fully out there, people can feel a little bit alienated. And so we've been mindful, I think this year of talking about new features but not making them the center of the show, except whenever they're first announced. So you will continue to see sprinklings of some of the new stuff, but we will be mindful of the fact that a lot of people Apple won't even be installing the public beta and will instead wait until the fall to rock the final versions. That is, I mean, is there anything else that you want to say in terms of the news and the updates? I think, you know, there's a lot there. We've talked in the past about what Apple announced at wwdc. Again, we'll continue to cover it, but yeah, the features are there.
- [43:30]
Rosemary Orchard
Yeah, the features are there. One thing I will say is if you're downloading this to try out Siri AI, please remember you need to sign up to try that out in settings. So yeah, open the settings and have a poke around and make sure that you've got that. And if you are testing it, enjoying it, that's fabulous. If you find anything that's broken feedback consistent, it's installed on every device, it's just hidden on non beta devices. But yeah, please file feedback if you find something that's not working as you expected or is broken.
- [44:01]
Micah Sargent
All righty. That is going to bring us to our app caps. These are the apps or gadgets we're using now or have been using for some time that we think are great and want to share with all of you. The app cap for me, this is a new feature in iOS 27, or I should say in the 27 updates that lets you in Safari monitor web pages for updates. Okay, so this is an upcoming feature that you will be able to use that essentially let's say you are. This was one instance. Right now it's hard to buy storage of any kind. Whether you're buying SSDs or HDDs. They're pretty pricey and they are are few and far between and so sometimes there will be prices that are more acceptable and sometimes not. Or perhaps you're hoping to get a ticket to a venue the moment that it's available. You can in iOS27 have Safari keep an eye on a webpage and look for changes to that webpage so that you're alerted and notified the second that something happens. One place that I have, I think I've even mentioned it on the show, but I had hoped to be able to. There's a musical that I love called the Color Purple and they have as many different musicals and other theatrical productions do. They have site where you can purchase the rights to perform put on whatever the production is. The cool thing about it is that means that me as a person who wants to go see it can keep track of where these performances are showing up. And so I set a notify me on the page to let me know when it's updated and I can check for a new location. And lo and behold, it is coming to my neck of the woods in January. And I was notified of the update and was able to, you know, get very excited about that. In the meantime, if you are looking to have your to be able to sort of track a webpage for changes, there is an app in the App Store that you can use and I've used this in the past. It's called Distil Web Monitor and it is honestly it's a more full featured version of the Notify me feature. It lets you select specific elements on a page, it lets you change how often it's checking for updates. And what's great about it is it can do it directly on your device or use the cloud service to do so. And so it is kind of a relatively foolproof design and sort of implementation. So if you are looking for something to keep track of a webpage, prepare yourself for the 27 updates. But in the meantime Distil Web Monitor can come into play. So that's my pick this week. Rosemary, tell us about yours.
- [47:19]
Rosemary Orchard
Yeah, my pick, Micah, is one that a bunch of people have probably already tried using and that is Microsoft Copilot. So I do need to mention There are two different apps for this. There is the M365 Copilot, which is for those people who have an organization account with access to Copilot on their mobile devices. And then there's a Microsoft Copilot app where you can sign in with Apple and you know, things like that. So I had a bunch of screenshots of data to go camping. So this is part of my camping packing list. But I wanted to share this specifically on paper with the other people who I'm going camping with in a week or so. And I wanted to get all this out the app. Unfortunately, the app, I picked the one flaw with it and an otherwise excellent app is data export. Not really a thing, because I was just going to export it as a CSV manipulator and shortcuts and so on and so forth. So instead I took screenshots of a bunch of the data. Now, something that's kind of messy here, and it's a bit difficult to see, is there's a games column and then there's a kitchen column that starts and then the actual screenshot has the kitchen column on the next page. And then there's things where I've gone through and I've screenshotted, you know, the same column in multiple places. But, like, because the column scrolls, not the whole thing, it was basically a really messy data set. And I could have tried to stitch this together using something like Pixo and then done text recognition, all those things. And I was like, yeah, this is way too much work. Like, I can do it. I can also sit there and manually copy every single one of these and out. But I don't want to do that. I don't want to do any of this work. So I took, I want to say it was about 10 screenshots in total and I threw them into Copilot and said, hey, copilot, format this and create this as a nice document for me so that I can actually print this. And so now I have not. There, there we go. It seems a little bit crazy. Crazy. It formatted it for me, it added emojis to the title and things like that. I will say I've done a little bit of massaging of this and reformatting things to suit my font preferences and all of those things and so on and so forth. But Microsoft Copilot was perfect for this. And there's a whole bunch of things that AI can do for you where it is a good use of an assistant, a virtual assistant, essentially, but it's like a computer based assistant, obviously. And so, yeah, I'm not expecting everything to be perfect here. But the good news is it was screenshots of typed text. So it's not like it's got handwriting recognition issues to go with. It has just got other recognitions. I particularly appreciated the fact that you use paw prints next to our dog's name for everything because I'd added like a paw print as the tag icon. And so yeah, it did a really good job with this. And yeah, there's a bunch of things that AI can be really great for. If you're going to get it to generate a packing list for you, please don't check it once, don't check it twice, check it thrice. Also because the last thing you want to do when you go camping is forget something critical like your tent or tent pegs, stakes for the Americans or a ground sheet or your sleeping bag, things like that. So, you know, make sure you're. You're double checking the output of all these things. Things, you know, they can still hallucinate in some pretty intense manners. But Copilot is great for all sorts of things. I literally just opened up the app on my iPad and off I went. That was it. Super simple, free to use to a certain extent anyway. And I left it specifically on the Smart option. You can choose in Copilot which version of the assistant you would like to use. And yeah, I have have. So there's Smart, which basically it calculates it based on what the prompt that you give it is. Think deeper, study and learn and search and all these have got descriptions underneath it to help you choose correctly. But yeah, I left it on the smart one because that's what I tend to do most of the time. And I find that it is pretty smart about picking the right assistant to help me solve my problem.
- [51:46]
Micah Sargent
Lovely folks, that is going to bring us to the end of this episode of iOS today. Thank you so much for tuning in today. We appreciate it. Of course you can email us iostodaywit tv. I also wanna remind you about our club TWIT offering TWIT TV. ClubTWIT is where you go to sign up. $10 a month, $120 a year gets you access to some awesome benefits. You can also use that QR code in the top corner to get to the site. When you join the club, you will gain access to ad free content, just the show, none of the ads. You also gain access to some special feeds. We have a feed that has kind of behind the scenes moments before the show. After the show we've got a is devoted to our live coverage of tech news events and a feed that has our special club shows like Minecraft and Corner Media Club and so much more is available there as well. Along with access to our members only Discord a fun place to go to chat with your fellow club Twitters and those of us here at Twit and Chapter Markers. Yes, people are very excited about that. I am too. If you are a member of the club, you will be able to to have chapters for your shows so long as your podcast app supports it. Again, Twitter TV Club Twit is where you go and if all of those benefits aren't enough, you will also get that warm fuzzy feeling knowing that you're helping to support the work we do here on the network. Rosemary Orchard if people like to follow you online and check out all the great work you're doing, where should they go to do so?
- [53:17]
Rosemary Orchard
The best place to go is rosemary orchard.com, which has got links to apps, books, podcasts I am or have been involved with. And of course there's also links to my social media there. The only place not included is Discord because you'll find me hanging out in the Club Twit live chat during the show and of course the iOS today forum after the show.
- [53:36]
Micah Sargent
If you're looking to find me online, I'm at Micah Sergeant on many a social media network. Or you can head to Chihuahua Coffee, that's C H I H U A h Coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active on Link line. Thank you so much for being here today and we'll catch you again next week for another episode of iOS today.
- [53:51]
Rosemary Orchard
Bye bye bye folks.