iOS Today 825 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on iOS Today, Rosemary Orchard and I, Micah Sargent, talk about bringing in your second brain on iOS. Stay tuned. Podcasts you love.

TWiT.tv [00:00:16]:
From people you trust.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:19]:
This is TWiT. This is iOS Today, episode 825, with Rosemary Orchard and me, Micah Sargent. Recorded Tuesday, October 20th, 2014. 2026 for Thursday, October 22nd, 2026. Your second brain on iOS. Hello and welcome to iOS Today. I am Micah Sargent, and of course, this is the show where we talk about the wonderful platforms that Apple has on offer. iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, HomePodOS, sort of.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:55]:
It's called HomePod software and HomeView software. And this is the show where we help you make the most of those devices. purchased by telling you about apps and gadgets and settings and, and features that you can use to make your experience even better. As I mentioned, I am one of your hosts, Micah Sargent.

Rosemary Orchard [00:01:18]:
And my name is Rosemary Oshood. And you know, my brain is kind of crazy, so it's nice having a second brain that can also be crazy, but in a different way, because, you know, I have several different digital systems to manage all things. things, you know, if it needs to get done, it lives in OmniFocus. But there's more to my life than just OmniFocus, folks.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:37]:
If you can believe— So

Rosemary Orchard [00:01:38]:
crazy.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:40]:
Yeah. So I think this is a really important topic because it is a topic that we— it's a topic that you hear a lot about, people trying to build a second brain. And of course, the fact that when you have so much going on, it's nice to have some external place to put it and to keep it and to make sure that you can refer to it again. Mm-hmm. And so that happens to be a great place for your phone to fill in the blanks or your iPad or whatever you happen to have. So let's talk about it because I am kind of curious, Rosemary, to hear about your latest rendition of your second brain and how you set things up for yourself. And then I can kind of talk about my more trimmed down, I would have to imagine, version.

Rosemary Orchard [00:02:39]:
Well, I mean, the key for me is to start about what are the sorts of things that I need to remember, but there isn't a good place for it. So for example, I've just been resetting up my 3D printer. If you heard us chatting in the pre-show, you might have heard about it. I've installed a new motherboard. I've replaced the BLTouch with a CRTouch and some things like that. This is amazing. Now there's various things that I need to keep somewhere related to this. So the fact that I'm using a motherboard that's 4.2.7, that's something that, yeah, I mean, I could probably actually just stick a label inside my printer, but then I have to turn my printer upside down and take the bottom off to look at that because that's where the motherboard is.

Rosemary Orchard [00:03:18]:
Um, and what the Z offset is and things like that. And all of these things are things that I should probably just write down so that then when I need to think about them, I or need to reference something, which is more likely, then I can just pull up some sort of document somewhere that goes, hey, this is all the information. Or realistically, I don't remember that I have a document, but I just search whatever application it is that I'm using and it goes, oh yeah, your 3D printer is an Ender 3 V2, it's running a 4.2.7 motherboard, and the Z offset is -1.15. Done. Like, and you know, it tells me all these things. And you can expand on this to do things like filament inventory, or the list of books that are on your to-be-read list, or your personal book reviews with notes so that you can find things and reference back to them later. But the key to start with is, what is the information that I'm constantly losing and needing to re-find or rediscover? And that is an interesting journey. But the great news about search, and especially in the era of AI where you can type something in, and as well as it searching for Micah Sargent, it might look for misspellings of Micah Sargent.

Rosemary Orchard [00:04:29]:
Mm-hmm. That it can then fix and retranslate is surfacing that information. Obviously, you don't have to have an AI integration into whatever it is you're using. If you just want a collection of Markdown files in a folder somewhere, you could do that. But it's really nice to have a system that can actually integrate into all of this and go, hey, it looks like you're looking for this, or I see that you're talking about your 3D printer. Your 3D printer is connected to OctoPrint, and that is linked to your network document because your network document shows how you've connected everything up in your house. But I don't know, Micah, is that more complicated, less complicated, or just plain different to what you're doing?

Mikah Sargent [00:05:10]:
I think it's— I think it's probably just different, right? I— so for me, I think it's about like the investment energy that's required to kind of get that more in-depth second brain set up. And I have tried in the past. I've used I've used Craft. I've used, you know, we'll talk even more about Notion. I have used all sorts of kind of text collecting apps. And every time I start to make the investment in them and then something kicks off and I kind of forget about it. And it's, it's a matter of like that commitment has never stuck for me. And so my second brain ends up being kind of scattered.

Mikah Sargent [00:06:01]:
I would benefit from one one place to have everything running and sort of a place where I could reference, you know, a document that has all of the information about the last time I did, you know, maintenance tasks in my house and that kind of a thing. So this episode is as much for me as it is for the listeners out there when it comes to having a second brain for storing everything. Do you find that having multiple apps that can all be a second brain means that you struggle to kind of commit to one or the other? Or is it a matter of kind of like sticking with one and then testing other options every once in a while to see if anything out there is better?

Rosemary Orchard [00:06:51]:
At the end of the day, it's finding a system that works for you. So personally, I have multiple systems because that is actually what works for me. If it is a thing that I need to do, at some point in time, it is in OmniFocus. If it is documentation, reference material, that's the one that's been a little bit more up in the air because I have DEVONthink for— I've just got manuals and things like that all dumped in there and recipes that I've saved and so on and so forth. I have multiple apps that have recipes in. My recipes are a complete mess. So we're going to have to do an episode on that to force me to attempt to sort some of this stuff out at some point. But most of the time I am looking at usually something like Obsidian if I'm creating documents and, and reference material by myself, and then something else like Craft or Notion or maybe even Parchment or Kando for bigger things where I can then put all of this information in and export things from elsewhere.

Rosemary Orchard [00:07:53]:
Now my big personal thing is cross-referencing. I love to be able to copy a link to something so that I can reference it somewhere else. So for example, in OmniFocus, I might have a task that says empty the washing machine filter, and then I have a link back to DEVONthink in my case, which has got the manual in it for my washing machine. And I actually have a link to the correct page in the manual that tells me how to empty the washing machine filter so that I don't do the stupid thing of just trying to unscrew the, the center part without draining it first and accidentally getting water all over the garage floor, because that would be really annoying. So, you know, I, I find that I need personally at least 2 applications to build my system. But at the end of the day, that's also because I potentially have a little bit more going on than some people. There's a 5, almost 6-year-old, a dog, uh, another, uh, you know, I've got my parents, uh, I still have my grandmother. I, you know, there's a lot of things that I need to organize at the moment, such as a birthday party, uh, and things like that.

Rosemary Orchard [00:08:55]:
So it really depends on How many things are in your brain that make it feel like it's too much stuff in your brain? Because that, for me, is the point where it's there, like, oh no, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about the things I need to remember. Right. I need a system that I trust. Uh, you know, we'll steal a little bit from David Allen there. It's only a good system if it's a system that your brain trusts to actually offload things into. Because if you're thinking about whether or not you remember the fact that you put the thing into the system, Your brain doesn't trust it. So yeah, I need a system that I can trust to put all the stuff in there. Now, I have a couple of colleagues who I've been talking to about this.

Rosemary Orchard [00:09:34]:
They absolutely love Notion for dumping all of this stuff out of their second brain into— or out of their second brain, out of their brain into, so that they have a second brain. Because at the end of the day, it's about finding somewhere where you can actually search and find the information when you're looking for it, and also helping you to internalize the thoughts by saving it in some way. For some people, that's picking up a pen and a paper and writing it down. For a lot of people, it's just organizing some notes and throwing some things in there so that you can search for, and that totally works. So yeah, there's a bunch of different approaches.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:06]:
Now, when it comes to how we— Notion is the place that I have started to hop back in to kind of having a second brain. I used it a long time ago and then it, like many tools, fell by the wayside. But I jumped back in recently and the number of kind of methods of showing different types of data and the fact that it can be sort of a wiki, it can be a, you know, a chart, it can be a table, it can be links, it can be embeds. That has made that tool for me invaluable as a means of collecting information that I might want now or I might want later. And then the fact that Notion ties in with so many other tools makes it a pretty powerful application and service as well. The app is free to download in the App Store, and you can also download it, you know, directly from Notion for your Mac. And then there's a subscription service for Plus that is $10 a month. There are business options as well.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:33]:
But the Notion is a, is a fairly popular at this point, well-known system. It's funny. Of course, because it's the way of things right now, Notion pretty heavily pitches its AI features, and I haven't used any of those, to be honest with you, other than when it first came out and I was, you know, giving it a try. But it is— there are AI features where you can, you know, act on the documentation that you have and get more insights and summarize and do all sorts of stuff. But for me, just the basic features of a place where I can keep all of the data and also link out to other places where I have data is so handy. And I've got different tie-ins as well. So when I use ElevenLabs, which is a text or a speech-to-text transcribing system, it does a lot more than that, but that's what I use it for. They automatically— the transcripts automatically get imported into Notion, and so I can find those and reference those later when I need to.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:50]:
I've used it in the past as a show planning tool. I think it's still currently being used, if I'm if I'm correct, Kevin, for Windows Weekly as the show planning tool in the background. Yeah, and so it's it's it's really good at sort of text and data management, and I know a lot of folks who. Sort of like to show off their templates that they've created for Notion and the different examples that are available. There's a one that I think automatically gets loaded into Notion if you start a new one, and it is an earthquake preparedness plan. And it's a pretty neat tool that I think can very quickly show you excuse me, just how much you aren't prepared for an earthquake and what you, you know, might need to have in place for it. So lots of, lots of cool stuff within Notion, lots of people kind of sharing what they do with it. And I think that that adds to the experience.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:06]:
Yeah. Any, any tips or tricks that you have, Rose, for Notion?

Rosemary Orchard [00:14:13]:
Not particularly, Micah. It's one of those things where I have used it before— used it in before— I've used it previously. I love it. I also end up for some reason not liking it because it doesn't quite click with my brain the way my brain needs to work. Hmm. And that has always been my problem. I do love the fact that you can embed tables and turn those tables into databases if you want to, and have multiple databases on a page and have each of those link out into their own pages and, and all of those things. And that is is absolutely incredible, and the ability to use all those features and make it as complicated as you want is amazing.

Rosemary Orchard [00:14:52]:
My brain also goes, no, I do not want a database in a page. That is wrong. A database is a separate tool. And don't ask me why my brain says that, because I really wish it didn't, and that my brain would just be like, I love Notion, it's amazing, we should just use Notion all the time. But it unfortunately has ended up not being for me. Personally, and I, I don't exactly— I can't put my exact finger on why that is, but one that I am currently revisiting at the moment is Craft. So this is an example of my 3D printer note, which I am currently in the midst of creating, uh, in Craft. So you may notice that there are 2 pictures in there which are not of my 3D printer.

Rosemary Orchard [00:15:32]:
That's because I need to actually take some good pictures of my 3D printer, but I, I realized that I've got some stuff up there, like I've got, I've got my spare drinks for the show up there at the moment, so I don't want to do that. So I put in a picture of a dog and a picture of my lunch just as photo text to prove that you can put pictures in. And I really like the fact that I can just make this note really, really simple and I can just add some text. I typed— as I typed this list, I, I used a hyphen and a space to create a list and it automatically formatted that for me. But if you're familiar with Markdown, then you can just write in Markdown and it will automatically do that. I can change some of these, uh, words if I wanted to to be bold. I've just added my filament connector here for my 3D printer that I've put in So that, you know, that works. And then I can go a little crazier if I want, and I can do, you know, fancy things.

Rosemary Orchard [00:16:19]:
And this is where this might be great for some people because it allows them to really make things look pretty. Because sometimes it's about the time that you spend playing with your information that helps get it into your brain. There's a whole bunch of things that make brains work happily or not happily, depending on who you are and how your brain works. Uh, so yeah, I have, uh, you know, a picture of my dog and a picture of some of my lunch. It's salmon and avocado for anybody who's curious. Because that was what was in the fridge. But, you know, I can change the formatting here. I can do loads of things.

Rosemary Orchard [00:16:52]:
And there is a Craft Assistant built in if you want to use the AI assistant. You don't have to. There's no obligation. I can obviously increase the indentation of my lists and decrease it if I want to. There's a lot that you can do. You can share something. And this is where this can be very useful using system like Craft or Notion versus something like Obsidian, uh, because you can actually say, hey, Micah, I'm working on a thing. Here's a link to it.

Rosemary Orchard [00:17:21]:
I would like you to collaborate with me. Hmm. And this is, you know, that's, that's something that can be really important because sometimes you're not the only person, for example, who is attempting to look at your smart home and would like to know how the lights work in your smart home that has been written down in your documentation, because maybe you're looking at this as a thing which primarily is for you but maybe is also for other people. So this is where you can collaborate with somebody, share that information, and add that. There's also a publish option. You can just export something, so I can make this a PDF, or you can transfer and then it'll appear in a bunch of things. I love the fact that this can transfer to Drafts. Uh, Drafts— Drafts is one of my apps But I, I would say it's kind of my preliminary second brain, if that makes sense.

Rosemary Orchard [00:18:14]:
I dump a bunch of things into Drafts and then I decide what I'm going to do with them. And sometimes it's just, I was writing this down to remember it now. Sometimes it's, I'm writing this down to save it into another system and then I can use that information when I need to by taking it out of that other system. But the fact that there are so many options built into Craft, it's really difficult to go into detail because we could do an entire episode on Craft. I think we could do a whole episode on this and still not show every single thing about every single one of these because there's just so many good things.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:42]:
Yeah, that, um, it's— I think that that might end up having to be something, honestly, uh, because there's so much that you can do. Um, let's round things out here with the, uh, remaining apps that you have shared in our links, and then we'll move on to the new Including the news of our, uh, iPhone Duos.

Rosemary Orchard [00:19:13]:
So one of the apps that I mentioned is actually— so I put 2 here, uh, they are both made by people who Micah and I both know, which is always very exciting when we actually know these people. So Parchment is made by a lovely guy called Christopher Lawlick. You might recognize his name because he's done lots of YouTube videos He's also been on the network.

Mikah Sargent [00:19:34]:
Yeah, he's been on the show. Yeah.

Rosemary Orchard [00:19:38]:
And yeah, so Parchment is a great app because it's an agenda and daily note thing. And sometimes one of the things that I find that I need is the ability to take a note for a specific day and just be like, hey, this is my information for today. Maybe it's gonna be relevant again, maybe it isn't. And so it's kind of like a journal, but it's also not really a journal in the sense of I'm writing this down to have a historic record. It's just a— I'm taking a bunch of notes and they were all taken on this day. Okay, done. So you know that this is something that I really like. So you can integrate it with your calendar and your reminders.

Rosemary Orchard [00:20:10]:
You can have your daily notes, so you can add 10 photos or scan pages into your daily note, and you can just type as much as you want, which is great. You could go back in time. I didn't actually make any notes yesterday, unfortunately, or at least not any that I didn't clean out before the show to show you. Uh, but yeah, it's great. It can also just organically allow you to think of things in a slightly different way. Has handwriting support with your finger on iPhone. I believe it supports, uh, your Apple Pencil on iPad. But yeah, it describes itself as a daily journal, but for me, the way this works is I can add things into it and go, hey, you know, I want, I want this reminder of talk to Micah about holiday episodes, and I can, you know, specify all the information that I need, and then it's just, it's in there.

Rosemary Orchard [00:21:03]:
So maybe I should talk to Micah about holiday episodes later, because I had a good idea, actually. I should probably talk to Micah about that. So yeah, yeah, it's, this is really great. I really love it. The other app that I wanted to mention, uh, was also created by a friend of the show, Stephen Robles, who's been on the show before, and that is Cando. Cando is a project management app which, believe it or not, if you didn't guess it from the name, sort of a Kanban-style app. Yeah. So you can add things into this.

Rosemary Orchard [00:21:35]:
I've cleared everything out for this episode, which is always really frustrating, having to take everything out of an app so that I don't accidentally reveal a bunch of personal information. So I can add something like, plan the party! Exclamation mark. You can add subtitles, you can specify dates if you want to. You can set priorities. There's also start date. Start date is something I really, really wish more apps that do task management had, which is I can't do anything about this until this date. So just sort of hide it from me. Like, I can still go and see it, but I don't have to look at it and it doesn't keep going, hey, you should do something about this, when I'm there going, but I can't.

Rosemary Orchard [00:22:12]:
I can't make the sandwiches for the party until the day before the party because otherwise they will go stale or worse. That would be horrific. I don't want to waste food. So yeah, you've got all of this. You can go back to your overview. You've got a calendar, an upcoming view, a flagged view. There's various spaces that you can have. There's an archive.

Rosemary Orchard [00:22:32]:
So I can add spaces, projects, tags, and smart lists. And a space is sort of a folder. Projects can live in folders. Tasks live in projects. Tags can be attached to multiple tags. Tags can be attached to multiple tasks. Sorry. And smart lists allow you to bring up a predefined, essentially a database query, but much nicer to create.

Rosemary Orchard [00:22:58]:
Much like Reminders has smart lists. It's essentially the same feature, but for Kendo. And I really love this app. It's also only $2.99, which is great. Parchment, by the way, $4.99. Both of these one-time purchase. So that is always nice when you can. and test out something for a single one-time purchase.

Rosemary Orchard [00:23:15]:
And yeah, I really love both of these apps. And I also really, really love the folks who created them. So it's definitely worth having a play. And also, you know, maybe Micah, you and I should create our own apps. Maybe that should be an episode of iOS a Day. You and I have created our own mini apps.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:30]:
That could be fun. You and I creating an app would be so fun. Oh my goodness. We should make that an episode.

Rosemary Orchard [00:23:40]:
Maybe it would just be a miniseries.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:42]:
Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say it might need to be. Um, all right, folks, there are loads of ways— excuse me— to manage your life on iOS, on iPadOS. There are many ways to, uh, sort of get all of those thoughts out of your brain and into a second location. And we would love to hear about the way that you do it. There was someone in the chat who said they use a mixture of, uh, TextEdit and Notes as their means of kind of organizing their digital life. And it's funny, I'm also a huge TextEdit user on macOS. I more often these days use BBEdit and iA Writer, but TextEdit is still the— like, it's always open on my Mac. There's always a text box ready for me to use and put stuff in, and it's kind of a little scratchpad for me, even now that I I don't do it as like a date.

Mikah Sargent [00:24:43]:
I used to have this feature or a little system where every day TextEdit would automatically create and open a new file and then give it a date slug. And then that was my sort of daily TextEdit note. And now that I've moved over to these other apps, I don't use that as much, but TextEdit is still very important. Moving along though to the news. The news is up next. All right, Rosemary Orchard. And since we last spoke, Apple, of course, said, hey, it's time to preorder your iPhone Duos. And this isn't an iPhone Duo.

Mikah Sargent [00:25:28]:
This is just a—

Rosemary Orchard [00:25:29]:
It's a case for the iPhone Duo.

Mikah Sargent [00:25:30]:
It's a case for an iPhone Duo. And, you know, you gotta— I'm curious. I don't remember what time it is for you. It's 5 AM for me. So that's plus 8, I think, for you.

Rosemary Orchard [00:25:43]:
Well,

Mikah Sargent [00:25:44]:
okay, great. That's a great time to have the One 2 3.

Rosemary Orchard [00:25:48]:
I could have planned my life better for it, to be honest. I was in a car driving up the motorway. I was not the one driving, to be clear. My other half was driving, which is just as well, 'cause otherwise I would've had to pull over to try and do the preorder, which, as we will hear, folks, took me a little bit. So there was a little hiccup in my preorder. How did yours go, Micah? Was your preorder good?

Mikah Sargent [00:26:08]:
So let me, we'll take us back. I, of course, prepared ahead of time. I did the, you know, prepare for your preorder thing. And I knew I wanted the 512GB iPhone Duo in the white color. And so I had that ready, ready to rock, ready to roll. The, you know, morning or the night before, I set my alarm for 4:50 and then a second alarm for 4:55 AM and woke up up and, uh, had an iPad nearby in case I needed it, but had my iPhone there, and then also the card that I was using to make the purchase just in case Apple Pay didn't want to work. So I hop in, uh, and I wait, and pretty much at like 5:01, um, it ends up, uh, that there was a at like 5:01, my app loaded and it was ready. And I, you know, went in and saw that it had pickup listed for my local Apple Store on launch day.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:26]:
And I thought, well, I don't want to do that, so I'll just do shipping. Like I usually do. But between the time that I looked at— because I, I thought about doing pickup and I wanted to make sure it was truly the one that was local to me and that the app hadn't somehow thought I was still in California. So I popped in to make sure that the address was correct if I was going to do that option. By the time I went back to the screen to do the order, it was a pushed-out date for delivery and listed no option for pickup. What?

Rosemary Orchard [00:28:06]:
Mm-hmm.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:06]:
It was mere seconds of difference. So I completed the process, and as of this morning, I am still getting quoted for November 12th or 13th. Between— I think it says— let me find it. I'll just, I'll just find it. I think it's between November 12th and November 14th or something like that. Um, interestingly, uh, my younger brother, uh, who lives in Missouri, he also— yeah, November 16th through November 23rd is what it's being quoted as. So that will be after the arrival of my home view. Um, I think originally it even said the 13th, but anyway, um, bummer city for sure.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:53]:
My younger brother He got his, uh, or he's going to get his on launch day. His, uh, from the start to the finish, he had it locked in and apparently was faster than me and didn't, uh, hem and haw, I guess, about the possible pickup. And so he's getting his on launch day. Uh, so he's very excited about that, and I'm very happy for him. But yes, it was wild how it shifted, uh, within seconds. Wow. Now, Rosemary, you said you were in the car And you tell us about your, uh, experience.

Rosemary Orchard [00:29:31]:
So the app didn't come back up for ages and I was trying to reload it with force quitting. I was trying to open it in Safari, but I should have planned better, quite frankly, and made sure that I was at home with multiple devices like I usually do. So when I finally got in, which took 3 or 4 minutes, to be honest, I— it took me a little bit. Uh, to check that everything was right, and then I realized that my Apple Store credit was not being applied. So I deliberately went and traded in a bunch of devices, and on Thursday in the middle of the day, I added all of the vouchers that I had accumulated from trading devices in to my App Store credit because I know that there is a limit on the number of vouchers you can use when you are actually purchasing purchasing a device. So I went in and I added all those and I had £565 worth of credit. Wow. So we're not talking about £5, which, you know, I'll spend it on apps and it'll be fine.

Rosemary Orchard [00:30:33]:
Don't worry about it. We're talking about—

Mikah Sargent [00:30:35]:
Real money.

Rosemary Orchard [00:30:36]:
A quarter of the price of an iPhone Duo.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:39]:
Yeah.

Rosemary Orchard [00:30:40]:
Even though I was going for the 512GB in Star White, just like Micah, because apparently we're iPhone Duo twins. We are. Anyway, It's cute weird, not weird weird. But either way. So, uh, yeah, so I did that and I realized it wasn't applying this and it was like, okay, this is not okay. I need it to apply this. And I was trying to figure out what was going on and it was saying use credit, like, or use, use a voucher, but it wasn't pulling in the vouchers. I force quit.

Rosemary Orchard [00:31:08]:
I tried again. It wasn't doing it. And eventually I realized the problem is, is I had set up a pre-order on, or I've pre— I'd pre-ordered my pre-order on Monday And I don't know if it was the fact that I did it on Monday and I did the vouchers on Thursday. I don't know if it was just because I had already set it up as a request, but I had to go in and completely start from the beginning, at which point my launch date had— or my ship date or arrival date had shifted from the 23rd of October, so launch day, to the 30th of November through to the 7th of December. Oh. So I'm, so I'm getting a nice Christmas present this year, but I'm not getting my iPhone Duo anytime soon. And the worst part of this is, is I've seen people saying online that they're noticing that the ship dates for the iPhone Duo are moving backwards. So people who had ordered who are not getting it until January are now getting it in December.

Rosemary Orchard [00:32:09]:
People who were getting it in December are now getting it in November. Mine hasn't shifted. Mine hasn't shifted either. Apple, come on. This is just very frustrating. It's one of these things where I wish there was an easy way for me to just be like, hey Apple, I actually have a podcast. Can you like make sure I get this earlier? But they have their set list of people who are on their press invite list, and those people get shipped a device to play with and test and do stuff with. And I'm sadly not on that list.

Rosemary Orchard [00:32:37]:
I'm sadly not on that list, at least not yet. Who knows? Apple, if you wanna put me on that list, I am not gonna complain. But yeah, it just means that at the moment I'm not getting my iPhone Duo for over a month, about 6 weeks at this point in time. And we will have to see what happens because, Micah, I would love to make a podcast with you about the iPhone Duo as soon as it arrives. But the good news is, and I will just remind people of this, if you are pre-ordering a device, it will not charge you until the device is ready to ship. ship, which means that they verified my card is working, but now I have to sit and make sure that that money stays in my bank account until they actually take it. Especially if they bring the ship date forward and then it does appear 4 weeks earlier than expected. Surprise! Earlier than expected, that would be amazing.

Rosemary Orchard [00:33:24]:
It's not going to— I don't think it would move by 4 weeks, but it could move forward by a week or so, which would be a hopefully pleasant surprise. But yeah, you just need to Yeah, keep an eye on that and make sure that you've still got the money in your account. What's your iPhone Duo case, Micah? I was looking at various ones by third parties like Spigen. Spigen.

Mikah Sargent [00:33:41]:
Yeah.

Rosemary Orchard [00:33:42]:
I think, you know, and Pika.

Mikah Sargent [00:33:44]:
I think I'll end up going with, I may end up going with a third-party case, but I always like to get a first-party case because people ask about them and want to know. And so for this, I have, Apple's case, the iPhone Duo Folio with kickstand. And we were just talking about 3D printers earlier. I absolutely am going to 3D print a fake iPhone Duo that I can put into the case so that I can test it out. One of the cool things about this case is that it, it has a sort of spring activated area for the hinge. And so when it goes onto the front and back of the case, that part can stretch out and wrap around as it needs to, and then it disappears whenever it's not. Uh, so it actually—

Rosemary Orchard [00:34:35]:
Oh, that is nice. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:34:36]:
Yeah. Even without being, uh, connected to a phone, it lays flat. Um, and then of course this has the folio, uh, kickstand on the back. So there's the little, uh, kickstand part and they, this is nice. Like it's kind of hard to see, I'm sure, but there are metal hinges in there and that I think is You know, than a well-designed case. And for people who are curious about MagSafe, yes, we've got MagSafe rocking in there. And I can also thwack this part to the back. There's the opening for the camera.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:14]:
And overall, I like the feel of this. I really like the color of it. It's a pretty blue color. I just wish I had a phone to put into it.

Rosemary Orchard [00:35:24]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:26]:
But alas, this is This this is one of those where you know there've been there's been some commentary on Apple's choice to go ahead and push it out now when maybe it didn't have the supply available that it could have had. And you know one of the things that's interesting to me, Rosemary, is it is a question of how much of an impact does delayed shipping have, delayed manufacturing have on people's purchases? Like, I don't know the psychology of that. I don't know if someone taking time means that they're less likely to make the purchase. If you get swept up in the energy of it and then you otherwise would not, that's, you know, easy to argue that that would be the case. I don't know if it's actually the case. And so the argument that it impacts Apple's ability to sell more of these makes sense. Whether it bears out, I don't know. I mean, I can't cancel mine.

Mikah Sargent [00:36:41]:
I've got to have this to be able to talk about it. But I would be curious if there will be people who go, you know what, actually, I don't need this as bad as I thought, particularly if people get the first ones and they have issues. That will be a chance for people to cancel their orders and go, oh, actually, no, I don't, I don't want this phone. It's got, you know, it's got Gen 1 issues. So that'll be interesting to see as well.

Rosemary Orchard [00:37:11]:
Yeah. I mean, I don't think we're going to have a you're holding it wrong from the era of the iPhone 4 coming around anytime soon. But it's one of these things where if they don't ship ship it, then people— or if they shipped it next year, then the problem is, assuming this becomes one of the flagship iPhones, so it's not the E version, the lower-end version of whatever, of the iPhone that year, because those ship on an off-cycle— assuming they want it to be a flagship, then they need to at least try to start shipping it with the main line. So this year, that's the 18, 18 Pro, the Maxes, the Pluses, all of that jazz. If they don't try and ship it around then, then people aren't gonna buy it because they're gonna know that there's a new one coming next September, October, probably, right? And let's face it, the, the, the other iPhones that aren't the main flagship line aren't targeted at the people who are upgrading every year. They're targeted at the people who upgrade every 4 years, every 5 years, whenever they absolutely have to because they broke their iPhone or they ran it over with a truck, whatever it is. And they don't want it to be that. So I think they had to ship it when, when they, when they're trying to ship it.

Rosemary Orchard [00:38:29]:
It is a real shame that they couldn't get more production in beforehand to build up their stock. This is something that, yeah, the, the lack of supply is perhaps going to limit the number of people who will order it, but I think it's also building hype. And I think that is what they're, they're banking on here, the, the hype being built to make people go, oh yeah, the iPhone Duo is super popular, it's now backordered until January 2027. It's October 2026, something being backordered by 3 months, especially over the holiday season and with Chinese New Year and things like that. Because despite the fact that over 100 parts of the iPhone Duo are made in America, whatever good that does, you know, there's a good chunk of this that is still made in other countries. Yeah, there's— yeah, I don't know. It's one of these things where I'm intrigued to hear what people think, especially anybody who actually works in the logistics and supply chain, especially in the world of tech, what they think, because I— yeah, it's, it's a darn if they do, darn if they don't situation where if they didn't ship it, it, it becomes a non-flagship iPhone, or Apple's super late to the game because they don't launch it until next year. But also, yeah, I wish— I want my iPhone on launch day.

Rosemary Orchard [00:39:50]:
One thing I will say, folks, is if you're there going, oh, I'm just gonna pop into stores, see if I can get one on launch day, I have heard that Apple Store employees are being actively told to discourage people from that notion. You are not going to walk into an Apple Store on October 23rd or October 24th or anytime soon and go, hey, can I just pick up an iPhone Duo, please? That's, that's not going to happen. If you've, if you've not preordered one, you're not getting your hands on one for a while. So, yeah, that is unfortunate. But that to me tells me just how restrained supply is.

Mikah Sargent [00:40:26]:
Yeah. All right. The, a couple of other news items, including some updates to Reminders in iOS 27. There's now an option to kind of use natural language to create a reminder. So you can say, for example, research iOS 27 new features at 4 PM, and it'll create a reminder for you. That is something that I have really enjoyed in the Do app in the past. And there's also more in Reminders, the ability to, it's kind of the metadata editor that exists inside the tool for adding more information like date and time and all that kind of stuff has been improved. Grocery lists also saw an improvement.

Mikah Sargent [00:41:21]:
They, Apple says that grocery list items are sorted more accurately and it expands to multiple languages as well. So kind of going through these apps and the updates that come as part of iOS 27, that's one thing to be aware of. And of course there's, there's the Notes app improvement as well, which includes according to Tom's Guide, native section links so that you can link directly to a section of a note. So you could at the top kind of have a table of contents and not have to scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. You can use Siri AI to manage your notes. So, you know, somebody said, or the author Casey Hill of Tom's Guide said, for example, while planning an event recently, I just asked Siri to add a specific date and venue via details directly into the note, and it updated everything in the note in 2 seconds flat. So, you know, if you've got a note that's got a bunch of information and it all needs to be changed throughout, instead of using find and replace, this is a way to do it. There are now some wonderful divider lines we love.

Mikah Sargent [00:42:38]:
I love dividers. I use them all the time in Markdown, and they are something that you can insert in notes now. now. And of course, if you choose to use it, uh, there's Image Playground generation available to you. God, it's for me still an incredible disappointment. Like any— anything I've ever made with Image Playground, uh, emoji, uh, Jetmoji, I mean, or images, they all are just garbage. Um, that's that on that. Let's move to our App Caps.

Mikah Sargent [00:43:10]:
This is the part of the show where we, uh, share the apps or gadgets we're using now or have been using for some time that we think are great. And the app that I want to talk about today is an app from Steve Harris called Scrappy, a digital scrapbook. There's a typo in the title for that. I'll have to submit some feedback. But it is a nice place if you are a person who kind of needs to drag and drop stuff into just a big area. This is great for that. Like, you don't need to overthink it. You don't need to do a bunch of organization.

Mikah Sargent [00:43:48]:
Scrappy just lets you pop in text and GIFs and links and all sorts of stuff all into the app. So think of it as a place to save texts, images, data, and have it all available and visible to you. That is Scrappy from Steve Harris. It's available for free in the App store with in-app purchases, uh, as well, and, uh, can be, you know, your little digital dump, uh, as it were. I know that sounds bad, but it's, it's honestly, it can be a good thing to have a place where you can just pop stuff in and not have to think about it. Uh, Rosemary, what is your AppCap this week?

Rosemary Orchard [00:44:37]:
Well, my AppCap, Micah, is actually kind of linked to our show's content and my mention of parchment because you can do daily notes in it, which, you know, you could also use a journal. Well, I'm gonna recommend a journal. I'm recommending Everlog. Everlog is a really lovely app. It allows you to log your life, and it says to discover patterns. So you can speak or you can type, whichever works better for you, and then you can just create journal entries. What I love about this is it's not one page per day. It's a— I can create as many entries per day as I want to with this.

Rosemary Orchard [00:45:16]:
So for example, I've got an entry here for recording hours today. Mike had a great idea of Shortcuts Corner, but I need time to prep it. I've also got a work one. Went well. Need to open a ticket. I've clearly— I've very deliberately kept that one very vague because, you know, obviously I don't want to give away all the secrets. You can have a full calendar view. Overview.

Rosemary Orchard [00:45:34]:
There are various settings that you can change, so you can group your entries by day, by month, not by grouping at all. You can choose to display your word count in headers, so if you are looking for a longer entry, then you can look for something that is 2,000 words versus 10 words. You can change your entry preview, preview from to however many lines between 1 and 5, or just show the whole thing. Show times, show locations, show weather. You can add comments to things. You can show separators, Micah. I know you love a good separator.

Mikah Sargent [00:46:06]:
I love a separator.

Rosemary Orchard [00:46:07]:
Um, and your attachments, you can add attachments to things as well. So for example, if I were to pop into Coding iOS Today, then I can add attachments in here by doing various things. And also, yeah, there's, there's also prompts that you can use. So for example, if you could design your life's next chapter, what would the first scene be? It's a good question. And I love the fact that there are, you know, there are AI integrations. I haven't used that as much because I don't tend to want to integrate AI into every aspect of my life. But it's there going, what was it like to open a ticket at work today? And the answer is, there's a reason why it says I need to open a ticket, as if I opened a a ticket because it's gonna take me a while. This system, that, that genuinely needs a chatbot system or something so that you can add things to.

Rosemary Orchard [00:47:01]:
I can turn things into quotes and format things if I want to. I can add a nice little separator. I can insert a timestamp just by tapping a little clock. You can do all sorts of things. It's really nice. It's very simple. It has full shortcut support, which you folks know me, I love an app with shortcut support. But Everlog is just a really great way of being able to log your data as a journal on your iPhone.

Rosemary Orchard [00:47:21]:
So why not give it a try?

Mikah Sargent [00:47:24]:
Give it a go. Very, very cool. Um, all right, I do believe that brings us to the end of this episode of iOS Today. I want to thank you all for taking the time to be with us today on the show. If you have questions, comments, etc., email us. iosday@twit.tv is how you get in touch. We would love to hear from you with your app suggestions, your, uh, AppCap picks, and any other thoughts that you have. 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 [00:47:58]:
The best place to go is rosemaryorchard.com, which has got links to apps, books, and podcasts that I am or have been involved in. And of course, there's links to my social media there as well if you scroll right to the bottom. It's slightly hidden away, but that's where you can find me, with the exception being of the Club Twit Discord, because the best thing to do is just join Club Twit, and then you can hang out with us during the show as we record, or in the iOS Today forums after the show. Micah, where can folks find you?

Mikah Sargent [00:48:25]:
If you're looking to follow me online, I'm @micahsargent on many a social media network, or head to chihuahua.coffee, C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-A.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. And, uh, I would love to see you online. That's a weird thing I've just said that I don't normally say. Uh, anyway, thank you so much for watching the show, and we'll see you again next week. Bye-bye.