iOS Today Episode 581 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Mikah Sargent (00:00:00):
Coming up on iOS today, Rosemary Orchard and I are ready for the holidays. And we want to help you have fun with your family this holiday season. 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 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 Imperfect Foods. Imperfect Foods is catching the food that's falling through the cracks of our foods system by is sourcing quirky yet delicious foods. Right now imperfect foods is offering our listeners 20% off your first four orders. When you go to imperfectfoods.com and use the promo code iOS.
Mikah Sargent (00:01:07):
Oh, oh, oh, oh, hello. And welcome to iOS today. The show where we talk all things, iOS watch OS TV OS home pot OS. So my goodness, all of the OSS that Aple has on offer, we love to chat about them here on iOS Today. I am one of your ho ho hosts, Mikah Sargent
Rosemary Orchard (00:01:28):
And I am Rosemary Elf-chard That doesn't quite work. I tried, I tried to, I tried to crown the word Elf into my surname. It doesn't work. Let's pretend it was fine and move on.
Mikah Sargent (00:01:38):
We, we will pretend it's fine. And we will move on. We've got a show to get too, so we will kick things off. This is an episode about look, whether you're getting together physically in person with some of your close family members or with maybe some long distance family members or you are doing things from a distance. It's great because it's time to get together for the holidays and have some fun. So we thought we talk about some ways to play and have fun with your family. This holiday season, our first app, our first game, our first activity is all about sketching, sketch party TV available for $3.99 in the app store. I love the game we used to, it didn't even need to be the holidays. You know, we used to have people over and we would play sketch party TV as just part of our regular kind of gets togethers with friends and sketch party.
Mikah Sargent (00:02:36):
TV is a pretty simple app in, in its sort of setup. You basically are playing Pictionary. You draw different things and people try to figure out what it is. And in fact, Mac world as a review of this game said, if you like Pictionary, but hate cleaning up all those scraps of paper, sketch party TV is the game for you because that's pretty much how it works. It's got this clever sort of joining system where everybody can play on their device. You set up a room and you can all join together and see everything. It's, it's a really great game on the apple TV in particular. And so you've, you can have multiple teams as well and reorganize those teams. Rosemary, have you played sketch party TV before
Rosemary Orchard (00:03:25):
I have, but it's been a little while, but it's, it's just so much fun. Like all of these drawing games are because you know, it, it's the fun of the drawing, right. That's involved which makes it even better. And I really like the choosing the word list as well. So you can be really mean and, and choose difficult words or you can, you know, kid-friendly movies, things like that. There there's so much choice.
Mikah Sargent (00:03:46):
Absolutely. that's, that's a great one sort of Pictionary style game. Let's talk about just dance now. This is what I've never heard of actually. So this will be new to me.
Rosemary Orchard (00:03:59):
Yeah. So just dance is a great game it's available on Nintendo switch, Xbox PlayStation the iPad, the iPhone, the apple TV it's available on everything. And so there's a good chance that you'll come across it before. And the idea behind just dance is you hold your phone and you do the dance moves and it will try and score you as you do it. Oh. So you pick from some of the songs available and yeah, you, you do what it shows you to do on the screen. It, it's pretty great way to get everybody actually moving. Because as, as we all know, after eating large amounts of food, our inclination is to go hibernate and sometimes a little bit of movement is good for you. I should know some of the songs can be quite fast, so make sure that you've not had too much tweet first <laugh> like, you know, give, give yourself a little bit of digestion time, cause otherwise you're gonna be moving pretty darn quickly and pretty vigorously, but it's so much fun.
Rosemary Orchard (00:04:52):
And especially if you've got kids that you wanna tire out, this could be a pretty good way of doing it. There's a whole bunch, the, the advantage of the iOS app is you get use from a few more songs and so on, but they have everything in there. You can use laptops, all sorts of things. If you want to do it just an iPhone and iPad, you can actually scan a code from the iPhone iPad and use your iPhone as the controller. Or you can use your iPhone as a controller on the apple TV or whatever combination of devices works for you. Basically. There's so many options.
Mikah Sargent (00:05:24):
Okay. See that's that was the part I, so of course I'm familiar with just dance, but I wasn't aware of how they, they pulled this off on iOS on, on iPad OS and, and TVs. So that makes sense. Now I get it. Definitely might have to download that one and have a little dance party this holiday season. This should be fun. Exactly.
Rosemary Orchard (00:05:43):
Yeah. And especially like, if you're traveling anyway, then it's, it's easy enough to just take your iPad with you and you can still get to play this.
Mikah Sargent (00:05:50):
Yeah. Isn't that one of the beauties of this, if you are traveling pretty far, you know, board games take up a lot of space and yeah. These, these video games, rock band, and those kinds of things would be way too much to try to carry with you. So the idea that I just bring the device out, the device or devices I was already going to bring makes this very easy. This next one, there are so many Jackbox party packs that are available now. They, they release new kind of packs every, every year or so. And these games are incredible. It's available for 24 99, which may sound expensive, but I promise you, it is not, first of all, if you go to the store and you try to buy a board game, it's gonna cost you 24 99. Secondly, you get multiple games that have so much replay value that you can be playing this for ages and ages.
Mikah Sargent (00:06:45):
Even if you buy an earlier version of the Jackbox party pack. That's okay. Yeah, because later on, you'll still be able to play so many of those games. I think I, who are three Jackbox party packs that I've purchased mm-hmm <affirmative> and each of them has games that people love. So it'll be like, oh, can we play this from that Jackbox party pack? And this, from that Jackbox party pack, I know I'm saying that really quickly. There's there are sort of Pictionary style games. There are I mean, it's kind of hard because there's, there's so many different games that you could play. The Pictionary style games are the one that I remember the most, but there's trivia that kind of thing. Lots of different games you can play in Jackbox and I believe Anthony, we played some Jackbox party pack games for an episode of TWIs shelter and place show.
Speaker 4 (00:07:33):
Yeah, yeah. That, and also, I think we did one for, for TWI plus
Mikah Sargent (00:07:37):
Members also, or, or club to adventure. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's right. Yeah. so that's worth checking out as well, if you'd like to tell me about some apple arcade games that we can play with the
Rosemary Orchard (00:07:50):
Holidays. Yeah. So I, I just went through looking for a couple because finding apple arcade games is pretty easy. There's a game section in the app store, go check it out. If you don't have VA Cape, just remember it's only 4 99 to subscribe for a month. So if you've got a lot of downtime coming up, then, you know, 4 99 for one month of all of those games is a great deal. But Sonic gracing from Sonic as in, you know Sonic the hedgehog is one of these options. And it's really great because it's it something that other people can kind of watch as well. You know, when you're in that sleepy state, after dinner, where most people are quite tired, but you wanna go and have fun. You can do that in Singapore mode, or you can get some people involved and actually play with multiplayer mode as well.
Rosemary Orchard (00:08:35):
Each of you using your own devices. And it's just a racing game. It's really easy for people to be pick up. There's no complicated rules or any of that. Now, if people are a bit more awake, I'd recommend song pop party, because you have to guess some song. I love it so good. And everybody likes trying to do it because they're oh, no, but this was definitely that song. And well, the lyrics were in both songs actually, but the song that they're looking for is this one and so on and so forth. So that, that is a great option as well. And then there's also one for people who are up for something a little bit different. If you perhaps would like to have a bit more Disney in your life, then there is Disney Malay Mania which is a three versus three throwdown.
Rosemary Orchard (00:09:20):
And you've got Disney characters, Pixar characters, and all sorts. And essentially you are gonna have a battle, a five minute Malay of quick fry games of fighting on the fly. And you have to fight smart. That is the really good part of that. So yeah, you basically just get to have some fun and yeah, why not? There's lots of different game modes with it as well, which is great. So that's just a couple, definitely. If you are looking for some games to play, have a look at apple arcade because 4 99 for a month, and then you can cancel it afterwards. There is no lock in for a year or any of that, then this could be pretty if you're looking for some games for the holiday season.
Mikah Sargent (00:09:58):
Nice. Yes, I, I absolutely agree. This next one is I think a classic many people will be familiar with it. It is one that folks can check out to it. It's more for kind of, you know, maybe it's family that lives far away and you wanna send the them something to make them chuckle. It's called elf yourself. And it is one of my my favorites. You basically take a photo of yourself or another person that, you know, and you can put them into a hilarious scene where they're dancing and, you know, singing along to music and it makes this music beautiful kind of holiday video card that you can send out. Alpha yourself has existed in so many different iterations. And it's really fun that it's an app now to make it a little bit easier to, to create. And yes, you can add up to five faces in a single kind of video situation. So you can do the whole Emily jam dancing and jamming along, which is a lot of fun. Yes,
Rosemary Orchard (00:11:02):
Yes, definitely. It is. Excellent. And of course, you know, you can take a great picture of a family member and elf them instead of Eling yourself. And then send it to them and keep the incriminating evidence for next year. <Laugh>
Mikah Sargent (00:11:17):
These next two, I wanted to mention, because we actually played these during the pandemic with my family back home in Missouri. Milton Bradley has a whole lot of board games and marmalade game studio has brought a few of them over to iOS including mono and clue. And these are full featured games. I guess it's Hasbro now. I don't know if that owns Milton Bradley. I don't know how it works these days. But here's monopoly. You simply tap play, and then you choose online with friends. And once you do that you, you choose create game. And now I've got a room code 9 6, 2, 4, 6, that I can tap the share sheet button in the top, right. To share with other people. So I, I could send that to my mom. I could send that to, you know, my aunt, my uncle whomever, and, oh, I better quickly choose the dog before somebody else chooses it.
Mikah Sargent (00:12:21):
What's cool. Is that on top of the, you know, if you just wanna play with one other person at a time, then you can also use eyes to fill in those other spots. So I was able to play my partner, me, my mom and my sister all played monopoly together. And what's kind of cute. Is that in the game there are, there are a few interactions that you're able to do, so you don't, you can't fully chat. It only lets you, you <laugh>, it only lets you send kind of like canned messages. And so it'll be like, ha ha or, you know, I'm upset kind of a thing. And so that's, that's, that was a lot of fun to, to try. And in fact, let me see, I don't know if I add three AIS. I don't know if it's gonna let me do that.
Mikah Sargent (00:13:11):
Oh, and I love that there are three different types of games that you can play. So almost nobody actually follows the rules of monopoly. But there are the classic rules. There's the quick rules, which says skip over all tax chance in community chest spaces. The game ends after the first bankruptcy, you can build hotels after three houses instead of four, and players must leave on their first turn in jail. Then you can also set up custom rules. So if you and your siblings invented a really cutthroat version of monopoly, you can go in and make some adjustments to the game and they have some pretty popular ones, including, you know, the ones that I think a lot of people invented where if you landed it on a certain space, you'd get at all of the money from the the, the community chest or
Rosemary Orchard (00:13:59):
Whatever. Yeah. If you, if you land on the jail without being sent to jail, then you get the money from community, chest cards and stuff like that. That is a fairly common house rules for
Mikah Sargent (00:14:09):
People. Is there an option for me to flip the, the board <laugh> there should be, oh, one of the things I like is it's got this fun 3d look and feel to it. It's a little stuttery in the video, but, and that may just be the video that's coming back to me, but on my iPad, it's very clear. And, and very, it moves very nicely. Everybody's rolling to figure out who's gonna go first and it looks like the car's gonna go first. So here in the top left is that chat button and you can see there's. Hello? Well done. Yes, no. Yikes. Hurry up. Thanks. Wow. Hm, oops. GU a lot of asterisks and, or a lot of symbols, sorry, and goodbye. So you can only tap those that keeps the game kind of safe. <Laugh> because there is an online version where you can just get paired with people randomly and you can see that you're moving through.
Mikah Sargent (00:14:59):
I love the animations for this game. It's got a lot of content in it. It's a lot of fun to play. And if you like me dislike monopoly because there's hardly any skill to it at all. And it's mostly just about the role that I, in which cards you draw, then you may like the fact that they have clue clue is a lot of fun. I played that as well, and it's got a lot of fun music to it. And the animations as you are kind of putting together who the murderer is. So you can check those out there. 3 99 a piece in the iOS app store. And there are in-app purchases, but it's just to get like special versions of the game boards. So it's not really a purchase that you need to make. So pretty easy to do. Yeah.
Rosemary Orchard (00:15:43):
I feel I should mention for anybody who doesn't like monopoly the board game, there is actually a card version of monopoly called monopoly deal, and it's a lot more fun. It's there is, you know, still a massive element of chance because it's all about the luck of the draw of the cards, but you can also hog your cards for a while and then steal properties from other people and things like that, which makes it a little bit more fun. But sadly that one's not on the app store, but if we're looking for board games on the app store, then people can't forget ticket to ride ticket to ride. Isn't an excellent board game where you have to try to build railroads. And your aim is to build railroads, to connect all the cities that you've got, build the longest railroad for extra points and so on and so forth.
Rosemary Orchard (00:16:24):
This, this is a great one because you can play it on your own or you can play it with other people remotely or in person with sort of passing an iPad around. And it's also only 6 99. As Mike mentioned before, if you go and buy the version, like the box of this game, it's about $25. Well, this is 6 99 and you can buy additional boards in the game for, for example, ticket ride fronts ticket ride UK, Switzerland, Europe Asia for example, and they are around 2 99. Each, some of them are just 19 nine P or 1 99. But they also go on sale every soft done. So make sure you take a look at that because who doesn't want to try and take over the world with a train cuz why not
Mikah Sargent (00:17:07):
Exactly why not? And speaking of why not, why not take a break to tell you about our first sponsor today, this episode of iOS today is brought to you by better help online therapy. You can check them out@betterhelp.com slash iOS. The best way to kind of think about if you're trying to grasp sort of what is therapy, how can it help me the best way to think about it is with some analogies, an example, 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 to maintain physical wellness and prevent injury and disease. And we do chores regularly. Again, some of us to avoid a giant mess of a house and well roaches going to therapy is like all of these things, it's routine maintenance for your mental and emotional wellness to prevent bigger issues down the road therapy doesn't mean something's wrong with you.
Mikah Sargent (00:18:05):
It just means that you're investing in yourself to keep your mind healthy, better help. Isn't just any online therapy. It's customized for you by offering 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 and under 48 hours, why invest in everything else and not your mind. This podcast is sponsored by better help and iOS today. Listeners gets 10% off their first month@betterhelp.com slash iOS that's B E T T E R H E L p.com/i O OS. Thanks so much to better help for sponsoring this week's episode of iOS today. Let's talk about one little news item here, which is that swift playgrounds four, which has been in testing for a little while, was announced quite a bit ago is finally available and Rosemary orchard. This finally means that people can publish apps to the app store from their iPhones, correct, or from their iPads, rather
Rosemary Orchard (00:19:16):
I know yeah. From their iPads you can use swift playgrounds on the iPhone as well. You cannot use swift playgrounds, which does exist on the Mac to create applications. They want you to use Xcode for that. But you can of course take advantage of the iPad for this. And so I've connected my 12.9 inch iPad pro here, and I just clicked. So when you go ahead and you're inside of swift playgrounds, then you can click on the pencil and create a new app. That's it. That's all you need to do. And well, now you need to figure out how to code, but I've got the app over here on the right hand side. I've got my I code over here on the left. So if I wanted to, I could change this globe to something else. So I now have to think of the word for, or something for a SF symbol off the top of my head.
Rosemary Orchard (00:20:02):
So I am gonna try apple and see if I can find no, there is no apple. Okay, well, I'll put that back to globe. But what you've got is on the left hand side, you have all of your files essentially. So inside of an application, you'll have multiple files that make it up. You can change things like the icon here. There are some template icons that you can use or placeholders, you can even set capabilities and you can add things like, for example, Bluetooth access or can calendars camera contacts, et cetera in our purchases are not one of the things that you can add right now. I don't know if that is something that is missing or something that will be coming in the not too distant future, but if I wanted to change the name of this app, so I could say that this is Micah's app, then I can do that really easily and done.
Rosemary Orchard (00:20:52):
So now Micah owns this app and has to decide what we're gonna do with it. It is of course, no pressure, you know, no pressure at all. It is of course something where you are going to want a little bit of help, maybe some document. And fortunately swift playgrounds, unlike Xcode is localized. So it's actually available and it's got a whole bunch of information in a variety of languages. So if we were picking CarPlay for example, then this CarPlay information is available. But the user interface of the application of swift playgrounds is really well designed for this essentially. So if I'm looking at my, my vs stack, then I can, if I tap on this bracket here, then I can see it's highlighted the second bracket at the bottom to make it really easy for me to see what I'm doing.
Rosemary Orchard (00:21:39):
So I can go ahead and write an application. I, I don't quite know what I'm gonna do yet. I haven't quite prepared to do something live on Airmic. So you might need to give a couple of minutes to see if I can generate something, but it's pretty good. I've been having a little bit of fun with it, and I I've even got a little app idea, which I'm gonna try and work on over Christmas to new year because it's a very small idea and it's for next Christmas. Cause of course I have a C maybe
Mikah Sargent (00:22:04):
That'll be my resolution is to try and code a little app on in, in swift playgrounds. Don't hold me to that. I can't promise it cuz there's a lot going on, but it would be a lot of fun to say, oh yeah, I published an app and I did it all using swift playgrounds for so
Rosemary Orchard (00:22:23):
Keep that a mind. If people are interested in learned to code, I would definitely recommend the hundred days of swift and a hundred days of swift UI. Probably the a hundred days of swift UI is gonna be your better option for using with swift playgrounds. But it's it's available. It's online for free. It's just 100 days of swift challenges teaching you how to build a couple of different apps. I can't guarantee that everything will work in swift playgrounds, but 100 days of swift and 100 days of swift UI from hacking with swift are very good intros. They've got lots of examples and code and explanations in there that actually make sense, which is to, to their credit. Cuz sometimes when you're looking at programming things, it's just, it does this, it just does it. Don't don't ask why this is pretty good.
Mikah Sargent (00:23:11):
All right. Let's move into shortcuts corner Folks. This is the part of the show where you write in with your shortcuts requests and Rose May orchard. The shortcuts expert provides some shortcuts answers. Did you see, I've said shortcuts a bunch of times, the one we're starting off with is something that Rosemary mentioned last week and I'm so excited to she the outcome. Tell us what's up first here in shortcuts
Rosemary Orchard (00:23:48):
Corner. Yeah. So what I wanted to do was I mentioned a Thanksgiving that you there's always one relative, right? There's always one person who accidentally starts a humongous group chat when all they should have done was just individually message every single person to say happy holiday. And I thought like, you know, where, where are the geeks here? Where are the people watching Iowa today or in my case, making Iowas today, there's this great app called shortcuts. Why, why won't we just use shortcuts? So I've got three versions of this because of course I couldn't just do a little bit of homework. I had to be a SWAT and try and do everything. So I'm gonna start with a simple one because it's very, very simple. So to start with, you need to grab your contacts and then you're gonna go through each person from that filter that you found in contacts and just send them a message and that's it.
Rosemary Orchard (00:24:38):
And so it sends every single person, an individual message, very, very simple. And I'm sure everyone can figure this out. There is a tip that I will give you. I have left on show when run in this message, which means it's gonna pop it up so that you can add something to it, to customize it for each person. Now, if you're trying to send this to 150 people, you're probably gonna wanna toggle that off because otherwise you're gonna have to confirm every single message. So you might wanna change that, but I've left that on for you. So this is the very simple one and I thought, well, why don't we add the name of the person that we wanna talk to? So I added the name of the person. What we have here is we're just getting our repeat item and our repeat item is a contact.
Rosemary Orchard (00:25:21):
And so I've got the first name of the person and that's it. So now if I was sending to Mica, it would say happy holidays, Mica, with a little Christmas tree emoji at the end. And then I thought, okay, we're, we're going, we're going nerdy here. Let's go hardcore. I decided that I wanted to send a random message or a couple of different random messages potentially. So we're doing the same thing, right? We're getting a group we're getting our context and we're going through them. And then I've got this list here and I've put this list inside of the repeat people who are familiar program be like, why, why did you put there, why did you put somewhere else? It's because one of these options has that first name in it again. So we can still send customized messages with people's names. And then we're getting a random item from this list and then we're sending that random item to that person and that's it.
Rosemary Orchard (00:26:13):
That's all we're doing. And it's very I've tried to keep it very simple. So that it's quite basic. You can of course get super fancy with this and you could send them pictures and things like that. But I just wanted to keep it nice and simple because let's face it. If you want to give this to your grandmother and just say, Hey, like select these contacts so that you can send them all a message so that you don't start, you know, world war three with putting me and the cousins in a group chat again then you can do that. So fingers crossed this will soul, maybe some accidental holiday drama. We'll see. But in the meantime, either way, it's, it was a little bit of fun to just put that together. And we've got all three options which will be available in the show notes.
Mikah Sargent (00:26:56):
I love that. I think you did a fantastic job of giving people some different options there with different emoji, being able to set a random message that folks can then go in and change to, to what they want. And then yes, most importantly it stops that horrible thing of sending the group message that then everybody's a part of. And then everybody gets buzzed. That is just like, get me out of here. <Laugh> all right. David has written in to say, how do I quickly save a link on a webpage I E press and hold to get to share sheet from safari into OmniFocus with a useful title. All right, Rosemary, I have a feeling you've got some magic. You can work here for
Rosemary Orchard (00:27:40):
Us. Oh, I do. I definitely do. So what a David is talking about and I'll just quickly share my iPad again is when you go and this happens with any kind of link from anywhere, even the standard share sheet, if you tap on share and then you tap OmniFocus sometimes you get a, a title and sometimes you don't and whenever you're sharing with sort of tapping and holding, like, and then you go share, share sheet, it usually comes up with just nothing and that's really not very helpful. And then you have to type whatever it is that you wanted to to share with it. So I did a little bit of playing. I did some did some magic and I have a option, which I believe will work because I've already sent this today to it. And he was gracious enough to test this out for me, it's called link to OmniFocus.
Rosemary Orchard (00:28:29):
So we need to use this share sheet for this. So we're as having, we've got the share sheet, when you enable the share sheet by default, it enables it for everything. So I used the clear button over here in the top left, and I got rid of everything and I just re enabled sari web pages, URLs and articles, because I didn't want anything else to be trying to, to use this, just those. And then I said, if there's no input, ask for some text, because this way you can give it the URL. So say for example, you've got the URL on your clipboard. Well, this way you can paste it instead, if you're running the shortcut for some reason, and then it's gonna get an article from that URL. And then it gets the title from the article and it puts the page URL in here.
Rosemary Orchard (00:29:14):
And it also has a little ask each time. So inside of this, I've got both a variable from my get article and another variable, which is down here at the bottom called ask time. And that means that it will put the title in there, but it's also gonna ask me what you want, and this is the closest I can come to replicating the OmniFocus share sheet. So instead of doing what you would do before, which is go to the share sheet, theoretically, I should be seeing somewhere in this list link to OmniFocus of course this is probably right at the bottom somewhere, but it will pop up open shortcut modal from the top and then ask you to input some information. I can't see the link there. So I think I'll just leave that for now, but yeah, that solves that problem. So fingers crossed that will help out.
Mikah Sargent (00:30:05):
That's fantastic. David, there is your answer. All right. We are gonna take another quick break before we come back with one last shortcuts corner request. We'll head into feedback and questions and round things out with our app apps. I'm pumped to say that this episode of iOS today is brought to you by imperfect foods. Now you may be saying, okay, why is Micah talking about what he's eating and why is that bringing you this episode of I no, no, no, no, no imperfect foods. It's a brand every day, delicious groceries fall through the cracks of our food system, simply because of how they look imperfect foods is turning this around by sourcing quirky yet delicious foods and delivering them to you in a way proven to reduce emissions. What if getting your favorite groceries put time back into your week, instead of taking it away with the weather, getting cold or outside, you can stay cozy side and let imperfect foods deliver you.
Mikah Sargent (00:31:04):
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Mikah Sargent (00:32:02):
I love this too. You can say goodbye to packaging guilt because imperfect foods is the only national grocery delivery company that makes it easy to return your packaging after every order. So I got to try imperfect foods. Got, I was so excited, you know, I, I put in my sort of preferences, Hey, I like to eat organic if possible. And I'd like to try out these kind of different grocery packs. And they said, Hey, your delivery day is gonna be a Thursday. I think it was. And you'll come in a couple of days before and see what we've picked out for you. You can make choices you can make changes to those choices if you want to, and then we'll send it your way. So I hopped in, I took one thing out, I think, and replaced it with something.
Mikah Sargent (00:32:50):
And they, I got the notification, Hey, your on, on that Thursday, your order's out for delivery. I hopped into, they've got this great map app where you can see where the, the delivery is and then it'll be coming to you. And I thought it, it had this little imperfect foods van on there, and I thought, okay, they're probably using, you know, on track or one of these delivery services. And so I, you know, expected that at some point that on track would make the delivery. I lo and behold, I look out my peephole and there is an imperfect foods van, a true imperfect food van sticking like parked in front of my house, ready to drop off my groceries. I thought, oh wow, they've got they. Wow, that's so cool. So they dropped off the, the groceries, I brought them inside and it was so fun.
Mikah Sargent (00:33:37):
I pop open the box. I pop in that sort of metallic inside that keeps everything cool. And I'm just pulling stuff out. Ooh, this is awesome. This is awesome. It was right around Thanksgiving. I got a pumpkin pie in my box. What there were all sorts of delicious vegetables, you know, different produce rainbow carrots Brussels sprouts, which I love have a perfect recipe for brussel sprouts that I use. And so I was excited to get that in the box and incredibly cost effective prices. It, what I liked is that it kind of reduced the pressure a little bit because I used to do some different sort of recipe delivery services. And those were always like, you better make sure you get these used right away and you have to do it in just this way.
Mikah Sargent (00:34:24):
This is like opening me up to so many different options, so many different choices. It was really a lot of fun. I, I went with the meat and poultry pack, which was an added thing. And so I got some, you know, chicken and I can't remember what pork I think, and ground chicken as well, so much fun. Just like opening the box and seeing what was inside, cuz I sort of just skimed through I ended up getting, you know, a, a second box then after that and again, so much fun to open up, see what was inside and restock the refrigerator as, as my pantry. What I love that makes this so cool is that imperfect foods will let you take that, you know, the, the Mylar, whatever it is, that metallic reflective stuff and the cool packs that they put inside, you can leave those out when your next imperfect foods delivery order is made and they will take them and they will properly make use of them or recycle them or reuse them, whatever they need to do.
Mikah Sargent (00:35:28):
Those will get use. So it's so nice knowing that they don't have that waste. Imperfect foods are super cool. And I wanna say too, you know, some people might going, okay, but like, am I gonna get a potato? That's like moldy, that's not what we're working with here. That's not how this is. These are just in some cases, odd looking vegetables. In, in my case, there weren't even that many odd looking vegetables. They were just properly sourced vegetables and, and other produce. So right now imperfect foods is offering our listeners 20% off your first four orders. When you go to imperfect foods.com and use the promo code, it's very simple iOS. Again, 20% off your first four orders, that's up to an $80 value@imperfectfoods.com. When you use the promo code iOS, please use that promo code. Not only does it save you money, but also lets them know, Hey, imperfect foods, Micah was talking about you.
Mikah Sargent (00:36:28):
And I remembered and I got some groceries and I'm happy. And thank you so much. And that's imperfect foods.com promo code. I O S very cool. So worth checking out. I also have to say, you don't want it anymore. You don't have to call anybody. You don't have to chat anybody. They make it very easy to cancel. So even if you're thinking this isn't a good long term solution, get those four orders. Why not? And try it out. And then if you decide N not for me, cancel no, no problem. It's so easy to do. If you need to do that, I love that imperfect foods, like from the ground up, they're trying to be responsible, sustainable, and they, you can tell there's integrity, which is, I think incredibly important. So thank you, imperfect foods. And let's head back to the show.
Mikah Sargent (00:37:17):
Another at a different David has another shortcuts request for Rosemary. This says shortcut for teams status. Hi, Rosemary and Micah. I've been looking at shortcuts and was looking to change the status of Microsoft teams so that it goes offline when I'm not working. I managed to find a way to get the hour of the current date or time to trigger the cut to say, if it is later than 17, which is five o'clock. And again at eight to turn it back on, what I couldn't find was a way to access teams, actions for changing the status. The problem I have is that at work I sign off of my PC and teams goes offline unless another device is still available. As my company phone just sits in my, unless someone calls me on it, or I am visiting another site, I never change the status at the next level. I'd look at weekends and my calendar to see if I am on holiday so that it is marked offline then as well. But just getting at the status would be a huge first step. Thanks in advance, David. This is an advanced request. And I think Rosemary, you might have an answer for us here.
Rosemary Orchard (00:38:24):
Yeah, I do. So I looked and unfortunately teams does not have shortcut support just at all. It is very sad for, for those of us who use Microsoft teams, including myself, but there is something that you can do. Now I am just going to share well actually sharing my iPad, but I'm making it there we go. So I have here cheesy jokes. But what I did earlier today is I went into teams on my iPhone and I actually figured out what we need to do. So inside of teams, you go to settings at the top left, and then under notifications, you can set quiet hours for your notifications and you might be thinking, wait, this doesn't use shortcuts and you're not wrong. It does not. But if you use this to change the settings for your Microsoft teams app on your then outside of those quiet hours it will mark you not as offline, but it will mark you as a way.
Rosemary Orchard (00:39:24):
And basically what it will do is it just means that teams will look at your phone and if your phone, if you're like, if you actively pick up your phone, you start using teams, then it'll be fine. But other than that, it just shows a little Z next to you in the top left hand corner until like, it decides that you've woken back up again. But yes, so in teams go to the settings in your profile and the top left and then notifications and then block notifications during quiet time until whatever the right time is. So my quiet hours are set from 6:00 PM to 8:00 AM. And I have quiet days for Sunday and Saturday. Now this does not handle holidays, which was David's other request, which is a shame. However, David, if you use the calendar in teams and you put in an event to say that you are not there as an all day event, then it will deal, deal with that for you. So I think I have an answer and it doesn't use shortcuts. I'm not quite sure what, what happened there, Micah? Is it the end of the world or is it just
Mikah Sargent (00:40:24):
Not shortcuts corner? What I just checked and it looks like the world is still carrying on, but it is a little, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's a little weird, but we did it. We did it. All right. Yeah, we did. Let's move into feedback and question here. We've got one question from James who writes in good evening. Good evening, James. I've just listened to the latest episode of iOS today and thought, I'd tell you about sync gene. I've been using sync gene for a few years now to sync, contact and calendars between different accounts and it works great hope. This helps sync gene way to synchronize your calendars, your tasks and your contacts automatically mm-hmm <affirmative> across iPhone, Android, outlook, Gmail and apps.
Rosemary Orchard (00:41:08):
Interesting. So we had a request a little while ago, which is how to we sync contacts between for example, Google account and an iCloud account, which is quite useful to have, if you ever do end up on another device, and you're able to log into Gmail and you wanna send an email, but you don't have the email address can be quite tricky. So sync gene looks like in their free plan, they will do a manual sync. For every 30 days, they sync up to two sources, 500 contacts and they can share a calendar and that's their free plan. Their premium plan is $5 83 a month. So the, the app that I recommended which I believe was G contact sync which doesn't look amazing, but works is going to be a cheaper bet for you. But if you are looking for something that will just sync automatically, then sync gene as recommended by James looks to be a good solution.
Mikah Sargent (00:42:00):
Beautiful. Thank you, James. Michael writes in, I was wondering why when I delete an iMessage from my iPhone, it doesn't delete from my apple watch. My watch is the news series seven. Thank you, Michael. This is a tough one because you expect that deleting a message from one device will delete it from others. And sometimes it seems like those things do sync and sometimes it seems like those things don't sync. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> oftentimes this is a sync issue, but I have noticed that it is particularly the case on messages on apple watch. And so I do wonder if messages on apple watch has the same level of iCloud syncing that our other devices have. I don't know what your experience has been Rosemary.
Rosemary Orchard (00:42:45):
Yeah, so my experience has been pretty much the same where I'm not quite sure why, but it, you know, deleting a message from one thing. Doesn't always delete it from an another. And at the moment, I've got a very strange issue where my favorites in messages on almost all of my devices are the exact same nine, but the favorites in messages, the pinned people at the top are my work Mac. And only my work Mac are completely different. Like there's just three people there and they are not people who I've had pinned in quite some. And so I'm not quite sure what's going on with messages. I think maybe, maybe something's just a little bit up there. But it is one of those things where I'm afraid there's not really anything that we can do to help. It is tricky to try and do anything in messages on the apple watch.
Rosemary Orchard (00:43:31):
I have to say aside from replying with your voice or, or sending back an emoji or one of the canned responses, which don't forget in the watch app, you can edit your canned responses, but deleting a message. I would've hoped it would delete everywhere. So it, it should, but I guess maybe it isn't for some reason, just make sure that you have updated your watch recently, and you've got updates installed on your iPhone and everything as well. And if you've got all the updates everywhere, don't forget, you can always try turning it off and turning it back on again,
Mikah Sargent (00:44:02):
Indeed. That is always an option for, for, for folks to, to make. Alright. I can hear the music it's time, four hour app cap.
Speaker 5 (00:44:14):
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Mikah Sargent (00:44:56):
Folks. This is the part of the show where we wear silly caps, a top hour heads to honor our picks of the week. These may be apps or gadgets that we are using, that we enjoy, that we want to share with you out there. And to say HAA, rah to these apps, we put something a top, our heads, Rosemary orchard. Tell me about the cap at top of your head, the magnificent cap at top of your head. And then tell me about your app cap.
Rosemary Orchard (00:45:27):
Yes. So somebody in the chat room did notice. Yes, Mike and I were wearing hats early. We were both wearing red Santa hats because it, you know, it's that time of year. But I've exchanged my red Santa hat for the glory. And that has to be the word I use for this of the green Christmas tree made of tinsel. Amazing. It is it it's, Tensal, there's gold tinsel in there as well. There's some pompoms looking like bubbles on there. It's it's crazy. It's pointy. It's a hat. It does not have a star. Oh, it does have a star on the top. I forgot it's got a star on the top. It's a little difficult to see because I'm quite tall and it's sticking up the top of the camera, but there we go. That's that's live for you. So my app cap today is one are, we usually use on the iPhone but unfortunately I'm having some difficulty sharing my iPhone screen.
Rosemary Orchard (00:46:11):
So I'll share it on the iPad. And TechMate is a one bit journal. And basically it's to help you try and keep track of things that you wanna build up doing or stop doing and occurrences of things as well. And it's a free app from the app store that you can download. And I was thinking with the new year coming, I know people are always for ways to keep on track of these things. This might be a good option. So when you go to set sync when you go set the app up, it comes up with several different recommendations for you. Now you might have just seen some yellow and green appearing in the background. That's because I use this on my iPhone and it syncs it through iCloud. So that stuff is available on my iPhone and my iPad.
Rosemary Orchard (00:46:56):
And it just sinks in to everywhere for me, which is great. So what you've got is you've got some daily habits, some positive things and some negative things. So for example, didn't smoke is reversed. So it's looking specifically for the days that you didn't do it and classifying those as good. There's also occasional tasks like backed up five washed water bottle, washed hair, things like that, as it is. I think I am gonna go with exercise cause I'm probably not doing enough of that, but the good news is, is I have ballet glass tonight. So I will be able to just tap that and fill it in. And that's it all you do to say that you've done something or not done something is tap on the square now on the iPhone, of course it's a much error of you. But it's pretty simple.
Rosemary Orchard (00:47:37):
It's a way of keeping track of things. If you upgrade then you can have groups of tasks. And if you want to, you can get rid of one of them by just turning it off, or you can tap onto to any of your, your tasks that you're keeping track of and then use the delete option to get rid of it. So I've got reading and apparently washing my hair that should have actually been cleaning the apartment, but I forgot that I had set it up as that, but there we go. So I have a couple of options it's been working pretty well for me, slacked off a little bit last week, but I'm getting back on the ball with my reading this week, which is pretty great. And yeah, this is sync mate. It's free to download and give it a whirl might be useful for some of your new year's resolutions.
Mikah Sargent (00:48:18):
Very cool. I will have to give that a go for sure. I, the, the CAPA morning at top of my head was actually one of the birthday gifts from my mother. This is a baseball cap that is also it sort of morphs into a Santa hat. It's got a green bill. It says happy holidays. It's got the, the standard sort of adjustable strap in the back as a baseball cap does, but then there's a Santa bobble across the top. And it's even got those vent holes that you get with a baseball, a cap that they, they are done up in green embroidery. So it is just a delightful, happy holidays baseball cap, or as they call them these days as the kids are calling them dad hat. That is what I am wearing at top my head. And I'm very happy about it.
Mikah Sargent (00:49:05):
I'm also very happy about my app cap this year because my app cap is this year. I said, <laugh>, I'm very happy about my app cap this time around, because this is a finally moment in the sense that finally pixelate photo has come to the iPhone. So we've talked before about pixelate photo. It is the app that lets you that, that is incredible at photo editing, right? It is an app that has built in machine learning for automatically making adjustments to a photo for editing it for actually super scaling an image if you need to. And all of that functionality that was once only available on the iPad has now come to the iPhone. So again, this works a lot like the iPad version. You've got your basic options up at the top, including that machine learning magic wand tap I'll go ahead and turn it off really quick, just so you can see the previous and image.
Mikah Sargent (00:50:12):
So the before image is maybe not the proper white balance. If I tap on ML, it runs that machine learning and makes adjustments to the photo, including color balance, but also several other things. And I'll show that in just a second. The next option up at the top is the sort of correcting option. If you've got something in the photo that you don't like in there, you can swipe on that area of the screen and remove it, and it will try to kind of cover it up, patch it to the best of its ability. There's the crop option has some different things, including cropping, straightening, a photo, and shifting the perspective. If it's a little bit sort of wonky in the perspective that you've set up, but there's also an ML crop ML crop means machine learning crop, meaning that it will look at the photo and the composition and try to make a crop that looks good for that particular photo.
Mikah Sargent (00:51:05):
You've got lots of different options, including rotating the photo and flipping the photo. So I'll tap outta that crop option. And then now I'm gonna tap into the third, or excuse me, the fourth button here, which is the menu and settings option or the, the menu sliders option. And this shows you if I swipe up from the bottom, what ML features have, have what ML filters have taken place. I'm gonna swipe it back down though, just for a second. So you can see that by default tapping that button gives you access to the different filters that are available. These are kind of your standard sort of Instagramy filters that you can add. So you can see the different options you can tap on of them to add that filter to the photo. But if you swipe up again, then you will get these more in depth options.
Mikah Sargent (00:51:56):
So up in the top left is a nice histogram tapping on that, lets you change from RGB to luminance if you want to. And then now I can see white balance was adjusted using machine learning. If the, that little yellow icon is highlighted, if I tap that off, you can see it goes back to normal, tapping it again. We'll shift it back to where it was before the blue switch. The blue toggle is for turning on or off that adjustment. You can make those adjustments yourself. It made adjustments to lightness in the photo. It made adjustments to hu saturation. It made adjustments using elective color. It made adjustments to the color balance. And then from there are options that you can add. I can make adjustments to the levels and the curves, if there's a specific color in the photo that I don't want.
Mikah Sargent (00:52:41):
I can, for example, let's change, let's change this maroon to something else, just so you can kind of see how it works. And we'll change it to, I don't know, another green color. And so this is, you know, an ugly kind of way to do this. You can up the range to really make it make those adjustments if you want to. And then of course, the intensity, a slider to do that as well. You can sharpen the photo and you can add grain to the photo make a adjustments to the size of the grain and the intensity of the grain as well. And then there are some other options you can go to a specific adjustment. You can show presets, you can show the film strip, which the film strip is just what photos you have available. And then in the again, in the top, right, there's the three dots to share it.
Mikah Sargent (00:53:31):
If you want to quickly share it out to a friend after you've made that adjustment, if you want to export it, that will let you choose different types. You can do the H E I F, which is the compressed version from apple G AEG, PNG, a T file, and a photo file, which is a pixelated photo file. And then there's, you can make adjustments to the quality and the scale, depending on which export option you use. There are also options for copying the adjustments, so that if you want to sort of do a group adjustment to a bunch of photos, you can there's match colors, super resolution, and D noise, which are all machine learning features, match colors, lets you compare between another photo and the photo that you're working on and try to get that photo to match and color and then feel super resolution will upscale your image by quite a bit using machine learning technology.
Mikah Sargent (00:54:25):
And, and then DNO is if you've got kind of a really noisy photo and you want to remove some of that noise, that's what DNO will do. Show info will give you information about what the, the, the different, I can't even think of what that's called now. X if information that's built in and then settings, of course, lets you make some adjustments to, you can extend the values, meaning that if those sliders can go past certain amounts, they will and then background color. So if you don't like the dark gray and you wanted white or black or some other color, then you could do that very easily. So all the things you would expect. And then I also love in the top left corner, there's a comparing option. So you can swipe that compare option to see here's how the photo looked before machine learning.
Mikah Sargent (00:55:10):
Here's what the machine learning features did to the photo. I like to use pixelated photo because I am not a photographer and don't know kind of, I, I, I don't know what I should do to a photo photo. And so I like to have like a base and then make adjustments there based on what I like. So what I would usually do is take photos with the incredible camera on my iPhone and then wait for them to upload to iCloud and come back down into the, my iPad or I would, in some cases, airdrop from my iPhone to my iPad and just have duplicates simply because I wanted to use pixelate photo on my iPad to give that base adjustment to all of the photos and then go from there. Now I can do that all on my iPhone, which is so nice.
Mikah Sargent (00:55:59):
And folks, this is available for 3 99 right now in the app store. This is a ridiculous price for this incredibly powerful app. If you don't don't have pixel made air photo, go buy it right now for 3 99. You it's, it's a steal. You absolutely should buy this app. If you want to make adjustments to your photos and have them look good, pixel made photo continues to just blow my mind on the Mac. It's incredible. It's got this new feature that lets you do automatic transparency to where it can select something in the foreground. And it does it on the level of what Adobe's Photoshop can do, which is just, just beyond. So it it's a no brainer 3 99 in the app store for your iPhone. You need this app. Absolutely. yeah, that's my app cap. And that brings us to the end of this episode of iOS today.
Mikah Sargent (00:56:58):
Next week's episode will be a best of episode. So will see you after that. If you have questions, feedback shortcuts, corner requests send those to iOS today@twi.tv. Ios today records live every Tuesday at 12:00 PM. Eastern 9:00 AM Pacific. So you can tune in to twi.tv/live at that time to check us out. We think the best way to get the show is by subscribing to the show that way, if it is the best OFS episode or if it's you know, the, the regular regularly scheduled episode, you will get it when it's available. You do that by going to twis.tv/i O S there, you can choose to subscribe to audio or video depending on which you prefer. We think the video version of the podcast is the best version, but we do try to make the podcast as descriptive as possible so that the audio version is just as enjoyable.
Mikah Sargent (00:57:54):
You can subscribe across apple podcast, Google podcasts, Spotify, YouTube. We try to be in all the places that people listen to podcasts. And now's a great time to mention that if you had like to get all of our shows ad free, you can by subscribing to club TWI for seven bucks a month, you get every single Twitch show with no ads you'll actually get, it's kind of fun, your own little feeds for each of the shows. So you can add that to your podcast player of choice, and there'll be ad free. You also access to the TWI plus bonus feed that has extra content. You won't find elsewhere outtakes behind the scenes. I think there was some yesterday as we were recording the club or the, the TWI holiday special with aunt Pruitt, Jason Howell Leo Laport myself, and by yesterday, I mean, as we are record this yesterday and also access to the members only discord server, if you're wondering what is the members only discord server?
Mikah Sargent (00:58:57):
Well, if you've ever used Microsoft teams or slack, then you'll be familiar with that kind of setup. It's a place to chat with all of your fellow club, twit members, but also the, those of us here at twit Rosemary is a very active participant in the discord. And I should also mention, this is a great time with the discord. I failed to point out that if you own pixelate photo for iPad, then it will be available to you for free on the iPhone. So people who have not purchased or people who have purchased the version for the iPad, you'll get the iPhone version for free. Thank you, John for mentioning that in the discord oh, and we had some folks who said, Hey, you know, I just wanna support certain shows directly and I'm not really into the whole kit and caboodle. So if you, if you're not interested in club TWI, which is at twit TV slash club TWI, you can also check out our apple podcast subscription for 2 99 a month. You just go into apple podcast, us, you find the audio version of iOS today, and there'll be a little button to, to subscribe and you'll get the ad free audio version of the podcast for 2 99, Rosemary orchard. If folks wanna follow you online and check out all of your great work, where should they go to do so?
Rosemary Orchard (01:00:19):
The best list by me is over@rosemaryorchard.com, which has links to all the things and all the places where I am online, or if free, you can find me in the club, Twitter discord where I'm regularly, even if I'm not writing in the iOS today, channel, I'm always keeping on top of what's there. And of course you can find me on Twitter at rose orchard mic. What about you?
Mikah Sargent (01:00:38):
I am at Mikah Sargent on many, a social media network, or you can head to chihuahua.coffee. That's C H I H U A H A dot coffee, where I've got links to the places I am most active online folks. Thank you for tuning into this episode of iOS today. We will see you very soon, but in the meantime, enjoy this episode, enjoy the time with your family have a beautiful rest of your year. And we can't wait to come back with iOS Today after our Best Ofs episode. Goodbye.
Ant Pruitt (01:01:10):
So you got yourself, the brand new latest and greatest iPhone or Samsung smartphone, because you heard about all of the beautiful photography those things can create, but for some reason, you're just not quite getting the on with. When you try to make your photos, or you got yourself a brand new camera, because you were interested in getting started in photography, but you're a little new inexpensive camera still. Isn't quite cutting it. Well, you need to check out my show hands on photography here on TWiT. I'm gonna show you how to be a better photographer and a better post processor. And quite frankly, just help you get the most outta that new camera. That's that's either on your phone or the brand new one that you just got for your, your birthday or gifts or what have you. And it's gonna be a lot of fun. So head on over to twit.tv/hop that's twit.tv/H O P and subscribe today.
