iOS Today 663, 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, Mikah Sargent, are finally taking a look at the beta to talk about features you should check out now that you can join the public beta. Stay tuned. This episode of iOS Today is brought to you by Cisco Meraki. Without a cloud managed network, businesses inevitably fall behind Experience, the ease and efficiency of Meraki's single platform to elevate the place where your employees and customers come together. Cisco Meraki maximizes uptime and minimizes loss to digitally transform your organization, Meraki's intuitive interface, increased connectivity and multi-site management. Keep your organization operating seamlessly and securely wherever your team is. Let's Cisco Meraki's 24 7. Available support. Help your organizations remote, onsite, and hybrid teams always do their best work. Visit meraki.cisco.com/twit

(00:01:10):
This is iOS today with Rosemary Orchard and Mikah Sargent. Episode 663 Recorded Tuesday, July 25th, 2023. Check out these iOS 17 public beta features. This episode of iOS Today is brought to you by Duo Protect Against Breaches with a leading access management suite, providing strong multi-layered defenses to only allow legitimate users in. For any organization concerned about being breached and in need of a solution, fast Duo quickly enables strong security and improves user productivity. Visit css.co/twit today for a free trial and by Brooklinen, summer is in full swing and Brooklinen is here to help you swap out winter warmth for easy breezy comfort with our award-winning sheets and home essentials. Visit brooklinen.com today and get $20 off plus free shipping on orders of $100 or more with code i o ss and buy HelloFresh America's number one meal kit. Get farm fresh pre-portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep.

(00:02:21):
Skip the grocery store and count on HelloFresh to make home cooking easy, fun and affordable. Go to hellofresh.com/ios 50 and use Code iOS 50 for 50% off, plus free shipping. Welcome back to iOS Today, the show where we talk all things iOS and iPad, oss and watch OS and tv, OSS and HomePod oss, and all of the OSS that Apple has on offer. We love to talk about them here on iOS today, and we love to help you make the most of all those Apple devices you are buying. I am one of your hosts, Mikah Sargent, and I am

Rosemary Orchard (00:02:58):
Rosemary. You didn't mention Emergency S oss Mikah, that's another OSS that's built into one of the OSS

Mikah Sargent (00:03:05):
<Laugh>. I like that. I like that emergency Ss oss <laugh>.

Rosemary Orchard (00:03:10):
It's, it's right there in the feature. Yeah, so, yeah. Yeah, it's

Mikah Sargent (00:03:12):
Pretty cool. The letters are there. Today we thought we would talk about some features that you should check out now that the public beta is out, folks who might not be aware every year for quite some time now, apple has released two kind of preview versions, if you will, of the various operating systems that it puts out. So in, in, in the beginning, apple had betas for developers where someone who was making apps for the next version of Apple's operating systems could install the betas and test those new features with their apps. But in time I think partially because Apple saw some folks who would become developers for the pure sake of getting to test out the new features before they were ready. Apple decided to do something called the public beta. The public beta is a little bit delayed in terms of when it is available to folks to try out.

(00:04:13):
And what Apple does is they kind of, let's say you're having a dinner party, right? And you are inviting over someone, you just met your boss your mother and grandmother, right? These four people who are you know, maybe a little judgmental might be a little bit uncomfortable in a home that is not perfectly, wonderfully pristine. And so you make sure that everything is absolutely 100%, 1000% spotless, right? It is super clean. They go to you know, wash their hands in the restroom and there's beautiful soaps that you've bought from some local free range organic shop. And it's perfect, right? That in theory is the final version of the operating system, the one that will come out in fall. But let's say you invite over your favorite uncle to the house and your favorite aunt, your uncle and aunt come over and they're chill people.

(00:05:20):
They're chill, but you know, they still, they're, they're respectable folks and you want to show them a good time. So you do a pretty good job tidying up. You make sure everything's clean, but maybe you don't go down and buy that organic soap because you don't need it. That's the public beta. And then let's say you are just inviting over your two best friends. Not only do you not go buy the organic soap, but you don't really tidy up. 'cause You're not worried about them judging you. Their house looks the same as yours. Everything's just kind of how it is. And we all are in this understanding that, look, we're just trying to live. That is the developer beta. So what happens is Apple makes that developer beta, the one that's not really tidy and is gonna have lots of mistakes, but the people will kind of check out and make sure that they're good to go available to developers. And in this public beta, you know, the one for the uncle and aunt, it's got some messes in there, but it's in, in theory, it's not going to completely wreck your system. So that's why there's that delay there. They, they, they wait for it to come a little bit later so that you don't have as many problems. And now, now it's available. Rosemary, I was hoping that we could first start by talking about the ways that folks can hop on Chocho, the public beta train.

Rosemary Orchard (00:06:37):
Yeah, so there's a couple of different ways. And just to note as well, folks linking back to what Mikah was saying there, when there's a new version of the beta or beta, depending on your pronunciation that comes out, the developer one drops first. Okay? So the developer one comes, and then there'll be a little window. And that window could be a couple hours, or it could be a couple of days, or even up to a week before the next public beta version of the same one drops. And that's basically just to let all the developers road test it, because the last thing you want is your device, you know, overheating or doing anything super crazy because there's, there's a bug there that they didn't find in their internal testing. But if you have made a backup of your device, first of all, always make a backup of your device.

(00:07:19):
Don't forget, you can do that in your settings app. If you tap on the iCloud option and then you tap onto iCloud and then iCloud backup, you've got the option to tap backup. Now you can, of course if you've got a Mac, plug it into a Mac and back it up there as well. But once you've done that, you've got your backup, okay? You've made sure you've got enough iCloud storage space for all your photos and everything's backed up and safe and secure. Then what you can do is pop into general and then software updates. So this is in settings, general software updates, and then you can tap on your automatic updates option. And there should be the option there to change to the beta. For me, Mikah, that's just disappeared on me, which is really unhelpful because I have a feeling I have just run into a bug in iOS, but there should be the option there to enroll in the public beta as an option for your automatic updates. And then you can go ahead and join <laugh>. And it's as simple as that now.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:16):
Yeah, mine's gone too. <Laugh>.

Rosemary Orchard (00:08:18):
Excellent, excellent. 10 out pop day.

Mikah Sargent (00:08:21):
There we go. Oh, there we go. Underneath automatic updates, you'll see beta updates. And if you tap on that because I have a developer account, it is showing just the developer beta, but if I did not have a registered developer account, it would have iOS 17 public beta as well as the off button. So those,

Rosemary Orchard (00:08:40):
Yes, mine's just shown up as well now. So it's got so underneath the beta updates, it's got off iOS 17 public beta and iOS 17 developer beta. So yeah, that's, that's the options. Most folks probably won't have the developer beta, but a change they did made this year is if you have a free developer account with Apple then you can actually sign up to use the developer beta. Now, if you're not busy developing things for the next version of iOS or testing things out for that as you know, something that you, you need to do, I'd recommend the public beta. Or you can wait until September. But if we tell you about a feature today and you're like, I I can't wait to have this, I've gotta have this right now, then yeah, then you should probably consider checking it out.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:22):
Absolutely. And so, just to understand, part of the reason that we do this is because it is an opportunity. Part of the reason that Apple provides it is because it's an opportunity for them to get some feedback on what is going right, what is going wrong in the system. And there are some sort of options for how one can provide feedback. First and foremost, just by using it, you actually are providing feedback because every time something crashes, every time something fails, every time the usage is not what it's supposed to be, what's expected if you've allowed, so then logs will be sent to Apple, but you can take things even further. And I think that's what is, is well worth looking into. There is an app that gets installed on your device whenever you install one of these betas.

(00:10:15):
It's called Feedback, and I've got it launched here. Feedback has, it's a very simple app and it essentially lets you send information to Apple. And so if I tap this new feedback button here, I can choose let's say that there was something wrong with iOS. So I would tap on iOS and iPad oss and then I choose more information. So please provide a descriptive title for your feedback. So maybe it would say every time I launch Shortcuts app, it crashes which are you seeing an issue with? If I were to tap on that, it shows look at all these different options here. So I would look for shortcuts if that was, there it is. Then it says, what type of feedback are you reporting? Is this incorrect or unexpected behavior? An application crash and application being slower, unresponsive, battery life issues.

(00:11:05):
Or you can also drop in suggestions in this spot. And then you continue to provide more detail. Is this a shortcut issue with Siri or is it with the shortcuts app? What type of shortcut issue are you seeing? What is the iCloud link to your specific shortcut? If you are talking about a specific shortcut that you have? And then you would provide a screenshot or a screen recording that can show the issues that helps to give the developers who are looking into this, the information they need. And then it also goes on to let you describe the exact issue. So here I would type out or dictate out the entire bit of information. And the more detail you provide, the better to say shortcuts isn't working, is not enough. You need to go into detail. When I tap the shortcuts button from the home screen after I've just launched my device and I go into the first shortcut and try to edit the settings, then the app crashes.

(00:12:03):
That is so much more information versus shortcuts isn't working. Or even shortcuts crashes when I tap a button. Unless that is exactly what is happening. Like no matter what you're seeing, that shortcuts is crashing whenever you type the tap the button mm-hmm. <Affirmative> at the end, once you've put in all of this information, you'll have the option to send the information to Apple. And at that point then you will be able to submit that feedback. And I'm just going to delete that draft 'cause I didn't actually have any information there. And Apple will be able to use that information. So I submitted a bug not too terribly long ago. Let me see. There were some H T M L tags in apple crosswords that was showing up. And so I can look at the status of my submission here.

(00:12:52):
It's gonna take a second to load. We'll see if it actually does load. That's the other thing is I'm on. Oh, there we go. So I talked about what's going on. It's still open. That means that it has not been addressed yet. And you can see I've got HTML tags in Apple News Crosswords was the title. The area of course was news incorrect or expected behavior the news app, does this relate to serious suggestions? No. And then there's my little description as well as the image showing, let's see if it's still pops up here. Down in the bottom you can see those H T M L tags instead of the actual just italicized text, which is what they were going for. And so that information, you know, sent off to the developers at Apple to look at if they need to figure that out.

(00:13:40):
So I encourage everyone to consider using that feedback app as you were testing this. But do know that just by using the public beta, you are also helping Apple with the process. But this is the time, this is the perfect time to get your feature or your desired fix or whatever it happens to be in the line, at the very least. So this is the time that, that the developers at Apple say, Hey, we need to know what's going wrong so that we can fix it. And if you don't tell us mm-hmm, <affirmative>, then it's gonna be there in the end. So just be mindful of that. Yeah,

Rosemary Orchard (00:14:16):
Yeah. I wanted to mention two things in addition to that, Mikah, because there's you know, there's the saying a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, if you can get a screenshot like marker included that screenshot there with the H T M L tags in the crossword. So, you know, if things were looking funny, he took a screenshot of it. So it didn't matter how terrible his description was to an extent. But it meant the image was there to help the people at the other end. Similarly, you can also add a video. Okay. You can do a screen recording. I have screen recording added to my control center so I can tap on the screen recording function. And then it'll do a little countdown, and then I can demo whatever it is. You know, this thing is not working the way I expect it to.

(00:14:57):
I tap here, I tap here, I tap here for pictures. Worth a thousand words, a video at least a short one that's concise. It's probably worth 10,000, a million, I'm not sure either way. It's definitely worth considering. And you can do this for any developer of course. But the other thing that I wanted to mention is you can add feedback assistant to your control center. So in my control center, along with screen recording and various other options, including the ability to pinging my watch new in I 17 I have feedback assistant. And when I tap on that, it takes me straight into logging a new feedback. And as always, you can tap on hold to see the options. There's only one new feedback, but it's really useful to be able to just pop in there and quickly you know, fill out the information to let them know what the problem is if there is one.

(00:15:48):
Another bonus reason, by the way, to take a screenshot or a video recording is because then you can tell them the exact time that the issue happened. Now you, some of you Eagle Eye folks who are watching the video may have noticed the in Mikah's screen share that he had. And now in mine at the bottom there is an attachment and it'll say the name of your device, the kind of your device. So in my case, it says Rosemary's iPhone 14 Pro, iPhone 14 Pro, and it says, iOS cys Diagnose. This is a series of logs and, and things that get sent off to Apple. And being able to tell them the time that the issue occurred makes it a lot easier for them to figure out, okay, this is the point in the cyst diagnoses that we need to be looking at to start with. You know, they, they're building a haystack trying to find a needle. It helps if you can help them build a smaller haystack in the first place. And if you've got a screenshot or a video, then you've got the exact time that it happened at, because you can see in the screenshot or the video information when you recorded it or took it. So there we go.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:46):
Beautiful. Alright, folks, we are gonna come back with some features that you should check out in iOS 17, but I do wanna take a quick break to tell you about our first sponsor today. It's Duo Duo Portex against Breaches with a leading access management suite. Strong multi-layered defenses and innovative capabilities only allow legitimate users in and keep bad actors out. For any organization that's concerned about being breached, that needs protection Fast Duo quickly enables strong security while also improving user productivity. Duo prevents unauthorized access with multi-layered defenses and modern capabilities that thwart sophisticated malicious access attempts. You can increase authentication requirements in real time when risk rises. So if you see some stuff going on, or you've been alerted that there's some stuff going on, then you can go ahead and bring up even more defenses to make your individuals authenticate in a specific way.

(00:17:47):
And Duo enables high productivity by only requiring authentication when needed, which will, of course enable Swift, easy and secure access. Duo provides an all-in-one solution for Strong M F a passwordless single sign-on and Trusted Endpoint Verification Duo helps you implement zero trust principles by verifying users and their devices. So start your free trial and sign up today at a very simple uur l it's css.co/twit. That's css.co/twit. And we thank Cisco DUO for sponsoring this week's episode of iOS Today. Alright, we are back from the break, and that means it is time finally to talk about some features that you on the public beta should consider checking out. Yes, if you have done everything you needed to do to download the public beta and you are rocking along checking out the new features here are some that kind of stand out to us that we think are well worth talking about.

(00:18:52):
And the first is one that I continue to be super excited about. I just think it's a cool feature. It's called Contact Posters. And it's actually one of the first things, if not the first thing that Apple announced on stage at WW d c. It's essentially taking, taking the little photo that you have for individual contacts one step further, right? Up to this point, maybe you have family contacts in there where you have selected a photo from your photo library and made that person into a contact. And so you've got, you know, a little image. I remember when I first I think it was even when I first visited Petaluma, even before I joined the company, and I was doing a show with, I was doing iOS today with Leo, and we were joking around or whatever, and he's like, oh, you need to have a contact photo for me.

(00:19:49):
So he just made a silly face. And for the longest time, that was my photo for Leo in my contacts. But now there's a little bit more art and fun involved in contact posters where you can kind of customize the look and feel of your contacts. You can use emoji if you like. You can also use actual photos and they have some different options. A lot like the lock screen that came in iOS 16. I'm going to look into showing something Kevin, but don't show my screen just yet. 'cause There's gonna be lots of contact information and I wanna try to get to something where it's not revealing everything. So, yeah, let me scroll that down. Okay, now you can show this real quick. So here is the contact poster for Leo. And when Leo calls this will pop up and it will have Leo's name across the top, and it'll be just a little bit obscured by his hat there by the top of his hat. So think of like a magazine, right where the magazine is. Sometimes the, the photo will interact with the text. That's kind of how they have it. Okay, I'll have you switch away so I can take my finger off. Yeah, it gets a little, little difficult there, but I've set these up for so many different contacts. In fact, Rosemary, why don't you try calling me? Unless that's gonna cost you money no,

Rosemary Orchard (00:21:21):
I'll call you on FaceTime audio. Facetime audio. Perfect. Because that should trigger it. So I, I am calling Mikah on FaceTime audio and let's see what happens,

Mikah Sargent (00:21:28):
Because I do believe I set one up for you. And if I didn't, then I think you set one up for yourself.

Rosemary Orchard (00:21:35):
I believe I set it up for myself. Yes. Don't say it's calling you

Mikah Sargent (00:21:39):
And it is deciding to pop up instead on my Mac instead of

Rosemary Orchard (00:21:46):
<Laugh>. Is it possible that your focus mode filter is interfering with this?

Mikah Sargent (00:21:49):
It probably is. So let me turn off that focus mode filter. It is. Well,

Rosemary Orchard (00:21:53):
While you do that, Mikah, yes. I've just taken a very quick screen recording because I wanted to make sure that I didn't accidentally share all of your personal information as well. And so Mikah has shared his contact profile with me. And so in messages, I tapped on my messages of Mikah and I tapped on the little Mikah at the top. And then it shows me, you know, this, this profile version of Mikah. And so what happens now is, of course, Mikah's chosen which picture he wants to, to share with the world. But instead I can actually tap on the contact photo and poster and choose a custom photo instead. So I can actually override what Mike has chosen share. So, you know, if you've got, you know, that one friend who always has like a picture of their dog or something <laugh>, you don't want a picture of their dog when they call you, you want, you know, a picture of them, then you can overwrite that with your own personal choice which is always quite nice to have as an option. Oh, I've just realized I can actually show the other end of it. Oh, it's, it's stopped working. But if I tap call back, oh, there you go. I can see

Mikah Sargent (00:22:50):
That's what it would look like on my end, except it would have Rosemary's face. Exactly.

Rosemary Orchard (00:22:55):
Now you

Mikah Sargent (00:22:55):
Can. So there we go. And that is another, as Rosemary points out, you can create your own contact poster as well that you share with other people. In the same way that up to this point, we've been able to create our own little photo that when you first start talking to someone, or if you have them in your contacts, it will give them the option to update the contact with that new information. So that is all there as well. I'm going to turn my focus mode back on and I think contact posters are super cool. Yeah. show folks how you go about editing a contact photo.

Rosemary Orchard (00:23:29):
Yeah, so at the moment you can do this with just, you know, your profile pictures. So in messages at the top there's three dots over on the right hand side next to the new message button. If you tap that, then it should have your name and picture up there. And so then you can adjust things. So if I want people to call me Rose instead of rosemary, I can change that. And I can choose whether or not to share this automatically. And if I, if I even want to enable sharing now I'm gonna have the share automatically with my contacts and then I can tap on edit. So at the top I've got you know, the, the me emoji that represents me. And I can then choose customize. And I can either choose a contact photo or a poster.

(00:24:05):
And if I pick a poster, then it gives me me emoji of various kinds. So I can pick different ones and I can pose myself if I want to, or I can pick one of the standard predefined poses. And there's also the option to be mimo. So if you would prefer to be a unicorn, for example perhaps a slightly curious looking unicorn <laugh>, you can do that. You can also put your name on here and you can choose, you know, from different fonts. There's a couple of different fonts, different colors, and so on. I'm gonna put that back too, a pinkier color. And I'm just gonna swap my emoji back to one that looks a little bit more like me. I think I need a haircut. My hair is getting pretty long at the moment, so I have to see what I can do there.

(00:24:47):
But let's go with that one for now. Now I don't have a huge amount of control over this, but I can change my background color as well, so I can make that into a sort of very light light leaky color if I like. Or I can make it really dark and bright. I'll just set that back to the ooh, it's not going back. Now, typical there we go. <Laugh>, I'll make that into something a bit more purpley. And yeah, if you don't like what you've done, like I didn't, there, I can cancel that. And it shows you kind of preview of what it might look like. You can actually add more posters as well. You can choose monograms mi emoji emoji as well. And so if I wanted to be, for example, a rose, I can tap in the little search and I can pop a rose in there and then I can change the style so that I can make that into that.

(00:25:34):
And then, yeah, that, that's the little, you know, person icon. And then there's the poster bit as well to go with it. So, you know, there's, you know, a lot of fun things here. And this ties in nicely with that new feature with airdrop, where you're gonna be able to share your contact information with somebody via airdrop quickly. And if you're sharing something via airdrop and one of you walks away, whether intentionally or unintentionally, or whether it's because a dog or small child has grabbed your phone and run off with it then that will continue over the internet as well, which is something I've tried a few times and it's been very handy.

Mikah Sargent (00:26:06):
Nice. the next feature is one that I'm super excited about. I've been using this feature honestly more than anything else, just by virtue of how it works. And it is the standby feature. And standby is a feature that basically turns your iPhone into a kind of always on display with

Rosemary Orchard (00:26:33):
Like, the one right behind you. Mikah? Yes,

Mikah Sargent (00:26:35):
With amv.

Rosemary Orchard (00:26:35):
'Cause I've managed to turn myself into an iPhone

Mikah Sargent (00:26:38):
Nice. With ambient information. So here you can see Rosemary is swiping through some of the different options. We've got some text on screen that gives the time. So 1743 where Rosemary is mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, as well as a kind of time zone option. Now, some of these are still very crashy, so you may run into issues there. I, I had some real big issues with standby, but I have kept mine. I have a calendar on one side and then the time on the other, but the time can change to other things if it needs to. And that goes on. There we go. This is kind of what mine looks like at night. Although what Rosemary? Yeah, exactly. But the one, the, the big text there, I have set to a clock. And so that's just on my nightstand. And what's great is you can enable this in your settings.

(00:27:31):
It will use the ambient light sensor that's built in to determine how much light is in your room. And if the light in the room is dark enough, it switches to this deep red color so that it doesn't blast your irises with blue light. So it's a very handy kind of nightstand clock. And then it's also smart about about being aware of where you are if you are not in the room. If you are not glancing at the phone, then it won't stay on, it won't keep showing the text. If you walk out of a room for a period of time, then it goes away. There's a delightful kind of multicolor clock option where it's just a big clock and it will show a timer in the bottom right hand corner if you've got a timer going. So there are multiple clock options multiple sort of what widget options depending on which face you're doing.

(00:28:28):
And the widget face is actually interactive depending on what you have. There, it will show you the weather, it can show you your home stuff. And here is Rosemary kind of showing the ability to have widget suggestions turned on. And to smart rotate. You'll be familiar with that term Smart rotate. If you have set up widgets on your home screen, where over time the system will get to know you better and then use that information to help decide what it should display on the screen. If, if you're watching or if you're listening and not watching, then you will have missed that. Rosemary just added the home app to the widgets for standby, which gives Rosemary the ability to, while the phone is in standby, which is triggered by having your phone charging and horizontal or in landscape mode as they call it.

(00:29:31):
When your phone is in landscape mode and charging, that is whenever standby will activate. And then you can use standby to turn on and off lights. You have that one set up. So it basically turns it into an always on interface for your your smart home, but also just kind of your iOS life, so to speak. And I think it's fantastic. I'd love to see it on the iPad. I would love to see a purpose-built device which has been suggested in the past that maybe we'll see a home pod that has a screen kind of thing. And right now they have the apps split between what are optimized for standby and what apps are not. Apps that are not optimized for standby, my guess is they will not probably turn into kind of a darker mode when it gets dark and will use more battery life, although it is plugged in. But maybe it'll take a longer to charge, essentially if you are using certain apps that are not yet optimized. But developers will be able to create widgets that are optimized for standby. And I'm looking forward to seeing how different folks make use of standby. I think it's a very clever feature.

Rosemary Orchard (00:30:52):
Yeah, it, I really is. So I have my phone on it's an anchor Mac well, it's a Mac Go Charger, I believe here. And it just, you know, it's just a U S B C cable there. It's also plugged in over here, not because it needs to be, but because that's how I'm sharing my screen. So, you know, I have to have it on the Mac safe for it to work because this feature does require your phone to be on a Mac safe charger and is specifically a max safe stand charger to, to work. But it's great. And honestly, I, I really like the fact that you know, if I'm not looking at it, it does fitness isn't supposed to be optimized. It's, it, it's interacting with the pet that I'm not looking at it.

(00:31:30):
So it is working. So that's pretty cool. But yeah, I, I like the, the night mode specifically where if you wave your hand in front of it, it lights up and shows you the time. I have e ink clocks in my bedroom, so they're the kind of screens that you would find on like a Kindle or something. So they won't keep me awake. It's also really difficult to see them in the dark without a light. So it's quite nice to be able to just wave my hand in front of my iPhone and see what the time is. And yeah, now, now I have all of the options and it's very nice. I've been finding more and more max safe stands to be part of my travel kitten, things like that, because this feature has been a game changer for me.

Mikah Sargent (00:32:07):
Nice. the next feature is stickers. And of course there have long been stickers on iOS, but stickers have seen a very specific improvement and feature addition in this version of iOS. You can now create stickers from your photos and you can set up stickers to have kind of custom three D effects. So when you make these stickers, you can choose like holographic stickers that will change based on how you're moving your phone. They're kind of raised puff stickers that look as if they are three D models. And you can basically make stickers from photos of any kind as long as you lift the subject from the photo. So that lift subject feature that has been very popular in iOS 16 gets even more magical in iOS 17. And it looks like Rosemary has one to show us.

Rosemary Orchard (00:33:09):
Yeah. So I have a stick here that I'm in the middle of creating, so I'll tap, cancel and show Fox how to do this. So messages in iOS seventeens had a little bit of an update, can tap on the plus button on the left hand side of your messages. And then you can, instead of photos or camera or audio or location or one of the other options tucked away under more, there's stickers. And then I can tap on the plus. And I've got some stickers that I created before, but you know, I'm gonna create a new sticker of a unicorn that has been painted to be kind of like an ear of corn. So there's a unicorn fest going on in a local city raising money for charity. And the idea is that you need to go and capture all the unicorns.

(00:33:49):
Of course, you capture them with your, your photo or by taking a photo with a camera rather than anything else. But it's beautifully picked out the unicorn from the background here, so I can then just add a sticker. And then if it chooses not to crush then I can actually hopefully send that sticker to Mikah. I think I was on that screen for a little bit too long, so I'll just pop back in and do that again. And there we go. Yep, that's the one add sticker. And it's there we go. And now I can use this sticker in messages itself to actually reply. I can pick it up and stick it over a message or do whatever I want, basically. And it's just a very nice feature to be able to turn your friends and family members, your pets and loved ones or that cool thing that you saw wherever you saw it, into a sticker.

Mikah Sargent (00:34:43):
<Laugh>. I have a delightful sticker of Henry eating a little treat here. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And it is one of the motion stickers, so it will take live pho, it can take live photos and turn them into stickers so that they become kind of animated. And then there's another photo of Henry looking like the biggest loaf lump <laugh> that you ever did see, which I find delightful. Little option there. And so then I can take that ridiculous sticker and sort of take up the entire screen of our conversation right there. So there's a big Henry covering the our plans for future episodes of Violists today. No spoilers. 'cause The Henry Horn is here to make sure that it's not revealed. I find these stickers delightful. They're fun for little you know, exciting moments that I think people don't expect. Although, if I remember correctly, these will not show up for folks who are not running iOS 17.

Rosemary Orchard (00:35:49):
That is correct. Yeah. So if you send this to somebody who is not running iOS 17, or they receive it on a Mac that is not running the Sonoma Beta then that just won't be there. They won't have a notification to say that they've been sent anything or any kind of indication that exists. And if you send it and they later sign up to the beta or you know, they, they get the public release and they go back and have a look at it, they will see that sticker is there, but they're not gonna see it right now unless they're on the beta. But that said, you can, you know, get a headstart and start making those stickers ready to bombard everybody on release day.

Mikah Sargent (00:36:25):
Exactly. Exactly. And that's just around the corner. September is nearly here. Alright folks, we are gonna take a quick break before we come back with a couple more features we wanna talk about that are worth checking out in iOS 17 also. I, for some reason, all of your notifications are on a live delay or something because your FaceTime calls came in about 15 minutes after you sent, after you first called me. And then your messages of those stickers that you sent, they have not yet hit my phone, but I have a feeling that while I'm doing this ad, they're going to hit my phone. So I don't know what's going on, but for some reason my phone is delayed on getting messages from you, but they are showing up on my Mac right away. So maybe the Mac is like, interact interrupting, sending them to the, the phone or something.

(00:37:13):
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(00:41:47):
So in iOS 17, apple has introduced a new set of features and you can use it with your Apple Watch, you can use it with your iPhone. And what it does is it just has you check in on how you're feeling during the day. Okay? So what will happen is you'll get a little buzz on your wrist or on your phone and it says, you know, check in with how you're feeling. You can then sort of use a scale to decide. And let me actually see if I can pop into one of these so that we can just show this off. So it's, it's bugging out on me. I, oh, there we go. Expected it. So I will choose log, maybe. Okay. Yeah, it's bugging out on me. Lemme try one more time.

Rosemary Orchard (00:42:32):
Well, and the good news is, is I have showing up here

Mikah Sargent (00:42:35):
You work. Please do show us. Yes.

Rosemary Orchard (00:42:37):
So yeah, I've got the ability to log an emotional mood so I can either log how I feel right now or I can log how I felt overall today. And so, you know, if you're having a moment where you're like, I feel amazing right now, or I really don't feel great right now, then you, you might wanna look, you know, a specific time point, otherwise you can look generically how you're feeling throughout the day. Yes, really. So I

Mikah Sargent (00:42:58):
Can look how

Rosemary Orchard (00:42:58):
Right now,

Mikah Sargent (00:42:59):
Really quick, I do wanna note that those are standardized terms in American psychiatry and psychology. I, I'm not sure if it works the same, but mood and emotion are two sort of standardized terms, mood being how you're feeling in your whole day, emotion being a, a thing that you're experiencing in the moment. And so any kind of system that's doing that kind of tracking is going to use those, those terms if they're kind of backed by that, that science, by that, that study. So please continue.

Rosemary Orchard (00:43:30):
Yeah. so it starts out by putting me right in neutral. It doesn't default me back to where I've been previously. And so if I swipe all the way to the left, it goes into what I personally feel is a lovely purple shape <laugh> and says I feel very unpleasant. And then I can swipe through and go to just unpleasant, slightly unpleasant, neutral, slightly pleasant, which is going into a, a greener shade. Pleasant is yellow and then very pleasant is more orangey yellow. And that's that's the top of the scale. And then after that, I can choose some tags that help describe this feeling best. So I've got options here, like, amazed, excited, joyful, brave, amused, proud. And so I'm gonna go with passionate because I'm, I'm doing Iowas today and proud because I get to do it with Mikah.

(00:44:20):
And so I'm very happy as well. And there, there's the option for show more as well. And at this point you'll see other options which might not stereotypically like match with that emotion or mood. So for example, I've got disgusted or embarrassed or thi and things like that as well. I think I am gonna just tap down on that one and then I can tap next. And now I can say, what is having the biggest impact on me? So there's options like your health and fitness and self-care, your identity community, your partner tasks, work, education, money, et cetera. I'm gonna go with work 'cause I today is technically work and friends because you know, Mike is a friend as well. And I'll pop that in as done. And that's it. It's very simple. Now if you log a overall mood for your day then you can also add notes in there about the day as well.

(00:45:15):
There isn't that option when you're logging the emotion. But this is really nice and the fact that it's on your Apple Watch as well in the Breathe app. I was trying to get the Apple Watch too show up so that I could demo it through there, but unfortunately it's stuck on connecting right now mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So I'm not able to show my Apple Watch screen, but it shows up in the, the Mindful app there as an option along with Breathe and things like that, which is just really nice. And I like the fact that you can customize when you get the reminders as well. That's a really nice feature.

Mikah Sargent (00:45:46):
Yeah. And the thing that I feel makes this particularly magnificent is that you start to then build out information about your mood and your emotions, and you can look at then trends and look at times when this is happening. You can look at how much exercise you've had that day, what you may have been doing that day, and start to kind of see how different things are impacting how you're feeling. Which then becomes something that you can in, you know, sort of act on. And then you could also, you know, say that during the week you are logging your emotions each day and overall you log yourself being pleasant or very pleasant or perhaps even neutral. But then you get to Sunday, right? And you, something terrible happens, unfortunately. And if you didn't have this logging information, you might look back on the week and decide that it was a terrible week that, you know, oh my goodness, this week has just been against me.

(00:46:46):
I haven't had a good time. I, you know, this is going wrong, this is going wrong. But because you were logging that you can look back and go, oh, wait, no, that's just me kind of having this moment right now. But overall, this past week that I had was pretty great. I was pleasant at the very least most of the week. And so I can kind of then recontextualize and understand that it's just in the moment I'm having a down moment. And that is impacting how I am looking back at the day, thinking that, you know, it was much worse than it actually was. So, along with this, apple has included the standardized sort of assessments for anxiety and depression. These are assessments that if you've ever talked to a therapist before or a psychiatrist before will sound familiar to you.

(00:47:34):
It's like a long a scale of, of how much you've experienced this in the last two weeks versus how little you've experienced this in the past two weeks. And so every once in a while, far less frequently than than the, the the, the daily logging, you will get a prompt to fill out one of these assessments and then it kind of tells you your risk of anxiety or risk of depression to kind of give you some insight into that. So between those two things, I'm really excited to see more folks being able to make use of this. I think it's a cool feature and it was something that my therapist was like, no way that's coming soon. I was like, yeah, she was pretty pumped about that. So I, I hope that, you know, folks make use of this. The next, the next feature here is one that I think is I was surprised at how buried it was how kind of difficult it was to find and figure out how to enable, but it's one for folks who love to do stuff in their apple homes, their home kit homes that I think they'll be super pumped about. So Rosemary, given your your incredible home setup, why don't you tell us about the next and final feature we're talking about today?

Rosemary Orchard (00:48:54):
Well, the, the incredible home setup, you know, I, I do have a lot of you know, home stuff set up, but I have to say, Mikah, because of just how my, my home setup has evolved over time I have ended up with things mostly in home assistant and then being shared back into home kit rather than things being purely in, in HomeKit. So I am not as reliant on HomeKit as a number of other folks might be, but the feature that is coming in iOS 17 to the home app that a number of folks have been after for a while is history. So there's not a history for everything, okay? There's not gonna be this automation ran at this time and it was triggered by this person arriving home or whatever. But it is things like this door unlocked at this time so that you'll know, okay, this, this door was unlocked at this time because you know, of, of this reason.

(00:49:50):
And that is incredibly useful for security purposes, obviously. And I am just, you know, I've, I I have to say Mikah, I found it the other day. I'm now not finding it. So I've, I've, I've, I've lost it again because it, it's gone into hiding in my home app, which is typical. But the fact that you can go and find this inside of your, your home info so that you know when you'll, you'll see, you know, you can see when you, when things happened, it's just incredibly useful to, to try and figure out, you know, what's going on.

Mikah Sargent (00:50:25):
Yeah. So in the home app, and this is what's unclear to me. I don't know where the logs eventually show up in the home app. I can go into safety and security and then I can go into activity history and set that to one month. And then it is supposed to be logging activity history for the month. Unfortunately, I don't know, <laugh>, we don't know yet where that is. Then logged where that information,

Rosemary Orchard (00:50:56):
Well, I have just found it, Mikah. Good. The reason why I couldn't see it is because I, I didn't have many things in there. So inside of the home app so I've got the home app open here on my iPhone. And I've tapped on security specifically because I know that there's some things in security and I've just made sure that this shows up by unlocking and locking my front door, which is just outside of my office, so I can hear it open and close. And so now I can tap on the, on the home activity. And this is where it shows up. So it shows up, right? Sort of at the top inside of the security option for home activity. And so then I can see that my front door lock was unlocked by me, and then it was locked by me within the same minutes.

(00:51:33):
So I'll know that it was my fault that the door was unlocked. But this is, yeah, it's, it's, it's useful. I think this is probably more useful in multi-person homes because Apple has quite a few limitations on things that you can set up. But yeah, in safety and security, you can turn on either a month of activity history or no activity history. You can also have sound recognition enabled on various home pods for smoke detectors, which was a feature that they added in iOS 16, which if you haven't turned on, you should definitely go and do.

Mikah Sargent (00:52:01):
There you go. Well, with that, I think it's time to move along to the news. We have covered quite a few features this morning. There are loads of features packed into iOS 17, iPad OSS 17, all, you know, t v oss. But we think that, you know, you should consider checking those out. Join the public beta. Let us know if you do join the public beta what you think, what problems you run into, what and what features end up being your favorites. I'd love to hear about all of that iOS today at TWIT tv. And yeah, if there's a feature that you think is what, why didn't you mention this? We'd love to hear that too. Ios today, it twit tv. Alright, moving along to the news. I hear a rumor that airplay, which is not CarPlay, <laugh> is coming to Tesla. Why are we playing to Tesla

Rosemary Orchard (00:53:00):
<Laugh>? So Tesla have been very adamant that no, we're not doing CarPlay, we're better than CarPlay. GM are also doing the same thing, and apparently have seen record numbers of people deciding that they're not gonna buy GM cars anymore. So yeah it is what it is. Either way. There aren't that many alternatives to things in the same sort of class as a Tesla that are you know available at the same price point. So for people who have a Tesla or want a Tesla they aren't gonna get CarPlay. Now, there are some aftermarket options to try and edit. But I think what Tesla are trying to do here is go, look, we understand that you want CarPlay or you think you want CarPlay, but we know better than you. We're gonna give you airplay so that you can play your music via airplay to your car. But we're not giving you CarPlay. How, how folks feel about that is entirely up to them. I know some folks love the Tesla infotainment system and the 15 inch or 17 inch tablets built into their cars. And some folks would love to just have CarPlay. Please just give me CarPlay. It works. But either way, you're gonna get the ability to play your music via airplay, it seems.

Mikah Sargent (00:54:16):
There you go. Good <laugh>. I just think CarPlay is so great, and I think it's foolish that any

Rosemary Orchard (00:54:25):
Any, it was a requirement for me when I purchased my car. You know, I was looking at buying new cars and I was like, no, I, I want one that has CarPlay. If it doesn't have CarPlay, like I'm not connecting my phone via Bluetooth to some, like, you know, weird, sketchy system. Yes, some car manufacturer theoretically knows what they're doing. I, I work in it. I'm very aware that security is an interesting thing that a lot of companies don't put any money into. So yeah, I, I, I'd much rather trust Apple with this stuff than just trust any random car manufacturer who may or may not get it. Right.

Mikah Sargent (00:54:58):
Agreed. If you have not updated to iOS 16.6, I beg of you, please do. Apple has patched 16 security flaws two of which have been actively exploited. Meaning that they've, that security researchers have seen them being used to do nefarious things to devices. So you should be updating to the latest version of iOS 16 iPad OSS 16 tvo OSS 16 watch OSS nine, and Mac OSS 13.5 that I believe is Ventura macOS 13.5 Ventura update to the latest versions. You know, you're not gonna get a bunch of fun cool stuff, but you're going to get what we consider to be fun, cool stuff, which is a number of fixes and patches and updates that will make sure that your system is locked in and is not going to be exploited by bad actors. And by bad actors, I don't mean, you know, I almost said names and then I thought, I'm not gonna say a name. 'cause Somebody's gonna really like that actor, and then I'm gonna be in trouble for saying that they're a bad actor. So I'm talking about the bad actors, the people who whose acts are bad <laugh>. Save yourself from them, protect yourself and make sure your devices are updated. Now Rosemary, I heard, I heard a rumor that developers can now start applying to get a Vision Pro headset. Is that true?

Rosemary Orchard (00:56:40):
It is true. So developers who want the Vision Pro Developer Kit, so this is not the same Vision Pro that will land in January or early next year for consumers. This is, you know, the developer version. So it's not necessarily gonna be quite as nice though. This is Apple. So it probably will look pretty nice, but things may change between this version and the final version. But developers who wanna start developing for this stuff and want the physical hardware to test things out on are able to apply to purchase a Vision Pro, a developer kit. So you get help setting up your device and onboarding and things like that you need to submit an application for. It isn't just a, you know, you sign up, you give them some money and you get it. It is an application process which will be reviewed.

(00:57:28):
And I know a couple of developers who've signed up for it. I would love to but none of the apps that I am involved with are necessarily going to want or need to be on Vision oss and the New Vision Pro when it comes out. So I have a feeling Apple would refuse my application, and also I don't wanna take the opportunity away from somebody who's really working on something cool. I know James Thompson, the developer of Dice and Peak a has applied for it, and he's done some really amazing things with AR and VR before. So I am looking forward to hopefully fingers crossed him getting his Vision Pro headset and seeing what he comes up with, because I would really like to play with that when it arrives. So, yeah, it looks like you know, this is continuing full steam ahead, so hopefully we'll be seeing some really cool apps when that are specifically made for Vision Pro when it launches.

Mikah Sargent (00:58:19):
Now, I am concerned because I am worried that I will soon not be able to talk to you via iMessage, and that we will not be able to make FaceTime audio calls in, in, in on the show due to a threat from Apple. Rosemary, what's going on in the uk? I'm scared.

Rosemary Orchard (00:58:48):
I mean, it isn't just the uk There's a number of countries who've been there with this. And you know, they've, they've all decided that they, they would walk back on it, and the UK's the latest one to go, we're gonna try this again. And they'll probably, fingers crossed, hopefully change their mind. Essentially the UK once again has decided that for security reasons, they need a backdoor that is only for them into iMessage and FaceTime. So a backdoor into a system like this essentially means that the messages that I sent to Mikah and that Mikah sent to me are encrypted in a tiny little tunnel. Okay? It's a digital tunnel, but, you know, you can think of it like the the tunnel under the sea between the UK and France, if you prefer, you know, a nice big tunnel with lots of rock and some ocean on the outside, keeping it nice and safe.

(00:59:35):
But Mikah's got a key, and I've got a key. And so I can see what Mike has sent me. Mike can see, can see what I've sent him. And, you know, we can, we can see each other's things, but if my mom were to try and connect to that tunnel, first of all, she doesn't know where that tunnel is. You know, there's not something she can just do. And secondly, she'd need the key to be able to get to it. And those keys are just in your iPhone and iOS and so on. They're all synced through iCloud and so on between your devices, which is how come I can see messages from Micra on my Mac and my iPad as well as my iPhone. Now, the UK government has decided, once again, it wants a backdoor, which means that it wants a tiny little, you know, door into this tunnel so that it can just stick its head in and have a look and make sure everything's hunky dory.

(01:00:17):
Now, all done with the best of intentions of keeping people safe and being able to, you know appropriately you know, follow lines of inquiry and things in investigations that are ongoing. But the problem with this is it's a whole and if you think of a bag of air and you put it under water, as long as that bag of air is entirely sealed, it's safe. But if there's a tiny little pinprick, then that air's gonna start coming outta the bag, and you can put your finger over it, or you can put some tape over it, but the air is still gonna try and escape. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And essentially the back backdoor is, it's not the air trying to escape, it's the water getting into the bag instead mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and the UK government would like access to this stuff, but that means if there is a backdoor, then all of those bad actors that Mike was just mentioning that may have exploited things in the Iowas 16.5 release, which have been fixed with I 16.6, are also gonna be trying to get in there.

(01:01:16):
And so, yeah, the Apple said, look, if you do this, we're just gonna yank iMessage FaceTime. They're just gonna go away. We're just not gonna give you the option. Now this isn't, you know, this is a threat because, you know, they, they would actually have to follow through with it. But there is prior art for this. You know, apple has a specific iOS for China, which is different to the China, the iOS that you get in the rest of the world. And so I don't think this is an empty threat. I think this is a genuine case of, look, you think you know what you're doing, but you don't know what you're doing. And yeah, this is the problem with technology and politics. You have to really understand technology to understand why just putting a gate into the garden fence with a lock on it, which you have, the key means that other people will come along and pick that lock because they can.

(01:02:08):
And then some people will not just do that because they can, but do that because they want to destroy somebody's life. So, yeah, fingers crossed you know, the UK government will consult with Apple and Google and, you know meta for WhatsApp and Messenger and Instagram messages and thread and all of the stuff that they've got. And find out, you know, a better way to do what they want to do. And yeah, there, there will always be options available to them to, to get things, you know what, whether it's by having a physical device, you know of, of somebody to, to get that information or something else. But the right way isn't by making a hole. That's a really big security flaw. You know, if, if, if you want a boat, don't necessarily, you know, buy a Titanic and hit the iceberg <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (01:02:55):
All right, folks, we are gonna take a quick break before we come back with shortcuts Corner. I do wanna tell you about HelloFresh HelloFresh HelloFresh no, I love HelloFresh. And they are bringing you today's episode of iOS Today. You can take a bite outta summer with HelloFresh from chef crafted seasonal recipes to their new fresh and fit summer menu. Hellofresh brings flavor right to your door. You can get pre-portioned ingredients to help cut down on food waste while step-by-step instructions help to make cooking a breeze and not a chore. That's so important for me because I just, I need, I would just eat the same exact thing every day. If I didn't have something like this that was encouraging me, you know, it's not a chore. It's gonna be great. It'll be fine. We'll work through this. I really like making food, but I just rarely have the sort of gumption to make that happen.

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And then pork sausage and bell pepper risotto, wooy doofy. I wanna try all of this. And what I love is that almost all of the steps are like six steps. <Laugh>. They're not incredibly difficult to do. Look, six steps here. And then let's see this Tuscan pork tenderloin. There's just one more step in this one. Yeah, it's fantastic. You can make some delicious meals. I've made some delicious meals from HelloFresh that I ended up, you know, saving some of those recipe cards so I could try to remake it on my own because they were so good and so easy to do. I've been very happy with HelloFresh. Hellofresh is America's number one meal kit. Go to hellofresh.com/ios 50 and use Code iOS 50 for 50% off, plus free shipping. That is a ridiculous deal, half off and free shipping. That's hellofresh.com/ios 50. Use the code iOS 50 to get 50% off. I'm not saying 15, I'm saying 50 50 half off. Plus free shipping. Check out hellofresh.com/ios 50 with the promo code iOS 50. And we thank HelloFresh for sponsoring this week's episode of iOS Today. Alright, we are back from the break, and I can hear that music. It's time for Shortcuts Corner.

(01:07:08):
This is the part of the show where you write in with your shortcuts corner requests. And Rose Mary Orchard, our shortcuts expert, provides a response mea culpa. Last week, the episode was prerecorded hard to believe. That was just last week. And so we had two Davids who had asked for Shortcuts corner requests. And the second David who wrote in who ended their shortcuts corner request with German, that Rosemary thankfully read happened to have a pet tax payment that we missed. So it is now time to show the pet tax from, oh my goodness, from second David. We have a small, adorable golden and white dog that is wearing a harness with a nice little rope leash leading from the dog. A kind of incredible mane that's giving not Freddie Mercury. Who am I thinking of? Simba? A little bit. Simba, but I was thinking of David Bowie as Ziggy Starship or Ziggy Stardust. Stardust. Thank you. Wow. Ziggy Starship. Hmm. Ziggy Stardust. And I absolutely love, love the look here. What a cute dog.

Rosemary Orchard (01:08:26):
Yes, yes. This, this Lulu and David Ley forgot to send the picture of Lulu along with the

Mikah Sargent (01:08:31):
Request. Oh. So we didn't miss it. Okay,

Rosemary Orchard (01:08:32):
Good. Well, I mean, it, it came in in between times. So yeah, I thought I would include it for today. So thank you for that, David. We greatly appreciate Lulu, and hopefully your, your your answer or the answer that I gave was helpful for you as well. So, yeah, here

Mikah Sargent (01:08:48):
We go. Yes. with that, here is the shortcuts Corner request for today that comes in from G James. James G. James writes, loving the show, never miss one. Thank you. I have a problem with my ISPs mail server. Occasionally it will choke on an email and not download it, and all subsequent emails until the blockage is removed. I've created a script that runs on my ISPs shell access server that moves the offending email out of my mail spool. But it requires more step to run, excuse me. It requires more steps to run in Terminus and otherwise good Ss s h app than I'd like. I've had to do this more frequently, as of late, three times in two days. And switching ISPs is not an option, says g James, do you know of an alternative SS s h app that can be used with shortcuts to connect to a server and run one command remotely? It does need to be an iPhone app. And G James has paid the pet tax with both Colin and Quentin which we will see now, oh, two kitties. I don't know which one is Colin and which one is Quentin. But they, there's a, a, they're adorable, completely black cat or a nearly completely black cat. And then a what, what we call that gray and white or blue and white maybe cat. And there's, they're sleepy, sleepy babies. <Laugh>,

Rosemary Orchard (01:10:12):
They're adorable, sleepy babies. And yeah, so, so this is an interesting question. So essentially what James or g James needs to do is talk to that computer, the I s P mail server. And that just needs to be done via text. You don't have to go sit at the physical computer to be able to do something, you just have to talk to it. And there's already a script on the server, which is brilliant. So we don't have to deal with all of that. And so I had a look, and to start with, I actually have a recommendation in Terminus for James, because turns out that Terminus among other s ss H apps supports a number of features including snippets. So a snippet essentially is I, it's a, a, a command or thing that I want to remember.

(01:10:58):
So I've put a little snippet in here and then I can tap on my snippet. Okay? So I created my snippet earlier. And if I tap on select, then I can go into that and then I can edit it. And so I can set it up so it's got the script in there, which is the command that I need to run when I've, when I'm connected to that computer or server. And then if I had Pro, then I could upgrade to Pro and, and specifically set a target. But I don't have the pro because I only set this up today, and I just wanted to try it out. So I've created my snippet. I can tap on the snippet, and now I can tap on the computer I wanna talk to, and I can even say close sessions after running.

(01:11:34):
So I can just set it up so that, you know, I, it just does this. So I log in and then it runs it. Now this command's actually not really gonna do anything here, because there, there is no Docker compose file on the route. But you know, it's that is a starting point because there are a number of options in shortcuts. And it's really good that you've, you've asked this James, because actually you're looking for an app, but did you know that shortcuts can actually do things by S s H itself? And it works on the iPhone, it works on the Mac, it works everywhere. And so the scripting section has run script over SS s h Okay? So this is exactly what you're looking for. You can type your script in here. You can put your, your host in that's the, the computer.

(01:12:20):
So probably the IP address of the computer. You can specify the user. You can authenticate via a password over an SS s h key. Nice. and you can, you can choose you know, your s s H key. You can create a specific one or you know that you, you basically, you only create them, you can't import them into shortcuts. And then you can even give it some give your scripts some input if you need to. So from somewhere else, like, I dunno if I needed to run a script on another computer, but I was running it because my current calendar events that, that I was recording iOS today, then I could you know, give it the iOS today you know, event title for example. So this is another option, which I mean, if you don't like the term use option or you just wanna try this out, it's free.

(01:13:11):
It's building shortcuts. It's fabulous. And then I do have another recommendation as well because this is one of my favorite applications. I use it all the time, and it's called Secure Shellfish. Yes. so shellfish as in, you know, fish that have shells and secure Shellfish is actually as well as an s s H application. So it allows you to connect into the computer and, you know, talk to it via terminal. It also provides SS F T P support, so it then appears in files and in finder on the Mac. And so it's in files on your iPhone and your iPad, and it allows all of those servers to show up so that you can easily, you know, transfer files back and forth if you need to. But you can also start an SS s h session via shortcuts with with secure shellfish.

(01:14:01):
So that is another option. And Secure Shellfish also has snippets just like Terminus does. So I will just quickly pop into one of my machines, which hopefully is plugged in and therefore running. So there we go. My home server. So it's taken me straight into, or it should be taking me straight into a folder. I believe I have messed things up by breaking, I was, I was playing with some stuff earlier today, so it's probably not working right now. But yeah, you can usually connect to things. Let's just try this server instead. There we go. And then there's a little paste button above my keyboard, and if I tap and hold on that, then it gives me the options to either insert a password or show my snippets, and then I can just paste any of my snippets in.

(01:14:49):
And your snippets can be as long as you like. So you can have lots of things in there. So hopefully this will give you an idea of what you can do. James personally I would probably go with the native shortcuts action or secure shellfish. But I would like to remind everybody that the scripting actions in shortcuts are pretty wide ranging. You know, there's, there's all sorts of options. So go have, have a little look, maybe changing your playback destination or getting your hotspot password, or actually being able to intercom to one of your home pods and speak a message would be something that tickles your fancy. So, yeah, have a, have a look, you know, turning your always on display on and off at certain times, that could be very useful. It's worth investigating the scripting options because they range from, you know, playing with you know counting and things like that, all the way up to talking to a computer by terminal.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:45):
All right. I think we'll have to move feedback and questions to next week because we are running out of time today. So I guess that means cue the music for our rap caps.

(01:16:04):
This is the part of the show where we place caps to top our heads to honor our app and Gadget picks of the week. These are the apps and gadgets we are using now, or have used it some time that we, let me adjust that so it doesn't touch my microphone, <laugh>, that we want to share with all of you because we think they're great and to show how great we think they are. We put these hats or caps or other things atop our heads. Rosemary Orchard, tell us about the cap at top of your head, and then tell us about your app or Gadget pick of the week.

Rosemary Orchard (01:16:37):
Well, the cap at top of my head, it's a hat. It's specifically a straw boater. It is a lovely light straw color. It's not actually white. It's sort of a beige off white color. It's got a black band around it, and there's like a little bow on the side. It's a very flat sort of bow, but there is a bow there, I promise. And my pick of the week is it's an accessory fruit gadget, because most of us now who are here with iOS today have probably got at least one air tag in your life. And I know quite a few folks like to have useful utility tools on their keyring because it, you never know when you need a screwdriver or something like that, but you don't want anything that's gonna get you into trouble with T ss a or anything like that.

(01:17:16):
And if you're carrying an air tag as well, it gets big and bulky, or you could turn your air tag holder into a multi-tool. And this is the pataka air tag holder. So, pka do a couple of well, they do a lot of very cool things. I've been investigating some of their options, but this is specifically the PTA tag for multi-tool. So in the back, it's got an air tag and I can easily get at the air tag by just rotating that front cover, and then I can push through from the back to, to get at the air tag and, and take it out so I can change the battery easily enough when I need to. And this also means that if I need to hold this in a particular way to be able to use one of the multi tools, which maybe I might need to I could.

(01:17:59):
So going around from the top these are a little difficult to get out on camera. There is a tiny, tiny, tiny blade. This is what like, I don't know, a centimeter long. It's perfect for like slicing open like packages or something. You're not gonna be cutting down a tree with this <laugh>, but if you're looking for that sort of thing, probably don't want a multi tool to be honest. And then after that, there is a tiny little hex head screwdriver which, you know, I've, I've actually used for a couple of things recently. The bottom one is left empty so that you don't have things all the way around scratching up your stuff. And then we have a crosshead screwdriver, a little one. And then finally around at the top we have a flood headed screwdriver.

(01:18:40):
And this can just be, you know, really handy for, you know, like, oh, I just needed to, you know take apart this piece of IKEA furniture that I purchased in you know, in the bargaining corner that I wasn't planning on purchasing, and therefore I don't have a screwdriver with me, for example. So yeah, it's worth considering the inside of the Air Airtech holder. It's got like a little sort of rubbery bit, which is cushioned. So if I press on it and then move my finger out of the way, it, it, it, it comes back kind of slowly, so it gives it a little bit of cushioning. It's foam it's, it's not foam. It's actually just like an air pocket, but it's really well constructed. So that because the idea is that you put the silver side of your air tag in facing that because the, the speaker is on the other side that's on the white side.

(01:19:26):
And then that just cushions it so that it's not gonna, you know, like the battery is gonna be protected somewhat from impact and things like that. And yeah, this is not necessarily lightest, but I have to say it comes with this spinning sort of keying that it's attached to. So it won't go, oh, that's nice. It won't go around that it spins. But it will rotate freely on that. And then this metal ring at the top, it's not a traditional, like split keying. Instead it's got a hinged section so that you can easily clip it on. Like if your bag's got an O-ring in, those of us who are Tom Bin fans can clip them into our bags. You know, 'cause we've got O-rings there, or you can clip it on like a zipper pool or something. But yeah, it's, it's a nice little option.

Mikah Sargent (01:20:07):
A bonus if you pull out all four tools at once. It looks like a little person. So it's a little friend. It does, it does. It's like arms are sticking out and its legs are sticking out. <Laugh>, I'm looking at the photos on the, the website. I saw the,

Rosemary Orchard (01:20:19):
No, I, I really love this. Now I picked this up on Amazon. They had it on sale a little while ago. It is currently not available in US Amazon. It is available in UK Amazon, but you can also get it directly from I pataka. That's P I T A K a dot com. And yeah, it's 59.99 at full price. Though as I mentioned, I, I did get on sales, so keep an eye out for sales. And it comes in black or black. So there's, there's plenty of options there, but they also do another one, which is a U S B C cable which holds your iPhone as well, which may be worth considering. Oh, that's interesting. You're looking for more practical multi-purpose holders for those tracking devices that you usually keep with you. Anyway, so yeah, this is the Pitta tag for multitool pka Air Tag Holder.

Mikah Sargent (01:21:06):
Sweet. I am going to have to get one of those. Those are very cool. I am wearing a, I would call this like an Australian outback hat. This is what I think of. It's got the one side that's folded up on the side and the, the leather thong that goes around it to that, you can wear it around your neck and kind of looks like an Indiana Jones hat. So again, Australian outback hat. Now the app that I wanna talk about today is called quick notes. Email me or email me for short. And this is for folks who like to email themselves for reminders. So not this, this app is not super for me, but I have, every time I've talked about how I send text messages to myself, like I have an ongoing thread with myself then I get feedback from folks who say, oh, I do that.

(01:21:55):
I just do it in email. And so I thought this app would be great for that. But I want to quickly give a shout out. There was a listener who heard me talking about how I text myself and how it's annoying that in iOS it does not want you to text yourself. And so you are never given as a suggestion in the like, bubbles that pop up. And on top of that, when you type in a contact if you start to type your own name, it will suggest every possible other thing before it actually suggests you because it thinks that you don't want to send a message to yourself.

Rosemary Orchard (01:22:30):
Did you ever consider a shortcut?

Mikah Sargent (01:22:31):
I was gonna say, I was about to say before, Rosemary says, says it, but she already said it can all be solved by shortcuts. I know, but I'm stubborn. And so there was a tip that someone gave me a long time ago. They just added a contact in their phone, called me and put their phone number into it. And that works. Or you can use a shortcut anyway. So if you are someone who emails yourself, this is a great app where, first of all, you put in your email and from then on you can send yourself messages. And it's very simple, like the app pops up, it can have the text ready to go or the, the, the space ready to go. And I'm just gonna copy some text real quick and paste this in here some mip some, and then I just hit send and it's sent off.

(01:23:16):
I just felt the vibration so show telling me that it got sent off. And I'm sure that if I check my email, I will. Yes, I just saw an email come in from email me. They put the subject in based on the first text that I sent, and then sent it to the email that I have popped in. So I'm gonna put that text back. This time I'm going to add in a photo that I take live here of the studio. And so there we can use that photo that gets popped in. And then I'm also going to choose a photo from my app. And then I will choose send, and then I will wait for it to vibrate. I just vibrated. And then I'll check my email app again. And this time it pops up and it has two photos as attachments.

(01:24:10):
And then lastly I can also record. Hello there. I just needed to send this quick message to remind myself to bring a hat for next week. Don't forget to bring a hat for next week, and then I can stop that recording. I can listen back if I want to to see what that sounds like. It records the file as a I think it's a, let's see, I think it's a wave file if I remember correctly. And then I could, I could put a message in there if I wanted to. But let's go into the settings here. So you can choose multiple emails to add if you'd like. Set up a special theme. I just have the original theme selected. And then we will use device settings for dark mode. So it can go into dark mode.

(01:24:57):
You can change the app icon. And then in advanced configuration, here's some kind of cool things. You choose where from where it's sent. You could also have it so that when you launch the app, it automatically starts an audio recording if that's how you prefer to send the messages. You can automatically have it paste whatever text is on your clipboard into the message. You can add a page title. If you send a link you can allow it to send blank emails if you'd like. Display the number of unsent emails in the app icon. So if you know, you're not connected to something to send those via the outbox you can. And then as you'll notice down here at the bottom sounds and vibrate that is the option to have it make a sound when it sends and also vibrate when it sends.

(01:25:39):
I have that set to send. What's great is that there's also transcript processing for the message. So when I send this one off when that pops up in my email app here in just a moment not only will it have the text, but it also has the transcript record. Hello there. I just needed to send this quick message to remind myself to bring a hat for next week. Don't forget to bring a hat for next week. And then below is the MP three. So what is an MP three? Not a Wave file. Up at the top right is the outbox and the scent option. So it shows you kind of what you've sent. And that's it. It's a very simple app. But it is a great app for just quickly sending things to your email. It works on the Apple Watch as well.

(01:26:28):
And you can send to one email with the free version of the app. I believe it does limit whether like it, you can't send high quality audio and you can't send full quality photos if you use the free version. But if you upgrade to the paid version it's $30 if you wanna buy a lifetime subscription, which, and it's not a subscription, it's just you pay it once. It's 1999 a year or a dollar 99 a month. And you can get this app and be able to use it in full I forgot it's also an iPad. So yeah, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch. A great app for folks who do email themselves. So yes, check out quick notes, email me and that is my app cap for the week. Folks iOS today at twit tv is the email you want to send messages to feedback questions and concerns, shortcuts, corner requests, all that magic, all that jazz goes to iOS today at twit tv of course, we're also available in other places.

(01:27:36):
We, you know, try to pay attention to all the ways that you might be asking us stuff. We record this show live every Tuesday at 12:00 PM Eastern 9:00 AM Pacific, which is 1600 utc. You just go to twit tv slash live to watch the show live on YouTube, live on Twitch, and all the places where we stream the show live. But the best way to get the show is by subscribing to the show or following the show. Not only because that means you'll get it as soon as it's done, edited, beautiful put together, but also because that lets the folks who are making all of this possible, our sponsors know that you are out there, that you're listening, that you care about the stuff that we are making for you. So please subscribe to the show Audio and video formats at twit tv slash iOS.

(01:28:22):
You'll see the option to subscribe to audio or video. You can choose Apple Podcast, Google podcast, Spotify, YouTube, Plano, r ss s if that's what you want. Those are all there. And if you'd like to get ad free versions of every single show, including this one, well join the club. And that's not like a well join the club. No. Join the club at twit tv slash club twit for $7 a month, starting at $7 a month or $84 a year. You can join the club. And when you do, you get ad free versions of every single twit show. You get access to the twit plus bonus fee that has extra content you won't find anywhere else. Yeah, it's got behind the scenes before the show, after the show. Special Club TWIT events all get published there and access to the members only Discord server.

(01:29:04):
A fun place to go to chat with your fellow club TWIT members and also those of us here at twit. We have live events all the time that are in the club, so you can hang out, check those out. It's so much fun. Starting at $7 a month, I say that not because it's like a tiered thing where you get more as you go up, but because some people say, Hey, we'd like to give you some more money 'cause you keep adding new great stuff. So how do we go about doing that? Well, you can choose to pay more than $7 a month, but it starts at that TWI tv slash club twit. Join the club. You're gonna get access to some great shows that are club twit exclusives. There's the Untitled Linux Show, which is a show all about Linux. You'll get access to Paul RA's Hands on Windows program, a short format show that covers windows, tips and tricks. You'll get access to my Hands on Mac program, which covers Apple tips and tricks. You'll also get access to Home Theater Geeks, which recently relaunched in the club with the delightful and Jolly Scott Wilkinson. And a new show coming soon from Jason Howell that covers ai. All of that is only available in the club. TWI tv slash club twi. Please join Rosemary Orchard. If folks wanna follow you online and check out all the great work you're doing, where should they go to do so?

Rosemary Orchard (01:30:07):
Well, the best place to go is rosemary orchard.com, which has links to podcasts, apps, books, et cetera that I am involved with around the internet. Of course you can also find me in that club tweet discord and you can find me on various social media accounts. Also linked for my website and primarily at Mastodon at the moment, which is Rosemary at Snail It Social. What about you Mikah?

Mikah Sargent (01:30:28):
You can find me at Mikah Sargent on many at Social Media Network where you can to Chi wawa.coffee, that's C h i h u A H U o Coffee where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Although I keep forgetting I need to add threads. Maybe I'll do that today 'cause I am on threads at Mikah Sargent. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope you are inspired, or in some cases you were inspired to download the public beta to help test out Apple Software to help make it better for all of us. And at the very least, you got to see some new features in action, which is something we'd love to be able to do here for you on i o ss today. Thanks so much and we will catch you next week for another episode of iOS Today. Bye-Bye.

Scott Wilkinson (01:31:09):
Hey there, Scott Wilkinson here in Case you hadn't heard, home Theater Geeks is Back. Each week I bring you the latest audio, video news, tips and tricks to get the most out of your AV system product reviews and more you can enjoy home Theater geeks only if you're a member of Club Quip, which costs seven bucks a month. Or you can subscribe to Home Theater Geeks by itself for only 2 99 a month. I hope you'll join me for a weekly dose of home theater Geek.