iOS Today Episode 580 Transcript

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

Mikah Sargent (00:00:00):
Coming up on iOS Today, Apple has announced the best apps and games for 2021, so Rosemary Orchard and I take a look. Stay tuned.

Speaker 2 (00:00:12):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Mikah Sargent (00:00:19):
This episode of iOS Today is brought to you by Coinbase. Cryptocurrency might feel like a secret or exclusive club, but Coinbase believes that everyone everywhere should be able to get in the door. Whether you've been trading for years or you're just getting started. Coinbase can help for a limited time, new users can get $10 in free bitcoin when you sign up today at coinbase.com/ios. And by BetterHelp online therapy join more than 1 million people who have taken charge of their mental health. As a listener, you'll get 10% off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com/ios and by Wealthfront to start building your wealth and get your first $5,000 managed for free for life. Go to wealthfront.com/iostoday. Ha ha Hey, hello and welcome to iOS today. The show where we talk all things iOS iPadOS, watchOS, TVOS, homepod OS. They're loads of OS's that Apple has to offer and we talk about all of them here on iOS Today. I am one of your hosts, Mikah Sargent,

Rosemary Orchard (00:01:48):
And I am Rosemary Orchard. Hi everybody.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:52):
Hello, Rosemary. How are you today?

Rosemary Orchard (00:01:54):
Oh, I'm good. It's always nice. When Apple basically just gives us a nice little silver platter and it's got the entire show laid out on it. It's just, it's like, thank you. Thank you, you so much. You're making my love sticky holiday

Mikah Sargent (00:02:05):
Cookies, just a beautiful plate of holiday cookies that we can pull from and no on yes, apple at the end of each year. For quite some time has chosen the best apps and games of that year. These are games and apps most off that make use of apples tools to the best of their ability. So it's not necessarily the, the top most downloaded game or the top most downloaded app. They also actually did disclose some of that information as well, but these are ones that they actually chose to say, Hey, we recognize the brilliance that is this app or this game. And we think that this deserves to be shown and to be honored. And so this year it kicks off with the iPhone app of the year, which is called Toka life world. Toka life. World is a game that is not really, I would say it's not a game that's for everybody to enjoy, but certainly for people of a certain young age to enjoy. Let me see about switching here. So you can,

Rosemary Orchard (00:03:21):
It does say that its made for ages six to eight, which is of course their target market. And I have to say the design is super adorable. I, I love the fact that it's a design and basically you create your own little world and you play in it. Which I know at the ages of sort of six to eight, I was definitely my own worlds in my head all the time. And if I'd had technology like this back then, I would've been playing with this a lot. And there's, there's a lot of options in it. It, it looks really fun to play. It's one of those I've seen kids play with it quite a bit. I didn't recognize what it was until I saw it in, in the awards list. And then I looked it up and realized, this is the game that I keep seeing these kids play out and about. So yeah, I'm really glad it got an award because you know when, when apps do so well with kids that age, then it, it deserves something like that.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:13):
Yeah, I'm noticing. So I'm currently the one that's tip tapping around in this. There's a lot in here that you can just play around with. So all I'm doing is tapping and I was kind of impressed at how much I was able to move around. There are some controllers on the table so you can immediately see how a kid could pull this up on an iPad or bring it up on a, on a AirPod. I mean, excuse me, an iPod touch. And suddenly they've got all this stuff that they could tap. I imagine I'd be able to yeah, water the plants here. If I wanted to make sure they're doing well. Do a little spritz for the the Brussels sprouts there, turn on and off the lights. And this is just part of the game, you know, there's, there's a lot more to it, but I can pick things up.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:57):
I can, oh, it's time. Well maybe yeah. Time for you to go to bed. I can go into the kitchen, open up the refrigerator. And so this is actually a lot of fun because you there's so much that you can do just playing in this space. There's a restroom here. I mean, this, this is a very cleverly designed game that has, or I should say it's kind of a, it's a cleverly designed toy box that has lots of stuff going on. So now I've changed it nighttime and just, you know, going through this game, I can already tell there's or I, I keep saying game, I really should call it an app going through this app. I can really tell that there's a lot of interactivity that's available within this app. So it's not just kind of, it, it's not specific games or anything like that, meaning that you can give it to a kid and they can sort of just explore, play around and have fun.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:52):
And that also means that this game would be good for a parent who wants to lock down the mm-hmm <affirmative> the phone or the, the D device to a specific app. They can lock it down to this app and they know that their kid will have plenty to do before they ever get bored because they can hop through and play around. So I say, kudos, the developer on this one for creating this to world game that lets you build and play on and on and on it says it's one of the most expansive educational pretend apps available. And it was on the PC and of course is also available on iOS. So it also gels people, kids can play across the different to life games there's to life world, which has to universe and all these different ones. So think of it as kind of like a little, a little pocketable system that has all sorts of different things that you can play.

Rosemary Orchard (00:06:59):
Very cool. Yeah. So the app is free to download for anybody who wants to try it out, but it does have some in-app purchases, but they're not the kind of coins. And you need an infinite number of coins, which cost naturally an infinite amount of money. These are one time sort of purchases where you can buy a sort of snuggle cups furniture, which is a really cute furniture design pack with lime chair. That looks like a Fox for 99 cents, for example, and these range from there's one available free, and there's one for 1299. And most of them seem to be around the 1 99, 2 99 range inside that. So that is also quite nice if you don't want the but parent, can you unlock this for me every two minutes? Because they, they want up more coins or tokens or whatever it is, gems inside of the app.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:45):
All right, moving on to the next one, the iPad app of the year, cuz these are broken down by device is mm-hmm <affirmative> I think this is, this is easily. It makes sense. This is Luma fusion from Luma touch. Luma fusion is an incredibly powerful video editing application for the iPad. It you know, we sometimes talk about how the iPad has all of this power and sometimes you're going, why does it need to have all of this power? Because a lot of apps don't take advantage of it. This absolutely spreads out it's it's wings and takes ultimate a of what's available with the iPad. And I actually quite like editing clips with Luma fusion. Oh, you've got one there that you are.

Rosemary Orchard (00:08:28):
Yeah. So this one I actually had prepared from last time we talked about Luma fusion on iOS today. I've got some video clips of the foster kitty that I adopted and I just put them together with a couple of effects and it's a really easy app use. Obviously I'm not using it to its full power in this particular example, but it is, you know, super easy, you know, if I wanted to say, okay, like that's the perfect spot. I'm gonna cut it there. And then I can, you know, spread it out, drag something else in here. Beforehand obviously you you'd need another clip to put in there and things like that. And this, this is why Lu fusion is so good because it's so easy to use. It's intuitive. The buttons do exactly what you think they're gonna do. And of course it's got a fully built in tutorial as well by tap on the little settings question mark which of course my finger has decided that it is not touch stuff now. Then you could pop open the, the help in the settings and it would show you you know, how everything works and you get a mini tutorial when you start as well, which is great. I, I love Lumo fusion and it works well even on a teeny tiny iPad mini. It works great on a 12.9 iPad probe, but it'll work on the little ones as well, which is great.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:35):
Yeah. And Luma fusion has a bunch of built in tools. I went to see creed Bratton from the office in concert. He performed, this was not too long ago. And the, and so there's some clips from that along with your typical effects that you might expect from a video editor, like changing, making a adjustments to the lighting. So you could improve vibrance, you could make it black and white out of vignette, which would work for this. There are also stabilization features, which is very handy if you are using your hands to shoot footage there are also the transitions that you might be expect expecting like zooming out, zooming in, in tilting up, tilting down a lot of the ones that are very familiar for folks and then audio adjustments as well. So you can make effects, you can make adjustments to the audio by adding a dynamics, processor, a limiter delay distortion pitch, change band pass, filter, high pest filter.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:33):
I mean, incredibly powerful built in plugins that will help you make adjustments to the footage that you have so that you can get the clip exactly or clips I should say exactly how you want them. And then, I mean, if you've ever used a a, a nonlinear timeline editor or excuse me, a, a linear timeline editor, you will be familiar with the tools that you have here. Just as powerful here, I can have multiple tracks of video, multiple tracks of audio, if I want make individual adjustments to the audio exactly. As I need to bring up and down the audio fade in, fade out. I mean, it is truly a full feature video editing platform on the iPad and with the, the newer iPads that have the excellent apple silicone in them, you can get exports pretty quickly. And so I will often if I want to edit a video that I wanna quickly get exported and not have to wait for my Intel max fans to spin up.

Mikah Sargent (00:11:39):
And then later on, later on, later on finally export the footage, I'll pop that open in Luma fusion and get it done and export it so quick. It's so nice to have that. Luma fusion is 29 99 in the app store, which is a steel, an absolute steel for the app and worth the purchase for anybody who does any level of, of editing a video past just kind of sticking some clips together. If you want more than just sticking a few clips together which can be achieved by iMovie, then Luma fusion is an easy get for sure. And you could even use it on iPhone if you'd like. So yeah, it is the iPad app of the year, but it is available on Apple's iOS platforms. All right. We wanted to do an honorable mention for the Mac app of the year because this app is not just available on Mac, but is available across Apple's range of devices.

Mikah Sargent (00:12:39):
And this app has gotten a lot of attention lately. I believe it was just mentioned. And now, now I'm blanking on where else it had just gotten an award or some, some recognition, but the Mac app of the year that had again is available across platforms is craft, which is a documents and notes editor. That is a lot like some of the other documents and notes editors that we've covered in the past. And, you know, we, we just had an episode kind of covering different apps that are available for doing document storage and note taking. But craft deserves an honorable mention because it is written to be used on Macs, iOS, iPad OS from the ground up. I think both of us were part of the beta of this app and then got to see how it's grown over time. And if you are, excuse me, familiar with markdown, then this app is even easier to use. But if you're not, then you can, you know, start to learn using this app. And it's a, it's a great way to, to take notes. And I love the little cards feature that it has in it. That really makes it a handy handy app. Is there anything you wanna say about craft?

Rosemary Orchard (00:13:52):
I mean, it is a really good app for the kind of app that it is, which is a block based document editor where you've got blocks of text, and then you, you know, you, you move, you know, you move your blocks around and put things in there. So when, when you want something like that notion is similar for people who are looking for something similar to notion, but not the same. Then, then this is absolutely perfect. It creates beautiful documents and it has collaboration as well. Which is really important when you need collaboration, because as we all know collaborating together, live on a document, can run into some interesting experiences. I had one the other day in notes where I hit return on a line and a fringe just kept on typing right after the cursor. And I hadn't realized that she'd been typing at all. And it was quite amazing that, you know, it caught up at that exact moment and then kept on typing. And I kind of wish I'd done it slightly differently, but you know, there we go.

Mikah Sargent (00:14:50):
<Laugh> the next one is one that I think many people well actually, no, I'm sorry. The next one is not one that a whole lot of people will be familiar with. The next one is the apple TV app of the year. Yes, we cover tvOS on the show as well. And that one goes to Dayson, da Z E N, or da Z N. This is an app that lets you stream sports on your apple TV. It takes full Avan see, this is the thing is that there are a lot of apps on the app store on the apple TV that do not properly take a of the built in tools that apple provides the built in kind of players and rewind fast forward effect, the audio effect, the audio effect, et cetera. And so it is really annoying when you open an app and you just want to hit the, the button to the left, that set as, Hey, I want to go back 10 seconds and it won't do it because this app is chosen to implement a custom player. So anytime there's an app that just takes advantage of the player that apple provides. So that way it uses the new Siri remote that way it uses those controls. That way I can make adjustments to the CA optioning into the audio. I'm always going to champion those kinds of apps. And this days an app is one of those 

Rosemary Orchard (00:16:19):
As Knox Harrington and the chat has pointed out, it is very popular for boxing and MMA. So you can watch that it, it looks like it also has some tennis on there. But yeah, if you are into boxing, MMA and other sports, then you may wanna check out Dayson, which the app itself is available for free in the app store, of course, with in-app purchases to be able to stream those live sports. So it got a shout out from apple as the apple TV, apple of the year which it's always interesting seeing that category, the non gaming category for apple TV, that apple chooses at the end of the year, because there aren't a whole lot of options there that aren't just straight up media streaming apps, like, you know HBO, max, or Netflix, or one of those to actually have one that is I mean, this, this is ultimately just a, a, a media streamer for, for sports, but it's a little bit left field in comparison to some, some that people would be more familiar with that would be kind of front of mind, you know, the NBC app or something like that.

Rosemary Orchard (00:17:29):
So I always look to that category to see what apple has chosen there as its as its option. So congratulations to the days in group for their apple TV app of the year award. Rosemary, do you wanna tell us about the apple watch app of the year? I do, because this is an app I love. And when I say I love, I mean, I didn't need to download this or anything to demo. It, it is carrot for the apple watch. And I've set up my iPhone. I'm gonna try and hold my wrist still so that it's not moving in and out too much so that we can actually see this here. But carrot is a great apple on the apple watch. It has of course support for all from complications, but it has a whole bunch of extra detail as well.

Rosemary Orchard (00:18:13):
So if I just scroll back up to the top, you can see at the moment I'm looking at the weather and PA Luma where the Twitch studios are. And if I just tap on the cloud with 10 degrees, it's Celsius for everybody worried that Petaluma is currently, you know, at the end of the world, it's it's probably something else in Fahrenheit. Then, you know, can get more precise information and see, for example, when daylight is, or if I tap on the precipitation chance, then I get a slightly more precise information on that. And so on and so forth. And I just love the fact that there is so much detail here available on my wrist. And this means that I can display this information in complications. You can have multiple different complications on your watch face showing you important information that you want and need, and it is a fully featured application.

Rosemary Orchard (00:18:59):
So if I want to search for locations, obviously I can tap my current location and some other recent locations I've looked for, but if you've got more, the new apple watches, it supports the keyboard because care always supports the new features whenever they're available. So I can try and to something like type in San Francisco, which is a really bad choice of things to type in I might change this to San Diego because I'm typing at an angle on my wrist. <Laugh> which is really difficult to do, but that is the apple watch keyboard rather than anything else. There we go, San Diego much easier, and now it will do searching, give me some options. If there are more San Diegos, it would give me those. And then bam, after some pretty animations, I can see what the weather is like there.

Rosemary Orchard (00:19:42):
And I have to say you know, like being able to do weather app, weather maps and things like that makes this an even better app than it already was. And every time there's something new that the maker of carrot can add to the app, it will now I should warn people. It does have some options in the app for SNAR level which can range from completely professional all the way up to homicidal. You can also set political preferences and so on and so forth. Usually if somebody famous does something Twitter worthy, it will appear in relatively short order inside of the carrot app, as one of its snaky messages of the moment when you open it up or you check your complication or you check your widget on the iPhone it's also available on iPad and there's a separate Mac application as well. And they're all brilliant. I love them.

Mikah Sargent (00:20:34):
Yes. It's pretty delightful. Seeing how quickly those things show up. Sometimes I will end up using it as a way to go, oh, there's something new I need to learn about because it's showed up in carrot at weather. And clearly it is of importance. So shout out to the creator of carrot at weather. Who's always up on the trends and adding new things all the time to the carrot weather app, pretty great stuff. All right, when we come back from the break, we will cover the games of the year for different platform forms. But I do wanna take a quick break so I can tell you about Coinbase. If you've been looking to level up your financial portfolio, it's always good to diversify. So why not think about cryptocurrency backed by the world's leading investors? Coinbase keeps your portfolio safe and secure while adding crypto into your mix.

Mikah Sargent (00:21:26):
Coinbase offers a trusted and easy to use platform to buy, sell, and spend cryptocurrency. They support the most popular digital currencies on the market and make them accessible to everyone. They offer portfolio management and protection learning resources and a mobile app. So you can trade securely in monitor your crypto all in one place million of people in over 100 countries, trust Coinbase with their digital assets, whether you're looking to diversify, you're just getting started or you're searching for a better way to access. Crypto markets. Start today with Coinbase. For a limited time, new users can get $10 in free Bitcoin. When you sign up today at Coinbase dot coms slash iOS, sign up at coinbase.com/ios for $10 in free Bitcoin. This offer is for a limited time only. So be sure to sign up today, that's coinbase.com/ios, and please head to that URL. So they know that you came from here.

Mikah Sargent (00:22:26):
It's very helpful. Coinbase.Com/Ios to check it out. Thank you, Coinbase for sponsoring this week's episode of iOS today. And let's talk about the iPhone game of the year. I think many, a person will be familiar with this. There are lots of league of legends fans out there. I am not one of them, so I don't know a whole heck of a lot of about league of legends, but I do know it's a very popular game and league of legends, wild rift on the iPhone has claimed a spot for game of the year. Beautiful graphics, really well designed controls, which is a big thing. If you're not going to be playing kind of on a console or a, a PC to be able, able to kind of play the whole game that you want to play on. These mobile devices is really important, and that is what's done in the league of legends wild rift game.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:21):
There's also an argument to be made that some of this is a little political given that league of legends is kind of indirect competi with a certain big game of familiarity called fortnight which, which is created by epic games and epic is in an ongoing battle with apple. And shortly after epic, Fortnite was forced to leave the app store. We started to see more featuring of league of legends, and I think that it gave people who are on iOS, a replacement, should they want to just play sort of more casually on the device that they have. And so I'm not surprised to, to see it get iPhone game of the year here given that it is well designed it, but it also, because it is the other Fortnite, if you will, <laugh>

Rosemary Orchard (00:24:17):
Yes, it's got some truly beautiful graphics. I am not a league of legends player myself. I've tried it out a few times in the and it it's never really been my kind of game, I guess. But it, it is a very beautifully designed app and a lot of people love it for very good reasons. They do do updates frequently and yeah, have, have a look on the app store to give it a go there's a special event. It says happening now as we record which is available on the app store for this. So hopefully people can find out a little bit more about it

Mikah Sargent (00:24:52):
Indeed. Moving on to the iPad game of the year, this one will be familiar to many, a player who likes what Marvel has on offer Marvel future revolution. This is a, a fighting game that also has some, some familiar controls, familiar game controls. So when it comes to games of the year, apple really does focus a lot, not just on graphics, sort of what a developer takes advantage of with, with apples graphics on its devices, but also that the game is easy to play using the device in front of them. So you don't necessarily need a controller to be able to play this. The onscreen controls are built well and intuitively to let you play these games and actually kind of make it through the stage is without it feeling like you're giving up on something in order to play them. So I think fans of Marvel combined with fans of these sort of fighting games will very much like Marvel future revolution which is available in the app stores free to download in. And yeah, I mean, who doesn't wanna play as Spiderman? I mean, I certainly do well. I mean,

Rosemary Orchard (00:26:13):
Spiderman's pretty great, but also the Mac app game of the year is a really good one. It is unfortunately only available on Mac but missed by cion worlds is a really great game. And it is one I've played before. I'm not gonna demo on the show today because we are talking about iOS and iPad OS apps. But if you are a Mac owner and or user, then check out mist in the Mac app store, it is a really great game set on an island that's, as it says in the app store tint with mystery and shrouded in intrigue. And he doesn't like that as an intro. It's just such a magical intro. It's great.

Mikah Sargent (00:26:50):
Agreed. All right. Moving on to the apple TV game of the year, which again, I was talking earlier, this is a little bit of an easier category. The apple TV game of the year is called space marshals three which I am not surprised given that it is a game that looks good on a big screen, but is not so involved that it ends up being kind of slow and clunky to be able to play so, and says, join the rowdy space, Marshall crew on their latest misadventure and outer space, strap those boots on gear up and get ready to hunt space crooks. It's an action game. That is a little bit RPG. You know, it's telling a story as you're going through it, and you are working to kind of defeat some enemies while sneak around. So if you are a fan of stealth games, then you will probably like this.

Mikah Sargent (00:27:50):
If you are a Fran, a Fran, yes, if you are a Fran of tactics as well, then you will like this because it does rely, you do rely on the environment as you're moving through to hide behind different parts of the environment. And you can set up different distractions. This is a game that it works so well on apple TV, because you've got that huge screen. So you can see different parts of the stage that you might want to head to, to set up a flash grenade or a, a smoke grenade or set up a trap before you sneak through Ru in another way and, and set up different S stealthy methods of taking down the opponents. So that is a lot of fun for, for folks who like that kind of thing. And then of course, folks who like the RPG style of being able to improve upon the, their character over time.

Mikah Sargent (00:28:43):
So you can add extra items that you carry with you, extra weaponry, et cetera, et cetera to improve upon your own character. So apple TV game of the year space marshals three from pixel bite. And once again, free with in app purchases, several of the games all fall into that. It appears that if you want to unlock other chapters past the beginning of the game, you will then pay 2 99 to be able to unlock those chapters 4 99 to unlock chapter 1, 2 99, unlock chapter two. And then you can get both for 7 99, if you prefer. So you try it, you decide if you like it, and then you can unlock the remaining chapters to keep going. And I have to say I'm very fond of the the app icon for this game, because it is a cowboy in a swamp and the Cowboy's beard or the Cowboy's mustache is, is floating above the swamp water. <Laugh> yes. Pretty funny. Yes.

Rosemary Orchard (00:29:52):
Yeah. So on pixel bites website, they do say the chapter one and two are out now. So that's the first two chapters, which implant that there will be more chapters to come. And it's also available on iPhone and iPad as well, allowing you to play in more places than just in front of your TV, which is pretty nice. I always like having that option so that I can pick it up on an iPad or an iPhone instead of just in my living room.

Mikah Sargent (00:30:16):
Yes. All right. Then the apple arcade game of the year, I am not surprised to see this go to a beautiful, beautiful game called foundation foundation is made by mist Walker. And it is actually by some of the, I think game producers of final fantasy foundation is not only a really cool apple arcade game, but it also is a game that uses real life dioramas as part of the stage. So the creators of the game built IL dioramas that they use within the game. It is mapped to those dioramas here. If you're watching, then you'll be seeing a video showing the artists, working on the dioramas in the game as they are kind of gearing up to produce this game. So they made these stages and captured them so that they could put them into this space. And in some cases, the animations are also the, the, the actions that take place in the game are also real life actions that take place this game.

Mikah Sargent (00:31:32):
It's amazing that it is an apple arcade game because this game could very well have been a 30 to $50 game that you buy to be able to play through. If you like final fantasy style games, then you will absolutely love foundation. I started playing it and then I got distracted with a few other games, but while I was playing it, I found myself just staring at the scenes over and over again, or showing a video now that really shows off these actual physical dioramas that were created for the stage. And it shows your character kind of moving through the scene, but in real life, while this is going on, there's the actual stage that they built. So I just, it's, it's a really incredible game, of course, as all fan fan final fantasy stories have, this also has a, a fun story to follow along with, as you're playing through interesting camera angles, beautiful graphics, and excellent familiar gameplay, which all comes together to be quite good. So yes well worth checking out plantation, no surprise that it won apple arcade game of the year this year. And it'll be interesting to see what can even come close in the coming year, given how well this game was designed. Yep.

Rosemary Orchard (00:32:54):
Yes, definitely. It is beautiful. And I've played it as well. I have an op apple arcade subscription, which I make a point of once a week or so trying to sit down and play something for at least 2013 minutes to try and get at least some of my money's worth. And that, that's one of the games that I've come back to multiple times over the last couple of months. So I'm really glad that it

Mikah Sargent (00:33:14):
Won. Yeah, me too. I think again, it's so much deserved to win. This will ward and I was not surprised to see it up there. I think I would've been shocked if it wasn't up there. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> honestly apple could do a whole separate thing for apple arcade games if they wanted to because this, this would definitely be at the top, even in that, but it would be nice to see kind of some of the other games on there at the same time. I, I know apple wants to honor non-op arcade games to make sure that they get the attention that they deserve, which is totally understandable as, as a, a way to make sure that it's not just the ones that kind of have a closer relationship with apple that get the attention. But that we do see some of the other things that developers are creating out there.

Mikah Sargent (00:34:02):
All right. In a moment we will round things out with the trend of the year, which is something that apple has started doing. And we'll talk about that trend, what it means, and then sort of give a quick rundown of the apps that got attention for that. But I do wanna take another quick break so I can tell you about better help. This episode of Iowa today is brought to you by better help online therapy. You can check them out@betterhelp.com slash iOS. Sometimes it can be kind of difficult to sort of think about therapy and think about what therapy means. And so one way to think about therapy is by using an we get our cars tuned up to prevent bigger issues down the road. We get annual checkups and go to the gym. Some of us go to the gym to maintain physical wellness and prevent injury and disease.

Mikah Sargent (00:34:54):
We do chores regularly. Again, some of us to avoid a giant mess of a house, and more importantly to avoid road going to therapy is like all of those things, it's routine maintenance, but it's for your mental and emotional wellness to prevent bigger issues down the road therapy doesn't mean something's wrong with you. It means you're investing in yourself to keep your mind healthy and better help. Isn't just any online therapy. It's customized for you by bring video phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist. So you don't have to see anyone on camera. If you don't want to, it's much more affordable than in-person therapy, and you can start communicating with your therapist in under 48 hours. Why invest in everything else and not your mind. This podcast is sponsored by better help and iOS today. Listeners get 10% off their first month@betterhelp.com slash iOS.

Mikah Sargent (00:35:52):
That's B E TT E R H E L com slash iOS. And thank you to better help for sponsoring this week's episode of iOS today. All right, let's talk about connection, which is the trend of the year. The goal is to identify a movement that had lasting impact on people's lives and to re is the standout apps and games that met that moment. I'm reading from apples site. The top trend of 2021 is connection. This year's trend winners brought people together in meaningful ways while meeting social personal and professional needs for users around the world. The first one, many of you will be familiar with it's among us among us the game that took the internet by storm, the game where you and your friends try to determine who is an imposter, who is your friend and who needs to be shot out of an airlock?

Mikah Sargent (00:36:53):
This is a game that I think a lot of us have played at least once, maybe twice, maybe 900 times. It's a lot like WW. It's a lot like some of those other games that are out there, but it had jolly good graphics that had cute cutey graphics. I, you know, sort of lower quality graphics, but ones that people just really fell in love with. It was very easy to play. Very easy to explain to other people as you started to play. And then it was one of those games where you realize that it has so many layers of different techniques that you can add so many layers of game play to make things harder for others or easier for others. It's a lot of fun. And as apple points out with a mix of cooperation and competition among us cultivated community through bite size matches that urged users to talk and listen to each other by a banter, bluffing and teamwork. So you did have to communicate to figure out who is the imposter and make sure that you got the right person. And then sometimes you didn't get the right person and you had to laugh when they got ejected from the airlock. So not surprised Rosemary. I imagine you've played among us a few times.

Rosemary Orchard (00:38:09):
Yeah. I only a few times as well, those where I think it's more fun with people that, you know, quite well. And of course for me, coordinating people across time zones can be kind of tricky. But it is a really great game and I highly recommend it. It's a lot of fun. There's a web version as well. The, the iPhone and iPad version is just available on those apps on those devices. But of course there are apps for other platforms as well for you to try out.

Mikah Sargent (00:38:37):
Then the next one is Bumble. We not gonna go into super detail about this. Bumble is an app for connecting with others, including friendships. And also they did, they did kind of broaden the horizons to include professional networks. Also people who are looking for dates. The cool thing about Bumble is that it is, it empowers women in the sense that women are the ones who get to initiate the conversation so they can choose to initiate the conversation or not. And the other person is not able to communicate less, the woman chooses to to start that conversation. So it can feel like a safer place for women to set up their dating profile and feel better about sort of putting their information on there. Really cool place. I know I've known several people who have you used Bumble to forge some really incredible friendships where they were having trouble finding, you know, friendships sort of organically, so to speak. And in other ways, and using Bumble, they found some friends who were incredibly compatible with them and now are their closest friends they've ever had. And I love that. I think that's fantastic.

Rosemary Orchard (00:39:58):
Yeah, I've used it myself for making friends. Cause of course I moved back to the UK in the middle of a pandemic. It's pretty difficult to meet people that way. And so I signed up with the friendship option and I have made some pretty good friends with it. It's it's great. I can recommend it for that. I have not tried any of their other options. But based on my recommend my experience with the, the friendship option I can probably recommend it. It's pretty good.

Mikah Sargent (00:40:22):
The next one is Canva. Canva is a way to create slideshow for your well slide. That's the thing is that it's, it does a lot. It's not just slide I chose, but it's, it's for creating graphics. So you may want to create graphics for your Instagram account. You may want to create signs for your classroom. You may want to create garage sales signs, bake, sale signs Twitter images. It's it makes you easy. Yeah, you exactly. Everything you could think of when it comes to graphic design, it makes things a little simpler and it helps you to create the best graphics that you can instead of sort of trying very hard to learn Photoshop or one of those things. This is this makes it a little bit easier to, to do.

Rosemary Orchard (00:41:19):
Yeah, they do. They have all sorts of options as well, including doing things like creating print calendars and so on. So if you wanted to create your own like print a calendar with you know, your own pictures in that's something you can do, it is great for, you know, I've got some images, but I don't wanna spend hours doing design work and measuring things out with a digital ruler. This is the great, this is a great way to go. And it works really well for also just things like, you know, Twitter header images and so on, because they've already got the sizes for these things set up, which means that it can be incredibly useful and get you on the path to something great, really fast.

Mikah Sargent (00:41:56):
Indeed. The next one is eat okra. I download this app quite a while back, and it is a guidebook for finding black owned eateries around the us, I believe, and elsewhere by this point eat okra is an app where you submit the different locations. And then it has information about those locations. There are now more than 11,000 black owned eateries that are included in this database. So if you are looking for local black owned eateries, you can use eat okra to find them to support them. And also if you want to, you can help to sort of build out that list of black owned eateries. I like that it's called eat okra. Back where I'm from in Missouri fried okra is a very popular sort of appetizer or side dish. And so it, you know, touches my heart to have the app called eat okra as the way to, to find those pretty cool.

Rosemary Orchard (00:43:04):
I will know I downloaded it here in the UK and while the app is available for download and opens up and says, you know, it can, you know, do things for me. It only offers products sold in dollars and it has nothing within quite a radius of me and I am right next to a city called Bristol, which is pretty big and has a lot of black own Deru. So I would hope that people were using the app if it was sourcing things over here. So at the very least over here in the UK, it looks like it's not rolled out yet. The fingers crossed it will in the not too distant feature.

Mikah Sargent (00:43:35):
Indeed. All right. And then last but not least, can you tell us about peanut Rosemary? Yeah.

Rosemary Orchard (00:43:42):
So I looked into this a few times and essentially peanut is a social network for women who are looking for support in some key areas. So people who are looking for support with fertility in pregnancy, motherhood, menopause and essentially it's trying to connect you with women at a similar stage to you in life. So that, you know, you can get support with things like that because as I'm sure any woman or, you know, female will agree, hormones are a thing that affect everything that we do in our lives, whether or not we want them to. And so having the support of some other people going through similar things to you can be incredibly important and helpful. And peanut is designed to try and connect you with those people. There are live audio conversations. You can, you know, make posts, there are groups you can meet up with people in real life assuming it's safe to do so where you are and so on. And it's, it's an app that is designed to support women and help women support each other. Which I have to say in general is something that I, I wish more social media we're trying to do instead of sewing division between us, if everything could bring us together in such a way that would be wonderful,

Mikah Sargent (00:44:59):
Agreed love will keep us together. Folks that brings us to the end of the list of apples app store awards, which honor the best apps and games of 2021 we'll of course, of course include links to these different apps and games, the list as well. So you can check them out. There was a lot to cover, and so we did our best to sort of breeze through them so that you could get a little taste of what was available, but we did once make sure that we got all of those mentions in there. So you knew what you could check out from that list. It also has on the page a link to kind of the top games and apps. So if you are curious about what apps and games made the top of the list in terms of downloads and the top apple arcade games you can check that out as well, all over on apples page, congratulations to the app store awards, winners congratulations to the individual and teams of developers who worked so hard on these apps and games this year. And thank you for keeping Iowas today, rolling along by creating these apps and games. Alright, I hear the music it's time for shortcuts corner.

Mikah Sargent (00:46:30):
Welcome to short cuts corner. This is the part of the show where you write in with your shortcuts requests and the shortcuts expert. Rosemary orchard provides an answer. We hope occasionally there is no answer. Occasionally. There's a fantastic answer. Occasionally Rosemary goes so in depth with an answer, the you go, I didn't even know it was possible, but it is yay. ALA, we are here and ready to kick things off with Simon who writes, hello, Micah and Rosemary. I am having difficulty with automating a shortcut. I have set up a shortcut to open the, my permit parking app. I have tried to automate this shortcut so that when I arrive at the maltings car park in Salisbury, it runs the shortcut. It works okay, but also works. When I arrive at the car park on foot, how can I make it so that the shortcut only runs when my phone is connected to my car's Bluetooth.

Mikah Sargent (00:47:32):
I hope this is clear. Keep up the good work Simon from the UK, Simon. I think this is clear. You basically want to use the Bluetooth connection to your car as the flag that tells your shortcut, Hey, I'm in a car and only run the, this shortcut. When I do this, if I'm walking to this location and I'm not connected to Bluetooth in my car, then the flag says this person is not in a car or the flag is, is empty, essentially. So Rosemary, is it possible to set up this automation to say, yes, I know this person is in the car because know, I know that my iOS app, my, my iOS device knows when I'm connected to my car's Bluetooth, because when it does, it automatically turns on do not disturb while driving. So in theory, this is possible, but I guess we'll find out.

Rosemary Orchard (00:48:24):
Yeah. So in theory, this is possible. And I looked at this a couple of different ways, but before we get to that, I just wanna say Micah 10 out of 10 points. I left the word Salisbury in there. It's a city near me, but so many people pronounce it Salisbury. So you get full points for getting that right? Well done. You're just down the road from me. <Laugh> so I had a look at this and essentially the difficulty is knowing, for example, if we're in a focus mode, because if you connect to CarPlay well, you can't get that. You're connected to CarPlay, but also you can't get your focus mode. So even if you have do not disturb while driving enabled when you're connected to CarPlay, I can't get that either. And I was going nuts thinking, there's gotta be a way to do this.

Rosemary Orchard (00:49:06):
And then of course, I pulled out my trustee friend toolbox because toolbox pro has an excellent action called get audio output device. And when you drag it onto into a shortcut, then it gives you things like get or gives you the action, get details about current audio output device. So I'm crossing my fingers, Simon, that your car is also a audio output device. Now mine is an audio device. It's not called car, but I've just put car in here as an example. So what you want to do is use toolbox pro to get the details about your current audio device. And then if the name of this is car, so I've selected the variable here, which is automatically input, but what you need to do is scroll down to the bottom and get the name, okay, because the name is the important art first here.

Rosemary Orchard (00:49:52):
And then you can say, Hey, if the name is whatever the name of your car is, then you put your shortcut magic in here to open the, my permit app. And for people wondering how you can open an app, there is just a great action, cold open app, and that's what you would do. So you would just drag this one in here, and then you select the, my permit app. But of course you need to know the name of the audio output device. So I have a bonus helper shortcut for anybody who wants this which is getting the details of your audio output device. And then it's just gonna copy that name to the clipboard for you. And then you, so you can start by downloading this shortcut, run it. And then when you install this shortcut as part of the setup, it's gonna ask you what it should put in this little section right here, where it says car right now. And then you can just paste that in. And so both of those will be in the show notes, you will need to either put this in to side of the shortcut automation, the personal automation that you have, that's running things based on your location or you'll need to modify the shortcut. That's being run through a run shortcut action for that, but fingers cross. This does what you need Simon. So I'm gonna hope to hear back from you that everything works.

Mikah Sargent (00:51:08):
All right. Our next one comes from Dominic, from Portland, Dominic writes in I'm charging my iPhone only till it gets to 80%. So when it gets to 80%, then I create a shortcut that runs, and it says that the battery is charged after that I'm disconnecting my phone. And from the charger, I would like to have something similar when I'm charging my apple, watch seven, sadly, I wasn't able to find out how to do it. Can you help me with how I could accomplish my goal? Maybe toolbox pro can do it best regards Dominic from Poland. So it sounds like what Dominic wants is to only ever charge the device that he has that they have to 80%. So does that with, with their iPhone, wants to be able to do that with the apple watch as well. It gets to 80%. I pulled it off the charger is this possible?

Rosemary Orchard (00:52:00):
So I had a really good dig around and basically the difficulty is getting the information about a device that isn't the device that your car running the shirt cut on. So when you run, for example, something from your iPhone, then it has access to some apple watch information. Like for example it can get your current apple watch faces and things like that. So I'm just gonna pop this up so people can see, you can set your apple watch face and you can set if you should, auto launch audio out apps and things like that. And if we go into the watch app, sometimes you'll find that just typing in watch, won't show you all of the shortcuts actions. So you'll wanna have a look in here, but there's nothing here that's gonna help us. And if we look under the device details we can see toolbox pros got some information about devices.

Rosemary Orchard (00:52:49):
It's not got any information about, even with the extended device details. It's not got any information about your apple watch. So unfortunately this isn't something that we can do with shortcuts, but I am wondering if Dominic knows about optimized charging, because this is a relatively new feature that Apple's brought to both the iPhone and the apple watch, and it automatically handles the best way to charge your iPhone or iPad for you. So it will not basically keep your phone at a or your apple watch to around about 80% charge until shortly before you would usually take it off the charger at which point it then takes it from 80 up to a hundred percent. So with optimized charging, you may find Dominic that you actually don't need this. But if there is a way to get the percentage of the apple watch battery on the iPhone as part of a shortcut, well, I would really like that myself, because this way, when I can, when I run other shortcuts, it can say, by the way, your apple watch batteries starting to run low, you should probably pop that on charge. And that would be great. But unfortunately right now, I'm not seeing an option to do that.

Mikah Sargent (00:53:54):
All right. We are going to take a quick break before we come back with feedback and our app caps, I would like to tell you about wealth front. Who's bringing you this episode of iOS today. Look, there are Stanks those, those stock memes called STUs. There rocketships look day trading can be a lot of fun, but if you actually wanna grow your long term wealth and make it to the moon, well, you should open up a Wealthfront investment account today. The odds are not in your favor. If you are doing it alone. So team up with wealth front instead, investing can be complicated, but whether you're a beginner or you've been investing for years, wealth front makes it easy. They have the right tools for every portfolio. After answering just a couple of questions, wealth run can create a portfolio of globally diversified, low cost index funds personalized just for you.

Mikah Sargent (00:54:52):
In minutes, you can also build your own portfolio with clean energy funds, crypto trusts, tech and hundreds of other investments and wealth front even offers a socially responsible portfolio, which is a mix of funds built around human rights, climate change, sustainable and diversity, no manual trades, no picking stocks, no watching the stock market every day. Wealthfront automatically handles all the investing based on preferences. You control don't wanna spend hundreds of hours trying to lower your tax bill. That's good. Cuz they help you do that. Not sure how to rebalance your portfolio or what rebalancing even is. That's fine because they do it automatically. Wealthfront is trusted with more than 27 billion in assets, helping nearly half a million people build their wealth. Get your first $5,000 managed for free by going to wealthfront.com/ios today, all you need $500 to get started. Grow your wealth the easy way and let Wealthfront do the work for you to start building your wealth and get your first $5,000 managed for free for life. Go to wealthfront.com/ios today. That's w E a L T H F R O N t.com/ios today. To start building your wealth, once again, wealthfront.com/ios today and get started today. Thanks so much to Wealthfront for sponsoring this week's episode of iOS today. Let's head into the questions. Rosemary, do you wanna tell us about the first question we've got?

Rosemary Orchard (00:56:29):
Yeah. So the first question starts with a little bit of follow up again from MJ who previously emailed us about the Instagram and two factor authentication, which wasn't supporting the third part, the two factor authentication apps that MJ had installed on his iPhone, but good news. We figured a way around that. If you go to the website, then you can get the code that you need to put into your two factor authentication app to set everything up. And this time MJS back with another quick question about context syncing. And he says for those of us living in the Google and iOS worlds, is there a good way to sync on text between both platforms and not just a one time sync, but ongoing, whenever changes are made. Thanks for the help. And I love the show MJ, and this is a really good question because I have tried a whole bunch of different apps for this over time.

Rosemary Orchard (00:57:18):
And I've not ever found one that will just sync automatically whenever changes are made. It will only sync when I open the app now using an using something like shortcuts. You can set that up relatively easy to pop you, pop up once a week and go, Hey, do you wanna run, run this now? And you tap on it and it'll open the app. And the, the, the application will get on and sync it. But Mike was wondering, do you have any recommendations for specific apps here? Because the last step I used, I checked, unfortunately it's no longer available in the app store. It's still on my phone, but it doesn't mean I can rec or it means I can't recommend it, unfortunately, even though it still works perfectly fine.

Mikah Sargent (00:57:57):
I was going to say just the built in ability to turn on account syncing with Google you is the way to go about it. You know, in your, in your settings, just by adding it as an internet account, I don't have any third party apps that I would recommend for this in particular. I, because the problem is I have used third party apps and third party services, like if this, then that in the past and in doing so I ended up getting duplicates across my sit system. And that's the last thing I want. So I just tend to use the built in controls for this, because this does help.

Rosemary Orchard (00:58:34):
Yes. I have just had a quick look in the app store for one that I was previously using, and that is it, it looks terrible, but it was really good when I was using contact sync for Google Gmail. So I can see why MJ might want this. I've found personally, if you use the web version of Gmail, of course it doesn't have access to your apple contacts, which means that those people, that you usually email your, them relying on them, appearing somewhere in your email history, to be able to email them, instead of having all that information at hand. But I have, I'm sure use this application but or four. And I don't actually remember why I switched away from it, but they have updated this relatively frequently. Which means that it is probably going to be your best bet that said, if anybody has a recommendation for an app that can do what MJ is asking for it, then please do let us know. It is always great to hear from our listeners. And of course, some of you have the best experience with these things versus us. So being able to ask the audience is one of my favorite features of bios today.

Mikah Sargent (00:59:36):
Agreed. All right. What about this question from bill?

Rosemary Orchard (00:59:42):
Yeah. So bill asks, I have a directory full of textile worksheet per journal on my Mac. I can search finder for a term and see all of the files that contain that term in the content of the files on iOS. It seems like an only search for the term in the file name. Do you know of a way to search an entire directory on iCloud for a term in the content of a file? Not just in the file name. Thanks. I've been a fan of the show from the very beginning bill. Well, first of all, it is very flattering to hear that somebody has been listening to Iowa today, which was iPad today for so long. So thank you bill for continuing to watch and listen. And this is one that I have tried to accomplish a couple of times, including with shortcuts.

Rosemary Orchard (01:00:26):
And I found it's surprisingly tricky to be able to search the contents of files as well, but I do have a solution for you, which is a great application called one writer. Now there's a couple of different applications out there which can do something like, but essentially if you install one writer and you make sure that the folder that you use in iCloud drive is inside of the one writer app, then it should be able to just see everything. And when you search it will then show you the file. That's got everything you want. Now, of course, this is a writing application that is signed for writing the text files, not just reading the text files, but that's the, the idea that I had. And I dunno if Micah you've got a solution. But if I just, I've just reinstalled one writer here. So I can just quickly show you can choose a folder so that you can set things up. And then you've got a whole bunch of options, including local on your device, iCloud, Dropbox, and web dev, as well as other, where you could go ahead and set things up. So for example, if you are using other applications like working copy and secure shellfish, and my examples, then you can select those folders there. But that is the solution that I had for this.

Mikah Sargent (01:01:36):
So what you wanna do is, so I, I pulled up my text, edit file, for example in files. And so I launched the files app. I went to a text at a file because I knew that that would have a whole bunch of text edit files in it. And I type in the word lemon. Now, there aren't any results for titles, but look, what we see here, an option that says contains lemon. When I tap on that, then it will look into the actual text files themselves and find the one you're looking for. So it's one extra tap, which is annoying because yes, on finder on spotlight, on finder, it's so much easier to do, but it is possible within the files app on iOS. It's just a little bit more involved. So you have to actually launch the files app, use the search feature in there and then tap to choose contains.

Mikah Sargent (01:02:26):
But bill that will do it for you if you want to do it with the built-in tools. Luckily yeah, there are third party tools that will take it advantage of that as well. Then the last one comes from Nigel and I'm trying to make it so that we can read this here. There we go. Nigel writes, hi, Mike and Rosemary, love your show. Perhaps it is appropriate. Considering audible is a sponsor of the show. Yes, audible is a sponsor of the network and we have had sponsorable reads here on the show before Nigel wants to know how do you ease or way for that matter sync audible audio books with an apple watch. Mine is apple watch series six, cheers, Nigel Rosemary looks like you have a a, a, a support document that shows you how you go about syncing audio books with audible.

Rosemary Orchard (01:03:19):
Yeah, I do. And I also have my apple watch right here, because if you open the audible app on your apple watch, it actually has a little mini tutorial, which I've taken a screenshot and we'll put a link to that image in the show notes so that people don't have to try and read my apple watch, but there's a little mini tutorial here. And essentially what we need to do is we need to open the audible app on our iPhone. And then when we have a book, so I've got atomic habits here, then from the not this view, of course, I'm doing the wrong view here from the library. Then we can go ahead and tap on something tap on the three dots on the B on the right. And then there is a sync to apple watch. And then it recommend that you put your apple watch on the charger to speed up the sync. And then it will go ahead and sync that over. And now it's going to take a while it said it was preparing, and now it's syncing chapter one of 12 and it's at 1%. So it's gonna take a little while to do that. If you put your iPhone on the charger, it will be faster. If you leave your iPhone near your apple watch, of course, that's also going help things but it will sink. So that's how you can do that. So I hope that one helps you out Nigel.

Mikah Sargent (01:04:28):
Awesome. Yes. That is not, not too difficult of a process and I hope that that works out for you. All right. Now it is time to move to app caps. This is the part of the show where we wear caps the top, our heads to honor our picks of the week. These may be apps or gadgets we are using now that we enjoy or ones we've used for a long time that we want to share with all of you. And to honor those picks, we put these caps on Rosemary orchard. Tell me about your cap and then tell me about your pick of the week.

Rosemary Orchard (01:05:17):
All right. Well, just on a, a minor camera adjustment, really, really sorry, Anthony. I know you prefer it usually with camera tilted a bit down, but we need to get this hat in because it's a head fan with little L hat on. It's got some feathers on the front and of course it's got a little bell on the top just to be extra annoying. Fortunately it doesn't move. It doesn't jingle all that much. And my app cap today is not just an app. It's also a physical device. And it's called the go cube. And if I rotate the box a little bit, then you might already have an idea of what this is. So I've recently been getting into solving the rub, a rubiks cube. And I have like just a, a regular rubiks cube, but I mean, this is me as in it, Micah, I, I have to do things properly.

Rosemary Orchard (01:05:59):
So I had a look on Amazon actually, and I found the go cube, which comes in this amazing box. It does not come premixed. I should point out that I did that before the show. But this is a Bluetooth connected rubiks cube. And I will just say like this, this packaging super neat. I love this. Because if you take out this part, then it also has in it, a charging cable, because you will need to charge the Rubik's cube from time to time. And so the back on the yellow side, there's four dots inside of the, the yellow cube in the middle. And then the charger is just a little thing that, that pops on there, which is pretty great. But what I like about this rubiks cube is it's not just rubiks cube, it's Bluetooth connected rubiks cube.

Rosemary Orchard (01:06:44):
So you can connect to it using the go cube app on your phone. And I, I'm not gonna stay notified about things for the time being, but what I like is there is an academy and you can start at the beginning with the academy and go all the way. And as you progress, you'll see I'm already at the end, it shows you how to solve different stages. So it starts by teaching you the, the frequent commands that you'll see, like for example spinning the left or the right of something. And in, at the app, in the app at the top I can see that the Ruby cube is currently 34 and solved, well, I'm guessing that's from these, these blue ones here, which are in the right place. And there's some red ones in the right place as well, but this has been fairly thoroughly mixed up.

Rosemary Orchard (01:07:29):
But it will teach me how to solve the rubiks cube. So I'm actually going to go ahead and tap on one of the sort of mid-level lessons and you have to hold it so that the white, a, the Rubics cube is pointing up and the green is facing you. And then when you've done that, it calibrates it. And it's gonna tell me how to create a Daisy, but as I move the rubiks cube in real life, it actually updates in the app. And so, wow, I am trying to do this, so I need to point the yellow side up and I can say I've got it. And then it tells me that it wants me to get all of the white pieces around the the side of the, or the, around the the part of the yellow, part of the rubiks cube.

Rosemary Orchard (01:08:16):
And this is quite difficult to do while I'm talking. So I'm just gonna have a moment where I think, aha, there we go. I've got one of them already. And as you can see one of them is kind of on the wrong side. So I'm just gonna see if I can fix that a moment. That is kind of getting there. Nope, Nope, definitely not. Okay. If I do that, then this is gonna go wrong. So how about I do that one and now I have two which is much better. Excellent. So now if I put this one, maybe if I, oh, no, I'm gonna have to do, I can't do this while I'm talking Micah, this is actually surprisingly more difficult than I thought it was going to be. But if I do this then fingers crossed, oh no, I've done it almost right.

Rosemary Orchard (01:09:02):
Very difficult while, wow, that's there we go. But it updates in real time as you're trying to do it. So what you need to do it says for this is to create a Daisy. So you've got the white parts around the yellow, and then if you continue, then it will show you how to turn that into a cross. So I will just skip the video because we don't need to wash that and then I can show people. And then it tells me to turn it upside down twice and look at that. Now the white one is the white part. The shipping next to the green is indeed next to the green. And so now I need to follow these same steps for everything else. So I am going to, to the blue line, oh, I need this.

Rosemary Orchard (01:09:47):
Yeah, it's great. Because for people who want to learn to solve a rubiks cube, this is going to teach you how to find out. Now it said that there's too many mistakes. That's fine. I was just demonstrating and I have actually got a white cross on the top of my rubiks cube. But also, I dunno about you MyCare, but at some point I can't get frustrated with a rubiks cube mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so it has an option here for a solve where it will tell me what I should be doing with this. So, and if I do something incorrectly which kind of difficult to do, oh, there we go. Look, I rotated the bottom one and I meant to rotate the back one. And now I need to rotate the right one twice. Oh, no back one. It's very difficult to do well, I'm doing this, it'll you?

Rosemary Orchard (01:10:35):
It is. It, it corrects me until me what I'm doing wrong. Which is really great. And I have to say, I do like that. And when you do something wrong, it highlights it in red and tells you how to correct your mistake. And of course back twice you can go left or right for this. And it's great. I'm really enjoying this. Obviously the silver is not going to teach you how to solve a rubiks cube per se, but it is gonna do a pretty good job of helping you get to a solved rubiks cube. And then if especially gets stopped at the end to say that you've completed it. So I have to say, I'm really loving this. They do. So this is the go keep edge, which is their, their top model. They do frequently have sales on Amazon that you should keep an eye out for.

Rosemary Orchard (01:11:25):
They also have a smaller two by two one, which if you're looking to get something for a younger child or something for Christmas, a I two, one might be ideal, or you could jump straight into the rubiks cube. They also have some other options for the three by three cubes. But this is great. There are also some other apps that you can use, which I am experimenting with, but I'm not yet quite happy enough to make a recommendation for one as my app cap, but this is my favorite way to sell a rubiks cube now, because I can cheat when I need to. But also I can just look at the instructions and get some help when I figured out which part I'm struggling with. And it's got regular patterns in there that you can learn to help you do things like, for example rotate a corner piece, if you need to. And things like that, that this is a, a great app and device. And I'm really glad I found it. And I think for people who want to learn to solve a rubiks cube, get faster at it. And so on, this has got a bunch of options. It's got timers stats, you name it, it's all there. So very rubiks cube that lights up when you've solved it and it's rechargeable.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:33):
Nice. All right. My app cap this week is actually a service that I wanted to mention because it's just so cool for 6 99 a month, you can do something with all those photos you have on your device. This is Google's premium print series, and it is a way you pay a 6 99 a month. And then every month you get 10, four by six prints sent to your home. So then you can add those to frames that you have. You can give them out to people. You can choose the finish in the border so you can set it to have a glossy finish or a matte finish and then choose to have a border or no border. On the back of the print, you can actually set it up to just have the date, or if you want to, you can make them into postcards.

Mikah Sargent (01:13:22):
So it will print out kind of postcard information on there. You can choose featured people, meaning that you, these are the people who you want to show most often. And then anytime you want to, you can skip a month if you to side, eh, I don't really need to get photos this month, or I do want photos this month. You can the apple notify you and say, this is part of Google photos. The apple notify you and say, Hey, I've picked out the photos for this month that you will, that, that we want to add to your list. You can go in you can crop them high. You want to, you can do all of the photo editing options that Google photos provides. Google photos has some pretty incredible automatic photo correction options. With the iPhone, it will take portrait photos, any Infor, any depth information and use that to improve upon the photo.

Mikah Sargent (01:14:14):
So I've found that it's fun to go into my different portrait mode photos, and make adjustments to them with Google photos because of what Google photos offers. I feel it does even a better job of like highlighting a face and blurring the background, et cetera because you've got all the Google smarts at the back of it. So if you've been looking for a way to pull some of those digital photos that you have into the real world, and you want something that's more passive, I Google photos premium print series is a fantastic way to do that. I love that, that passive nature of just like, I don't have to go into that app that I use and find the ones that I want. It gives me a list of what it feels are the best. And then if you don't like those, you can change 'em out.

Mikah Sargent (01:14:59):
If you do like 'em, you can, you know, adjust those. And then if you wanna skip a month and not pay 6 99 a that month, then you can, and if you wanna turn any of them into a postcard, you can, like, I went ahead and turned on the postcard option on the back. So that way, if I do decide that I wanna send a postcard out, I can very easily, there are high quality photos. That again, you can put into a frame if you want to or you can just, you know, set them up in a room or, or if you want to tack 'em to the wall, whatever you wanna do with them. But I just thought this was a brilliant way. I'm always trying to think of things to do with my photos, but I often do it in these huge kind of I'm in, I'm in one of those moods.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:39):
And then I have, you know, 50, a hundred photos that I wanna get printed. This just kind of keeps them all rolling in. So nice. So if you have a Google photos account, then you are able to take advantage of this. We have recommended in the past, the Google photos app is another way to store your photos and for people who are looking for more storage on their devices. So you may have the Google photos app. I use the Google photos app as a backup to my backup, to my backup but also because of these cool features that Google photos provides. And while you're the, there, then you can take advantage of Google photos, other printing services, they have an integration with some large pharmacy chains. So I can order in the Google photos app prints and then go and pick them up at my local CVS for delivery or not for delivery for, for pickup.

Mikah Sargent (01:16:33):
So if you don't wanna order online, you may have that option available as well. But yeah, Google photos premium print series is my app cap this week. It's very handy, very fun to get those photos in the mail. And it just got my first one. They, they look great, they turned out awesome. And I'm looking forward to seeing what gets chosen this coming month. And it also encourages me to take more photos, cuz I don't take a whole lot of photos. So this helps to, to kind of keep me creating more so that they have ones they can pick folks that brings us to the end of this episode of iOS today. If you have questions, if you have shortcuts corner requests, if you have apps that you think we should talk about on the show, any of that, you send that to iOS today at TWI dot T.

Mikah Sargent (01:17:18):
You can also tweet at us with hashtag ask iOS today. So the best way honestly is to email us iOS today@twi.tv. We of course are record this show every Tuesday at 12:00 PM, Eastern 9:00 AM Pacific. So you can tune in live at twi.tv/live to check out the show, but we think the best way to get the show is by subscribing to it. And you can do that by going to twi.tv/ios and clicking to subscribe either via audio or video across all sorts of platforms, Google podcasts, apple podcast, Spotify, YouTube loads of different places. We try to be in all of those places for you. The video version of the show is the best we think, but we also make the audio version as descriptive as possible so that you can be able to join the fun, even if you're listening to the audio version of the show and always open to feedback there.

Mikah Sargent (01:18:10):
If you feel we missed something, let us know iOS today@twi.tv, with that. If you'd like to get all of our shows a free, now's a great time to do it. You can do that by subscribing to club TWI for seven bucks a month. What do you get? You get all of TWIs shows completely ad free. You get to the exclusive TWI plus bonus fee that has content. You won't find anywhere else, outtakes behind the scenes after the scenes it's all sorts of special content. You won't get elsewhere and access to the members only discord server where Adam w just said, Hey, that's us smiley face. Yes, Adam w that is you as well, many more folks in the club, TWI discord who have joined us have joined. The fun are hanging out there. If that sounds fun to you, seven bucks a month is all it costs twi.tv/club TWI.

Mikah Sargent (01:19:03):
And Hey, if you're listening and you are you know, in charge of a business or are in charge of some of a business might want to know that we've got some really cool corporate plans available. And we just had a, a company who bought a bunch of seats for their employees to kind of hand out and say, Hey, for the next year, you've got ad free TWI to check out. So if you'd like to buy some seats for your employees as a gift, as a thank you for the year and yet all of our awesome ad free plus all the extra stuff as well, then you can check out the corporate plans anyway, head to twit T V slash club TWI to check that out. And given that you are iOS today, listeners, it's likely that you are listening to us in apple podcasts. So you should know that you can support the show directly by choosing the audio version of the show where you'll see a button that says subscribe for 2 99 and by doing so for 2 99 a month, you get the ad free version of the audio feed of of iOS today. And that is how you can support us directly with that subscription. All right, Rosemary orchard of folks, wanna follow you online and check out all your great work? Where do they go to do so?

Rosemary Orchard (01:20:17):
The best places ever@rosemaryorchard.com, which has links to all things I do online in various social media, where you can find me mostly, I have to say on Twitter with the username rose from orchard. Micah, what about you?

Mikah Sargent (01:20:29):
I am at Mica Sergeant on many, a social media network, or you can head to chihuahua.coffee. That's C iaa.coffee, where I've got links to many of the places I'm most active online folks. Thank you for tuning into this week's episode of iOS today. We appreciate you. We thank you for your questions, your feedback, everything else, and we will see you next time on iOS today.

Speaker 4 (01:20:51):
Have you ever read a tech news story and thought to yourself, man, I would love to talk to the person who wrote this to find out more information. Well, that's exactly what Micah Sergeant and I, Jason Howell do each and every week on tech news weekly, we read the stories that matter to us. We reach out to the people taking a break in the tech news and we invite them on to tell their story and you can find it at twit TV. Look for tech news weekly, every Thursday.