iOS Today 673 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 is out, but don't worry because Christopher Lolly has agreed to join me today and we have a lot to talk about because it's time to discuss interactive widgets from iOS apps. Stay tuned, podcasts you love from people you trust.

TWiT (00:00:21):
This is TWI tweet.

Mikah Sargent (00:00:26):
This is iOS today, episode 673 with Micah Sergeant and Christopher Lolly. Recorded Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023. iOS apps with interactive widgets. Welcome back to iOS Today, the show where we talk all things iOS, tv v, oss, watch, oss, HomePod, oss, iPad, oss. Did I say that one? Yeah. There are lots of operating systems to talk about and we do our best to discuss all of them on this show and the various apps and services and settings and features and tips and tricks that you need to make sure you're making the most of those devices you have. There's a new iPhone out, there's a new operating system out, and so there are lots of features to unpack and discuss and I am very pumped to be doing that today. I of course am one of your hosts, Micah Sargent, and today I am joined across the vastness of the internet by my co-host Christopher Lolly. Welcome back to the show, Christopher.

Christopher Lawley (00:01:29):
Hey, thanks for having me on. I'm excited to chat with you about all the stuff we have lined up today. It's going to be a good one.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:36):
You are a consummate professional and what was fantastic is I had asked you a while back if you would be willing to join me on the show, and I messaged you ahead of today's episode and said, Hey, I'm thinking about doing interactive widgets today, and lo and behold, you had already worked on a video for this very thing and so had some different suggestions. So let me give you a moment to tell people where they can go to watch that video and more from you.

Christopher Lawley (00:02:10):
Yeah, absolutely. So I just did a bunch of videos a couple of weeks ago about big old iPad OSS walkthrough, iOS walkthrough watch, OSS walkthrough reminders, notes, and a video all about interactive widgets as well, and you can find them all on my channel. You could just search for Christopher Lolly, l a w l e y. You can also go to my website, the Untitled site, and there is a about tab there that has links to all of my stuff, including my YouTube channel. I'm all over the place, but yeah, you can find all of that stuff. There are some widgets in that video that I don't think we're going to get to today just because I covered a lot in that video. So there's interesting stuff all around.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:53):
Absolutely, yes, everyone go there, subscribe, check it out. But let's kick things off today talking about a viral darling when it comes to widgets in general, but now that there are interactive widgets, I have to tell you I was not aware of just how powerful, or I guess I hadn't considered the potential that Interactive Widgets could have when they were paired with an app called Widget Smith. Tell us about Widget Smith.

Christopher Lawley (00:03:29):
Yeah, so this was the app I thought of when Interactive Widgets were announced. In fact, we were sitting, in fact, I was sitting directly in front of David Smith, the developer of this, and I think you were sitting right around us or you were sitting next to me, I don't even remember now, but we were sitting in the same area as him and the whole time I'm like, okay, he's nerding now. Right now he's excited and what Widget Smith does, I'm going to cut over to my iPad screen here. There's a bunch of widgets, but my absolute favorite one is this new music widget. It brings cover flow, cover flow from iTunes. It's on the iPad now. So what's cool about this is the way you can configure it, I'll show it you in just a second, but you can click on various different albums and it will cycle through them and then you can click on it again to start playing.

(00:04:16):
Now, I'm not going to start playing this because I don't want you guys to get a copyright strike or any sort of D m a takedown or whatever, but you would just click on this again or tap on it again in order to get this. But we can go into the actual app here and there's a whole bunch of different options in here, but we'll start with the cover flow. This is I have set up as a medium widget. You can go in and you can add different collections of music in here. I have my favorites mix, my Apple Music radio station. I miss emo playlist because I'm total emo kid and a pop punk playlist in here. Unfortunately it looks like I just found a bug so that it's doing some weird things with the album artwork. But yeah, you can hit plus and you can add more stuff to it if you wish.

(00:05:03):
You can even come in here to options. Now, one of the ones that I find the most interesting about this Cover Flow widget is by default it is set to play music using the Widget Smith app. If you're using Apple Music, switch that over to the music app. This means the now playing controls through control center or if you use the Music Widget app, or I'm sorry, the music widget or whatever else that pairs into music, you can now use those together because it's just streaming music or it's playing music from the music app. I also have shuffled on, and by default it's on these nice square looking icons, but I put 'em on these slight curvy ones to me too to kind of make it look a little bit more like app icons and then you can have this mirrored effect. It literally adds nothing, but it just makes it look like classic cover flow, which is I am guessing you and I, Micah, I think we've talked about this in the past on one of the podcasts, but you and I got into Apple stuff around the same time I believe. So Cover Flow was like peak us getting into Apple.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:05):
Yes, exactly.

Christopher Lawley (00:06:07):
Yeah, and Widget Smith has a bunch of other stuff. They have interactive photo widgets, that's me and my niece right there. What's cool about this is you can set them up to do different things, so you can set this up to be a drawer, so you can click on it and it will open up into a different widget, so it could be the time you pick the alternative widget right here, there's an interactive calendar widget where you can click the various days to see your different dates. There's even a tile based game that's kind of similar to threes that you can play right from the home screen. There's so much cool stuff in Widget Smith. I'll just click in here. There's an interactive tab right here. It's the finger icon. These are all the interactive widgets it has. There's a lot in here, lot to play with, but if there's one in particular that you should play with, it's the cover flow music widget because it's genius.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:00):
I agree. I also, yeah, the drawer one that you mentioned, just the idea that it can be a photo and then you switch it to something that is helpful to you for a moment and then it can go back. I want that in real life. I want this calendar I have on my wall, so you'll be able to tap it and just turn it into just a photograph and then I tap it again. I guess there are ways to make that happen. I'm thinking of Amazon devices or an iPad or something, but

Christopher Lawley (00:07:27):
Oh, my mind immediately went to getting a touchscreen device, hooking up a Raspberry Pot. I'm fully taking over the Rosemary Orchard seat this week and I'm just like,

Mikah Sargent (00:07:39):
What could be done? So Widget Smith is available, I believe it's now available as a free download with in-app purchases, so you can get it in the app store for free and then you pay a dollar 99 a month or 1999 a year to gain access to the more premium features. But what I think is so amazing about Widget Smith, even outside of the new interactive widgets is that this was the first app I saw that finally convinced people that it was worth it to, when I say people, I mean sort of the general, the general population that it is worth paying something for the apps that we have. I love that Games obviously don't count because a lot of people do those little in-app purchases for games, but I can remember some different viral things that had taken place, like the AI photos that with profile photos, and I had family members asking me, how do you do that?

(00:08:47):
And I explained and then, oh, it costs $4 or whatever it was. Oh yeah, and then different apps. What app do you use for this? Oh, well it costs a dollar 99, so Widget Smith, being able to push past that I thought was pretty fantastic. So congratulations to underscore on a, I think, incredible addition to the app. Now, another app that I think is popular among the nerds but is something that anyone might be able to find useful if they take the time to dig in is launcher and I am very curious to see Christopher, how you are using Launcher, especially with interactive widget support.

Christopher Lawley (00:09:30):
Yeah, so Launcher got a few really cool updates including support for building folders inside the widget. I was just looking for my demo of that and it looks like I deleted that. So unfortunately I don't have a demo of that one ready to go, but I will show you how I've been using Launcher and I've actually been using it with standby Now for those watching the video, I have my iPad on the screen. I don't have my iPhone, so you'll just have to imagine standby, but I have this widget set up right here, play music to Home Pods and what this does is it runs a shortcut. So this whole widget I have set up, it's in standby mode and the only thing it does is it run. Nope, nope, nope. Don't do that. Don't do that. Cancel, cancel, stop. I didn't think it was going

Mikah Sargent (00:10:21):
To that music. That's okay. Yeah,

Christopher Lawley (00:10:22):
It was going to play my emo music to the home pods that are three feet away from me. Okay, I caught it in time though. We're good. Okay. Alright. So what this would normally do is this would just show the widget on my iPhone when it's in standby and just tapping that one button. What it'll do is it will play, it'll play my Apple Music radio station to all the home pod sets I have in my house. I can pull up that shortcut here, let me grab that. Basically the way this works is let me close out city in here. It plays my Apple Music radio station. It sets my office pods as the destination, it adds my bedroom home pods as playback destination and it adds my kitchen home pods as my playback destination. And between those three I can get music playing throughout the whole house.

(00:11:13):
No matter where you are with those three, you can hear it. So it's kind of a nice way to just quickly get music playing throughout the whole house. I have my phone in standby all the time, especially when I'm sitting at my desk. So it's nice to be able to just reach down, hit a button. There is a limitation with this because it has to go out of standby, you have to hit the button and then there's another icon that appears that's this arrow pointing out. You hit that and then it launches the app, which will then run the shortcut, but there is no shortcuts widget for standby, so this is kind of a way to get around that.

Mikah Sargent (00:11:46):
Okay, cool. And launcher, I mean it's constantly getting new kind of and features and settings that allow it to do all sorts of things. There's so much you could do with it. We could do a whole episode on it. Yeah, it was one of the first with the N F C stuff, they did a really great thing there where you could use N F C to kind of tap and have launch or do something. It works with live activities as well. So if you have just upgraded into a phone that has the dynamic island, this is a great opportunity to kind of try out some of the live activities, widgets that are live activities. They're not widgets live activities. It's very impressive what this app is capable of doing and is certainly extensible upon your experience. Now one of my favorite editions, and I've talked a lot about this on the show, is the addition of interactive widgets for home.

(00:12:53):
Because Siri has in the past disappointed me so many times. I am not a person that uses Siri to control my home or pretty much do anything. It is very rarely that I ever use Siri outside of the car and even in the car I do my best to avoid using it. And so I like to have the physical control to be able to do whatever it is that I need to do and before I would swipe down from control center and then maybe launch the home app or hope that it would properly show the right button in the control center for the thing that I was trying to do with the home. It was a mess before. Now all I have to do is while my phone is in lock screen mode, I can just swipe over. I can tap to turn on or off.

(00:13:49):
The different lights that I use regularly or trigger specific scenes that I need to use right now can see that If you're not watching, if you're just listening, I have the home widget at the top of my iPhone and in the bottom right corner, the office key light is sort of lit up. That tile is lit up and if I tap on that tile, it will turn off one of the lights that's in front of me. So you will see the screen get darker and then brighten up again afterward and there's no delay. It works the same as if I was in the home app itself. So I have found the Home widget, the interactive home widget to be a very handy addition that I definitely make lots of use of. If there's anything you want to say about the home widget, you can, otherwise we should talk about, oh yeah, go ahead please. It's not even the, so I

Christopher Lawley (00:14:50):
Have upgrade to the home widget for you. This app is called Home Widget, but think of it more as Home Widget Plus. You'll see right here on my screen if you're watching the video, if not, it looks very similar to the Home widget. You can control scenes, you can toggle lights just like you can on the normal Home Widget app, but this app, which is called Home Widget, not to be mistaken with the widget for the home app, but this app Home widget can do more than just toggle lights and scenes and stuff like that. So the actual home app, the built-in home app is limited. You can't open up cameras or anything to see live streams. You can't really, if you toggle a thermostat, it opens into the app. You can't toggle anything right from there. So Home Widget, the third party app allows you, I can toggle my thermostat on and off from right here without going into the app.

(00:15:50):
I can also tap on one of my cameras here and it will open an app, but it'll go right into there and you can see Sally the Mustang right there, and boom, there's my garage, my very messy garage. But yeah, so this is kind of like Home widget or the widget for the Home App Pro, but what's even cooler is we can go into the app, not the Home Depot app, the home widget, and you can come in here, you can set up different sizes. Another benefit of this app is that the home, the widget for the first party home app, the one that's built in only comes in a small and medium size. This now has a home widget. The third party app has a large and extra large version if you want those as well. You can also come in here and you can change the background. If you're baked into theming, you can change the color, you can make it red, orange, whatever. I just make my black because I keep everything in dark mode. So this one has a lot more options than the built in home widget app, the built-in home app, which gosh, these names. But yeah, it's tough. Anyways, if you're looking for something that just goes a little bit further than the Home Apps widget, home widget, the third party app is a good get for that

Mikah Sargent (00:17:11):
Folks, we will have a link in the show notes that will get you to the home widget for HomeKit app, which is separate from the widget for the home app from Apple. It is available for free with a monthly subscription of 49 cents, an annual subscription of 4 99, or you can buy the lifetime license for 10 bucks.

Christopher Lawley (00:17:37):
Yeah, I just bought that lifetime one. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:17:39):
Definitely.

Christopher Lawley (00:17:40):
Yeah, it's so worth it

Mikah Sargent (00:17:41):
Easy and I like that it's also available on Mac OS as well. So it's designed for iPad, so it's an iPad app that you can use on the Mac, but that leads me to believe that I could probably do the widgets on Mac OSS Sonoma with it. I'll have to try that. Yeah, you

Christopher Lawley (00:17:57):
Could use iPhone widgets on True Mac os Sonoma. Now I still have an installed Sonoma, so I don't know how it works, but I'm the iPad guy. I don't worry about Mac OSS

Mikah Sargent (00:18:07):
In the betas. The iPhone widget experience on the Mac was not great and so I've had it turned off and I've yet to turn it back on. So once again, it ends up being one of those if you mess up too much, it was messy for a long time. None of it would update. Yeah, so I thought I'm just not going to use the iPhone app, iPhone widgets because I like the widgets that are available to me on Mac OS itself. Now moving right along. The next option is one that people are probably tired of hearing me talk about because this is my calendar app. It has been for forever and will continue to be. It is fantastical. And what is cool about Fantastical I think is that even before Interactive Widgets came along, fantastical had a really delightful means of providing functionality with the widget, the limited widget experience. You could essentially tell it, I want when I tap on your widget to do this, this or this, and then it would, whenever it felt the tap properly go to the page that if you're trying to start a new task or if you were adding an event or whatever it happened to be, it would go to that. But the idea of being able to add even more interaction to fantastical is pretty fan. Darn it. See, you didn't want me to make the pun is pretty fantastic.

(00:19:50):
I was like, no, no, no, you're going to choke instead. Yeah. So tell us about the updates to Fantastical. I'm assuming this is your calendar app of choice as well.

Christopher Lawley (00:20:04):
Yeah, so I love Fantastical. It recently got a very big price increase, so I've been debating if I still need it because I don't do a ton with my calendar, but it's very, very good and the new widget is making it even better. So with interactive widgets now there's still the traditional old widgets that you could use that just show your upcoming appointment. But then there's this new widget which gives you a calendar on the left and actually I think this was in there, but it's updated now. So there's a calendar monthly calendar on the left and then your appointments on the right, you can use the arrows at the top to jump between months. You can also click on specific dates to see your appointments and what's really cool is the dates are heat mapped, so the darker the dates, so yellow being light and then red being heavy, that shows how many, if you have a ton of appointments.

(00:21:00):
So this particular day, technically I only have one thing, but then there's two formula one thing. So it thinks I'm a lot busier than when I actually am, but no, so I thought that was really cool that you can just click around, you can see which date it has the heat map, which is really nice. I particularly like that a lot. You can see from my calendar, I don't have a ton going on. I don't use my calendar for a lot, but I keep a calendar widget on my home screen because I don't use it a lot. I don't open up my calendar app very often and I was finding I was missing appointments. So having a calendar widget right on the home screen is just kind of a nice reminder of, oh hey, I got to record iOS today. Today,

Mikah Sargent (00:21:43):
Yes, I live and die by my calendar. And so having fantastical there and with a little bit more available is very handy. It's something I've got to have frankly. So it's quite nice. Alright, that is the first little bit of apps with interactive widgets. We will of course have even more in just a moment.

Ad (00:22:10):
Escape into the old world with the ZO Pay Family Circus. Join us at Redwood Empire Fair this October for over 175 years, the ZO Pay Circus has been delighting families with their one ringing circus starring Nino the clown. The circus features acrobatic beats, equestrian showmanship, canine capers, clowning, and plenty of audience participation. The circus will be at Redwood Empire Fair, October 1st through the ninth, bring yourself and your family to the ZO Italian Family Circus under the one ring European big top for an immersive two hour long circus production, family packages and discount tickets available online in advance. Only book your Italian family circus experience today. For tickets and more information, visit xpe.net.

Mikah Sargent (00:22:51):
Alright, we are talking about interactive widgets for iOS. And look, we've been talking about some very serious widgets. They are powerful. They are all about saving time. They're all about productivity. They're all about making sure you get to your appointments. In some cases playing music, but what is an iPhone, if not something that can help me be distracted from what's going on around me? And now you can do so on your home screen, your lock screen with games. What honestly, congratulations on finding this. I had no idea this was out there,

Christopher Lawley (00:23:36):
So this is pretty cool. I'm going to switch over here. There is a bundle that you can get with a whole bunch of different games, tic-Tac Toe Connect four, and I'm using the real names, but I think they go by a generic name. Checkers my personal favorite, Minesweeper, and I forget what this is called. Honestly, I don't even know what the point of this game is. I forget what it's called. But anyways, there's a bunch of games. There's a few different developers that have done this. There's also Pixel Pals just put a full game in a widget as well. So there's a ton of games out there that are widgets. Kind of like a fun thing just to have on your home screen while you're swiping by. You can make a move. Oh, I lost, I found a mine.

(00:24:24):
Hit the wrong button. But yeah, no, it's really cool that developers have been thinking about, Hey, more than just seeing your next appointment or task or something like that. There are options in here for just playing games, having fun. These are on my home screen right now for demo purposes, but once I finish up this recording, they will get deleted Because of my A D H D, I will just sit here sweeping mines all day long and won't get anything done. So if you don't have a D H D, you don't get distracted easily and you just want something fun to fidget with. These are good widgets to fidget with

Mikah Sargent (00:25:06):
Indeed. And as they are available on iOS and iPad oss, they are also available on Mac oss. So you can have those widgets right there on the home screen to play with them, or I guess the desktop to play with as well, which yeah, I'm going to keep these off of my phone. Yeah, don't blame

Christopher Lawley (00:25:28):
You.

Mikah Sargent (00:25:29):
That's something maybe if it was tucked away in a drawer where I could swipe to it after a while, that wouldn't be so bad.

Christopher Lawley (00:25:36):
You could put it on the today page, the one that's to the left of your home screen. You could put it there. I don't know. I'm not going to risk it. I mean, they're going to get deleted as soon as we're done recording, they're going to get deleted, but they're really, because that's just the way my brain works. Not because they're bad, but very good. The way my brain works, it will not mix well with them. I won't get anything done. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:26:00):
Yeah. So those are also available in the app store for free with in-app purchases to, let's see, it's a 4 99 game pass that I believe gives you access to all of the games where if you purchase one individually, it's 2 99 to unlock the full game. So it's well worth paying the 4 99 to get access to six different classic games, four in a row, chess, the slide puzzle, tic-tac-toe, minesweeper and checkers. All right. A favorite among those who are trying to get things done while trying to avoid distraction is dark noise and dark noise has had an upgrade that provides a little bit more functionality via a widget so that you don't necessarily have to launch the app itself to be able to control or select the sounds that you choose to play. Now, dark Sky Dark Noise is a sound machine that has all sorts of sounds in it.

(00:27:16):
It's not just a white noise player, it can play the sound of an airplane, fireplace, crackling storms. I mean it's just a full huge jam packed sound machine. And so whatever it happens to be that you like to listen to, you are able to do. So almost everything inside of Dark Noise, I am impressed with the way that they have set up these interactive widgets so that you have some different options. So you can create a widget that lets you again kind of play and pause specific sounds. But also as you can see in the bottom here on my screen, I've got the Dark Noise widget that just has eight different tiles. And so tapping on these tiles would let me play one of those specific sounds like the sound of a coffee shop or the Sound of a beach or the sound of a fan or the sound of a fireplace. And these widgets can get big. They have the very large widgets that have all sorts of options. What does it look like on your iPad?

Christopher Lawley (00:28:29):
So I have it all set up here to play a few different options. Now, one thing that I really like about Dark Noise is you can set up scenes. So if we go into the app here, I have a few mixes set up. You can come in here and oops, swipe to the other way. Let's see here. Bad Night. This is my favorite one right here is a bad night. I try and name 'em all very clever, but I think I'm a lot more clever than what I actually am. But you could take these and you can mix the sounds together, you can put 'em at different volumes and stuff like that. So I have four of these. So I set these up, those are the top four, and then the bottom four are just single off sounds. So I can just tap on any one of these and it will start playing that sound.

(00:29:12):
Let's go ahead and pause that. And on top of that, I have all these other ones. So I have Waterfall, river, rain, but also Spaceship, which literally sounds like a certain NCC, 1 7 0 1 D, but probably just distinctive enough. But yes, so I absolutely love Dark Noise. Full disclosure, they have been a sponsor of mine in the past, but it's an app I pay for. I've been using it literally before day one. I was on the test flight of it and I absolutely love it. It is like a staple on my devices. I use this, like I mentioned, I have a D H D. I use this when I really need to focus, and I absolutely struggle focusing on a particular task, especially writing. If I'm doing a lot of writing, this is where Dark Noise for me really comes in because music I can find to be a bit distracting.

Mikah Sargent (00:30:05):
Yeah, I'm with you. Well, depending on the music, the most played music in my music app is the social network soundtrack because it is just sound and is not any voices. But yeah, this is a great app for I think anyone who maybe has had that nice brain itch from white noise or something similar and is wanting to expand upon that, this can really take you all the way with it for sure. Now the next app I think is one that not a whole lot of people know about, but I think a whole lot of people should know about because for anyone who has little thoughts at times and then they fly away and they flit off into the world and you don't have them anymore, it can be very frustrating. So having a place where you can put these little things and then be reminded of them, I think on your screen, it's quite nice. And then for them to sync across your devices, the app that I'm talking about is Cheat Sheet, and it is an app that is available and it's just a little note holding or I wouldn't even call it a note holding, sort of an item holding app. You think that's a fair description, Chris?

Christopher Lawley (00:31:32):
Yeah, absolutely. So the way I think about this app is kind of all those people that have post-it notes that they put 'em on their monitor and stuff like that so that they can have a note of whatever it is that they're needing to be reminded about, Hey, call Kevin or email Cynthia or whatever, or go to this address at 2:00 PM or whatever. So

Mikah Sargent (00:31:54):
Cheat Sheet

Christopher Lawley (00:31:55):
Gives you a way to just kind of put this stuff. If you're watching the video, it's the widget in the bottom right corner. It's a way to kind of put this information into a spot that's right in front of you. Now, where I find this particularly useful is with standby mode. So standby on your iPhone, you put it in a Mac safe charger. I have one sitting right underneath my monitor just to the left so that it's an eye view and if I have a note or something or something I need to remind myself to do, I can just jot it down right there and that information will be right there. It's just kind of a nice way to temporarily write something down. Maybe it's not a full blown task that you need to put in your task manager. It's not a full blown that you need to write in your notes app, but it's just something you need to be reminded about and just have that in front of your face what people traditionally use Post-It notes for. So I found that to be really interesting. I guess it's technically not an interactive widget. Nothing you can tap on in the widget. If you tap on it, it's going to open the app, but, but I found it to be an interesting widget and I figured we should talk about it.

Mikah Sargent (00:33:04):
Absolutely. Another option that truly is interactive is the Tally app, and I have created a tally that has two names in it, S I R I and A L E X A, the virtual assistants for Apple and Amazon respectively. And I think the next time I am hosting one of the shows, see on this show, we do our darnedest to not say either of those words with the proper phrasing, but on other shows that I've hosted when my colleague Leo is out, folks are maybe not as mindful of that. And so the next time I bought one of those shows, I've got my tally button ready on my lock screen or rather on my home screen so that I can see how many times people are saying the word that we end up having, well, not me, but that our editors end up having to bleep out so that people don't get upset that their devices are being turned on. So that's my tally, but do you use Tally and what do you use it for?

Christopher Lawley (00:34:20):
So over the beta period, I have a couple of demos here set up. So I have one demo. This isn't actual factual information, but I was like, let's just turn up and make a joke out of how many Dr. Peppers I drink in a day. So I just turned it up to a really high number just as a demo. And then as a fun little Easter,

Mikah Sargent (00:34:41):
I made one that sure, it's just a demo. You totally didn't have 50 yesterday.

Christopher Lawley (00:34:47):
Moving on, I plead the fifth, your Honor. And then I have a demo one that says, time's annoyed by my niece, but it's at zero because she could never annoy me. But what I was playing with is I am coining the term fidget widget because I literally had this on my home screen during the beta and I would just, usually just as I scroll by, I just hit the plus button or the minus button and I would just fiddle with it. And literally the tally is called Bored Out of My Mind. It's literally just not that I am bored, but I just literally fidget with it. So it's a cool app if you need to count something, if you need to keep track of something, if you're keeping track of how many times somebody says a certain word, especially now that hey is dropped out of the phrase. So it makes it even harder. I think I might be like your other show and just go for it. And if I set people's devices off, I set people's devices off because I don't want to be like S I R E all the time, or did I say whatever? You know what I mean? You

Mikah Sargent (00:35:49):
Did, but they knew what you meant. Yeah, I know.

Christopher Lawley (00:35:51):
Anyways. But yeah, so it's a great app if you need to keep track of that kind of stuff stuff. But yeah, I don't have a particular use for it, but I just found it to be a very, very good interactive widget. It's kind of the app that Interactive Widgets are made for.

Mikah Sargent (00:36:05):
Yeah, it's delightful that you can do something. It seems such a simple thing, but that's there on my home screen is quite nice. I think if there was one complaint I had or one request that I had for the developer, it would be, if it's possible, because I don't know the constraints for developers, it would be to make the touch targets just a little bit bigger for the minus and plus, because if you tap even slightly outside of the minus and plus it launches the app immediately. And so it would be nice if that minus and plus touch target was just a little bit longer or taller. So that way I have a little bit more area to touch and don't accidentally end up triggering the launch of the app itself. So yeah, if you're listening incredible app and would love to see that tiny little update to it. Now for you, I would imagine that this is a very useful app and widget. I would be just, I couldn't do this. I'm sorry. No, no, no, you're good.

Christopher Lawley (00:37:24):
You're good. It's not for everyone. It's not for everyone. I

Mikah Sargent (00:37:26):
Tracking my time sounds like an absolute nightmare is all I will say. However, I know a lot of folks track their time for personal reasons. A lot of folks have to track their time for literal job reasons. And so having some means of doing that is important. And I know a lot of folks who use the Service Toggle, which lets you do just this, track your time for projects, track your time, and then it can also be helpful if you just are a person who lives that quantified self life to know what you're spending your time and your focus on. So I imagine, Chris, that this is something that you do maybe for many reasons. And along with Toggle, there is an app for integrating with Toggle called Timey and you have mentioned a widget for that. Yes.

Christopher Lawley (00:38:22):
So timey acts as a front end for Toggle because Toggles iOS and iPad OS app is not great. Now, I will say right off the bat, like Mike has said, time tracking is not for everyone. If an employer, if I was still employed by somebody and an employer came to me and said, you need a time track, I would quit that job. I would absolutely not. I would not put up with that one bit at all. No way. I don't do micromanagement. That's not happening. That being said, I am not employed and I want, and you

Mikah Sargent (00:38:56):
Micromanage yourself.

Christopher Lawley (00:38:57):
And I micromanage myself because as we have established, I have a D H D and it's very bad, and if I don't micromanage myself, nothing gets done. So I use time to kind of keep track of how I'm spending my time, make judgment calls on projects. I did, especially when I was first self-employed, I bit off a lot. I started a newsletter, a podcast, all sorts of different things, and I was using time tracking to keep track of like, Hey, is the return on investment any good on these? Am I getting anything out of these? Especially the amount of time I'm putting into them. And time tracking told me I wasn't. So those projects got shut down and I focused on the YouTube channel. Now, time Marie, time Marie has a bunch of different widgets. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they have the most interactive widgets, but there are two key ones that I use.

(00:39:51):
I won't go over all of them. We'll be here all day. The first one right here is basically the time starter widget. You can click on any one of these and just starts a widget right there. You get the live activity and then you're on an iPhone with the Dynamic Island. You'll see it in the dynamic island, or you can get the live activity right there. And then I'll go back to my recording podcast, so I know I'm properly tracking this time. There's also this one right here that is a reporting widget. So the top section shows what I've done today. The bottom section does what I've done this week. Now we're recording this on a Tuesday. My week starts on a Monday. I did not work yesterday. I took all of last week off and Monday off. That's why they're in sync because I had a crazy three weeks where I was working insane hours and I needed a break.

(00:40:42):
Normally these would not look identical. Now what's really cool about this interactive widget is you can tap on any one of these projects right here. So I'll tap on research and it will filter right into research. So it would show me how much time I've spent researching throughout the week or how much time I've spent recording a podcast or meetings or whatever. Really handy. Absolutely love this. Again, time tracking is not for everyone, and I apologize, Micah, you just lost half your audience because I talked about it, but I'm done. I've moved on. I just love it.

Mikah Sargent (00:41:14):
Thank God. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. No, it's totally fine. So here's the deal. Had I could meet Remy from OUI and I could give Remy all the food that Remy wanted, and what Remy would do is not stand on my head and control me with my hair. I can cook just fine. Anyone can cook, not me. Oh, come on, anyone can

Christopher Lawley (00:41:42):
Cook. No, no, no, no.

Mikah Sargent (00:41:44):
I would put Remy on my desk and have Remy do the time tracking for me. And then I would become more aware of how much time goes into this, how much time goes into that. Basically, it would give me an idea of what ends up being my hyper-focused times and the hyper-focused topics, which I think what I would find handy, it's the disappointment that I felt when I have started to do the time tracking and then forgot about it and kind of lost it. You know what I mean? And then I don't even get a full week of it because I had forgotten to get it going or hit the right button or whatever. And so it's always one of those things I start and then I end up disappointing myself and not remembering to follow through with it. So I think that's part of the reason why. So yeah, if someone else was handling it for me and then I could just get the benefit of seeing how it all worked out. So what I'm saying is I understand why someone would want to time track, and I do not begrudge anyone their desire to do so. It's just something that's not for me

Christopher Lawley (00:42:45):
Personally. I need to share shortcut with you. We need to talk. It takes a little bit of configuration, but if you are actually interested in doing it, we can get you set up.

Mikah Sargent (00:42:59):
It takes a bit

Christopher Lawley (00:42:59):
Of configuration, that's why it's not a public one that I've talked about because it's kind of a pain. So yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:43:06):
The next and final app we'll talk about today for Interactive Widgets is an interactive widget for keeping track of things you need to do. It is things three. And I am very excited to see this app get interactive widget support because this feels like another category that just makes sense, the fact that I can have some to-dos on my screen and I can just tap to make them go away. So catch up on reading. I've done that. I hit a little checkbox, eat lunch, I've done that. This is in quotes, backup files. I've done that record iOS today. Oh, I won't mark that one off yet. I'm still doing that. But all of that, I was able to just mark off right there in the things widget tapping the plus icon will bring you into the app and let you create new to-dos, but I just love that right there on the screen. I'm able to mark off my to-dos. I want to see the do d u e app add more interactivity into its

Christopher Lawley (00:44:17):
App. So there is another reason why I added this to the list. I honestly think a task manager, it is table stakes for them. If you make a task manager app and you don't have an interactive widget where I can check off a task, what are you doing? But things takes it a step further. So we'll cut over here. If you're watching the video, you can see my things widget in the bottom left corner. I have a stack right here I have today and upcoming. You can tap on a task in things. So not the checkbox, but just the actual task itself. So the title. So this one right here that says Update Channel Artwork. If I click on the actual task and not the box, it opens things and goes straight to that task and highlights it. So if you use something like Notes in a Task or Subtask or any of that extra metadata, this is a great way to quickly jump to a specific task that is in the widget. So you don't have to go and hunt it down, you can just click on it and boom, it opens the app and highlights it for you. I just think that's a nice addition and I haven't seen any other task managers do that. Maybe there were some out there that I missed, but I know Apple's Reminders app doesn't do that. So yeah, I thought that was a really nice touch.

Mikah Sargent (00:45:38):
Yeah, that's the thing about, because people might've said, well, just use the Reminders app. There's more out there. There's more that you can do with these third party apps. Now, as a listener in our Discord has pointed out, DO has added interactivity. Oh good. So that is my bad. I needed to go into the app store to the page. Sometimes this happens where the update for some reason doesn't just automatically show up in that list. And if you search for the, this is a pro tip, if you search for the app in the app store, it can kind of re-trigger the system kind of looking at the app to see if there's an update available. And so there is the option to do a search for different to-dos that you have to start a quick timer or to add a due notification essentially to add a due task.

(00:46:44):
Folks, there are many, many apps that have added interactive widgets to the experience. These are just some of, I think some of the coolest, some of the handiest, some of the most helpful apps that are there. And so please let us know what apps you have been using with what widgets. Email us at iOS today at twit TV to tell us what you think are the most awesome interactive widgets on iOS and developers. You of course can also feel free to reach out if you've created a great widget that you think we should know about, let us know there too. Alright, let us move along. Actually before we move along, I want to have a serious moment here with all of you. Not that we're not always serious, but I'm not. We're being extra specially serious, and I think I'm going to continue to be extra, especially serious for at least some moments during the show over the coming weeks.

(00:48:00):
I think iOS today is one of the most helpful tech podcasts on the internet. And I am not a person who, when I'm in serious mode, likes to exaggerate. This show is incredibly helpful because what we do every week is try to help you make the most of your iOS, iPad, oss, et cetera devices you are able to write in and ask questions. You are able to have your shortcuts created with Rosemary's Brilliant Mind. You are able to check out new apps, features, services, settings because of what we do with iOS today. And if this show has been helpful to you and you want to continue to have this helpful show, then there's something I need from you. If you're out there listening right now, I am talking to you. One thing that you could do to help us continue to bring you this show that matters to you and so many others is have a family member or a friend subscribe to the show.

(00:49:30):
If even a third of the people who are listening right now, get one more person to subscribe to the show, that would be an incredibly helpful thing that shows that you find value in what we're doing here on iOS today. And I want to continue to bring this show to you. I know Rosemary wants to continue to bring this show to you and want to continue to help you make the most of those devices that you have. Of course, when Christopher is here as he is today, to continue to help you make the most of your devices, the way that you can help us in return is by doing that. I would love it if you out there listening, hear this and you do ask a friend, a family member, an enemy who you're trying to make amends with, a coworker, a colleague. If you get someone else to subscribe to the show, let me know. You can email Micah at twit tv, M I K H at twit tv, and I will respond to you and provide my thanks for doing so.

(00:50:51):
I know that this show has one of the most diverse listener bases because we are a show that is aimed at the techie people, to the general public, to everyone in between. And I hear from so many people who say that they listen to this show and learn things that they then help their family members out with. And I love that and I want to continue to do that. So yes, that is my request to you. Again, let me know if you take up the gauntlet, Micah at twit tv, M I K A H at twit tv and that you got someone else to subscribe to the show. I'd love to see that subscriber number climb because I want to continue to make magic happen with iOS today. And you just heard Leo say it on Sunday that the audience number is vastly important when it comes to being able to continue to bring you the stuff that we do.

(00:52:13):
So yeah, I try not to ask you for help. I like it when you ask me for help, but now I'm asking you for help. So iOS today needs you to have a friend or a family member subscribe to the show and thank you to our loyal listener base. You are incredible and we love hearing from you every week. Alright, so going back into only semi-serious mode. Now let's move along to the news. The first thing I want to mention is that Apple is rumored to, oh wait, let me see. I've just got a message. Your iPhone will receive a test emergency alert from FEMA tomorrow and you can opt out. Thank you. Skid Rex. So let's start with that. Oh yeah, this is actually really good. FEMA and the F C C are conducting a, I'm reading from a nine to five Mac article, are conducting a nationwide test of the public alert and warning system in the United States tomorrow October 4th.

(00:53:17):
This means that your iPhone will sound off with an emergency alert at around 2:20 PM Eastern or 11:20 AM Pacific FEMA is required to conduct these tests of the public alert and warning system at least once every three years. That last test was conducted back in 2021. So there's what you need to know about it. You cannot opt out of the test. The alert will cause your iPhone to vibrate and emit a sound similar to a siren. You may have heard this before and the alert will even appear on your Apple Watch. Now, let me read this. While iOS offers an option in the settings app to enable or disabled government alerts to tomorrow's alert will override that setting. So don't email me saying that you can opt out of it. You cannot opt out of it. This is overridden by this system. And honestly, Chris, I think this makes sense as it used to be the case that we had AM and FM radios in the home at almost all times and most of the time they were playing. And so you kind of knew that you could get into people's homes. And then from there we went to TVs where you could do an emergency alert on televisions, but now a lot of people aren't using those devices, so we need a new way to do it. Go ahead.

Christopher Lawley (00:54:42):
Yeah, no, absolutely. It makes total sense. I always thought I remember back as a kid thinking what if and seeing those test alerts and stuff like that. And for a time I lived in Texas where we would get tornado warnings all the time, never had to deal with the tornado, but we always got the warnings about them. And it was one of those things, it was like, I wonder why there's not a way to just turn on TVs and put that, I mean, now there's a way that they could turn on TVs, but now phones and watches and stuff are more, it's a much better way of getting ahold of everyone. I'm kind of surprised there even is a setting to turn those off. I know it doesn't affect this one. It does not affect this one, but that's why I'm kind of surprised because I mean, if there's always a major national disaster, hopefully there isn't. But if there was to be an ever major national disaster, of course they're going to override your settings notification. So I'm kind of surprised there even is an opt-out. I remember one time in California we had an Amber Alert one, which is scary, that's terrible, but it happened at 2:00 AM or something like that. And it freaked me out because I had never heard that sound before. I had no idea what was happening. And it's very loud. It's

Mikah Sargent (00:55:54):
Very loud.

Christopher Lawley (00:55:55):
Be prepared. It is going to be loud and it will be startling.

Mikah Sargent (00:56:00):
And even after telling all of you about it and hearing about it, I am still going to forget it's going to happen and I'm going to go,

Christopher Lawley (00:56:10):
I'm not going to remember. It's going to happen a while and it's going to be while I'm filming tomorrow. So I'm going to be like, what is this? So yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:56:18):
Someone in the chat had said, could you give details on how to subscribe if you're listening to this, then you are subscribed. And so you went through the process of subscribing already, so you probably know how, and you can probably show your friend or family member or anime, but if you have forgotten, just go to twit tv slash iOS and there are, you'll see you just got to read the screen and it says, subscribe or listen to the screen being read to you, subscribe to audio, subscribe to video. Moving right along. Thank you, Kevin. Moving right along. There was a report from Bloomberg's, mark Goman. I almost said Mark Berg, which is not Mark's name. Sorry, mark. That's Mr.

Christopher Lawley (00:57:07):
Gutenberg to you.

Mikah Sargent (00:57:09):
Bloomberg's. Gutenberg was talking about Apple having an internal search engine with the name Pegasus. And essentially this search engine is at the root of some of the ability of iOS to search for content. And there was been a conversation about Apple maybe working to create a search engine competitor for Google, but also points out that if Apple were to do that in the short term, and maybe even in the medium term, it would hurt Google or would hurt Apple because of the lucrative deal it has with Google. For Google to be the default search engine choice on iOS, I don't know. I think given the search, okay, I'll say this. If Spotlight is an example of what search could look like, then I'm on board. I like Spotlight, especially on the Mac. But if app store search is an example of what search would look like, then I don't want an Apple made search engine. I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Christopher Lawley (00:58:41):
Yeah, I want to know which team is working on it. I think that would be a big clue. I genuinely hope Apple is working on something. Google needs a competitor. I know there are other search engines out there, but if you're going to tell me DuckDuckGo is a competitor to Google, I don't know what to tell you, not it exists, but the amount of traffic DuckDuckGo does versus Google, it's not the same. And Apple, having Apple make a search engine along with whatever OSS update that would come alongside that Apple would obviously make their search engine the default. That's billions of devices or millions, they hit billion, I don't even know. But that's a lot of devices that would automatically be using that on day one. Hopefully it's good. So they don't get the Apple Maps kind of press where it's like, oh, this is bad.

(00:59:36):
Everyone switched back to Google Maps and download the Google Maps app and stuff like that. So hopefully it's good. Hopefully it can be a serious competitor. I think it's years away. The thing I really want them to tackle, the big thing I want them to tackle is ss e o stuff. Because I don't know about you Micah, but searching for stuff on the web has gotten very hard the last few years because everyone makes these clickbait articles, and not even clickbait, that's the wrong word, but these long articles with tons of keywords in them, so they always get pushed to the top. So I could search for something that could literally be a one line answer, and here's a six paragraph thing, and the answer is somewhere in that six paragraphs. But they had to write six paragraphs because they needed Ss e o to garble it up. I'm just so sick of that as somebody that literally makes a living off of search and people discovering their stuff over it. I really am. You can look at the landscape of YouTube and all the titles of iPhone fifteens, overheating

Mikah Sargent (01:00:42):
War.

Christopher Lawley (01:00:43):
Oh my. It's, we've never had, I guess we're going to talk about that in a second, but

Mikah Sargent (01:00:50):
Yeah, no aside for sure. That's

Christopher Lawley (01:00:53):
My whole, please Apple, fix it. If you fix it, I'll be your best friend. How about that?

Mikah Sargent (01:00:58):
Alright, really quick, I'll just mention that Apple is working on a software update to fix a, or maybe some bugs in iOS that are contributing to potential heat overheating issues for the iPhones. Have you heard about iPhones overheating? It's kind of come down to a few third party apps, including Instagram and then also the internal, some sort of bug from my understanding, based on multiple readings of different sites who have received comments from Apple and otherwise. The bug fix is a bug fix alone. It is not a throttling fix. It is not going to throttle your processor or anything like that. It is simply that there are bugs or a bug, whatever it happens to be that they've tracked down that is responsible for Apple's side of the overheating. And then they've worked directly with app developers who have made popular apps that have also contributed to the iPhone's overheating.

(01:02:08):
And so in both of those cases, it's going to be addressed, taken care of, fixed, et cetera. So yes, be on the lookout for that. And then of course, always be hitting the app store to do your updates. We are running out of time, so we're going to move right along to feedback and questions. The first bit of feedback questions comes from Deb. Deb writes, I am getting a message failed to send at random times for at least the past week or so. I have not sent any iMessages out and deleted any messages that were there. The Apple community is also having the same issue as well. Thanks in advance for your reply. Now, when Deb says the Apple community, I imagine that Deb is talking about the Apple Community Forum given that Apple and community are uppercase. So Deb probably did a search, saw this there.

(01:03:00):
This just happens from time to time. Depending on what you're using, you may see this pop up. Now, I have typically only seen this when I was sending an S M Ss or m s message that tried to deliver but then did not deliver. And you'll typically get the option if you tap and hold on the message to try to resend the message. And if it doesn't resend, then you'll get another notification. And the reason for that is because s m s and M M S do not have that same ability that iMessage has to show you that the message was sent and delivered, whereas you can see that with iMessage. So you can kind of tell when a message has not been sent. So Deb, it is likely that somewhere across one of your devices, some S M S or m M s was trying to be sent and it didn't and it just caused the system to mess up. It could have even been, maybe you got one of those stupid messages from some company and you replied stop to stop getting those texts and then it didn't send for whatever reason.

Christopher Lawley (01:04:09):
Yeah, I've gotten this in the past when I just don't have good cell service. It just happens. It should fix on its own.

Mikah Sargent (01:04:17):
And then we'll do one more. This one comes from Mike. Mike writes, and this is funny, I hear this a lot. Mike says, it seems no matter how hard I try to follow how TOS online, whatever is playing on my Apple TV appears on my iPhone's lock screen and I want it not to be there. The Apple TV is connected to my two HomePod minis by default, if that is useful information. Thank you for any insight you might have. Mike, this is a feature, not a bug, and it is a feature that I have been in trouble for because I am the stand-in for Apple. And so when my partner was experiencing this and wondering why it was happening, then I'm the one that's in trouble for the fact that it's showing up on the lock screen. Yeah, so it is frustrating. Now, some people have said the most common suggestion that I saw for how to make this stop outside of just if your Apple TV is not logged into the same Apple id, that's one way to solve it because it is all, it shouldn't happen automatically at that point because the Apple ID is kind of what causes continuity, which is Apple's system of communication between devices to work together.

(01:05:36):
But that is not an elegant solution. That's not how it's meant to be. It's supposed to work this way. The other thing that I saw people suggest was if you turn off airplay on the Apple tv, some people were able to, they at least saw that this was not happening to them. I cannot confirm that. That was just the most common thing that I saw. In any case, if I'm in the control center and the top right corner, you will see the kind of media controls. If I tap and hold on that, it will bring up a little screen that shows me my I Media controls for what's playing currently. And down at the bottom you will see a button that says Control other speakers and TVs. If I tap on that button, I can switch between the different devices. And what I have selected here is what's going to show up on my lock screen in control center, et cetera.

(01:06:36):
So yours is automatically switching to the Apple TV probably because you've got the Apple TV remote on your iPhone connected and you're doing all of that stuff. And so it's just trying to play it smart and give you the controls if that's frustrating to you. Yeah, simply tapping on control other speakers and TVs and then choosing iPhone even if there's nothing playing on the iPhone. So you'll notice I can tap on office and now in that top right corner, there's nothing showing in the now playing screen, the same thing would be on the lock screen. If I was on it, it would just not show anything playing. So control other speakers and TVs and then switch it back to your iPhone from the Apple tv. Now again, that's not the most perfect, elegant solution because you have to tap those buttons to do it, but that would at least take care of having it not show up. Now, Chris, do you have any other suggestions outside of the ones the internet offered and then the one that I just suggested?

Christopher Lawley (01:07:33):
You could, now that I'm thinking about it, you could instead of could make a shortcut that, let me mock something up here really quick. I'll be as quick as possible, I swear. So we could use set playback destination. So you'd use this action right here, I'm sorry, it's change playback destination. And you would set it to be your device. So in my case, it's the iPad, not the tv. And then you could add this to your home screen. So whenever you did this, you could just tap it and run it and it would run. So

Mikah Sargent (01:08:09):
It'd save a few button presses at least. Yeah,

Christopher Lawley (01:08:11):
It would save a few button presses, but that would work to be fair. I like that

Mikah Sargent (01:08:17):
Feature. Me too.

Christopher Lawley (01:08:19):
I actually like that. But I also get what you're saying, Micah, as you're the stand-in for Apple, my extended family does not understand what I do, and they think I work for Apple and I get all of the complaints,

Mikah Sargent (01:08:30):
All of them. Why is my iPhone doing this? And why can't you fix it? Why doesn't

Christopher Lawley (01:08:36):
Facebook work? Right?

Mikah Sargent (01:08:39):
And you don't even have a

Christopher Lawley (01:08:40):
Facebook account.

Mikah Sargent (01:08:41):
I love the very vague ones like, this isn't working. What do you mean? What does that mean? It's not working. What part isn't working? What does not working me? Yeah. So Mike, no, it's a good question. A lot of people in the responses that I was looking through said very similar to what you were just saying, Chris, which is, I like it. How do I make it do it even more often? Yeah, it's a feature, not a bug, but I understand it being bothersome. And so yeah, you may even be able to get it down to just one press. Maybe even if you use launcher, you could have it on your Today view screen and be able to just quickly access it from there.

Christopher Lawley (01:09:27):
Yeah, you can make the shortcut a home screen icon. You could add it to the widget launcher, whatever makes it easier

Mikah Sargent (01:09:33):
For, oh, I, you forget the shortcuts has widgets too. I'm thinking launch and

Christopher Lawley (01:09:36):
The shortcuts widget's very good too. So the launcher widget will open the launcher app. The shortcuts widget just runs right from the home screen.

Mikah Sargent (01:09:43):
So yeah, that's handy. All right, folks, it's time for a quick break and a word from our sponsor.

(01:09:51):
Hey there folks, get ready for the Backbeat Media podcast network, your new go-to place for top-notch podcasting fun. You're an Apple fanboy or fangirl. We've got you covered with the cult cast delivering all the I News you could ever want more of a literature lover. Bookworm is going to rock your world. Got to think for theater. Broadway Radio is going to hit you right in the fields while Matt Geek Gabb and Matt Cast are here to feed all your tech cravings, punk rock your vibe. You're going to vibe so hard with Jughead's basement and for all the dinosaur nerds out there, I know Dino is basically your spirit animal, but hold up all about that mental health pop culture and tech life. Christina Warren and Brett Terpstra are serving up your weekly dose. Love a good flying tail. Fig and repeat are about to take your imagination to new heights. And hey, to all you small business gurus out there, Dave Hamilton and Shannon Jean are dropping knowledge bombs every week. Backbeat Media Podcast Network folks, it's where your passions come alive and there's never a dull moment. Hit up backbeat media.com and get ready to binge.

(01:10:51):
All right, we are back from the break, and that means it's time for the music because it's time for

(01:10:56):
Our app caps.

Christopher Lawley (01:11:04):
Wait, it's going to work.

Mikah Sargent (01:11:05):
This of course, is the part of the show where we put caps to top our

Christopher Lawley (01:11:09):
Heads

Mikah Sargent (01:11:10):
To honor our app and or gadget picks of the week. These are the apps or gadgets we are using now or have used it some time that we think are great and think you should know about. So without further ado, Christopher Lolly, tell us about the cap at top of your head, which is incredible. And then tell us about your app

Christopher Lawley (01:11:32):
Cap. I followed the way of the manalo, and this is my family Skar helmet passed down for generations and generations definitely not made of plastic and made by Hasbro.

Mikah Sargent (01:11:46):
It's fantastic.

Christopher Lawley (01:11:48):
It may be based off of the prototype that they made for Bobette for Empire Strikes back when they were designing a character literally to sell toys. I'm going to take it off now because I can't hear you. So yeah, hang on one second. And now my hair looks like, oh, I think mic is frozen. Is Micah frozen? Mic might be frozen.

Mikah Sargent (01:12:11):
I'm frozen and now I'm You're frozen with

Christopher Lawley (01:12:13):
Two thumbs up and it looks great. It's fantastic. You're frozen in

Mikah Sargent (01:12:16):
Carbonite. I know why.

Christopher Lawley (01:12:18):
Oh yeah, literally

Mikah Sargent (01:12:20):
I'm frozen because I did two thumbs up and it caused macOS Sonoma to do fireworks and now it won't. Lemme unfreeze.

Christopher Lawley (01:12:35):
I can stall for

Mikah Sargent (01:12:35):
You while you take it.

Christopher Lawley (01:12:36):
Yeah. Okay. I'll stall for you while you fix that. So my app, I had to take the helmet off. I'm sorry, I can't hear anything, but my app is World Clock Widgets. I figured we'd stick with the widgets theme, but this really isn't an interactive widget, so that's why I pushed it down here. So world Clock Widgets is this guy in the top left corner. If you're watching the video, it literally is a widget that shows me the time of the time zone I'm in. And the date, I absolutely love this because I just turned 33 last week and the time and the iPad, the time and the date that is in the top left corner for the iPad is very small. It's too small for me. So I like having this bigger widget, but also I really like this widget on the standby boat, on the iPhone, there is a clock widget that you can add a built-in clock widget, but it's all analog. And Micah, I don't know about you, but I have this huge pet peeve about analog clocks on computers. I just don't like 'em. They don't make sense. It's a computer. I like analog clocks, don't get me wrong. I have mechanical watches and all that stuff. My hair looks absolutely disastrous after wearing that hat.

(01:13:48):
I love mechanical and analog watches, don't get me wrong, I just hate them on computers. So I use this world clock one. I'm looking at it right now. It's right there to kind of give me a nice little time in standby. What's also great is they have a bunch of other widgets. So if you work with people in different time zones, you can add their time zones to the widget so you can see your time or their time and other people's times. I was going to say I could Micah's time, but Micah and I are in the same time zone, so it would be the same time. But I could see East coast time, London time, Italy time, Germany time. I don't know what all the time zone names are. Sorry. But you could add all those there. Really nice. Absolutely love it. It's a great app, especially if you just want to add a clock widget to your iPad or iPhone or standby or whatever.

(01:14:38):
I missed those days of iPad, OSS 14 when it had a widget that was built in that kind of just blended in with the background. The time was nice and big. The time and date was nice and big there. So this is kind of my way of recreating that while getting a good looking widget because you see the north and South American continent and a little bit of my geography is failing me as that Greenland. No, I don't even remember. I'm not going to even try. I'm not going to even try. Somebody's going to tell me later, but it's a little bit of something else poking in.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:11):
Alrighty, that is awesome. I have a widget, no, a shortcut that I use to see the times of different people. And this is so much easier than using a shortcut because the shortcut gets in the way. So this is a nice way of doing it. I'm wearing some hat that doesn't fit me at all. I don't even know what it is or why it exists. I think it is reminiscent of some sort of jockey cap. It's made of wool and it's blue, blue gray. And yeah, it was not made for my head. It came from the studio and it is very tight. So I'm going to get through this and talk about my app cap. You must purchase this app if you want to use it, but I think you should. It's available for 2 99 in the app store and it is space plan. Space Plan is an app that is one of my favorite kinds of apps, which is an idle app, and that's I D L E, not I D O L.

(01:16:15):
It is an app that there's a game that you play where basically you are on a ship that is orbiting around a planet and all of your systems crash. And for some reason the only system that's working is the potato library. And so what you are forced to do is basically burn potatoes to give power to the ship so that the ship can do what it needs to do and eventually, I assume land on the planet as you would hope it would. And as you go, you gain more potatoes. There's a little square at the bottom that you press to add potatoes, and as you add potatoes, you get more points that you can use to make or repair things. So I can add more potatoes. I can add a probe potato, which will, it says modified spud for planetary harvesting, so it will actually harvest electricity from the planet.

(01:17:24):
So you can almost think about how the old science demonstration where you'd have a potato and I think at a lemon or something and you'd run wires from it and then you could have it turn on power alarm clock. Yeah, power, exactly. So that's kind of the idea here. And then over time you get more potatoes and you get better with your potatoes. So this will three x my potato power by making a quality mashed potato. So I've just spent, I dunno, that was so many watts and now I've repaired solar panels 10 times. I have 11 potatoes running. I have four potatoes that are out collecting energy and I am trying to gain energy to get aud Nick, which is a potato satellite that gives me 42 watts per second. And then if you keep playing, you can kind of upgrade the technology that you have like adding an incubator so that while you're away for 15 minutes, it will continue to add potatoes to your total.

(01:18:35):
You can up the quality of the solar panels to add more technology there. And then even further, you can bore into the surface of the planets to gain more potato power. And then over time, a little story kind of gets written. It's a little text-based story. It's a delightful little game that has really good music. I was jamming this morning while I was hitting a little square at the bottom, very impressed with the soundtrack. And given that it's available for 2 99 in the app store, that means it's an ad-free experience. You pay for it once and then the rest of the game is just that. There aren't any boosts or anything where you do an in-app purchase. It's just 2 99, I think. It's delightfully designed. Again, the soundtrack is incredible. And yeah, I've had fun with this. I just like these. There's another one where you hatch chicken eggs that I played for a long time, and it's the same kind of thing over time.

(01:19:40):
You get better technology and then you can make more chicken eggs and you make weird chickens and stuff. It's goofy. I don't know what it is about these games, but they just work for me. So I'll check in on my potatoes throughout the day and see if I can get some new tech for them. But yeah, that is space plan. Again, available on the app store for 2 99 and this folks is i o s today. I hope that you got a lot out of our conversation today about iOS apps with interactive widgets. Again, you can tell us about the widgets that you think are great by emailing us iOS today at twits tv. That of course is also where you send feedback, comments, questions, shortcuts, corner requests. Rosemary will be back next week to do some of those again. Micah at twi, M I K A H at twit tv is where you send me an email to let me know that you got a friend, a family member or an enemy to join the fund by subscribing or following if you're in Apple Podcasts, the show, the way that you tune in live as we record the show every week, Tuesday at 9:00 AM Pacific, 12:00 PM Eastern is by going to twit tv slash live.

(01:20:56):
There is how you can find us live streaming on Twitch and YouTube and all the other places that we stream. So twit TV slash live, but subscribing to the show, as I mentioned before, twit TV slash iOS. There you'll find buttons to subscribe to audio or subscribe to video across different podcast providers, apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, while it's still around YouTube, Spotify, et cetera, et cetera. We try to be in all the places so that you can get the show no matter where you are. Now is where I will also mention Club Twit. That's another way that you can help support the network. Twit TV slash club twit. If you'd like to get all of our shows ad free, just check out Club twit starting at $7 a month, $84 a year. You can get every single twit show with no ads. It's just the content.

(01:21:44):
You will also gain access to the Twit plus bonus feed that has extra stuff you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the scenes after the show, plus Special Club TWIT events that get published there. So it's kind of great when you join the club. You'll have this huge back catalog of great stuff that you can go and listen to and watch, as well as access to the members only Discord server. A fun place to go to chat with your fellow club TWIT members, and those of us here at twit, that's all available. Twit tv slash club twit. Now, I said starting at $7 a month, not because it's a tiered subscription, it's not a tiered subscription. If you pay $7 or you pay more, you're going to get the same things we just heard from some folks who said, you keep adding stuff to the club, we'd like to give you a little bit more money.

(01:22:25):
So you have that option too. Along with all that stuff, there's even more. You gain access to some club to exclusive shows. The Untitled Linux Show, which is, as you might imagine, a show all about Linux. You gain access to Hands-on Windows, which is a short format show from Paul Thoro that covers Windows tips and Tricks, hands-on Mac, which is my short format show that covers Apple tips and tricks and home theater geeks from Scott Wilkinson covering all things home theater as well as AI inside from Jason Howell, an AI focused show, all in the club, TWI tv slash club twit. Now, Christopher Lolly, if folks want to follow you online and check out all your great work, where should they go to do so?

Christopher Lawley (01:23:09):
Yes, you can go to the Untitled site, links to all of my stuff are there, including Mastodon Threads, Instagram, YouTube is the big one. Obviously, if you are a Final Cut editor or a final cut, interested in Final Cut, especially final cut on the iPad. Thursday. Thursday, right? Yes. Thursday, October 5th at 10:00 AM I will be doing a final Cut Pro Roundtable with some of my fellow people who will be giving talks at the Final Cut Pro Summit in Cupertino in November. So if you're interested in that, you can go check it out. Links are on our threads. Macedon, my YouTube channel. You can find all that. And if you're really interested in Final Cut, you can go to the Final Cut, creative Creative Pro, final Cut, creative Pro Summit, and I will be there giving a talk on the final cut for the iPad. I'm very excited. It's my first public in-person talk, so

Mikah Sargent (01:24:14):
Congratulations.

Christopher Lawley (01:24:15):
Yes, I'm very excited, very nervous. Got to get to work on it. It's going to be exciting. So yeah, final Cut Pro Creative Summit. Yes, beautiful. Remember sixth through the eighth.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:27):
Awesome. Yeah, congratulations. That's really cool. Yeah. Alrighty. Well, if you're looking for me online, you can find me at Micah Sargent on many a social media networker. Head to.coffee, that's C H I H U A h, oa.coffee, or I've got links to the places I'm most active online. As always, thank you so, so, so much for tuning in. It is my absolute pleasure to bring you the show every week. And Christopher, thank you so much for being here this week.

Christopher Lawley (01:24:53):
Happy to be here. I can never fill Rosemary Orchard, but always happy to try.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:58):
And of course, Rosemary and I will be back next week. Until then, it is time to say goodbye everyone.

Christopher Lawley (01:25:05):
Bye.

Lou Maresca (01:25:09):
Come join us on this week in enterprise Tech Expert Co and I talk about the enterprise world, and we're joined by industry professionals and trailblazers like CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CSOs, every acronym, role plus IT pros and marketeers when we talk about technology, software plus services, security, you name it, everything under the sun. You know what? I learned something each and every week, and if you will, too. So definitely join us and of course, check out the tweet tv website and click on this weekend Enterprise Tech, subscribe today.

Ad (01:25:47):
Escape into the Old World with the ZO Pay Family Circus. Join us at Redwood Empire Fair this October for over 175 years, the XPE Circus has been delighting families with their one ring circus starring Nino the clown. The circus features acrobatic beats, equestrian, showmanship, canine capers, clowning, and plenty of audience participation. The circus will be at Redwood Empire Fair, October 1st through the ninth, bring yourself and your family to the Zo Pay Italian Family Circus under the one ring European big top for an immersive two hour long circus production, family packages and discount tickets available online in advance. Only book your Italian family circus experience today. For tickets and more information, visit zo pay.net.