iOS Today Episode 604 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, put away those wallets. We are looking at free apps that are well worth your time. Stay tuned

... (00:00:11):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Mikah Sargent (00:00:18):
This episode of iOS today is brought to you by nomad. Go to nomad goods.com/ios today, and use promo code iOS today for 10% off your first purchase of any nomad accessory. They have Apple watch straps, wireless chargers, ultra durable cables, and more. This is a limited time offer. And by it pro TV, it pro TV has everything you need to level up your it skills while you enjoy the journey, visit it pro TV slash TWiT for an additional 30% off all consumer subscriptions for the lifetime of your active subscription. When you use code TWiTt 30 at checkout, whoa, ha Hey, welcome to iOS today. This is the show where we talk all things. Ios TV OS watch OS home pod OS iPad OS it's all the OSS. Apple has an offer. We love to talk about them here on iOS today. We love to help you make the most of your devices. And I am one of the people helping you make the most of your devices. I am Mikah Sargent

Rosemary Orchard (00:01:31):
And I am Rosemary Richard. Hi everybody.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:34):
Hello Rosemary. It is a good day. It is an exciting day as we dive into apps, how are you doing?

Rosemary Orchard (00:01:43):
Oh, I'm doing pretty well. As some of our, our live streamers know briefly before or the show, there was a hat incident involving jam, but the good news is my app cap is safe and we've got a great show lined up for everybody, which doesn't even need you to pay for anything, which is great. Why not enjoy yourselves?

Mikah Sargent (00:02:00):
<Laugh> yeah. So I am really excited about this episode because look, there are a lot, a lot, a lot of apps out there, and there are lots of excellent premium apps that you should absolutely pay for. And we talk about a lot of apps all the time that are ones that you pay for upfront, but there are some apps out there that you can get that are excellent, are well worth your time and are at least at the front end free to download. And in, you know, in the apps that we picked all of the apps, even if there is an in-app purchase, it is sort of a secondary mechanism. It is not a mechanism where you are going to be kind of going, oh boy, you know, I gotta, I've gotta, if I wanna actually use this thing, I've gotta pay for it. So we're talking about free apps that are well worth your time today and Rosemary kick it off with a classic.

Rosemary Orchard (00:02:57):
Yeah. So, and this is a great one because I know there are loads of us out there who love looking at the earth and learning all about it. And so one of my favorite apps, which I have got here and I'm just pulling it up on my iPhone is Google earth because who doesn't love the idea of literally holding the entire world in the Palm of your hand, inside of a maybe even tinier iPhone, if you've got one of those minis. Now this is one of the a larger app, but it's free to download. Of course from Google as will all of the apps be today. And it gives you a whole bunch of information allows you to just pan around the world. So there it is. So you know, when you, when you check out the app store, it does, you know, show you a little bit about it.

Rosemary Orchard (00:03:39):
And then when we pop into the app, you just start with this great splash screen and I've got the world and I can just pan around. I'm gonna go see if I can try and find Mikah. This might take a while. Because my American geography is pretty rubbish. So I, I vaguely in the right area here. I I've found California a little higher up. Yeah, exactly. I'll tell you what, I'll aim for petal Michelle. I, because I, I vaguely know where Petaluma is. Okay. So I found San Francisco. So it's gotta be somewhere like around here. If we do this, I'm gonna be here all day, but I love the fact that I can, you know, I can do this and then I can use a two finger swipe. That's what I just did there. I did a two finger swipe up to go into this sort of 3d mode where you can see, you know, there's mountains and everything here.

Rosemary Orchard (00:04:18):
And I can see some of the streets and everything. And as I zoom in you know, I get closer and closer to the ground, of course, but it's turned into what almost looks like Google street view, except it isn't, these are renderings, they're computer drawn images of what the world looks like. And you can even tap a location to be highlighted. So I just tapped on a little person icon. And if I tap down onto an area of the road, then I can jump into Google street view and see what it's actually like, Mikah, if I stand here for too long, I'm gonna get run over. That's not good. Right. <laugh> no, yeah. Get outta the street quick. Yeah. So I will, I'll back out of orange avenue there, but you know, it's, it's really lovely to be able to just go and visit the world, even when you aren't going anywhere or, you know, check it out before trip, after a trip and so on.

Rosemary Orchard (00:05:08):
There's plenty of fun options available in here. If you roll the dice at the top, then it'll take you somewhere around the world and it'll give you a whole bunch of options across the bottom as well. So this is I'm gonna mess up this pronunciation in France. That's not how you pronounce it. And there it is with some lovely little points of interest in that area. And if I roll the dice again, then Ooh, the Mozu tombs in Japan. And you can have notifications. I would recommend not turning on notifications because let's face it. How often do you wanna be notified about places that you are not actually in, maybe not that often, but it's great fun. I highly recommend looking at it. And you know, just take a tour around the world, enjoy all the things. And if you're using that roll the DYS option, take the opportunity to check out some of the historical information. And it's got links to Wikipedia where you can then often find even more links at the bottom.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:02):
I did not realize that it had that much information in there. I, you know, I loved to play around in Google or if I can remember it being on the computer lab computers and everybody loved to sort of explore, but I didn't realize that it even included links sort of historical understanding. So that's awesome. Then it's got those extra features in there as well. I think I might spend my day going through Google earth. <Laugh> lots of fun and again, free to download. Super cool. Super cool. Alright. Tell us about this next one as a way to kind of if, if, instead of sitting at home and surfing through the world if we actually want to step out into the world and know where we're going is there an app to help with that?

Rosemary Orchard (00:06:48):
I mean, there's plenty of apps to help with that. As we all know, Mikah, including things like the built in maps app, but built in maps is great. Google maps is good, but sometimes we just want a dedicated app. That's gonna get us from a to B using, you know, some kind of transport and my per personal choice for that, wherever I can use it is city mapper. So city mapper, you can choose city around the world to be. And so my current city is New York. It thinks I'm in Bristol and Cardiff. I'm close to Bristol. I'm about a 45 minute drive away, but that's the closest one. Birmingham Monoham in London are also roughly within range Manchester and Liverpool are a bit further away. But as you see, there's plenty of countries cities and countries around the world. So I could be in Bordeaux or I could be in Hamburg or I could be in Marsai or Venice Vienna, Slava, Riga Elsin Philadelphia, or I'm just gonna go with New York because I was there recently.

Rosemary Orchard (00:07:43):
And I, I kind of vaguely know where some things are in New York, maybe. But you can change cities and what's good is when you get to a new city. So when I landed in New York and I opened city mapper, it said, Hey, do you wanna change to New York? Yes, please. I would like to change to New York. And so that worked perfectly, you can also track your CO2 savings, which is quite nice, especially if you're using public transit and you can save addresses so you can save places, work home, and then you can just search for information. So I'm gonna go to times square and I suspect that as it's starting on times square, it's gonna struggle a little bit. So I think what I will do is I'm gonna start on Liberty island if I can or let's start with Liberty state park.

Rosemary Orchard (00:08:26):
That seems reasonable. Definitely not quite the same as Liberty island, but it's gonna try and give me directions now, obviously, depending on where you are and how you're trying to get from a, to B your transit options are going to vary and they can vary in price as well as the amount of calories you burn and the amount of time it takes. And these are all, you know, various options. So if I was gonna walk, it would take me 460 minutes and burn 1,730 calories. Okay. Maybe not the most time efficient option. If I was cycling 667 calories and only 159 minutes, less than three hours. Okay. That, that seems pretty reasonable. And taking a cab is 50 minutes, obviously zero calories, except the ones I consume whilst I'm in the cab. But, you know, that's a problem for another time, or then I can take any of these public transit options.

Rosemary Orchard (00:09:16):
And of course this varies as well in this particular case. And what I really like is they do their absolute best to integrate with all of the transit options available. So for example, things like city bike are listed on here as our Uber and Lyft as your transit options, you can also say, and this is really great that you only wanna travel on buses or only on trains or you need step free access. You know, especially if you have mobility issues or maybe you're just looking a big suitcase you don't necessarily wanna have to like hike it up three flights of stairs or something. And then there's, there's mixed options as well. And when you tap with these, it thinks about life for a little bit, and then it comes back and it tells you here's how you're gonna do this.

Rosemary Orchard (00:09:57):
And so, because I've selected mixed, it's starting me out with bicycle which, you know, it's okay. And in total, it's gonna take me 48 minutes. So I'm gonna save a minute over the cab ride, which is quite nice. And so I'm gonna ride for 1.2 miles and then I'm gonna walk for a couple of minutes and then I'm going to take a path. I don't know what path is. I'm guessing it's some kind of like transit subway type thing or overground train mm-hmm <affirmative>. And it will even tell me how often that leaves and it works. It works really well. It will tell me where the best exit is. And in many places, it can even tell you the best place to be on the train based on how busy the train is. And also where you're going to be getting off and where you're going to need to exit the station based on that. So it knows because you've put in your ends destination, not just the station, you're going to, it'll say you wanna be at the back of the train when it arrives. And when you get off off the train, you wanna turn right or turn left or whatever, because that, that's where you're going. And that's why I love Citi mapper.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:55):
Nice Citi map is awesome. And so detailed, so much information that you can get from Citi map. The app that I wanna talk about first is one that I think was my app cap before it's kind of an up and coming social media network, it's called be real, or I should say be real because it's B, B E R E a L period available for free in the app store. And what be real is it's a social photo sharing application that encourages spontaneity and truth in social media. So the way that bere works, where it's unlike other social media networks is if you think about Instagram, for example, I might post a photo on Instagram that I have edited, and then I have pulled it into Instagram and added filters and cropped it and did all these different things to get it exactly how I wanted to look on my Instagram page.

Mikah Sargent (00:11:54):
I, I don't tend to do a whole lot to Instagram, but a lot of people do and be real, wanted to kind of encourage folks to feel more free to share what's really going on in their lives. It was kind of a direct response to some of the social pressures that people feel with social media. And so what happens is at one specific time each day in a 24 hour period no matter where you are in the world, everybody at the same time gets a notification saying it's time to be real. At that point, you can tap on the notification or open the app, and you will be presented with the option to take a photo. And you have I think it's two minutes to take the photo if I remember correctly. So what happens when, when you take the photo, is it captures a photo of the front facing camera and the back facing camera at the same time and posts that to your be real everyone else is doing the same and you can't see your friends be real photos for that day until you have posted your own.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:04):
You're meant to post it whenever that notification comes up, but Hey, people get busy, things happen. And so they do let you post it later. And then it just makes a note that, you know in, in a case of one person I'm following Megan Morone, who was a, a former co-host of the show when I see her as if she's posted late, say Megan posted her be real, you know, two hours later, whatever. And so again, the idea is to kind of not sugarcoat things or wait until you're in the perfect situation to take a photo. And so a lot of the photos are very you know, down to earth nitty gritty just kind of what's happening in someone's day, which I really appreciate about the app. I think that part's fun. I will be honest and tell everyone out there that I currently do not have the app on my phone because I found it.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:55):
I, I, I'm not a person who takes a whole lot of photos in the first place, and frankly, I don't post a whole lot either. And so I did end up kind of finding it stressful where I would get that notification and I would kind of go, oh man, I've gotta I've gotta post as, as quickly as possible. Or if I didn't, I I've sort myself kind of being on the lookout for it. And so then getting distracted in that way. So it didn't work for me, but I once to say that for folks who are looking for a fun social media network, that's a little bit different. I think this is a great app and most importantly available to use for free and check it out that way. So you can get it in the app store again, be real period. And it's super easy to get set up and, and try it out. It is still a, a fledgling social media app. So I have noticed that in the past, occasionally you'll get some problems with uploads, but it all irons itself out in the end. All right, let us move to the next free app from Rosemary.

Rosemary Orchard (00:14:57):
Well, the next app that I'm going to talk about is one that solves a problem that some of us do have on social media, which is posting images to Instagram, where you want to post, for example, Panorama. And if you think about Instagram, if you're going to post a picture, if you post a story, it's a portrait image, which is approximately the same size as you know, you would get if you took a regular portrait image, but if you post a, a photo it's a square and squares are great, unless you wanna post something, that's really a great landscape photo, or maybe it's a Panorama and you want to share all of that, but you don't wanna like squish it down and have like these massive blackboards at the top and the bottom. It's really not great. So there exists an app to solve this problem.

Rosemary Orchard (00:15:40):
Of course there does. It's called UNS squared and it's purpose is to UNS square the squares in your life or rather to square the UNS squared pictures depending on how you look at it. So I'm just going to look and hopefully I've got some pictures from New York a couple of weeks ago here. I'm just going to see, and this is gonna be a test Mikah as to whether or not I can recognize one of my panoramas from just like the middle section, because I can only see the middle. And if I posted one of these images to Instagram right now, this is what it would, would come through as, so possibly this one, let's see it's just loading it for me. Apparently it's downloading it from iCloud. So that was maybe not the best pick. So here we go.

Rosemary Orchard (00:16:21):
This is a landscape image either way. So I could say yes, I want to proceed with this, or no, I'm gonna go back. I will go with this one for now, but it's defaulted by cropping this into three. And if I tap there's a couple of icons at button there's cancel there's there's sort of rotating so that you can do a vertical version of this, where you can split it into three shots. There is undo, and then you can specify the number of pieces. So I'm just gonna switch it back to being landscape, and I'm gonna select five pieces and just see what that looks like. And you might have seen to start with it sort of shows everything and then it, it sort of zooms in, well that that's, that's how it works, but then if you tap just sort of behind or above those, those squares, then it will adjust what you're looking at.

Rosemary Orchard (00:17:05):
And so I'm gonna try four, I think four might be better for this. And yeah, that looks pretty good to me. So now I tap done. Now this doesn't modify the original image. It saves these images into my library. So now, if I were to go to Instagram, which I shall just briefly stop sharing my iPhone, for those of you watching the, the video and I will create a new post just because otherwise it's gonna show everybody what's in my feed. Now I can select some images and it's got this one, which is number 1, 2, 3, and four. So instead I will tap on the little two squares section on top of each other icon, and then I can select all four pictures. And then when I tap next, I can see, this is what it's gonna look like.

Rosemary Orchard (00:17:50):
And you can see it's done a very good job, cropping it. Now, this is not a brilliant picture to start with that. If I'd been able to slap from my favorites, I would've chosen a better one. But it's done a great job of just taking that image and cropping it into squares so that as you swipe through that post on Instagram, you get to see all of those pictures next to each other and scroll through whatever that beautiful pan Panorama is. Or maybe, maybe it's a vertical shot because you can use your iPhone in Panorama mode to take a picture of something really tall, which is a great trick when you've got something that's really tall. And now you can share that back on Instagram.

Mikah Sargent (00:18:26):
Nice. That's awesome. Alright, let us take a quick break before we come back with even more awesome free apps, well, worth your time. I got something else that's well worth your time. And I have to tell you, I am so pumped that this sponsor has joined us here to support this episode of iOS. Today. You may have heard about them on this very show. And when I heard that they were going to be joining the, the network as a sponsor, I thought, oh, this is fantastic because it's no mad yes, sorry for the, the long preamble. But I just wanted to, to point out that, you know, we were pretty pumped to hear about this. So nomads founders, they met in Santa Barbara, California, and they started actually as a Kickstarter project in 2012, the goal was to build ultra rugged and minimalist tools for the 21st century that would seamlessly integrate into your everyday carry EDC.

Mikah Sargent (00:19:26):
Everyday carry is this really long lived concept of, of what devices you bring with you or what stuff you bring with you regularly. And I can remember Tumblr being very full of, of EDC posts and nomad honestly makes some of the best EDC stuff that you could have as well as some of the best gadgets and accessories Forset gadgets that you can have in the past nine years, nomad has expanded to offer a wide range of mobile accessories to fit any need from iPhone cases, Apple watch straps, wireless chargers, premium wallets, passport holders, all crafted with H leather. This is leather from the H Tanner in Chicago founded in 1905. You get unparalleled blend of quality and consistency with the H leather. And, you know, I gotta say I've had Apple watch bands from nomad. I've had cases from nomad and they're made with that beautiful leather.

Mikah Sargent (00:20:22):
It lasts so long. It's also so comfortable and nice in the hand. And as the device ages, it only gets better. It only looks better with time my AirPods pro case that's around here somewhere has a nomad case on it. And it's this nice leather case that goes, you know, it goes in your pocket, you can take it wherever. And as time it's the Mo first modern leather case with that beautiful, deep brown color called rustic brown. And, oh my goodness, it, it fits perfectly and it looks so good. I, you know, I can just sort of pull it out and say, ah, check this out. Plus, as we've talked about on this show before nomad has some really great wireless charging solutions for your home, for the office, for your bedroom with a suite of charges for whatever Apple device you use, as well as for your Apple watch and your AirPods.

Mikah Sargent (00:21:17):
In fact, nomad has a C adapters now there's the 30 wat adapter and the 65 wat GaN adapter. Those will charge your devices quickly. And the 65 wat power adapter actually has two ports on it. So there's plenty of USBC power that you can go. And I gotta talk for a second about their cables. This is one that nomad actually sent me and this cable is they, they make these cables with Kevlar <laugh> it's USBC. This one in is USBC on both ends and not only can it do it can do high power charging, so you can use it for a MacBook pro but it also works just fine for iPads and any other devices that you have that are USBC, but what's nice about this is I've got a chair with, you know, big old wheels on the bottom that I'm occasionally sliding in and out of my computer or my desk.

Mikah Sargent (00:22:20):
And I've run over these cables a bunch with this chair, and that's never been an issue. These are strong, awesome cables that, oh, and I should mention built in little holder for the cable. So you never have to worry about cable management there. And this is a long cable. There's so much room for me to be able to move around with that device. I've got this one to show, but I've got one plugged in right now to an iPad that's charging. And here is the one of their new Apple watch bands. So I also have to say, I love their boxes, their packaging design. So this just simply slides open. It's kind of got a little lip in there and then it slides open and these are the new sport bands that they have. This one is this beautiful light blue color.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:13):
I can't remember the exact name of the color. Oh, it's Marine blue. And it's got, of course your, your standard Apple watch lugs. But they do an Apple whoop, an Apple inspired clasp for the band. So that let me see, I'm trying to think of how this would go. So boom, and then this would go into here and then it clicks into place like that. And there, you can kind of see how that Apple watch band works. So it's a really pretty color it's made with that same kind of material that Apple uses. And yeah, it's, it's just super premium stuff. Waterproof of course, as is the standard with this kind of material and long lasting, that's the most important thing, you know, I don't like to buy random Apple watch bands on Amazon because I've run into issues in the past with them not being as high quality as Apple bands with nomad, you can count on them being very high quality them lasting forever.

Mikah Sargent (00:24:19):
Oh, and there is one other thing that I wanna mention. They are a climate neutral, certified brand, and that's more important than ever. And so hats off and cables out to nomad for making that part of the company's goal, the company's mission they prioritize design and quality over everything else. And when they design new products, they use the highest quality and longest lasting materials available designing all of their concepts from the ground up rather than white labeling existing products. Oh, I've got another thing sitting on my desk. This is an 18 wat charger, wireless charger for an iPhone. I don't currently have it plugged in because I'm just using it as a stand for my iPhone. And it's great for that. It's got this nice leather on the front aluminum back and just everything. It looks so great at the same time that it works so great.

Mikah Sargent (00:25:21):
That's what makes nomad so awesome. You get sometimes it's that little, that circle. You can choose two. You don't get all three here. You get all three. I don't know what the third thing is, but you definitely get something that looks great. You get something that works great and you get to be happy about it. So what does this mean for you? Well, it means that you can go to nomad goods.com/ios today and use the promo code iOS today to get 10% off your first purchase of any nomad, accessory, and folks. These are affordable accessories. These are not ridiculously priced accessories. And they, you know, are always very mindful of that. You are getting very high quality devices that are priced friendly and priced to quarterly. So head to nomad goods.com/ios today with the promo code iOS today, this is a limited time offer. So hop on@iostodayisthepromocodefortenpercentoffyourfirstpurchaseofanynomadacc… slash iOS today. All right. Let's head back into the show. Thank you, nomad for sponsoring this week's episode of I O S today. Rosemary. I'm so pumped that we're talking about the next app, because this one's just way

Rosemary Orchard (00:26:42):
Too cool. Not to cover. Yeah. I mean, to start with, it's got the name RO stone, which is just a really, really great place to start. I love it when apps have fun names and RO stone is a free of course, because all of the apps on today's episode are free, but also open source text editor for iOS. So if you're curious, maybe you're getting into iOS development. Maybe you just wanna go and see that the code really is out there. Well, you can go and check it out on GitHub, which is linked from the app store. The developer website is linked and the GitHub page is linked at the bottom there, but RO stone is a text editor and its whole purpose is to allow you to edit files. So I have here quite a few of these recently edited files actually.

Rosemary Orchard (00:27:23):
Omnifocus automations that I've written, so they're JavaScript files, but they don't just have dot JS at the end. Like you might expect a JavaScript files to have, they've got dot OmniFocus JS. So that means that, you know, they're, OmniFocus specific. And when I tap on it, it just knows this JavaScript. Now it's doing some magic to figure this out. Obviously there's JS right at the end, but you can also go ahead and do things like in the settings, you can actually set everything up so that you've got your appearance and so on, including your languages and inside of your languages you can set up some more stuff there. Now I've turned off the premium because we're just talking about the free part of stuff in today's episode. But I mean, look at this, isn't this lovely, it's got all of the different colors into syntax, highlight everything so that I know that for example, task is the name variable cuz it's black and.name.

Rosemary Orchard (00:28:13):
Name is a function, oh, sorry. A property of that variable because it's it's blue and it's just really nice to be able to see this sort of thing and actually edit this stuff on iOS because without a great app opening a code file on iOS. Well, it's kind of hard. And especially if I had an error in one of these files, I, I wanted to change it. I wouldn't wanna have to go back to my Mac to do that, but RO stone, doesn't just allow you to edit out, edit text files. You can also create them so I can do something like I'm gonna call this one, Mikah and I am going to try something, which I'm not very good at Mikah. I'm gonna try writing this in go. So I'm gonna call it Mikah dot go. And I'm just gonna see, and I'm now going, hang on a minute.

Rosemary Orchard (00:28:56):
I can't even remember how to start a file in go <laugh>. But you know, if I were writing something that it's gonna have a whole bunch of different syntax highlighting, everything's coming out a bit brown right now, but it's, it's great along the top, it's got these these buttons, which will change depending on you know, what it is you're doing. And so if I created micro.md, which is a markdown file, so that's a kind of plain text. Now I feel more comfortable <laugh> oh, there we go. Then yeah, then this is going to be slightly more useful within that. And of course there are the settings and so on which you can change if you've got premium, but you can print this, you can share it, there's find and replace. You can go to a specific line and then there's formatting documents.

Rosemary Orchard (00:29:38):
Or, and if I go back to my, my nice big example from earlier, if I select a section of it then obviously I've got, you know, all of my standard iOS options here. But then if I tap on the three options and go to format, there's also format my selection, which is really useful if you've just changed a bit and you just wanna reformat that, then you can do so. So honestly it's a great app. It's a free app and it's open source as well, which is just even better. So I'd highly recommend checking it out. You have options to do things like change your texting coding. So if you are writing in Japanese instead of Unicode characters, then you can change all of that, whatever it is, hopefully room stone can help. And if not, I mean it's open source, so you can open an issue or if you know some code then maybe take poke at yourself and see if you can fix it and make poor request. Why not

Mikah Sargent (00:30:29):
Nice? Yeah, room stone. Very, very cool. And I just, the design of it and the simplicity of it and the the, it, it's both simple, but also it's complex in, in its coverage. So I, I love that about it. All right. The next one that I wanna talk about is an app called shop and shop is an app that's made by Shopify. That is you may have, have seen online when a, a site uses Shopify to be able to do your, your purchases. Then it will typically will have you like type in your phone number. And then it'll say at the end track, your purchase with shop and the app is a way to track purchases, but it's also a way to, you can, you can use it to make purchases in some cases, keep track of the different a, the different sites where you typically make those purchases and so much more.

Mikah Sargent (00:31:32):
So what I wanted to talk about with shop is a really cool feature that lets you do tracking outside of just shop itself. So you can of course do your tracking in what they call the shop network, meaning anything that is done with Shopify, but you can also log in with your Gmail account so that anytime a tracking number pops into your email, then shop can automatically pull that in and help you track it. And you can even connect your Amazon account if you would like to be able to track your purchases from Amazon. And there are a couple of reasons why I suggest shop the first is that the app that I know and love and use for most of my tracking it's called deliveries and deliveries. The on, on their website made mention of the fact that a lot of a lot of shipping companies are closing down their what's called an API, which is a way for an app in this case, to be able to talk to ups or talk to FedEx and say, Hey, my user wants to track their package.

Mikah Sargent (00:32:48):
Tell me where their package currently is. A lot of them are locking that down now and making you use their apps in order to do that tracking. And so it's nice knowing that there are other ways to go about tracking your package and shop is one of the ways to do that. And I like the automation features of it, but the biggest thing is the privacy policy. So on shop's own like in the app, whenever you go into the settings and the reason I'm not showing it currently on the screen is because there's lots of different addresses and stuff in here. So it says shop has been independently verified to securely handle emails. That's the first thing. So you know that they're securely hand handling your emails, but when you go to their privacy policy related to shop we believe your personal data is precious and belongs to you alone with shop.

Mikah Sargent (00:33:41):
Your information is safe and you can delete your accounts at any time they meet strict PCI compliance standards for vaulting credit card info. You it's all been independently verified. And what I like is that they're not using the the tracking stuff that they pull from the, from your email in order to try and serve ads and all that kind of thing. So a lot of the time that's something that you have to worry about where a, an app is looking to try and make money by serving you different ads or doing D those kinds of things. And I should also mention that shop has a feature where you can help to remove carbon emissions from the atmosphere through, you know the carbon offsets. So lots of great stuff within the shop app. And I've also found it as a, it's a great place to be able to find, discover new new stores that are worth taking a look at because there are lots of independent companies that exist that use Shopify.

Mikah Sargent (00:34:53):
And so shop the app will show you, in fact, I, I can show you some of those different companies in its kind of a discover section, so you could look through and see what different shops are out there different things that people are making. And there's also augmented reality stuff. So that if you wanted to see what this unfortunately, very expensive, $3,000 goofy chair <laugh> looks like in your space, you could do that as well. So lots of fun, different integrations that shop has, but the biggest thing is that it is very good at making sure that you have an idea of where your packages are in. And if the site is using Shopify as its platform, it will also show you kind of before it even gets to the tracking number, where your order is in terms of the purchases that you've made. So that is why I wanted to talk about shop. And I think you need to look up to find it shop all your favorite brands is your best way to, to kind of find it in the app store. Cuz if you just type in shop, it's gonna show you lots of different things, but shop all your favorite brands will help you come across that. All right. Rose Mary, tell us about your next app.

Rosemary Orchard (00:36:13):
Well, the next app is actually one that I found thanks to a request in the chat room, in a club Toit discord, where I can't remember who it was now, somebody was asking for the ability to have sort of timers repeat throughout their day. And I already had several different apps in my arsenal, but he wasn't necessarily sure that was going to be the right solution. So I didn't wanna recommend something that was gonna cost a bunch of money only for him to find out that the technique that wasn't gonna work for him. But if you've used a Pomodora timer before, which is where you do 25 minutes of work, you take five minute break. You repeat this three times, but your third break instead of five minutes is 15 minutes. You're familiar with the idea of looping timers. And this is what timer loop does.

Rosemary Orchard (00:36:54):
Timer loop loops timers all day long, at least within your defined parameters. So let's take a look at my working breaks, which is something that I have set up and it's going to remind me every 45 minutes between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM Monday to Friday, that's it. And I can enable this or I can disable it. It was disabled before. So it was black. And now because I've, re-enabled, it's blue and if I were to create another one, then I can you know, do a similar sort of thing. And if I tap and hold, then it's gonna increment or decrement by 15 minutes as well, which is really nice. And I have to say, this is very simple. And I like the fact that it does just, you know, do what it says. So it'll pop up as a notification, every, you know, however often you set between whatever time period on whatever days you set.

Rosemary Orchard (00:37:43):
So if you only want something to pop up at the weekends or on Friday nights or on Tuesday mornings to, you know, do something every X minutes, then you can do that. And you know, it, it works, it works really nicely. It solves, you know, that particular problem that you might have there where you want to create something and do something you can swipe to delete them. And yeah, that, it's kind of simple and it works, that's it, there's not a lot to it <laugh>, you can send in feature requests if you want to. But it's just the idea of having a recurring reminder every X minutes. And I know for a lot of people who do time tracking at work, this could be a really good way to just get that prompt of, Hey, what are you doing quickly? Make a note. Great. Now go back to doing the thing without having to like open up the application for time tracking and stuff. And then later in the day, they can perhaps correlate it all into the system where it all needs to go. But for the time being, why not just get a reminder every 45 minutes.

Mikah Sargent (00:38:42):
Nice. this next one I think is of course this is a, a, a thing that's solved in so many different ways. There's so many different ways to go about doing this, but it is nice to just have one option to do this thing that we have all done at different times. I know it's quite the intro to this app, but tell us about your next pick.

Rosemary Orchard (00:39:07):
Yes. so my next pick is very simple. It's called flight F L I T E. And it's whole purpose. Just to email, you send you an email with whatever the content is. So I've reinstalled the app to get the, the startup again, because it explains it very well. So it says, got something on your mind, type yourself, a note in flight swipe, lift to switch to a different template hold down the arrow to pick your target inbox and then swipe up to send a note to your email. And that's it, your notes waiting in your inbox. So when you set it up, then you'll, you'll need to, you know go through and do that. But to start with I'm just gonna swipe up on this one and that's it, it's sent it. And then I can say where I want it to go, and it's gonna, pre-fill some email addresses, I'll just put in my standard public one here.

Rosemary Orchard (00:39:55):
And it will appear now I haven't had to input my personal email information. It's not sending stuff from my email, it's sending it from flight. But you can change things you can set which email addresses. So if you want to add multiple email addresses, so for example, maybe you frequently need to email stuff to your work email and your personal email. You can add both, you can increase and decrease your text sizes and you can see a history of your notes as well. So I can see that this one was the, the standard flight one which it's sent out. And I have to say it's pretty nice to just, you know, do that. So the, the standard template is just empty text. The next one over is a to-do list. And the last one after that is contact information. And if I tap on the plus, then I get the options to add the last picture, take something from the camera or pick photo from my photo library. But the whole purpose is just very quickly send some information to yourself so that you can handle it later. And that's what flight does. And it's free.

Mikah Sargent (00:40:55):
Nice Rosemary orchard. Tell us about the last app on the list.

Rosemary Orchard (00:41:02):
Well, the last app on the list is sort of an app born of necessity. Have you ever been out somewhere and you just need to go, like you need to go to the bathroom right now. Where is the bathroom? And lots of cities have got different maps online for finding things like this, or maybe it's in Google maps. Maybe you can find something on Yelp, but it's really difficult. And especially if you've got somebody with you who, who is desperately in need or similar than, you know, you just need that information. So it's better to have an app already on your phone with this information, and this is what flush is intended to solve. So let's flush away your problems and instead you know, solve them. So I have opened flush and I've just panned over to London just because I don't really wanna show from my home location.

Rosemary Orchard (00:41:45):
But it turns out there's plenty of public bathrooms around here. I didn't know about either. And so as I pan around, then you can see the, the toilets available to me or the bathrooms available are changing. And some of them have got little dollar sign next indicating you would need to pay. And some of them don't. So if I wanted to go to one particular bathroom that was free, then I can select the Sheraton in Adeli Mayfair in London. And then if I tap on that little info, then it's gonna open the maps and it's gonna take me one day and nine hours to walk there. So I might need to find a bathroom on the way first, but I'm pretty certain that flush is going to be able to help me out with that. Now I can also add a bathroom.

Rosemary Orchard (00:42:25):
I can note that it requires a fee or requires a key. That's something that certain disabled access bathrooms over here in the UK have and or that it's got disabled access and I can also change the address. So if I were to long press on, for example this location here, I'm probably a bit too zoomed out, but I know Bowood park definitely has maps. Definitely has a bathroom. So there we go. I can suggest a toilet. I'm not gonna add that because that's not where the toilet is, and that would not be nice to other people who perhaps are in need, but it's great. There's a location button in the top left to zoom you to your current location. And I can also search for a specific location. Now you'll note, I do have ads at the bottom that's because that's the free version of this app.

Rosemary Orchard (00:43:08):
If you wanted to just give them some money to get rid of the ads, there is a one pound 79 flush pro restroom finder in the app store as well. But I have to say the free app still has the same number of bathrooms. So therefore it still solves that problem, which so many of us have. And especially if you've got kids it's really useful to just be able to know where the bathroom is when somebody inevitably says, I gotta go. And you know, that, that gives you about three minutes. Well, you can find something with this. I used it when I was in New York, found bathrooms whenever I needed them, it was great. It worked really well and I'm just gonna keep using it. And I'll stick with the free version for now. At some point I'll probably upgrade to pro because, you know, it's good service. Why not throw them some cash, but for the meantime, free works. Great,

Mikah Sargent (00:43:52):
Nice free does work. Great. <laugh> all right, folks, we're gonna take another quick break. Before we come back with the rest of the show, including the news shortcuts corner and the app caps. I wanna tell you about it pro TV, who are bringing you this episode of iOS today. It's important when you're looking for an online it training platform that you're getting the most up to date, content and certification. So let me make it easy for you. Very easy. Go to it. Pro TV. In fact, they just released a new course, CompTIA, a plus core one and core two series. This course is designed for professionals who support today's core technologies from security to networking to virtualization and more compt is a plus certification is an industry standard for launching it careers in today's digital world. In this course, you're gonna learn about hardware operating systems, networking, security, and troubleshooting.

Mikah Sargent (00:44:47):
We talk about how great it pro TV is here all the time, but let me give you a reminder of why that is the case, because they've got seven studios where they're filming Monday through Friday. What does that mean? It means that their courses go from the studio to their course library in 24 hours and are divided into 20 to 30 minute episodes for easy binging. Plus they make sure you are prepared, truly prepared for your exams with their virtual labs and practice tests. The best part about it pro TV is that you can learn and get certified on your own schedule. And it always remains entertaining may is ramping up for summer. And so is it pro TV? They're focusing on Azure and have two free webinars this month for you to check out and are these ones are now available on demand, including what is Azure bicep.

Mikah Sargent (00:45:37):
I want to know what that is with Adam Gordon and west Bryan and all things cybersecurity with Daniel Lowry and John Hammond. Don't forget about your it team. Check out an it pro TV business plan for your team today. Visit it pro.tv/TWiT for an additional 30% off all consumer subscriptions for the lifetime of your active subscription. When you use the code TWiT 30, that's it pro.tv/TWiT and use code 30 for an additional 30% off for the lifetime of your active subscription, it pro TV build or expand your it career and enjoy the journey. Thanks so much to it. Pro TV for sponsoring this week's episode of iOS today. All right. Back from the break and it's time for the news developers, developers, developers start your engines because there's a new requirement in town. And this starts in just about a month. Tell us about this new requirement, Rosemary.

Rosemary Orchard (00:46:33):
Yeah, so it is important to note that Apple did announce this a while ago. They're not springing this on developers at last minute, but they have somewhat unusually for them. Put out a reminder that as of June 30th, 2022, that is a month ago as of the recording of this episode, that the requirement in the app store review guidelines to require account deletion inside of an app, wherever you can offer, sign up is going ahead. So your app is not going to be able to update if you try to release an update after that. So you're gonna have to put that in, and this is good news for all of us, because that means that any accounts that we've created through apps on our iPhone, we're gonna have to be able to delete those as well. And there's nothing worse than just having random data about yourself, floating about the internet with no way of controlling it or removing it. So this fulfills multiple local guidelines GDPR in Europe. And of course there's similar laws in California and plenty of other states and countries around the world. So I'm glad that Apple have put out a reminder and app developers are I'm sure either done or hard at work, getting this fixed ready for the end of the month. But yes, good to know,

Mikah Sargent (00:47:45):
As we've been talking about a lot on this show and elsewhere on the network, Apple's worldwide developer's conference is just around the corner. In fact, June 6th is the day of Apple's developer conference, where the company will kick things off with the Apple keynote on June 6th at 10:00 AM. That's on a Monday as opposed to Apple's typical day and well regular, fairly regular day of, of using a Tuesday at that time. So we, of course here will be covering WWDC Leo and I will be in the studio on Monday to be able to talk about the event as it is going on. But lots of great stuff around the corner. I am looking forward to WWDC and seeing what these next versions of the operating systems are going to look like, what new features we could expect. Are you excited? Rosemary,

Rosemary Orchard (00:48:45):
I am excited. And part, part of that excitement is in that announcement that they made. So they've got all color of emoji. Well they've got five, but or MIMO it's it is. But the last one is a very nice purplely pink. So I'm really hoping that that means that we're gonna get color themes for iOS, and I'm gonna be able to have everything be purple that's. That's what I'm hoping. <Laugh> I, I think I'm being a little optimistic here. I don't think anybody's room at this anywhere, but come on Apple, give me purple. Give me purple on my iPhone. I love purple. It's one of the features I missed from the Mac, so maybe we'll see it. Maybe not, but don't worry. We'll be here next Tuesday to give you all of the good gossip.

Mikah Sargent (00:49:20):
Yes. Indeedy. I am looking forward to it. We've got, well, we're gonna have a lot to talk about, so it'll be a good show. And for folks who want to kind of get in on the fun and sort of be part of the experience you can download the app called Apple developer. This app has it's got a new update. That's got the session videos. Of course, that will be coming out special digital lounges for those people who are registered developers, but also access to some of the fun emoji that are always added every year. I just sent a bunch to Rosemary this morning as I was trying to capture those. So that was kind of a fun little moment there where I got to see what new emoji there were in fact, let me, me pop that open right quick. And so there's the, they've had the, every year they do one that has the laptop, but the stickers tend to change. So in this case, it's two P signs, meaning 22. And there's of course a nice build hammer getting a little dizzy with swift the cloud head and the clouds, except it's iCloud. And the let's just call this one. I'm a little angry, cuz my code's not compiling is, is what that was.

Rosemary Orchard (00:50:39):
Yeah. I'm gonna go with error or exception thrown and a stack trace UN findable or something is the quote for that one.

Mikah Sargent (00:50:46):
<Laugh> there you go. There, there you go. That is that is the developer title for that for sure. Anything else you wanna say about the developer app?

Rosemary Orchard (00:50:57):
No, no, it's, it's just worth noting that, you know, it's been updated and it does have all of the cool functionality in it, which includes stuff like share play. So if you were looking to try and watch some of these videos with colleagues or friends remotely, oh then share play could be a great way to do that over FaceTime where you'll be able to share the playing of the video. And so you're all watching it together simultaneously, which is really nice. That's

Mikah Sargent (00:51:22):
Actually super cool.

Rosemary Orchard (00:51:23):
Yeah. Yeah. There's some other stuff as well. Like there's interactive activities like digital lounges and labs directly in there. And some one-to-one stuff as well, but I think for most people, because anybody can download this app it will be the emoji, of course we all love them emoji. But also maybe share, play. And if you think I'm not a developer, I don't care about these videos. You might be surprised, take a look at the titles. And a lot of them now are only five or 10 minutes. So if you are interested in the topic, it might be worth just checking it out to get an overview.

Mikah Sargent (00:51:55):
I'm not a developer for almost in almost every case. I, I, there's a little bit that I have done. And every year I watch so many of these videos just because it's showing the next the next iteration of these different features. It's a lot of fun to just kind of be at the forefront of that and knowledgeable of what's coming next. With the update to iOS 15, you can now access, what's called the Apple account card in the wallet app. The Apple account card was formally the iTunes card. And let it lets you have a balance on your Apple in your Apple app store and in other places where you would use that money. So now they've added it as the Apple account card and money can be added to it as needed to be able to purchase apps and that kind of thing. So it's just another way to manage funds for your for your account. And I think of it as like a a good way to sort of Dole out, you know, oh, you've got a $10 budget a month. So if you wanna buy your little crystals and gems for your games, my dear child then you can do that. You know, that's part of your allowance. So this can be a great way to, to make that happen.

Rosemary Orchard (00:53:14):
I do want to just quickly mention for anybody who's looking for this and they've tried sort of double tapping on the side button on their iPhone, or maybe they've even done the swipe down in control center. I said, pressing on the carpet instead of the stream, it pedal to show my iPhone that doesn't open the wallet app that opens the wallet. There is a difference. If you want to open the wallet app, you need to either find it in spotlight or on the home screen of your phone or in the app library. And that's where you'll find the Apple account a card information, just the wallet itself has your cards and so on in, but doesn't have that extra information that you might be looking for. So just a quick reminder there that the app is separate to the the preview for the wallet where you can pay for stuff.

Mikah Sargent (00:53:55):
All right. And then last but not least, this is an interesting story that I know they'll be talking more about on Mac break weekly here in under an hour. And that is about how the Senate seems to be kind of pulling back a little bit. This was a political article pulling back a little bit on regulating big tech particularly in relation to the fears surrounding side loading for folks who don't know side loading is the idea that you, well, it's, it's a, it's a practice in which you put apps or other software onto a device that is typically locked down. So an example of that is the iPhone to install apps on the iPhone for the most part penance you go to the app store and you find an app and you download that app and then you have it on your iPhone.

Mikah Sargent (00:54:48):
It is checked by Apple, either auto auto in an automated capacity or by, you know, human being. And it is posted to the app store. You're able to get it there. Side loading is where you download and install an app outside of that sort of, sort of protected bubble. And it's typically only been possible to do this again for the most part by actually what's called jail, breaking your device, or sort of hacking it to give you the ability to install apps that don't exist in the app store. There are again, some caveats there and some other ways that that can happen. But for the most part, that is how it works on Android. On the other hand, it's a little bit easier. Most of the apps that you get you're gonna get from the Google play store, but Android does allow a little bit more side loading where you can get apps from different places that aren't just the app store for the, for a while now the us government has been looking at a way to say Apple, you've got too much of a strangle hold on the market.

Mikah Sargent (00:55:54):
You need to allow people to download and install apps outside of the app store. And Apple has been fighting that for some time. And it seems that it has made some sort of progress because according to Politico, there is in fact, let me look at the the, the, there we go headline in private vulnerable Senate Dems back off of the tech bill, democratic leaders want to crack down on big tech, others in the party think it's too big of a risk. So this political piece goes into detail kind of about what's going on there. But in any case, it's interesting to see a shift there because it looked like a lot of stuff was going forward and a lot of changes were going to be made. And then suddenly that stopped.

Rosemary Orchard (00:56:43):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> all right. I do wonder if

Mikah Sargent (00:56:45):
Please

Rosemary Orchard (00:56:45):
Do finally learning that they don't understand technology as much as they think they do the back door for me, but not for the and yeah, but it's only for the good stuff, right? Doesn't, doesn't work in the world of tech. So hopefully they're learning and we can find a good middle ground that keeps everyone safe, but does allow a bit more freedom

Mikah Sargent (00:57:04):
Indeed. All right. With that, I can hear the sound it's for shortcuts corner.

Mikah Sargent (00:57:22):
Welcome. It's a shortcuts corner. Sorry. If I scared you there. I scared myself a little bit. This is the part of the show where you write in with your shortcuts corner requests and Rosemary orchard. These shortcuts expert gives you some advice. Our shortcuts corner segments today involves a request from Michael Michael Wrightson. Hello. I wants to remember to start an outdoor walk on my watch when I get to the park, I always forget. Is there a way to use a shortcut to start the outdoor walk? When I get to the park also, I forget to end the outdoor walk. Is there a way to end the outdoor walk when I leave the park or the location and, or get in the car or when I get home? Thanks. So I wanna be clear, Michael is talking about on the Apple watch the, I believe this may work with the iPhone too, but for certain on the Apple watch, you can do different activities that are tracked.

Mikah Sargent (00:58:14):
And if you, if you don't go into the Apple watch app and actually say, I'm doing an outdoor walk after a while, the Apple watch using the different algorithms that are built into it and, you know, machine learning, blah, blah, blah, it will say, oh, I'm pretty sure you're walking right now. Are you walking? Do you wanna record this as an outdoor walk? You say yes. And then it can also say, oh, I realized that you've stopped walking. Do you wanna stop your walk? Because I am also bad about that too. I forget to actually say start and stop the different exercises that I'm doing. So Michael is hoping, Hey, look, I go to the park regularly and I regularly do these walks, but I just forget to get the thing going. And when I get in my car, that is when the walk is at an end. And I'd like for that to be the time at which the outdoor walk ceases. So is there a way to do this with shortcuts or do you have other advice for how Michael can tackle this problem?

Rosemary Orchard (00:59:14):
Yes. I have multiple different things that we can do to solve this. And the fact that Michael drives to the park is a really good start because that means that when Michael goes to leave the park fingers cross, that's gonna come up as a car play. But if not, I still have a solution. And so my solution to start with involves focus modes, not shortcuts, but we'll get to the shortcuts in a sec, a second. So to start with focus, modes have automations that can be automatically turned on and off at times or locations. And there's also app specific ones as well. But for example, this fitness one which is a default focus mode that you can enable or disable, then you can see I've got my ballet studio in here and I can add another schedule or an automation, including a location based one using this information.

Rosemary Orchard (01:00:03):
Then we can use this to turn on and off our focus mode automatically. So Michael, step one, add the park and enable focus modes. Okay. You can allow whatever apps you want through. You can allow whatever people you want through. We don't care about that from the shortcuts perspective. We just want your focus mode to turn on. Okay. now it will automatically turn on when you start a workout, if you set that up, but the problem is you're forgetting to turn on the workout and turn off the workout, which is, you know, kind of our, our, our issue. So assuming we've got our focus mode set up, then inside of shortcuts, go to our automations tab and tap the plus. We want to create a new personal automation. And so we'll scroll down. And now under our focus modes, we want to select when our fitness mode turns on.

Rosemary Orchard (01:00:46):
So your fitness focus mode is going to turn on automatically when you get to the park and then we need to start our workout. So there is an option here to actually log a workout or start a workout. This is the one we want. We don't wanna log a workout and you're going to want to start, whatever is appropriate. I'm going to assume that you're going to play pickable with an open goal, you can obviously pick the right thing. I assume it'll be an outdoor walk, but let's have something fun. And then we tap next, turn off, ask before running. That's what the one we want gone and then done and now comes the inverse. Okay. So we get you to the park and your workout automatically starts. Perfect. it might start a little bit early. That's okay. It's recording a bit early as you, you know, get out of your car and everything, then it will actually be tracking all of that already, who doesn't like a little bit of bonus in their exercise count, but now we need to finish it so that when you leave the park, you don't have your automation running.

Rosemary Orchard (01:01:44):
Now there's two options here. If you've got CarPlay, then we could use you connecting to the car or we'll use the inverse. Okay. Because our focus mode will start and end with our location. So when our location, when our fitness focus mode turns off, then we can actually use our workout. And this is going to be the same action as before. So I'm gonna search for workout and you'll see, it says start workout. We actually want to stop it. And there should be the option here to do so. And it's not letting me do it now, which is really unhelpful. But it will be there. It should show up for you to do that. So I'm just going to check if there is another option, because it was here earlier when I was looking for it, and now it's hiding from me.

Rosemary Orchard (01:02:30):
There, there was an option earlier and you should be able to stop it, but once you've set that up, then you go through the same process where you say next and turn off, ask before running, don't ask and then say done. And that's it. That should be all you need to do. Now the only caveat of what you might potentially want is that you may want to change it so that when you start your workout that you also also for example, change, your watch face are similar, and I have something similar for this already. So when I start any workout, then it will set my watch face to a specific workout watch face, which is really useful. And you can do all of that in the same automation. And so I will just pop in here and open this one as well.

Rosemary Orchard (01:03:16):
You can change your open goal to something like 15 minutes. So if you're usually at the park for 15 minutes then you can set that or 15 hours if you want to, or a certain number of calories and that's worth bearing in mind, but that is how you can do that. It's very easy to do. And this actually specifically starts the workout on your Apple watch for you as well. Now there is one other thing that I wanted to mention, which is, you said when you connect to your car Bluetooth and connecting to your car Bluetooth, or your home wifi, or arriving at location as done via the shortcuts, automations are not automations that allow you to run things entirely, automatically, unless your car Bluetooth is actually CarPlay. And if your car Bluetooth is CarPlay, then you can do different things.

Rosemary Orchard (01:04:01):
So connecting to the blue to the CarPlay will disab, which disable your, your workout. But what let's say when we disconnect from this, and what we're going to want to do is get our location. And we'll say, if it is this particular location and so if I did there we go get current location and then if my location and then we don't want, has any value. We need to get an address. So you'll check the address for example of this and see whether or not it matches your park. So let's get the street address from here. And then if my address, now you can do location latitude, longitude, altitude, city towns county post code, region, phone number, label, your NA, or name. I'm gonna assume it's a nice big park. So it's got a name. And so if our name is, and I'll select that one that we saw on the map earlier, Bowood park not boxwood Bowood and then you can say, so if I'm here, when I get out of the car and then start my workout and so you can do that there instead.

Rosemary Orchard (01:05:07):
So there's several different ways that you can do this fingers cross Michael. One of these will work for you. Unfortunately, I can't share these shortcuts with you in the show notes because they are personal automations and personal automations can't be shared. So if you are looking for this, I'd recommend opening up the video and jumping forward to shortcuts corner, to look at what I've shown on my screen so that you can recreate this for yourself. But that's how you can do it. There's a number of different ways. So fingers crossed one works for you.

Mikah Sargent (01:05:38):
Nice. All right, folks let us go ahead and answer some, some feedback and questions. Wayne writes in Rosemary and Mike sometimes when I'm in a store like home Depot or a small office complex, something seems to hijack my data signal on my iPhone 12. You've probably talked about this before, but I must have missed it. Thanks for all the practical knowledge you send my way each week. Wayne. So Wayne, this is a tough one. Because there are, there are a lot of questions here when someone says hijack my data signal. That could mean any number of things. I don't know if, when you say that you mean that your data signal goes from 5g to 4g or 3g LTE or something, or, or it completely disappears, or it goes from being 5g to suddenly connecting to some wifi network somewhere hijack typically would mean taking something over that you, that the, that the thing is not meant to control.

Mikah Sargent (01:06:40):
Like if you hijack a car, you are taking that car from someone else and driving it yourself, driving it away. So in this case, when you say hijack my data signal that implies that something is taking your data signal and making use of it for itself, or is taking your data signal and changing it in some way. So there's not a lot of details here which makes it difficult to be able to address the problem that you're experiencing. There are a couple of things that I'll note off of the top of my head, based on what you may be saying. If you're talking about just a simple loss of data, you are no longer able to get a signal home Depot is, or a small office complex. Both of these places are places with lots of metal, lots of concrete that has metal inside of it.

Mikah Sargent (01:07:29):
And lots of other types of, of shielding materials, materials that keep your phone from being able to actually talk to the data the data tower. And so that could be the issue. There's also another one, and this is a, this is something that I've never seen on an iPhone, but we did have a long time ago, a listener call in on the tech guy radio show and was talking to Leo and said, every time I go into the grocery store, my phone crashes, I don't understand why, but any time I go into this grocery store, it crashes my phone and the person was so confused. Leo was incredibly confused, you know, at, at, at first kind of thinking, okay, maybe the person is not quite providing all of the details there. What it ended up being was that there was an app that the person had installed on their phone for that grocery store.

Mikah Sargent (01:08:24):
And that grocery store was using a type of beaconing technology where when you were near the store, it would provide you with push notifications for coupons and other offers that you could make use of in the store. And so because of that, there was a bug with that push notification or with that beaconing software that caused the phone to crash. So there are a number of possible things that this could be Wayne and I would love, love, love to get some more details from you. That's the most important thing that you can do for anybody who's writing into the show is give us a very clear understanding of what is happening to your device. So when you say my, it seems to hijack my data signal explain precisely when you walk into the store, the bars go down the bars, go up the bars, turn into little flower emojis. Like, what does it mean when you say hijack my data signal so that we can provide a, a clear answer for you?

Rosemary Orchard (01:09:30):
Yes. There are a few things that I'll note as well that could be options to solve, or maybe create the problem depending on what it is. The first of which is if your phone's automatically connecting to their wifi and their WiFi's not great. And you're trying to do stuff on your phone, then it might need a hand and under settings for cellular or mobile data. Then if you scroll all the way to the bottom, that you'll find that you've got loads of different apps that are probably in the way, there's this option for wifi assist. And if you turn wifi assist on, then if your phone is connecting to their likely pretty rubbish wifi network, then wifi assist will allow your cellular data to boost that and fix it. But there is another option as well. If it is indeed connecting to the wifi and that is open settings, go to wifi, and if it's connecting to the home Depot wifi, then you can tap on the little eye button and straight up, forget in network.

Rosemary Orchard (01:10:28):
Okay. Because if it, if it, if it's really rubbish there, then you can just disconnect from it and forget about it. The other option is if you SU do sometimes need to connect to it, I know some stores will only let you like join the queue for the restaurant, if you're on their wifi or something like that, turn off auto joinin. Okay. This option right here for auto join, just turn it off. So that your phone can still connect to the network. It's not gonna forget about it, which is useful. If you've got like passwords and stuff, setups that you need to authenticate to it, but it's not gonna automatically join it. And then the other option here is low data mode. And turning on low data mode will reduce the amount of data that your phone send out over that, that network connection.

Rosemary Orchard (01:11:09):
So it's not gonna try and do things like download iOS updates. The last thing I want to mention is one that I don't usually recommend disabling. Obviously I've done it here on my home network, because this is my personal device, my personal network, I'm fully in control of all of it. And I know where my data is going. That's safe, but I found, and this is very specifically Ikea that I found this in, but I wouldn't be surprised if home Depot had a similar problem. If I tried to connect to the wifi in Ikea, I could go around the entire store and my phone wouldn't connect. And I turned off the private wifi address, and then magically my phone was able to connect to the Ikea wifi and everything worked. And I needed to connect to the network in Ikea because Ikea's store, at least the one near me is a, what Mike has said, humongous metal box, which guess what really rubbish for signal really rubbish for signal.

Rosemary Orchard (01:11:58):
So I wasn't able to actually access my shopping list, which of course I hadn't printed out and taken with me. So I was just walk, wandering around the store, picking up stuff. I thought I wanted and putting it in my, in my, in my, in my trolley, in my shopping cart, which as everybody knows is a recipe for disaster in Ikea. So yeah, I, I turned off the private wifi address and that got it working. But it, it's almost certainly gonna be something related to their network and the local area that's causing this problem. And it would be really great to have some more information to try and help track that down. But yeah, try, try taking a look at the things that Mikah said and the wifi information and just wifi assist could be really useful to turn on generically anyway. So worth taking a look.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:45):
All right, with that, it is time to move into the final segment today. It is time for ACAS.

Speaker 4 (01:12:54):
Hi, I'm Leo Laporte the host of MacBreak Weekly. Every Tuesday. I get together with Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, and Rene Ritchie to talk Apple we're enthusiast, but we're not fan boys. We get deep into the weeds talking about how products work, which products you should buy and which you should stay away from. Also, what's next for Apple. Join me this Tuesday and every Tuesday, won't you for one of the longest running Apple podcasts, Mac break weekly@TWiTt.tv and wherever you get your podcasts.

Mikah Sargent (01:13:25):
This is the part of the show where we wear caps the top hour head to honor our app picks app or gadget picks of the week. These are silly caps and these are great apps or gadgets that we think are well worth checking out ones that you will likely enjoy and want to use and tell other people about. So with that, we can kick off our app caps, Rosemary orchard. Tell us about your incredible cap today, and then tell us about your pick of the week.

Rosemary Orchard (01:14:01):
Well, my cap today, I I'm afraid I had to cheat a bit Mikah because I couldn't find, or I could, but I was not willing to spend that much money on it. A union or a British flag hat for today. So I instead am wearing a ridiculous headband with a humongously oversized bow which is blue, white, and red. And of course has the, the British flag on it. Because this weekend it's a long weekend for us here in the UK, and it is the platinum Jubilee celebrating the Queen's 70 years of service. So I felt I should probably do something in honor. And hence the app of the, the cap of choice. Now, the app of choice is not quite related, unless you say that the game has one phase for every seven years of her reign thus far, but it's a game that I learned about when I was living in Germany.

Rosemary Orchard (01:14:51):
And it's a good fun game. And it's called phases 10 or fad scene in German, and it's incredibly popular in German speaking countries I found, but it's a great card game or in this case iOS app. So the idea is it's based somewhat on Rummy, where you need to do different things. I'm actually gonna go back and start at the beginning because it gets progressively more complex. The number of phases you go through until you reach the 10th phase, as you might guess. So to start with you get Dell, a deck of cards or a hand of cards and you need to collect two sets of three. And so if I'm looking at my cards, I have 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 8, 9, 2 nines. I've got two nines, a 10 and 11. And I can either take from the cards that are visible from the discard pile, or it can take from, from the, from the deck.

Rosemary Orchard (01:15:39):
So I'm gonna take one from the deck. Dana, I've got given a four. Okay. I'll try discarding the 12 and Nope, not, not putting that in my set. I'll just try discarding it and seeing what happens. Looks like I should have gone with the 12, oh, well, but I'm now on two fours and two nine. So I'm just gonna keep going until I actually manage to get two sets of three here. And I'm really not doing very well, but I've got two sevens now. So I will try discarding this eight and seeing what happens and I'm playing with one other person. You can actually play this in multiplayer mode. Great. I now have three sevens. Perfect. I will discard this five that five's not gonna be any use to me. And I just need a four or a nine.

Rosemary Orchard (01:16:20):
Yes, I've got fours. So now I can put my fours in the sets of three. And I can put my sevens in a set of three as well, but I'm not finished. I need to get rid of all of my cards to win the hand or to end the hand. And so I'm gonna drop that nine and I can still pick something up that would or I have to pick something up and if it were to match one of my sets, then I can drop it in there. So if I see something on the discard pile, then I can grab that, but it's unlikely the other player's gonna discard something that's gonna match, but there we go, I can do this. I've got my fours and I am done. And so Dahlia got minus 35 points, poor Dahlia, but I won.

Rosemary Orchard (01:17:00):
I won the round and it progresses. So you've got sets and you've got runs that you need to collect. And as you go, you know, you, you keep going through them. There is the option in this game to buy gems and win stars and things like that. I have to say, I've managed to successfully completely ignore that and just use the free section of the game. Now, there is a multiplayer mode where you can play it with friends or in a coin arena, and you can create a room and then input a room ID. And so this is where you would need coins if you were playing that together or in my personal favorite, buy the card version off of Amazon and play that together and just use this for sharpening your skills in the meantime, but it's a great free app. And it's certainly one I'll be playing, I think probably offline and in person with some friends over this coming weekend where we get to have some extra fun. In the meantime, Mikah, what's your app cap?

Mikah Sargent (01:17:50):
My app cap this week. Oh, the cap at top of my head is one of my favorite caps. It's the feather. It's sort of a feather wig if I'm honest. But it, it, it fits more like a, a hat does, but it's just lots of different feathers and lots of different colors. And it's kind of obnoxious because it sheds all the time when I wear it. And there may have been a time or two when I inhaled the feather because of this stupid thing. But it just felt fun to do today. So that is why I'm wearing this cap at the top of my head. Now my pick my app cap this week, full disclosure is run and maintained by my cohost Rosemary orchard. But that is not why I am showing this app. I am showing this app because it is something that I find ridiculous is not well known already because of its simplicity because of its need.

Mikah Sargent (01:18:47):
And well, because it's, it's, it's Rosemary Orchard approved and, and made it is called when works. You can go to when works.app to check it out and download when works, try it for free what this is, it's an app slash service that lets you figure out how to schedule appointments. It's like all of those look, I've seen dozens of these pop up on product hunt and they have all of these nonsense features and they cost a bajillion dollars and they don't, they, they, I try to tie in all these weird integrations that make things so much more difficult. This is so simple in comparison, this lets you set up the type of meetings that you want to make available to people. It gives you a link where you can send that link to people. And then the guest who's trying to book that time can book online and that event will be added to your calendar automatically.

Mikah Sargent (01:19:48):
And you can even go as far as to have the app or the service send an email to the other person, inviting them to be part of that event. So I've set that up. So I'll just show you an example. Let's say I want to do a new kind of event, so I'm gonna choose new. Oh. And by the way, check out this beautiful green color. I mean, come on. It's like it was made for me. <Laugh> I tap new event type down at the bottom and there are some options here for templates to kind of get things rolling if you want to. So a phone call that you might have lunch or a meeting, I'm gonna choose custom event type and I'm gonna call it podcast. And oh my God, a little microphone icon just popped up next to it because it was smart enough to know that I was talking about a podcast location.

Mikah Sargent (01:20:32):
I'm gonna leave blank. And when do I want this to happen? This is gonna be on, let's say Fridays and Saturdays. No, no, no. Let's do Sundays and Mondays. So I'm gonna go into Sunday and I'm going to change that so that it says at a time range, it will start at nine we'll end at five and just tap done Tuesday, I'm going to set that to unavailable and that's by just whoops, deleting that there done Wednesday we'll delete that timeframe done. Maybe. yeah, there we go. And Thursday we'll delete that timeframe done Friday again, unavailable done. And then we will go. I think it just needs to take, yeah, there we go. That it's updating and the time zone is set to my time zone. And so we'll go back and the duration will set to, oh, look, if it's TWiT it's two hours we'll go 45 minutes and, or see, and you can actually have multiple options.

Mikah Sargent (01:21:39):
So if mm-hmm <affirmative> you, if somebody wants to do a 45 minute podcast or an hour long podcast, you can do that. And then where is it published? It's published at my link, which is when works app slash Mikah Sargent and then some other options, including adding it to a specific calendar in this case. Yes. I wanted to be added to my podcast calendar minimum notice before event. This says basically if somebody were to go in 15 minutes before they wanna schedule one, you can say, no, no, no, no, no, I need more time than that. So I actually would set this for 24 hours at a least, and then event timing down here, minimum time before event so that you don't end up having, so maybe I need an hour of vocal rest. So at least an hour after the first podcast is recorded, then do that.

Mikah Sargent (01:22:23):
And then your availability of course can be set for these different increments. So you know, 9, 15, 10 30 et cetera. And then if I wanted to, I can type in pre-booking description. So this is where I would say, like, if you want a podcast with me, you gotta wear a silly hat and make sure your microphone sounds good. If I wanted to there, I love that there are also guest questions. So you can set those up too including, you know, to pull that data, their phone number, their text message then you can set up a checkbox or a radio button so that they can pick different things. So it's like a whole form. And then some other notes that you want to hear, I'll go back and then I will choose preview and it will show me what this would look like.

Mikah Sargent (01:23:07):
This is a person who's scheduling an appointment with me. The title is of course podcast, and then they can change the duration. We'll set it to 60 minutes and then tap gets started and they, you can see that I don't have any availability today because I said I only was gonna do that for Sundays and Mondays. And this is just a preview of it versus actually seeing it on the website where it would show the whole thing and then I can just tap, create. And then now that is done, I can copy that link and send it to someone who can set up that event with me so that they can schedule a podcast on Sundays or Mondays, as I said, that will get automatically added to my podcast's calendar and is there as I want it $0 for the online scheduling page for unlimited event types it as automatic support for iCloud Google calendar office 365 and outlook.com and for $0 or free, you can schedule up to five appointments each month.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:06):
The pro version is only five bucks a month and that gets you the ability to schedule unlimited appointments. Or if I was the emperor, I would say unlimit appointments for people who watch star wars. They'll understand that for other people they're going, what the heck is he saying? Anyway go get when works, you don't need any other calendar event application system service. This one is beautifully designed. It works exceptionally well. And as I said before, I think it's ridiculous that more people aren't talking about this because this, ah, it's just so good can, so I was hoping Rosemary, you could tell us a little bit about your because I, I think that you ended up taking, oh, just tell us about the, the history of when works.

Rosemary Orchard (01:24:55):
Yeah. So if when works was originally created by the, the creator of busy co or the, the thought idea, my man behind busy cow and it was going to be shut down. It wasn't particularly popular and not enough people were paying for it. And I looked at it and realized that by doing a little bit of trimming down here and there, I could actually make it into a much more profitable app. And so I worked on it on my own for a few years. And then recently I was, I was struggling to do everything on my own. Obviously I've got the podcast and everything and realized that I've got some great friends who could help out with this who are wonderful developers and thought people and can help us with all of this. So we are in the process of actually doing some fairly big updates behind the scenes to make the process even smoother and easier for everybody to use.

Rosemary Orchard (01:25:42):
So I just saw Mikah, you were struggling a little bit disabling the days I've already noted that down. And we've got an idea which may even make it into the next big update that will be coming out soon, which of course will be free for everybody who's currently using the app and service. So, you know, you'll, you'll get it either way. But yeah, that's, that's how it got started. And yeah, it's how I learned to be an iOS developer, which was interesting because it's all written in objective C there's very little swift in there, but it was a good challenge. And one, I'm glad that I got to do. And in particular work turns out working with calendars and dates and times is one of the most difficult things you can do as a developer. And so of course, that's, that's what I started with, but I'm loving it. So why

Mikah Sargent (01:26:24):
Not? I'm glad, I'm glad it's, it's beautiful. And, and it works very well. So yeah, definitely check out when works. And folks that brings us to the end of this episode of iOS today, if you've got questions, feedback apps, you think we should check out all of that kind of stuff. Those can go to iOS, TWiT.tv. We'd love to hear from you. We record the show live every Tuesday at 12:00 PM. Eastern 9:00 AM Pacific. You can tune into TWiT.tv/live to check it out. And that includes this coming week. We don't have to shift the time or anything because Apple's keynote is on a Monday. So that works. But in any case, we think the best way to get the show and, and be able to watch the show each week is by subscribing or following if you're using Apple podcast. Because when you do that you will get the show as soon as it's available.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:10):
As soon as it's been edited and put out for the world, that's a TWiT.tv/ios, where you can click to subscribe to audio or subscribe to video on Apple podcast, Google podcast, Spotify, YouTube. We try to be in all of those different places. So it's a great place to go to check that out. Now, if you were listening to the show today and you thought, you know, love the content, love what they are putting out, but I do kind of wish that I could skip the ads. I could just do the show itself and hear everything that Rosemary and Mike are talking about. There's a way if you would like to support us, see that the ads are there to make sure that we can do this. It keeps my lights on. Well, I should point forward my studio lights on. It keeps me able to buy goofy caps and be able to talk about this.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:57):
But if you instead would like to get an ad free experience, then you instead would just hand over a couple of do a few dollars each month and join the club Twit that TV slash club tweet for seven bucks a month, you are going to get every show with no ads. So lots of different content there you'll also get access to the TWiT plus bonus feed that has extra content. You won't find anywhere else, including outtakes behind the scenes. Lots of different AMAs and all sorts of interviews and even more content I think in unboxing was was published there recently and last but not least to get access to the discord server TWiT's Discord server. That is a fantastic place to go to speak with your fellow club, TWiT members, but also those of us here at TWiT, if you've always wanted to I don't know, ask me about my chihuahuas or when Wordle first came out, we were all in there. Brow bragging about our Wordle scores, that kind of thing. That's a great place to hang out with your, with your favorite TWiT folks and with your favorite club, TWiT folks, TWiTtter TV slash club tweet, seven bucks a month, Rosemary orchard. If folks wanna follow you online and check out all your great work, where should they go to do so

Rosemary Orchard (01:29:12):
At the best places, Rosemary orchard dot com, which has links to all the things I do around the internet. And of course you can also find me in the club wi discord, where I get to hang out with some of the really lovely people who watch the show and answer some very interesting questions. Mikah, where can people find you?

Mikah Sargent (01:29:29):
I am at Mikah Sargent on pretty much every social media network. You can also find me@chihuahua.coffee. That's C H I H Hua hoa.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Check me out on Saturdays with Leo aport for the tech guy, the radio show heard around the world where we take your questions via call in and answer them for you. And on Thursdays, where I record tech news weekly with Jason Howell show, where we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of iOS today. I hope you got a lot out of this episode, free apps that are well worth your time. We will be back next week to talk all things. WWDC. And I know we're both excited for that until then. Goodbye,

Ant Pruitt (01:30:19):
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.