iOS Today Episode 600 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 take a look at some of the ways you can make the most of all of your Apple devices working together. This is all about maximizing your use across different Apple devices. Stay tuned.

... (00:00:19):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Mikah Sargent (00:00:26):
This episode of iOS today is brought to you by eight sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer and nature's best medicine. Go to eight. Sleep.Com/Ios. To check out the pod pro cover and save $150 a checkout eight sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, and the UK, and by wealth front to start building your wealth and get your first $5,000 managed for free for life. Go to wealthfront.com/ios today. Wow. Hello and welcome to iOS today. The show where we talk all things, iOS TV OS watch OS iPad OS. And I already say that one I may have, I don't know, but it's all the OSS that Apple has an offer. We love to talk about them. We love to help you make the most of those different devices that you have. And yes, as Keith five 12 has said in the chat, it is a very gray day as I have a gray sweater. And I of course am one of your hosts, Micah Sergeant,

Rosemary Orchard (00:01:37):
And I'm Rosemary Orchard. I'm not wearing a green t-shirt, but it's kind of difficult to tell because of the light. I'm gonna have to see if I can fix that in a moment. Ah, okay.

Rosemary Orchard (00:01:46):
It's slightly green. It's slightly green. Like if I maybe close to the camera, there we go. It's

Mikah Sargent (00:01:50):
Kind. There we go. Yeah. So yeah, sort of like a, a Sage or a, a light mint green. We we're in the shades of gray today. Nevermind not shade

Rosemary Orchard (00:02:03):
Shade, which shades the Apple offer all of their devices in. You want shade? Yes.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:05):
There you go. Apples,

Rosemary Orchard (00:02:06):
Shade of gray, which you like this year. <Laugh> that you've only got one choice per year, but it varies every year. So there's some variety.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:13):
Is it, is it, is it darker space, gray? Is it a lighter space, gray? Is it space black? Well, I remember those days anyway. Today we're talking about using your devices together, because this is one of those things that Apple is well known for, right? This is part of the reason that they talk about the walled garden, that, that folks talk about the walled garden that is Apple and the benefit of joining that wall Wald garden. Come on, have some tea, have some crumpets, join us here in this walled garden. Look at the flowers all around you. It is the idea that all of these devices that we have can communicate with one another and can work together in a way that makes everything feel more productive. You can do something on your iPhone and have that sync to your iPad and your Mac and the different devices that you might have.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:06):
But on top of that, it's the opportunity to sort of move between devices. I, for a long time, was using an iPad air as an external monitor for my Mac, for example, and that feature was built in, there's all sorts of fun stuff. Now there's airplane to your Mac. I mean, there's, there's everything. So we thought we would talk about some of those features today, starting with your screen and Rosemary, just before the show was kicking off, you mentioned this relatively new feature for different Apple devices. It's called universal control. What is universal control?

Rosemary Orchard (00:03:44):
Well, universal control is a really handy feature. That's been in the works that Apple for years, seemingly at least some of the interviews that some of their engineers have done kind of gave this secret away and universal control is the idea that from any of your devices, with a cursor and a keyboard, you can then use that cursor to go to the edge of your screen. And then you push kind of through an invisible wall and then bam, your cursor is on the next device. So for example, you've got an iPad pro with a nice magic keyboard and a Mac mini on your desk. Well, if you'd swipe across on your, your iPad pro, so say your iPad pros on one side, then you just keep pushing bam. You can then use that same cursor on your Mac mini or vice versa. You've, you know, you've got a Mac mini there and or any kind of Mac and you're sitting there and you've also got this handy dandy, little iPad mini there.

Rosemary Orchard (00:04:33):
Well guess what? You can just push your cursor across. And then if you've got this feature enabled, it means that you can control all of your devices with one cable or mouse because let's face it. Who wants a six of these on sitting on their desk. I mean, I know it lights up in RGB colors, but that doesn't make it worth having six or seven of these on my desk. So it's great to be able to just universally control. There's no special mode that you need to pre enable or anything like that. You literally just mouse over and then whatever is on that device stays on that device, but you can just keep working with it and you can drag AFE with you, take some text over whatever you like. It's pretty great. So great that I accidentally was using it before, as the show started to control this me without realizing that I was still connected to my work machine, which is to my left because it's that smooth, like that's how smooth it is. I didn't know. That's how smooth

Mikah Sargent (00:05:22):
It's, it's very impressive. I have a Mac studio now and most of what I do is there, but when I was still getting things set up, still trying to figure out sort of my layout situation, how I wanted to do things. And also while I was still installing things on the Mac studio I had cuz I, I wanted to do it fresh. So I had my MacBook pro sitting next to it on, on my desk and I'm using, you know, one keyboard, one mouse and, and track pad and, you know, sliding back and forth between, I felt like I was an ice skater or something just easily moving back and forth so much. So it it's, it's almost one of those things that is dull in its in, in the way that it, it works because it works so well that your brain almost just kind of forgets that it's happening.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:12):
And then you do quickly kind of start to move between things and realize, oh right, I forgot. This is like two computers that are just networked together. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and they're both being able to share screens, copy and paste text from each of them, as you need to. It's kind of magical in, in the way that it works. And the fact that you can not just use, you know, two max together with one keyboard and mouse, but that you can use an iPad as well, that you can switch between these two different operating systems is kind of mind blowing mindboggling and all sorts of awesome. And that has been a fun experience of just, you know, there are things that I want to do on one device that I just quickly need to grab something or see something that's on the, the, this big screen that I have with the studio display.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:03):
And now being able to just switch between them is so simple. Yeah, and I, I think that Apple has done a good job of one thing that Apple, a common critique against Apple that I think is fair is that a lot of times features are not entirely discoverable that you learn about these new, this is why sometimes these TikTok videos blow up where somebody's showing off some feature that's available. And for example there was, there was one time where someone someone's video went viral, where they used the gesture, which I think is like four or five fingers to pinch to copy a photo. And then they went to, they did that on maybe their iPhone. And then they went onto their iPad in an app that has sort of a place where you could paste and they spread their fingers out on the screen, which essentially what was happening is they were copying on one device and they were pasting on the other.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:00):
But because of the way that the gesture worked, it seemed as if they had grabbed the photo on the one device and then dropped it on the other. And so people were thinking it was some sort of AR feature or VR feature. But all it was was just the universal clipboard that exists between those two devices. If you have two devices logged into the same Apple ID and you have the continuity keyboard and, and universal clipboard, all these features kind of enabled through what is essentially the umbrella called continuity. Then you were able to do that, but it gave it more because it was kind of a hidden thing that people maybe didn't know those gestures that you can do paired with that clipboard that's pastable between them. But all that's to say with universal control, I feel like this feature is a little bit more discoverable because of the way that Apple has done it, where you slide your mouse to the edge of the screen and then slide some more. And if you've got that device nearby that can, that can pick it up, then it will.

Rosemary Orchard (00:09:02):
Yes, yes. I should note that your iPhone, your iPad, your Mac, they don't actually know where they are in relation to the other devices. Now, I'm sure they could use some smart technology to figure all this stuff out, but they don't instead they rely on you pushing through the correct side of your screen. So for example, if I have and I'm just gonna grab two devices for illustration here, so, oops. And I'll spill some water everywhere as well. That's all right. So if I have an iPad here and an iPhone here and I push through from this device and I go this way, then I could still end up on, on the other device if I've got curses connected to them. And so that is a feature that, you know, you as a human need to be a little bit smart about using as well as you know, everything else, but it is really handy to have. And you know, that universal clipboard, Michael's talking about that's part of this feature. That's how you can drag a document from one device to another, or copy some text and paste it on another device because yes, you can do all of that. And that's pretty amazing.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:01):
I agree. All right. Let's talk about the next feature, which is one that I had mentioned earlier. This is a feature that's existed kind of long before. Universal control came around and it was a feature like folks were buying iPads, right? And if you buy an iPad pro in particular this is a device that has a really, really nice screen any version of the iPad pro not just the 12.9 inch with the mini L E D and all that magic stuff. But if you do have one of those then you really have a nice screen and sometimes you might be out and about with your MacBook air or your, you know, your, what is it, 13 inch MacBook pro, and you just need a second screen to go along with that first one. So Apple thought, you know, what we should do, we should make it so that you can have an iPad as a secondary screen, as a secondary monitor.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:56):
There's this whole market for secondary monitors that you plug into your computer. And so I'm not surprised that Apple said let's use this technology that we already have to make this possible. So with sidecar one of the, the things that that, that you have to understand is that it is a feature that turns your iPad into a secondary display. And so in, in your brain parts, you gotta think of it, not like universal control, but think of it as if you had connected over HGM, I, or USBC a display to your screen, that means that it's not gonna have touch inputs built into the display part of it. Right? So when I use when I use sidecar with the iPad air, I think it was I turned off the side bar and the touch bar feature that are part of side car.

Mikah Sargent (00:11:50):
However, if you have those on, you do get a few extra things that are touch sensitive, you can either use your finger, or you can use your Apple pencil. And either of those will allow you to make some, make some changes to the screen. So there's an option to hide menus. There's an option to show the doc you can press and hold for command alt option, those kinds of things. You can then also just right there from the sidebar disconnect from the, the Mac, which is nice. And then if you have an app that has touch bar or rather if you have an app that has touch bar controls then those will also be available on an iPad. So now that I have the Mac studio I don't have a touch bar anymore because that was what was available on my MacBook pro.

Mikah Sargent (00:12:43):
So if I wanted to access that again, I could in theory, or I could, if I wanted to it, it's not in theory, but if I decided to use sidebar or excuse me, sidecar, to be able to access those controls again. So it is a nice way if you don't have the need to go full on with universal control, if you're just sort of, maybe you're sitting at a at, at a coffee shop and you sort of have your MacBook there on the table and you pull up your iPad, sit it next to it, just for doing some extra stuff that you wouldn't do otherwise. Or in my case where I was using it as a secondary display, just to have a smaller display, I could use to be able to see things that I needed to. That's what made side car very helpful.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:29):
We are gonna take a quick break, but we will come back shortly with lots more to take advantage of including some other options for control and taking control also of the screen. So before we do that, I wanna tell you about eight sleep who are bringing you this episode of iOS today. Look, I love my eight sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer and nature's best medicine consistent, good sleep can help reduce the likelihood of serious health issues. It can decrease the risk of heart disease. It can lower blood pressure, and it can even reduce the risk of Alzheimer's. Look, I I'm a big sleep nerd. I had a subscription to the journal sleep that I did a podcast for a long time on sleep science and dreams. And I was just, and, and still am to this day, big into sleep.

Mikah Sargent (00:14:26):
There's so many good books that I wish I could recommend right now that you should read if you're interested in sleep, which everybody should be. That's kind of the point is that one thing that I learned is that everybody's like, oh, sleep's very important. And you hear that a lot. You know, sleep is the most important. What I learned is that I was underestimating. Even that belief it's hands down, the single most important thing that we can do for ourselves is get good sleep because everything else is built on top of that. When we get good sleep, our body is able to restore itself in the way that it's meant to. And then we're able to go about our day in a way that's so much better. And eight sleep is there to help you with that. More than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep.

Mikah Sargent (00:15:11):
And, and it turns out that temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep. Even before eight sleep was a, a sponsor in this network. I had been talking about how important temperature is for sleep. Our bodies sleep better when it's cooler and it's between, I believe 63 and 65 degrees that researchers have sort of honed in on what that proper sleep temperature is. And folks, I am a very warm sleeper. I used to wake up and just be just entirely too warm, sweating, uncomfortable, awful. I tried all sorts of things to, to make that experience better for myself. Running a fan is one thing that, you know, folks think is a good idea, but it turns out that's not a great idea because it dries you out. It makes your your body, your, your sinuses in particular, produce more mucus to try to combat the dryness, which then leads it.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:05):
Trust me again. I could go into whole detail about why just running a fan on you is not a great idea. Cranking up the AC can also be a bad idea because the AC is a drying process, the, the way that the AC works. And so it's also drying out your air, all of these things. So like these were the things I was trying to do to make it better so that I could stay asleep and not wake up uncomfortable, just heated, sleeping without a blanket. Can't do it. Don't know why can't do it. I try doesn't work. So now eight sleep has freed me from all of that because now I not only fall asleep in record time and, you know, fall asleep faster than I ever have before, but I can sleep comfortably. And it's all thanks to the eight sleep pod pro cover.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:48):
So eight sleep has two products. They've got a whole pod and they've got the pod pro cover, which if you love your mattress already, which I do, then this just goes over the top of it. The pod pro cover by eight sleep. It's the most advanced solution on the market for Thermo regulation. That's what we're talking about here. It pairs dynamic, cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Yes, that's right. It also can track all the things related to your sleep. You can add the cover to any mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit, or as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. As I say, every time pro tip, that is not helpful for your sleep. You can do it, but I suggest against it. You wanna go to that cool way, which is what the eight sleep can help you do.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:29):
The temperature of the cover will adjust each side of the bed based on your sleep stages, your biometrics and your bedroom, temperature, reacting, intelligently to create the optimal sleeping environment. Yeah. despite the fact that I just preach and preach and preach about how you should sleep. Cool. I'll say the person who sleeps next to me definitely chooses to sleep warmer than I do. And so I just like, okay, I'll let you do your thing over there with that heated bed. You're sleeping on. I've got my nice, cool chili, eight sleep, which is so nice. And what do you get as a result? Eight sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster. They reduce sleep interruptions by 40% and they get overall more restful sleep with 30% more deep sleep. That means you can be confident that your mind, your body, they're all moving through the restorative sleep stages that are vital for physical recovery, for hormone regulation.

Mikah Sargent (00:18:21):
And for mental clarity, when I am powered by eight sleep, you know, that means you get to show up and be the best version of yourself. Ah, again, it's so nice to wake up, feel refreshed and feel more like I can tackle the day than ever before. In fact, I have mine as it starts to ramp up to me, waking up, it will warm the bed because that makes me wanna get outta bed, not stay in it and and sort of fall back to sleep. So that is really helpful. And also the pot pro cover has this cool feature built in. That's an alarm and it's got these different vibration motors inside of the cover itself. So on top of warming me up, it's also slowly kind of quietly vibrating to wake me up. So that gets me outta bed as well.

Mikah Sargent (00:19:11):
It's incredible. It's fantastic. And then I get to look at my sleep scores and stuff, as it was tracking my heart rate, variability and respirations and all that kind of stuff overnight. So go to, if this sounds good to you, which I, I couldn't see how it couldn't, it's such a cool thing. Go to eight, sleep.com/ios to check out the pod pro cover and save $150 at check out $150, eight sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, and the UK. That's eight sleep.com/ios to check it out. And of course my thanks to eight sleep sponsoring this week's episode of iOS today and making it so I can rest comfortably at night. All right. We are gonna talk about a third party option that folks can use if maybe they have a device that doesn't support sidecar, universal control, which do require in one place. And whether it be the iPad or the device that you're using there, or the Mac itself requires some newer technology. I think one of the cool things about Luna display is that an older Mac might be able to work with it.

Rosemary Orchard (00:20:18):
Yeah. So Luna display is a little U S BBC mini display port or HTM. I dongle for 99 99 that you can plug into a device. And then you can use that to turn your iPad or another Mac into a display. And what's really cool about this is it works on a Mac mini as well, which doesn't have a display connected because if anybody has tried to use sidecar before on a Mac mini that doesn't have a display connected, they'll realize they, they can't set it up at all. And so if you frequently find yourself with headless devices so that's one without a monitor connected that you need to connect something to, or maybe your primary machine is a windows machine. Then the Luna display is a great option. I have to say it's such a great option that I actually have two, I have a HTMI and a us one because I, I find it's just incredibly good.

Rosemary Orchard (00:21:05):
And also every so often I'll run into weird situations where for whatever reason, the network that I'm on is not supporting universal control or side car, but I can usually get around that with Luna display. So it's a great fallback for, for when I do need an extra display there. And it's a teeny title dongle. It fits in my Tobin tiny, tiny ghost whale, which I have loads of little tech things in it. So it's worth knowing that this is an option that exists for things like that. And also if your primary computer is windows, then this makes it an excellent option as well, where you can extend your display in a slightly different way. It supports drawing input as well, making it somewhat more like a WAC on tablet in some ways if you set it up like that. So it's it's a solid device. It's not the cheapest, but I have to say I can definitely recommend it.

Mikah Sargent (00:21:56):
Yes. I want, could, can that be used with raspberry pie?

Rosemary Orchard (00:22:01):
So it, I don't think they have Linux support at the moment. I can't remember if they're working on that. It definitely works with windows but unfortunately it doesn't work with RAs PI, but our next option on the other hand will and our next option is jump desktop because jump desktop is an excellent option. There's also screens BNC, but I found I've had much better luck over the last couple of years with jump desktop. It's a remote desktop protocol or virtual control application, allowing you to remote back into any device that you have. So you can remote into a windows machine. You can remote into a Linux machine. You can remote into a virtual, physical machines, Mac machines, whatever you like, and you can connect to them all really easily. And it works like, I, I don't know how to describe it other than it is very universal control, like in that you set it up and it just works.

Rosemary Orchard (00:22:54):
There is no in insanity to this. It, it does just have all of my devices there in, in the in the list and I can pop up my iPhone and show people, you know, I've got a couple of devices here. I've got one device that I've connected twice because I'm in the middle of setting that back up. But I have my, the USS enterprise is both a Starship and in my case, also a windows computer. But I've got connected that via flow of remote desktop and windows, remote desktop, and, you know, they, they're both very good options and I have the ability to add any other machine, including Ross pies and more if I want. And so what I could just do very quickly is if I remote into the USS enterprise then I can actually connect.

Rosemary Orchard (00:23:40):
And because I've got it set up, then I can actually see everything that's going on and control my windows computer right here on my phone from, you know, anywhere in the world. So if I rotate my device, then it re scales, and redraws my display for me to automatically match. And on, on the display that I'm, I'm imagined to show on the video version, it's a little bit cropped off. That's just the way that the frame is set up for the iPad. This is actually an iPhone. And I'm fully in there. I've got a track path mode. I'm just dragging my finger around on my iPhone display, but there's various different options as well. For example, you can have a pen input, you can lock the screen do view only windows multitouch and depending on your device, you have some other options.

Rosemary Orchard (00:24:23):
So for example, if you're on an iPad with a magic keyboard or another cursor input then you'll probably want direct touch, which is, you know, if I touch it and then it clicks just like it would, you can change your screen resolution. You can show a circle if you want to all sorts of things. And, you know, I have to say, this is, you know, this is not the cheapest of applications. The iOS app is 1499. The Mac app is 29 99, but you know what? It works every time I have yet to have a problem with it, not working. And anytime I thought all, no jump desktop has failed me. It's turned out that the computer has turned off, or I didn't actually have a network connection. I thought I did, or something like that. It has never actually been jump desktop. So it's well worth the option. I should note, if you are an owner of the setup, suite of apps on the Mac, then you actually have jump desktop for free on that device and any devices that you have that subscription on. So it is well worth it, whether your favorite Lennox, distro IBAN to RAs or arch because you know, some of us really love to hate ourselves at times.

Mikah Sargent (00:25:29):
<Laugh> <laugh> I always forget about set and I, I should not cuz it's

Rosemary Orchard (00:25:35):
Yeah, they, some iOS apps as well, making it very worth looking at if you are inclined to look at that sort of thing at all.

Mikah Sargent (00:25:45):
So some people, so when I use what is it called now? I'm trying now I'm forgetting, oh, spotlight on my Mac. I hold down command and I press space and I can search for anything. But some people like to use third party options. One of those third party options is called Alfred mm-hmm <affirmative> and you are mentioning something called Alfred remote, which is a way to be able to control things with your iPhone or iPad and access Alfred on the Mac. Tell me about that.

Rosemary Orchard (00:26:21):
Yeah. So Alfred first of all, the name comes from Batman. Alfred is your Butler just like he's at he's Batman's Butler. Yes, really. But Alfred basically is sort of spotlight on steroids and there's a number of things that you can do with it, but one of them is download the 4 99 alpha remote application, and then you get to control your Mac without having to actually remote into your Mac. Because if it turns out that I just forgot to mute my Mac, when I walked away or something, I don't wanna have to open up junk desktop and blah, blah, blah, and go in and, and hit, you know, mute there. That's, that's not worth it, but I could set up a button in alpha remote to do that, or I can set up buttons to quit all the applications or open system commands. And for example, preferences, if I go here and then I, you know, tap on printers and scanners, it's just opened the system preferences menu on my Mac in front of me.

Rosemary Orchard (00:27:07):
Now, you can't see this because it's, it's up there. As I look at it on that screen, but you know, this is pretty great for just being able to, you know, quickly tap into things, especially if you are in the process of switching devices and setting things up and you don't necessarily have the keyboards and the mice in the right place, or you actually need to be doing it over here, but you want that device over there to just pop up and quickly show you this mouse across three displays to get to, it seems like a lot of work it's, it's nice to just be able to, you know, go in and for example, put your Mac back to sleep. Open, specific folders that you've got saved view keyboard, his clipboard history, control your music. That's, that's something that you can do that we do have a, another option for that. Open some bookmarks, search the web, et cetera. And it's just nice to have this as an option and even nicer that you can customize it and connect multiple Macs. So if there is results of Macs in your household, especially if one of them is a shared Mac, then this way, you know, when the kids are being silly, then you can just pop in and hit block. And that's it. I would do that, but that seems like a terrible idea. Mid podcast.

Mikah Sargent (00:28:11):
Yeah. What would be a little bit no, not great. So that, that is Alfred remote. That honestly, that's something that I would consider installing to, to be able to mm-hmm, <affirmative> sort of have a control over, over my Mac. I would consider installing Alfred just to have Alfred remote for use, if I wanted to. Yes. There are

Rosemary Orchard (00:28:35):
Some

Mikah Sargent (00:28:36):
Excellent things like that. Yeah. So tell us about this next one, because this one, I think is one that even the folks who are watching this show who are maybe not as power user, as as, as some of the other shows would be able to make use of pretty easily. And it's something that we use in a more hardware way that folks could use if they wanted to give it a try.

Rosemary Orchard (00:29:03):
Yeah. so the next one is the Aalto stream deck mobile. So I'm just gonna show on the video. This is my actual stream deck, as it's set up right now for controlling iOS today, which allows me to do things like, you know, switch over to the view of my iPhone with me, or switch back. I also have the stream deck pedal, but if maybe you're just, you know, you're not sure that you want a physical device on your desk or something, or you just wanna give it a try without having to buy a hundred dollars piece of hardware. Then you can get the Gato string deck mobile app. And I've not got this set up right now because I don't actually end up using the mobile app. I've ended up buying the physical devices. But the idea of the mobile app is that it is a virtual version of a stream deck, meaning that your phone has 15 buttons on it that you can set up in the stream deck app on your Mac or on windows.

Rosemary Orchard (00:29:50):
And they allow you to just, you know, control your device, doing whatever the heck it is you need to do. So if you're, for example, Marcus Sergeant and your recording, I to Paul Marcus Arron, and you're recording Iowas today, you might need to switch between a view of yourself and a view of your iPad with a little circle of view on it. That's a button that's a really easy button to create, thanks to the combination of apps that are available to us. And whatever your preferred apps are. There's almost certainly either an existing stream deck integration for it. That's official for alga or somebody's created one, or it turns out it's gonna be very easy to create in the alga stream deck app on your main device, be that the windows or the Mac device. And it's really useful. It literally just gives you a macro pad of buttons, right?

Rosemary Orchard (00:30:34):
Your fingertips that you can tap and the magic happens, and you can use this in all sorts of ways. So for example, at work, I have it set up so that it opens my most used applications. If I go into teams and I only go into teams, when I'm going to join a meeting, it shows me a specific meeting view, which has like meet yourself, unmute yourself and, and buttons for other things like that, you know, like share my screen, stop sharing my screen et cetera, because all of those are things I need quick access to, and it can change based on the application that is currently foremost on my Mac or my windows machine, if I'm using it on windows. So it is well worth setting up and taking a look at and it's only, I believe 3 99 a month to actually get this a full full blown trial, but it is, or like to, to subscribe, but it is free to download 2 99 a month, sorry, it's 2 99 a month or 24 99 a year, but it is free for 30 days to give it a go.

Rosemary Orchard (00:31:28):
So if you're interested in this and you think, oh, that sounds interesting. I like the idea of this it's worth checking it out. And you know, if you're still not sure after the first 30 days only, only 2 99 for another month to go to go. So it's worth taking a look at, and I should know there is an Android version of this as well.

Mikah Sargent (00:31:47):
Nice. Yes. I, yeah, that's, that's nice that you can, whatever platform you have to be on, you should be able to use this. And then the final two iTunes remote, which man been a while since I heard that one

Rosemary Orchard (00:32:01):
<Laugh> oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Itunes still exists, but only in the remote form. So if you're the sort of person who likes to play music from your Mac, or from iTunes on a windows machine, then you can still download and install good old iTunes remote from the app store. It is still there. It's still present. I checked before the show. It is, of course now not showing up because I have to search for the word remote in my options. But then you can control music playback. I'm actually not gonna do that right now. Cuz if I start playing music, then I have a feeling that I'm gonna, you know, get Twitter into trouble for probably playing music much too loudly, mostly. But what you can do is when you've set it up, you'll need to enable home sharing. I don't actually have the music app open on this device at the moment, but you can connect using home sharing, and then you will be able to control the playback from your Mac, which is great for those of you, who've got large music libraries or you don't have iTunes match or Apple music.

Rosemary Orchard (00:32:56):
And you just wanna play from your Mac. It's, it's a great way to just be able to control all of that though. I should know if you do have those and you've got some great speakers connected to your Mac, you can also just airplay from your iPhone to your Mac. So yet all the options there with the music right now.

Mikah Sargent (00:33:14):
And then finally this last one under control is one that you I remember you telling me about this maybe even been on iOS today and I thought, oh my gosh, I gotta get that. And it was one of my, my happiest purchases for

Rosemary Orchard (00:33:27):
Sure. Oh yeah. Yeah. Translator is a great application for your iPhone and on your Mac. And basically it allows you to transfer the download of a, of a thing. So I can see these are some things that downloaded relatively recently on my Mac studio. Here are some things that are downloaded on my laptop. And then I can just go ahead and add. So there there's preferences over there. I tapped on the wrong side. I can add any link and tell it to download on any of my devices. And so if I select, you know, these devices, then it will go ahead and whatever link I paste in there downloads on all those devices. And this is really handy for, I found something really cool or a friend has just shared this great Mac app with me and I wanna download it on my Mac, but I'm gonna forget to download it or it's gonna take a while cause it's a big file.

Rosemary Orchard (00:34:14):
Start it now. And then the next time you're on your Mac, bam, it'll be there ready for you. You can even on the Mac sign into different websites within the trans loader app so that if it needs authentication to download things, then it will be able to just download them in whatever manner is necessary, which is just really handy. And it's, it's a free app on iOS as the iOS app is just the companion. And then I believe the Mac app is 1499 to to get that. But it is really a great app high, highly recommended, and it's certainly has made my life much. Easier'm more productive even when I'm only on an iOS device and I did need a Mac, unfortunately.

Mikah Sargent (00:34:55):
<Laugh> alright let's take a quick break and then we will come back with a few other picks before we head into the news. I wanna tell you about wealth front, who are bringing you this episode of iOS today. Stock trading can be a wild ride, right? But the thrill of risking it all well, that's best enjoyed in moderation like casino, gambling and eating questionable street food gotta sort of make your, make your picks there. If you're playing the market. I hope for your sake that you're stashing some safer money in a place like wealth front, you might think that day trading stocks is the secret to investing success, but wealth front has a ton of data to show that time in market, almost always beats timing. The market they're globally diversified portfolios, automatically optimized to hit the goals you set and the risk level you choose.

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Rosemary Orchard (00:36:59):
Yeah, yeah. There's a couple of different ways. We can put a, a link to a guide in the it's show notes that goes through how to set everything up with, with one of the contenders. But there's essentially when I did some research, there's two different apps that make using your iPhone as a web camera, much easier. And one of them is camo and the other one is epoch cam. And depending on your setup and how you like to do things and so on and so forth, you know, the different version, different app might, might be better for you, but essentially it allows you to take the great camera on the back of your device, even on an older iPhone and use it as a web camera, which is especially handy. If you've got an old iPhone hanging around and you're like, okay, like the whole pandemic thing happened.

Rosemary Orchard (00:37:38):
There was the working from home. Nobody had webcams or that nostril cam that's in the hinge of my laptop was fine. Like I can live with it. And now you're like, okay, well I'm actually permanently working from home and I wanna buy a web camera and we've got chip again. There are no chips, which means that all the webcams are hundreds of dollars, but I've got this old iPhone success here. I could use that or, well, my sister's just got rid of her or getting rid of her iPhone seven and getting a new upgrade. Maybe I can take that off for hands for a very low price. And instead you can, you know, use that as your web camera. And there is a couple of things that you can do with this as well, which makes it E an easier to use longer term, but it does require a bit more setup.

Rosemary Orchard (00:38:22):
And there is an excellent guide from Simon sting. Who's the creator of a couple of really niche, little lovely iOS apps, like data jar, Jason and so on, which allows you to just use the iPhone permanently as your web camera without having to open the app or anything, because it just gets permanently locked into that one application and that's all it does anymore. And that's using Apple's tools to lock that down just like you would lock a, an iPhone or an iPad down for school use or, or whatever. So that's really handy, but you can use your iPhone as a great web camera, so you don't have to go out and buy whatever, you know, the latest and greatest is I'm using a Logitech Brio, but by the time this signal gets across the internet, it's not 4k anymore. <Laugh> but you know, you can save some money and why not reuse an old device after all the three hours are reduced reuse and then recycle

Mikah Sargent (00:39:14):
<Laugh>. I am actually today coming to you from an iPhone using camo studio, I stopped using it because on my Intel Mac, it would spoon spin, spin up those fans, and they would be picked up by the microphone. And also, I just didn't like the MacBook pro running that hard just to have this, the webcam, whoops. I just shook my whole screen. But I, now that I'm on the Mac studio it, it works very well. And the bonus point is that I get to use camo and I can do fun things like let me find it this where, oh, suddenly we are much closer because view can switch between the different cameras that are built into the iPhone. And so there's wide ultra wide and and tele tell AOTO, but then you can also do fun things like adding a portrait mode, for example, which gives a nice blur behind you. But then things like having face follow where you can move all over the screen and it moves all along with you, for folks who are listening, it's just this very kind of abrupt

Rosemary Orchard (00:40:32):
Mike is trying to make us all motion

Mikah Sargent (00:40:33):
That's happening here.

Rosemary Orchard (00:40:35):
Exactly. Yeah. It's like having a studio display without having to pay Apple for the studio display or having to find an nest space for an extra display. Have you got a cat on your head, Micah,

Mikah Sargent (00:40:45):
Now that

Rosemary Orchard (00:40:46):
On Micah has an AI cat on his head. Okay, this is, this is officially the end of the universe. You know, the, I mean, breaking news happened this week anyway, and the Apple made more money. So I think we are 

Mikah Sargent (00:41:00):
I will get rid of,

Rosemary Orchard (00:41:01):
I love the fact that you could do all these things with, with the with these apps. And of course, you know, it's, it's nice to be able to reuse your devices, or even if you just don't have a web camera or the web camera is gonna be on a laptop that for whatever reason needs to be pointing away from you. And usually you've got everything, but this time you don't need to camo and epoch camera are good options to know that exist and have one of them in your back pocket, just in case you do need one.

Mikah Sargent (00:41:25):
There you go. All right, folks moving into the news segment now up first Apple has released some new firmware for air tags. If you've got air tags or one air tag, you will be able to get this firmware update. Apple has kind of fine tuned the, the built in options or not the built in options, but the built in ability for these things to sound off based on when when they are being used, where they are, and to make sure that people are aware that there's an air tag around them, for example that is what the, the air tag firmware is aimed at doing. As well as I believe, some improvements to battery as well. Yes. Have you ever replaced any of the batteries in yours yet?

Rosemary Orchard (00:42:16):
Nope. Not at all. They all seem to be going pretty well. I still get regular notifications when I leave my keys behind my accident. And it's just close enough that I'm still willing to turn around the car and come back and get them. I should know I have smart door locks, so I won't be permanently. I'm not properly locked out if I don't have my keys, but if my phone and everything else runs outta battery, then it's, it's nice to have the keys as a backup. But it's yeah, I seem to be doing pretty well and have yet to be told anything other than, you know, here's your air tag when I lose my keys or whatever it is. And I navigate to it using find my app. So

Mikah Sargent (00:42:50):
Nice. All right. And oh, since we lasted our episode that's right. The, the day after Apple finally unveiled peeled back and showed off the iPhone self-service repair program that mm-hmm, <affirmative> you there, there's a, there's a website that you go to and you can order parts for your iPhone for, for more modern iPhones. I believe it's iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 right now mm-hmm, <affirmative> including all the different sizes of those devices. What's cool is that there are also repair guides. And so of course I downloaded some of the different repair guides just to look through them and see what was available there. And you can actually Apple makes available for purchase and available for rent. Some of the more complex tools that Apple uses when you do a repair at at where, when they do a repair, rather at an Apple certified repair service or at one of the Apple stores one device that actually heats up the display so that it can kind of be removed with the glue that's involved another one that properly kind of places.

Mikah Sargent (00:44:06):
And it, it serves as a press to, to lock in and make sure that the iPhone screen is sort of reconnected in a very secure way. And it made me think about the times that I've done repairs in the past without using any of those tools and how, how much I think not necessarily easier, but more secure, I would feel being able to make use of these official tools to do these repairs. And I was kind of surprised at the cost because you see kind of big industrial devices, like the heating thing it's all the way down. It should be all the way down at the bottom of that screen even past, so they've got the tools

Rosemary Orchard (00:44:50):
Hidden way at the bottom because they don't necessarily want everyone to be borrowing them. I guess they've got a limited number.

Mikah Sargent (00:44:57):
So there's an example, the 6.1 inch heated display pocket, which actually you put onto the device, that's just below this this row. And it is available for $108. Then the, the press, which looks like some giant contraption that would cost, you know, thousands of dollars is available for $216, if you wanted to buy it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. And the heated display removal fixture is no. So you can rent it for you can rent the devices for I think it's $30 for seven days. Those are the actual

Rosemary Orchard (00:45:32):
Purchase prices. So there's different toolkits available. I think I was just reading on this page that these, these are all rented devices that they are then returned afterwards. I'm not sure. It does seem like it should be a lot more money to buy heated display removal fixture than $256, but maybe not maybe I misread that because I now can't find the quote on the page after reloading it. So,

Mikah Sargent (00:45:55):
Yeah, I so I went through the process all the way to like check out my order and just didn't go that far with it and yeah. That you can actually buy those tools straight out if you wanted to. Yeah, of course I don't need a heated display removal fixture, or a display press. But I just thought it was cool that these, yeah, I mean, and frankly, you know, those are priced how they are. What's impressive to me is that the torque drivers cost as much as $99. These are for folks who don't know, a torque driver is a kind of screwdriver that has a built in sort of setting for how much you can tighten a thing. And so I, you know, when I did repairs in the past, I'm screwing things in and I'm going, should I push it a little bit more?

Mikah Sargent (00:46:40):
Should I stop right here? These torque drivers leave all of that behind. So you don't have to worry about it when you use it once you've tightened it to the point that Apple suggests it be tightens to, then it starts to make a clicking sound and won't let you tighten the screw anymore. So it's really nice to have that kind of built in knowledge. These are things that you can buy from third parties as well, but it's cool that they're available right there just, I was shocked at how expensive they were in comparison to just doing the seven day rental, which is $49 and includes all the pieces that you need, including the display fixture, the heated display, fixture, the press, and the torque drivers and, and all of those different tools. So I also like that, given that it's a seven day rental <laugh> it kind of makes you move quickly, right? It's like, okay, I gotta get this done. I gotta get this repair <laugh>. Yes,

Rosemary Orchard (00:47:32):
For sure. Yeah. I should know if anybody's considering renting this it comes in a Pelican case, which are pretty, pretty much indestructible. And those, those are great cases for transporting stuff in it weighs 43 pounds <laugh>. Okay. So, so you're getting a lot of equipment in there, which is why they want it back in seven days. And so it, it's gonna be pretty darn heavy to to you know, Lu that thing around. So you're not gonna wanna just keep it at home. It is gonna be

Mikah Sargent (00:48:02):
Depending on which one you get, you might end up getting two cases because the 13 pro max case one has the heated display fixture and the pocket and case two has all the rest of this stuff. So you would get two PE cases in the mail to, to do your repair. All right. 

Rosemary Orchard (00:48:19):
Let's yeah. I hope you've given your delivery person appropriate. Thanks. Of course.

Mikah Sargent (00:48:23):
Yeah. This next one was kind of a disappointment to me. So there there've been for a long time rumors about companies releasing true wireless charging, right? We've heard the, the rumors of true wireless charging for some time as this idea that instead of having to lay down your device on a charging pad, which is wireless charging this would be wireless charging where you could walk around your device, might be in your hand, it might be in your pocket and some sort of router style device, like a wifi router style device would be able to send out the necessary energy that you would need to recharge your device. Well, a company that was hoping to bring a true wireless to market called why charge said, Hey, here's our plan for re for creating truly wireless charging. And the CEO of the company said that they were planning on releasing a product in partnership with belken that was going to make this possible. And then belken was, was asked about this and ended up saying

Mikah Sargent (00:49:45):
So it might be too early to talk about this. This is the quote mm-hmm <affirmative> currently our agreement with Y charge only commits us to research and development on some product concepts. So it's too early to comment on the timing of viable consumer products. The Bekin method is to thoroughly investigate technology viability and perform deep user testing before committing to a product concept here at Bekin. We only launch products when we confirm technical feasibility backed by deep consumer insights. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> given given, given the horrible experience I've had in the past with Belkin's Waymo products. I disagree with that that assertion, but that's an aside. I'm curious, kind of when you heard about this are you, were you excited? Are you excited about wireless charging? True wireless charge.

Rosemary Orchard (00:50:34):
I remember hearing about this when I did my GCSEs. So you do your GCSE's age, 1516 here in the UK for context. I'm 31. So I heard about this quite a long time ago. Like this idea of like true world is charging and stuff like that. And to be fair, 15 year old me imagined it like being concentrated lightning, where you'd have to be careful not to touch, you know, don't touch the electricity. So the reality of it is probably going to be a lot safer. So it's exciting, but I'm also really not surprised by the statement in the article. The transmitter can deliver up to one. What of power considering the fact that with an iPhone. Now you need like a 20 wat charger to get the full, you know, full max, safe charging out of it. That's really not gonna do a lot.

Rosemary Orchard (00:51:14):
So the, the, the article does go and say, it can, it works well for things like headphones and accessories, like keyboards and so on. I can imagine that that seems really plausible, but I can't really imagine this actually recharging my phone. I think it's going to be more likely to delay the, you know, the, the, the, the drop of the the charge rather than actually charge it. But, you know, I do wonder at what point we go from, this is safe to charge our devices and safe for us humans, to this charges, our devices at a reasonable pace, and also is not safe for us humans anymore. Please put your phone in the locked room and walk away. But it does charge entirely wirelessly. It's one of those things where I guess we're gonna see I'm excited, but I'm not all that optimistic that we're gonna find out that this does actually work perfectly, but I guess we'll see. And hopefully we'll see soon, but maybe not according to Balcon.

Mikah Sargent (00:52:07):
Yeah. and then one more news story here is one that's kind of been brewing for a while. And it is now that the EU, the European union has officially objected to Apple limiting third party access to the NFC chip inside of the iPhone. This is early on when Apple pay was first announced on the iPhone that NFC chip was locked down and you could only use it with Apple pay on the iPhone folks who wanted to make use of that NFC chip for other things, couldn't do that. They weren't able to make use of it. And couldn't, you know do a simple tap on against a, an NFC tag or anything like that. Apple did eventually make that NFC chip that's inside of the iPhone available for use for developers and other third parties. But there is an objection that we've since heard, I believe from Bloomberg that PayPal may have been at the heart of this, this objection that exists. So yeah, this is, this is definitely something to be watching as Apple continues to be kind of front and center along with other big tech companies with concerns for antitrust issues where a company is sort of crowding out the market and not making it possible for other smaller companies to thrive in this space.

Rosemary Orchard (00:53:45):
Yes, I have to say Apple's site security is their reasoning for, for not allowing this. And from that perspective, they it's absolutely right. Do you want to potentially allow any and every app access to the payment data that you put on your phone? Maybe not like, you know, I can imagine most apps, you know, having to go through a vetting process and so on, you know, would be fine, but we all know app store view. Isn't perfect. And if they wanted to lock it down so that they could make sure that it was absolutely safe to let other developers use later, then I, I can't really blame them for that. I do understand, you know, from, from a competition perspective, you know, this wasn't a great thing to do, but it also meant that I didn't need to worry that all of the card details and stuff that were being stored on my iPhone for Apple pay could actually be just picked up by this app that says, oh, you need to download this app to use our transit system in this city.

Rosemary Orchard (00:54:41):
You know, that would be good. And I also think that a lot of the people maybe behind the complaints on this might have been companies like, you know, transit apps who are just like, oh no, no, no, no, we don't wanna support just like card payments. It's like, okay, but why mm-hmm <affirmative> yeah. That's not really accessible to the world, just in general. Why are you making it complicated where people have to download a specific app? You know, people always had, and still have the option of Android. People used to have the option of windows foam. We all know how well that did. It would, you know, it seems sensible that they are upset about this, but I also think that app was reasoning was logical.

Mikah Sargent (00:55:15):
Agreed. All right, folks, coming up next, we will have our S corner. It is our shortcuts corner coming next.

Speaker 4 (00:55:24):
I'm Jacob Goldstein. I used to host planet money. Now I'm starting a new show. It's called what's your problem every week on what's your problem, entrepreneurs and engineers describe the future. They're gonna build once they solve a few problems. I'm talking to people trying to figure out how to do things that no one on the planet knows how to do from creating a drone delivery business, to building a car that can truly drive itself, listen to what's your problem on Apple podcasts or wherever you like to listen.

Mikah Sargent (00:56:03):
It's time for shortcuts corner. This is the part of the show where you write in with your shortcuts, requests, concerns, and questions, and Rosemary orchard. The shortcuts expert provides a response. The first shortcut corner request comes from Mac Mack writes in and says, hello, Rosemary and Micah hope you're both doing well today. Thank you. On episode 596, useful utilities for iOS, Micah mentioned purchasing some NFC stickers for setting up his home kit devices. I'd like to know more about this. Can you either point out a good reference or maybe talk about how you accomplish this? Thanks in advance for the assist, love the show. Please continue to grow and prosper and to make more amazing shows, Mac, thank you for those very well wishes there at the end. I hope too that we continue to grow and prosper. I'll talk briefly about my setup with NFC tags as I've, I've done these in different ways.

Mikah Sargent (00:56:52):
So one thing that I wanted to have an NFC tag was just kind of an experiment. It was a simple way for me to interact with a light in my kitchen. I've got in my kitchen area, there's a countertop and the countertop actually has at the back of it, a higher countertop that then leads there's, there's a window back there. So there's like a window and then there's a ledge. That's the countertop. And then down below is the actual sort of cabinet height counter. So if you, if you can imagine basically kind of like a, a stairstep, if you will. And on that, stairstep we've got plants in front of the window and I don't know, the, the, the paper towel dispenser and in the corner, I've got a lamp that is just for the kitchen particularly at night because it doesn't shine as bright as all of the lights that are built into the kitchen up above.

Mikah Sargent (00:57:51):
So with that they, I decided to put an NFC tag on the inside of the lamp lampshade. And what I can do is with my iPhone, I've set up a simple shortcut. It it's technically a, a personal automation, but, you know, it's all running the, the shortcuts engine in the home app that when you detect this NFC card or NFC tag, then turn, well, it, it checks, it says is the light on, and if it is on, then it turns it off. And then if the light is off, then it turns it on and it sets it to a specific brightness. It's typically a dark darker brightness given that it's at night. So all I do is I take my phone and I move it next to that lampshade, and then the light will turn on or turn off.

Mikah Sargent (00:58:42):
And the reason why I have it that way is because it's not consistent. There's, it's not a specific time that I want that light to come on. Sometimes I don't need it. At night, if my eyes have adjusted the clocks that are built into the microwave and the, the stove enough light. But if I do need it, then I can tap on that and, and do that. And I'm a person who doesn't like to use my voice to control devices. So I like that physical ability to do so. The second one I have I'm actually reaching under my desk right now because I have on the left side of my desk, an NFC tag that I use to activate the what's called the on air scene in my office. And so occasionally I come into my office and I'm just here, not with cameras, not any of that.

Mikah Sargent (00:59:34):
And during that time, then I just have certain lights that I want on. So I can't just do a simple shortcut or I guess wouldn't be a simple, but a more complex shortcut of like when I walk into the room, then turn on the lights, cuz it's, the lights are different depending on what I'm doing. So this NFC tag that's underneath my desk, when my phone scans it, it turns on do not disturb on the phone. And it also sets my on air scene in home kit, which turns on the studio lights that I have in here for whenever I'm doing shows, which I just turned off for folks who are watching. So those come on and provide the light that's necessary there. And then it also turns on my lights behind me. I've got some Philips hug go lights.

Mikah Sargent (01:00:16):
They normally, when I'm not on air, they are just a nice white color. But during shows, I have them in purple and blue, and then I have the floor lamp here that lights up as well. So all of those things come on do not disturb turns on. And then I can scan that again to shut everything off turn, do not disturb off if I want to. And it also runs my shortcut that I use to keep my screen display turned on for the whole time that I'm doing the show. I also have one of these on the desk at the office at twits office. It doesn't do home kit stuff. All it does is it turns on, do not disturb on my phone. And there's one other thing that it does, but I'm forgetting what it is. It does a couple of things that work for whenever I'm going on air at the office. So those are some of the ways that I'm using NFC tags, NFC tags are useful. If you want a more physical way of controlling stuff, if you're doing it for home kit reasons, which is what you were talking about, Mac but not entirely necessary. If you just have automations set up kind like Rosemary does, I'm kind of curious Rosemary, if you have any NFC tags that you use and so much of what you do, you figured out how to automate.

Rosemary Orchard (01:01:34):
Yeah. I actually have a whole bunch of NFC tags. And I mostly have gone with like these plastic coin size ones. They're not stickers. They're actually like HARs of plastic with the chip inside of them, just because this way I can move them from thing to thing. And that's a little bit easier means that it's less like to get damaged and so on over time as well, because the problem with NFC tags or the stickers is that they, they kind of move. But what I should know is when you go and you set up a personal automation in the shortcuts app to, to actually, you know, do things with your, your iPhone and NFC tag. So if I tap on create personal automation and then run down to NFC, when I scan this NFC tag, it's not actually doing anything with it.

Rosemary Orchard (01:02:18):
It just reads the ID. So every single NFC tag has a universally unique ID, which is a long string of characters with some hyphens in it, numbers, letters, you know, the works. And this is what allows your iPhone to identify this as the tag. And so I'm just gonna scan this again, just to show people, cuz you don't actually need to touch it. So the NFC reader is up here approximately it's by the camera at the top of your iPhone, but you don't actually need to touch it. You're just like an interest so away and it should be able to read it just fine. And then after I've, and then after I've scanned it, I can name it. So I'll just call it this tag and this doesn't do anything to the tag. It doesn't write anything from the tag.

Rosemary Orchard (01:02:59):
It's only reading the ID, which means that you could end up in a situation. And I've seen this before. I, I noticed a while ago in the home assistant discord because the home assistant app allows you to do things with NFC tags as well. But you write to the NFC tag and then some people had set up shortcuts. And so it was doing the shortcut stuff and the home assistant stuff and people were very confused and it's because you had two things attached to one NFC thing. See but this means that then I can run any of my personal automation actions available to me when I've set this up. But there's also, this is only my tech. So if Micah were here and then he scanned this tag and I've set up whatever magic it is I wanna set up, it would do absolutely nothing because this is just for me.

Rosemary Orchard (01:03:40):
And this is actually something that can be very useful. So say for example, you know, you're, you're a two person household, one person whenever they, you know, whenever they scan their tag, they want this thing to happen and the other person wants a third thing to happen. Well, you don't have to have two tags. You can have one tag that does different things for two different people or you know, other things, depending on what you've got set up. Now, my personal preference for if I want stuff to be easily controlled, anywhere is buttons. I have buttons littered of various kinds around my house. So I've got some of these bigger Ikea buttons. This first one is a single shortcut button for Ikea. It doesn't run shortcuts, it just runs scenes. This one is a a dimer for Ikea. There's also this older dimer for Ikea with multiple buttons on, they have rotary dimers, there's hue, buttons around all sorts of things.

Rosemary Orchard (01:04:32):
I've even got a Zigby remote control somewhere, and I've set those up inside of my smart home so that the buttons, when I press them do the things that I want. So for example it's this button here, this actually turns on and off a heating pad in my office. It doesn't control a lights. It turns on my heating pads, this controls lights in various ways so that I end up with different lighting scenes and so on and so forth, which is all pretty great. You know, I personally have gone with the button approach where I'm gonna need button things, but as for what Micah was talking about, where you're combining scenes and automations, or just doing automations, NFC is a great trick. And I'm gonna give people a really simple example that you can use. For example, there's a certain card that you've got, maybe it's a, a work bus business card of some kind.

Rosemary Orchard (01:05:17):
And when you pay for it, you also need to log your expense. Well, how about because that card's got a chip in it, right? How about you set up your NFC with that? You're just scanning the ID. You're not doing anything to the card. You're not gonna break your card by doing this. And then your action inside of the shortcuts app for this could just be to open whatever the expense app is or to take picture your receipt and say, email it off to whoever the department is. But there's sorts of great things that you can do with NFC tags and you can get them pretty cheaply. You can get them pretty cheap and you can also get them built into other things as well. So for example, some smart rings have got them built in. Some people have gone as far as implanting NFC chips in their hand.

Rosemary Orchard (01:05:58):
Not gonna recommend that you do that on the show. But it's also quite nice for, you know, like setting up devices and stuff. So there's all sorts of things that you can do with NFC. And it's certainly worth looking into the other thing that I'll note is if you do have buttons like this one from Ikea, they've got a cover that you can take off so that you can put a sticker inside. Well, you could amp that up by putting an NFC sticker inside. Now this won't work with the tag. I don't think on it, if it does, I'm probably gonna get stuck. It does, it works with my, my, my tag as well, but you know, if I, if I had a tag in there, then I could actually even scan it to give myself even more options as well as the button, which is no longer actuating properly. So I should note Ikea shortcuts, buttons, only NFC stickers, no NFC chips. I'll fix that later off to the show, but there we go. So hopefully Mac that's some good options for you.

Mikah Sargent (01:06:49):
Yeah. and let us know, let us know how it goes and what you end up using it for. All right. Brianna writes in, I know I've heard Rosemary talk about this or a similar shortcut in her library, but it was such a quick comment about it. I haven't been able to find a link in any podcast notes. I use brave as my primary browser, including on my iPhone and iPad. And I have a windows PC. I use their built in sync for my bookmarks, but occasionally I have to use safari such as to import a web recipe into Croton. I'm trying to make a shortcut that I can add to the share sheet that will get the URL of my current webpage from brave, via the share sheet and otherwise use the contents of my clipboard. Then open that URL or search in safari. Thanks in advance for your help, Brianna.

Rosemary Orchard (01:07:34):
Well, I have got some great news for Brianna. The reason why this doesn't exist is because it's a very small shortcut that I've literally just started creating right now. So what you need to do is you need to create a shortcut and when you create a shortcut, the first thing you're gonna do is you're gonna go to the top options near the cl the close on the top, right? And you're gonna toggle on show in share sheet, and then what we need to do clear all of the options. You don't want this showing up in your share sheet everywhere, and you're go, just turn on URLs. Now you may actually end up wanting to turn on safari webpages and URLs because under the hood on iOS and iPad OS all browsers are using web kit. Which means that essentially, even though it's brave, it's a safari webpage, right?

Rosemary Orchard (01:08:15):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so what we're gonna do is I'm gonna enable both of those and you're gonna be able to do that. And then the next thing I've done is I've changed the, if there was no input to get clipboard, okay. So if you run this and there's nothing given to it, it's just gonna get your clipboard. And then I'm just gonna use a get URL from input because this is what we need to do here. We, if you're getting the clipboard, okay, it's entirely possible that it's actually not a URL. It's a cat picture. Or if you're me, it's probable, it's a cat picture rather than a URL <laugh>. And then we just need to open the link and that's all we need to do. And then we can just open those URLs and that should be it. Now you may find open URLs because brave is your default browser.

Rosemary Orchard (01:08:56):
That's not gonna cut it. So then we'll go to safari. And then there should be the ocean. Yeah. So this is the safari specific one look the same, but there we go. And then that's it. So now, if I were to go to, for example I will just open a new safari page. That's my shortcut for that that's one action. It just opens do, do go in a new safari tab. And if I were to go to this amazing website, I've heard of mic. I dunno if you know it twit do TV slash iOS. It's got links to the, this podcast that these people have done. Oh yeah. Show notes with links in

Mikah Sargent (01:09:28):
There. Look familiar.

Rosemary Orchard (01:09:29):
Oh my God. So then what I can do here, and obviously I'm doing this safari, it'll work the same way in brave. You'll be able to scroll down and then there should be somewhere hiding. There we go. Link to safari. And then this is actually going to ask, you're gonna need to grant permission. You could tap, always allow. And then it's in my case gonna send me back to safari, but for brave, it'll work the same way and it'll take you to safari instead. So hopefully Brianna, that that's the magic that you need to do that. And we'll make sure that link is in the show notes for you.

Mikah Sargent (01:10:00):
Beautiful. All right. Heading into feedback and questions. I think we've got time for, for one this one comes in from T-bone T-bone wrote to me on Instagram and asked about this. I says, hi, Mike, I've been a twit fan for years now. And I have a problem. And I was hoping for a solution. My mom, appraises quilts, she fills out a form and file maker pro and includes two photos in the form. She's unsophisticated. And I live an hour away and I always have to download her iPhone photos from her phone to her windows desktop. Then she knows how to import the photos into FileMaker pro. I need a way for her photos to auto upload, to a location on her desktop. I tried this by using photos, but when it imports from a photos, it's an H E I C file, which file maker pro won't display.

Mikah Sargent (01:10:48):
Can you offer a solution? I think it's weird that when I import directly from the phone to her windows, computer, it imports as a JPEG, but when I do it through photos, it's H E I C would Google photos be a better solution, please help. And this is a question that we've actually had sitting for a while that we haven't been able to get to. So I'm glad we're able to get to it this week. Essentially what's going on here is Apple by default uses a file format called high efficiency image capture. And it is a special way to be able to to be able to have a photo that is higher quality, but is a smaller size. And so there is a way to to, to in photos export those photos in a different format. So right by default it exports as H E I C, which you're seeing there and, you know, it's kind of confusing.

Mikah Sargent (01:11:46):
But we'll include a link of the show notes to a a guide that has everything you need to know, essentially in the photos app, you can click and select all the photos that you want. And then you go up to the top, you choose file, you choose export and you export however many photos it is. And under well, what, the, the thing that pops up, it'll say, Hey, what file type do you want to use at which point you can say JPEG, which is exactly what you're after. The imitable Rosemary orchard has also included in the well, will include, we will include in the show notes, a link to the shortcut that Rosemary has created. If you wanna tell us about that shortcut.

Rosemary Orchard (01:12:28):
Yeah. So the idea of the shortcut is this way you don't have to, you know, change the, the default export format of images or anything like that, especially if your mom has a smaller iPhone and it's not got huge amounts of space, and she's not very good at deleting things. Then you don't necessarily want to switch everything over to JPEG, which is just gonna massively inflate your file size. Unfortunately. So I created a little shortcut that will allow you to share photos from the share sheet and it converts them to a JPEG, and then it airdrops them to her Mac for her. So that's one of the, that's another solution as well. And hopefully fingers crossed that will do exactly what she needs. But I hope T-boned that one of these solutions is the right one for your mom and right back and let us know. And of course anybody else has any other suggestions for any of the questions that we get, then we always love hearing those two.

Mikah Sargent (01:13:18):
Absolutely. All right, with that, it is time to move into the app cap segment.

Mikah Sargent (01:13:31):
This is the part of the show where we wear caps or some sort of adornment to top our heads to honor our picks of the week. These may be app picks or gadgets that we are using that we think you should all know about could be new, could be ones we've been using for a long time. We finally got around to talk about them with you in any case, this is the end of the show where we share our app caps up first, Rosemary orchard. Tell us about the cap, a top of your head, and then tell us about your pick.

Rosemary Orchard (01:14:04):
All right. Well, the head of top of my head is somewhat inspired by Dick van Dyke because I ran into some old episodes of diagnosis murder the other day. And somehow this haply reminded me of him. I'm not quite sure why either way, I now have a collection of diagnosis, murder DVDs that apparently need ripping to go into my Plex library because you can't stream it anywhere. But that is not related necessarily to the app that I'm gonna talk about today, but it is somewhat related. So I've got friends who are always asking me for recommendations for task management applications and to do list apps, things like that. And depending on my friend or the person asking me and their requirements and so on, I'll recommend anything from reminders all the way up to OmniFocus or beyond if they, if they need something much more complex like JIRA.

Rosemary Orchard (01:14:50):
But a lot of the time what people are looking for is something that's kind of in between reminders and something more complex. That's simple, it's easy to use. It's pretty. And also it has like a split between things I need to do and things I want to do, because a lot of the problem with productivity at any rate is defining the difference between these things. If something goes on your task list, is that something you need to do, or that's just something that you want to do. And sometimes when deadlines are approaching, it's difficult to figure out what is what so zones is an application, which aims to help you handle that and you create different zones. So by default, it comes with personal work hobbies. I've added another one for today's demo of travel. I should note, this is not my actual zone setup.

Rosemary Orchard (01:15:33):
It's not connected to iCloud sync, but you have an overview of everything page there's personal, there's work there, hobbies, and there's travel and you can easily add things as ideas. So for example, as an idea is I am going to put Antarctica because I would love to go to Antarctica, but I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. And I can't spell, but fortunately correct is here. And now under my tasks. Well I am coming to New York in a couple of weeks, so I need to apply it for my ESSA. So I can pop that in there and whoop if I type correctly, then that I can see shows up with a later and you know, I can change this. If I need to, I can set a due date. I can set repeating. I can have, oops, sorry, that's my back tap automation popping in there.

Rosemary Orchard (01:16:17):
I can set difficulty and I can even focus on it. I can add subtasks. I can add notes. I can add attachments. There's all sorts of other things that I can do, but I can also just ignore a whole bunch of these and just create tasks. And then I can go through and so I can see overall on my scorecard, how well I'm doing if I, I did reset the app yesterday when I was setting up for the show. So it's not got a lot of information in here. You can have reminders to plan for your week pop up on a regular basis. So my reminder was removed there, which is nice. I can define some goals if I want to short term and long term goals. So this app really aims to, you know, give you all of the different options that you might need, but also to hide a bunch of that, because most of the time, most of us don't care about all these things.

Rosemary Orchard (01:17:03):
We just literally wanna just note down a couple of tasks for work and then, oh, right. And then personally, I also need to go buy some carrots. And that, that's what the idea behind the app is. So you can edit your zones and their appearances. You can change the order of them. You can change the colors, you can even add custom colors. So Micah can have every shade of green. He would like if that's what he wants you can choose whether or not you want to group tasks or not group tasks in their, in zones. So the personal one was not grouped if I just pop back into travel then you'll see there there's the today, tomorrow and later. And so if I were to add, so I'll make this due for it tomorrow or actually in one hour, I've already done this. So that's okay. When it pops up in an hour and then I will add another one, which is Peck my suitcase because I probably ought to Peck before I travel. Micah. I, I dunno about you. I I've heard this is a good,

Mikah Sargent (01:18:00):
Good idea. Tell me that. Yeah.

Rosemary Orchard (01:18:01):
Yeah. But now I can see that these are grouped and if I change this then under sorry, not the appearance to these zones and groups for this, then I can say don't group and then it doesn't have that grouping anymore. Giving me lots of options to go in and fiddle, but also just a really nice little way of keeping track of things in a nice colorful app. Zones is 3 99 from the app store. That's it 3 99. And it's on your Mac, it's on your iPhone, your iPad, and even your Apple watch making it a great universal app at a pretty low price. And I have to say, you know, I'm, I've been using this for various different things on and off. And I love the fact that I can easily split between the ideas and the you know, the actual things that need to be done on a regular basis or not so regular basis, depending on what it is so worth taking a look at and checking out if you are in the market for a new task manager.

Mikah Sargent (01:18:55):
Nice. All right. The app that I wanna talk about is an Apple arcade app. Apple arcade is available for 4 99 a month. And with that, you get access to a whole library of apps including the one that I'm talking about today, Outlanders Outlanders is a village building simulator. And so that's my kind of style of game. And I've currently played the tutorial and level one I'm on level two. So I'm gonna tap continue to head into this village here and what we are working with as it loads is my mission is to build three farms and have 50 tomatoes in stock in less than 45 days. And my optional mission is to have a population over 20 and at least 90% happiness. So right now I'm gonna pause just so you can kind of see what's going on here.

Mikah Sargent (01:19:49):
You see in the top, right, there are some alerts, so followers unemployed, and you're running out of food. So in my little town here, I can zoom in and out by pinching and dragging, and I can also rotate to see different things. I've got some different pieces that are being built for example, the lumberjacks base where you place the lumberjack, you can see there's this blue circle, and there's a white outline that those are the trees that the lumberjack will chop down over time. Again, another lumberjack. And then I've been building a foragers hut, the foragers hut, I've just added Tyrone to the foragers hut. You can see the little white circles. Those are all of the mushrooms that the foragers will collect to feed the town. So since I know that I'm running out of food, I need to try to add more food.

Mikah Sargent (01:20:39):
And also part of the problem is that this is my finished stockpile here. And this here is the rest of the stockpile that I'm trying to build. So it, they need some more space. And I needed to add that extra person to the foragers hut. I've got eight eight full employees, and so eight adults and four kids and all of them are happy right now, which is great. But we're gonna start to creep into unhappiness. All of them have a house, which is great. And with 12 people, I've got 12 beds. So as soon as I get some of the stuff built, I'm gonna have to build another house because eventually those babies will turn into adults and they will need places to stay as well as they become functioning members of society. So I'm gonna go ahead and tap play.

Mikah Sargent (01:21:33):
So you can see that they're kind of winding down for the day on the top left corner. There's a sun and moon kind of look there's yellow on the top and a sort of dark blue on the bottom to represent day and night. I'm gonna tap fast forward so that we can kind of zoom through the night as they all go to bed in the homes that are available to them. So overnight luckily this isn't a game where there's like where there's attacks or anything like that overnight. And you can see that my people actually got a lot happier because they're realizing, oh my goodness, we've got food. That's gonna come in, they're building out the stockpile. So that's about to get a lot bigger and the foragers of bringing in more and more mushrooms. So we'll start to see that happiness continue to climb.

Mikah Sargent (01:22:17):
I'm gonna hit pause now because I don't, I think everything is, is okay, so we've got just one more the foragers hut which will be done in about three hours, but the goal of my folks here is to actually build a farm this time. So I didn't have access to the farm before but they need, and this is, this is what's interesting on top of needing three logs, which you can get from your your lumberjacks going and cutting down trees. It also needs six planks. So if it needs six planks, then that means I need to build a sawmill. So I'm gonna go ahead and build out a sawmill. We'll keep it kind of close to where the the rest of the villages and where the stockpile is, so that it's easy for them to move it from the stockpile into the sawmill.

Mikah Sargent (01:23:07):
And we will build that out and I'm gonna go ahead and prioritize this so that they really start to get work on that completed. So we've started to play again, and you can see that just in time, the builders have started to lay out some of the wood that's needed to create the sawmill and now all of the logs are there. So tomorrow when they wake up they should be able to build that out. Now it says once again, that I'm starting to run out of food, so I'm gonna check and make sure I've got two people in that foragers hut. I think I built another foragers hut somewhere. Is that the foragers hut? No, that's the lumberjack. So I might need to build another forger's hut and, oh, there we go. Okay. So I can take somebody from the builders house, Genevieve, and I can move Genevieve to the foragers hut just to give some more folks food as they need it.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:06):
And you can see the happiness right now is at 97% 98 and climbing, wow, somebody's doing a good job. It's me. As I build out these, these places for the Outlanders this game, I find it's soothing, it's fun. And you have the ability to just kind of create little places. There's a sandbox mode where you can just kind of create and see see how your people respond to different things as you create it, which is a lot of fun as well, or you can complete the challenges as you go through and you get more buildings added over time. So yeah, I'm really enjoying Outlanders again, available as part of Apple arcade 4 99 a month to check that out. All right, folks with that, we have reached the end of this episode of iOS today. I, oh, I forgot to mention the, the cap at top of my head is not a cap.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:57):
It is a sort of headband that I have tied around my head. I think I've worn it before, but it was a headband kind of day. So I'm wearing it again. If you would like to email us, you can do so by sending those to iOS twit TV. That's a great way to send your shortcuts, corner requests, your feedback, all that kind of stuff or let us know in the discord, which I'll talk about in just a moment. You could also tune in live. If you'd like to watch us. As we record the show, we record live every Tuesday at 12:00 PM. Eastern 9:00 AM Pacific. All you do is go to twi.tv/live, and you can see us in all the different places, YouTube live streaming, as well as Twitch live streaming. And I think even a few other places or subscribe to the show which you do by going to twit do TV slash iOS.

Mikah Sargent (01:25:42):
There, you will find links to subscribe to the show in audio and video formats across all sorts of services, Apple podcast, Google podcast, Spotify, YouTube. We try to be in all those places and available to you to subscribe so you can get the show as soon as it's available and you get the cleaned up version, the nice and tidy version, so to speak. So that's a great way to do that. One way that we ask for your support, should you want to provide it is by checking out club TWI club. TWI is this great package of awesome stuff for seven bucks a month, you can get access to every single one of Twitch shows add free. So drop the ads, just the content there. You also get access to the twit plus bonus feed that has content. You won't find anywhere else, including AMAs and, and behind the scenes stuff.

Mikah Sargent (01:26:32):
I just did an inside twit that I'm now calling mamas it's. Micah asks me anything because I ask different folks from within TWI questions about themselves and sort of where they came from, what they do at twit, that kind of thing. And I just had one with editor and producer, John Ashley that just hit the, the feed. So you can check that out there and last but not least, you get access to the discord. Hi, I told you I was gonna mention it. The discord server is a place where you can go and chat with your fellow club, twit members, but also chat with those of us here at twit. And O honestly, that's a great way to be able to ask questions about shortcuts and iOS stuff, and maybe get answers that you wouldn't even get on the show given, you know, our time constraints that we have. So always a great place to, to check out and hang out. And we appreciate all of you for doing that. All right, Rosemary orchard. If folks wanna follow you online and check out all the great work that you're doing, where should they go to do so?

Rosemary Orchard (01:27:29):
Well, the best place is Rosemary orchard.com, which has links to all the things I do online and social media are various kinds. And of course you can also find me directly on Twitter and micro.blog with the username, Rosemary orchard. But of course, I'm always hanging out in the club chat room as well. Lurking wait, waiting for people to ask. Cool and interesting questions, which so many of our lovely people in the TWI club to chat room, do Micah, where can people find you?

Mikah Sargent (01:27:52):
People can find me at mic Sergeant on many, a social media network, or they can head to chihuahua.coffee at ch I Hua hua.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you got something out of this episode to maximize your multid device usage. And of course we will see you next time for iOS today. Goodbye,

Ant Pruitt (01:28:17):
Did you spend a lot of money on your brand new smartphone? And then you look at the pictures on Facebook and Instagram, and you're like, what in the world happened to that photo? Yes, you have. I know it happens to all of us. Well, you need to check out my show hands on photography, where I'm going to walk you through simple tips and tricks that are gonna help make you get the most out of your smartphone camera or your DSLR or mirrorless, whatever you have. And those shots are gonna look so much better. I promise you, so make sure you're tuning into twit TV slash hop for hands on photography to find out more.