iOS Today 728 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.

00:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Coming up on iOS Today. Rosemary Orchard and I, micah Sargent, help you get your Apple Health game on track. Stay tuned for this episode of iOS Today Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is iOS Today, episode 728, with Rosemary Orchard and me, micah Sargent, recorded Tuesday November 12th 2024, for Thursday, november 14th 2024, amping up Apple health. Hello and welcome to iOS Today, the show where we talk all things iOS. To iOS Today, the show where we talk all things iOS iPadOS, tvos, watchos, visionos and all the other OSs that Apple has on offer. This is the show where we help you make the most. I don't know where that accent came from, but there it is. We help you make the most of your devices by telling you about the features, the settings, the apps, the things that you should try out to make your experience rock. I am one of your hosts. My name is Micah Sargent.

01:09 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
And my name is Rosemary Orchard and I'm very excited with the alliterative title Amping Up Apple Health. Well, it's not alliterative. What's the word for things that sound similar? It's like it's not alliterative but it's the words that sort of sound similar. It just it's not alliterative but it's the words that sort of sound similar.

01:26 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It, just it feels right. Either way, I like the title I'm excited for today's episode.

01:29
Yes, rosemary wrote that title.

01:31
She did a very great job, and I, too, I love reading those sorts of titles.

01:36
But, yes, this is the episode where we thought it was time to jump back into Apple Health. This is a great time to do so, because when you get a new phone, or when you're hopping over to the Apple platform for the first time or perhaps maybe you got one a while back but you were so eager to try out the features that you skipped over some of the things that it has this is the opportunity that you have to kind of check in with what you have or have not set up in your Apple Health options and to make sure that you're making the most of what's possible including, you know, using some third-party apps and services that are available as well. So we should probably kick things off by talking about what health data is available on the iPhone and, finally, the iPad and what you can do kind of with the basics that are there before you go even further, and I think it'll be an opportunity for us to talk about our personal experiences using Apple Health as well.

02:39 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Yes, and one of the things that I would like to remind people of if they have used the health app previously and they have an iPad is the Apple Health app is now also available on your iPad, so you can actually view your health data on a larger screen if you like, and that could be very useful, especially if you're using, say, the ECT function built into your watch and you would like to show it to a doctor instead of showing them on a very small screen, which even a Pro Max screen is not that big. You could take an iPad along if you've already got one. Of course, those can also be exported as PDFs. But, yeah, the Health app is kind of what you make of it and there is some very good guides on the Apple website, but the absolute first thing that you need to do is fill out your health data. So if you open the health app on your iPhone and then you tap on the person in the top right hand corner, then you will hopefully, fingers crossed, see your picture, or a picture that you have assigned to represent you and your name, and then you'll have things like health details, medical ID and some features and so on that we're going to go into, but the absolute first thing that you should do. If you've not done this before and it will walk you through it, but if it's been a while since maybe you've checked this out then I would recommend tapping on your health details and just making sure that you've filled out as much information that you have here. So if you don't know your blood type okay and you don't know your Fitzpatrick skin type, don't set them, because that's really not going to be very helpful. If you accidentally set your blood type to be something super negative and like super rare sorry, not negative and then you know, if somebody looks at your medical ID, then that's a little tricky. But if you tap on edit, then you can actually tap on any of these and set them. So if I knew that I was O positive or O negative, then I could set that, but I'm not actually sure what my blood type is, so I will just leave that as not set. But, yeah, make sure that these things are set up, the basic information that you have anyway. And if you are taking any medications that can affect your heart rate, then you could also see those in here as well, and if you tap on the edit, then it gives you some examples, such as calcium channel blockers and beta blockers, which can all be very helpful. If you set your gender to female, then it will also give you the option to set up pregnancy in cycle tracking and also use the cycle tracking features.

05:07
But once you've done your health details, then we need to pop into one of Micah's favorite little things, which is the medical id, and so first of all, I would like to recommend there are some family oriented times of year coming up. If you are going see family, if you're going to see friends at these times, can you please give them a little poke and say hey, have you set up your medical ID? Can you just check to make sure it's working? And can you please make sure that it's available when the phone is locked? Now, if there are people who really don't need this information to be available to their partner for some reason or whatever, then you know there are some good reasons why you might not want this to show up when locked. But the purpose of the medical ID is, if you are in an accident and you are unable to communicate yourself, then the medical ID can pass vital information along to ambulances, police, firefighters, medical crew so that they have information about you and also information to help contact your loved ones, and so this will also be shared during an emergency call, if you turn that on, so you can add a photo, and I didn't realize that a photo was an option now, so I am going to add a photo and I'll come back and do that later.

06:19
Organ donation can be set to yes or no. Now we'll come back to organ donation in a bit, because there's a bit more to that pregnancy medications, allergies, your emergency contacts, which have some phone numbers in. So I'm gonna leave that off, um and so on, but just scroll through, make sure that's there and double check, especially if, like me, you have friends and family members who are not so technically oriented, um, and they are less likely to have made sure that all of these things are working. Underneath the emergency contacts, there are things like conditions and also things like your height and weight, which are quite useful, and you can also add notes. So if there is something that is very important for you to communicate to a first responder, then you can add that in there as well, and if they are able to check this, then they will do so, hopefully, and have that information available to them.

07:10 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, one thing that I want to mention to the section that Rosemary showed about putting in medication for your health, or rather for your heart rate medication. So what's cool about that is basically, a long time ago, when Apple first introduced some of these features like heart rate tracking, people who take beta blockers and calcium channel blockers noticed that they were maybe getting notifications for low or high heart rate and some other information that was inaccurate because it was based on the average person who doesn't take those medications. No-transcript. Quite nice to know that irregular rhythms or higher low heart rates or perhaps cardio fitness are affected by, as we know, beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, and so giving the system that information just means that it's more tailored toward you, which I think is great.

08:53 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Yes, and I would also highly recommend, if you are taking any medication that you need to take on a regular basis, pop that in there in the medical ID section, because if, for example, like like my dad, you're taking blood thinners, that is pretty important that they know that you're taking blood thinners if they want to give you any other medication, because sometimes these things can interact, and also if you end up in hospital for any period of time, then they need to administer medication to you, to, you know, do whatever it needs to be done on a regular basis. If you suddenly stop taking something that's critical to your health, usually it doesn't go well and, let's face it, we love our listeners. They're fabulous people and we'd love you to stick around. Hopefully you're not going to be in any accidents, though. Crash detection is available on iPhone as well as Apple Watch now, which is pretty great, but you know, should anything happen to you or any of your loved ones, it would be nice to know that everybody has access to the information that they need to help you survive and thrive, ideally. So, yeah, after you filled out your medical ID, there is a health checklist and, again, this is all under the profile section in the Health app. If you open up the Health app and you haven't reviewed things for a while, then it does pop up the health checklist there as well. But it basically just wants to make sure is emergency SOS on? When did you last update your medical ID? Is crash detection on? Is fall detection on? Fall detection only automatically turns on for people I, I think over 60 or so, somewhere around that area, it might be 65.

10:32
If you are accident prone, like me, you may want to turn it on. You may also not want to turn it on in case you accidentally trigger it, but so far I've only triggered it a few times. Once was when I fell off an e-scooter and broke my ankle in three places and it offered to call an ambulance for me. In hindsight I should probably have said yes, but I thought it was a sprain. So, yes, it's nice to have these options.

10:56
It's got walking steadiness notifications, high heart rate notifications, low heart rate notifications, cardio fitness, ecg, irregular rhythm, blood oxygen, vitals, sleep apnea notifications that's a new one noise and headphone notifications, and you can also potentially have AF history, which is atrial fibrillation, but that is not available if you have the irregular heart rate rhythms turned on. I have done the ECGs and it doesn't show any sign of me having AFib rate rhythms turned on. I have done the ECGs and it doesn't show any sign of me having AFib. So I turned on the irregular rhythm notifications because I figured that could be useful to find out if my heart is unexpectedly not rhythming the same way that it usually rhythms. It's not a drummer, it's not perfect, but usually it does pretty well without skipping a beat. I'd love it to stay that way, but it's also nice to know if there's a problem.

11:49
And the combination of the Apple Watch and the iPhone is great, but you can still get a lot of these features through other health monitoring devices, such as I'm wearing an Uber Ring. They have previously sponsored Twit, though I got this after they sponsored Twit. This is the Gen 3. They've now got a Gen 4 out, but Gen 3 is on sale. Fitbit there's a Xiaomi fitness tracker. There's all sorts of things out there that can provide data and sync it into the health app on the iPhone and then onto the iPad as well, and so you can get data from lots of places. So you don't have to have an Apple Watch to benefit from all the things here.

12:26 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yes, and that's an important point is that a lot of this health data is possible to be either logged or put in. You know, it doesn't all have to be the automatic stuff that is part of Apple Watch. It can be stuff that you log yourself, it can be stuff that comes from other apps, and I think that's something to keep in mind. There are some bits of health data that are in, I should say, in some ways exclusive to the Apple Watch, like Time and Daylight, which is a feature that Apple introduced mostly for tracking vision in children, but also is helpful if you maybe experience SAD or some other condition. Also, overnight health metrics, environmental noise levels, hard falls, that kind of data is all available via Apple Watch. But outside of that particularly those exercise minutes, activity that you've done, calories burned, that kind of deal all of that is part of Apple Health without needing to be tied directly to the Apple Watch. Now, when you're kind of looking through the system and thinking about what you want to set up again, that checklist is kind of your jumping off point because it does give you a lot of information about what health is capable of and at any time you can go in and make adjustments to what you would like. Now we're going to have Rosemary talk a little bit soon about setting up your activity and your sort of fitness goals, but I wanted to talk for a moment about health records within the Apple Health system. So the health app has integrations with many different health providers around the US and in some other places as well, and what it does is it lets you log in to those health providers and download your health records. Uh, if you you, if your medical provider, uses Epic, which a lot of medical providers in the United States do then the chances are that you will have access to this feature. Uh, what's great about it is I have found that I get my health record information sooner than I would relying on the health systems that my health provider uses. So, for example, when I've gone in for tests, I'll get a notification on my iPhone saying that my test is back, and I can read that information before it's ever presented to me in the online portal that's available for my provider. This information is you know directly from the health charting program that your health provider uses comes directly to your device. You can export it as a PDF if you'd like, and I have found that to be very, very helpful, because not only does it mean that I am getting my information quickly, but it also means that providers that I've had over time, I'm able to gain information from them as well.

15:47
So all the way back to college, I have my health records from my time in Columbia, missouri, where I went to college. I have the health records from my whole period of time there, moving all over Missouri to different health systems, moving from there to California and now here in Oregon. Everything is available to me my different health conditions that have cropped up over time, my medication records, test results. All of that over time is available and it's all within the health app Apple. Of course, it is not only legally required to maintain a certain amount of privacy for these things, but also, given that it's sort of Apple's whole spiel, its whole deal, that it maintains privacy is, I have found one of the best places to use that as well. It is really nice to be able to again.

16:50
At any point, I can go in and I can say, oh, you know what was one of the procedures that I have had over time according to my medical records? Oh, did I ever take vitamin D and how much was it that my doctor back in Missouri had prescribed whenever it came to taking vitamin D? What were those lab results that I took way back in January of 2020? Oh right, my doctor wanted to take a look at my vitamin D3 and D2 levels, and here's what that information was. All of that, oh, and then also like what are the allergies that I've experienced All of that is available in my health records app, and what's great is I can export it, as I mentioned, as a PDF, but I can also share it with my doctor if the doctor has a health system that supports it, and so I really have found this to be a delightful system that again gives me the information that I want as soon as I need it and doesn't make it difficult to access, so I very much have appreciated being able to use this system and be able to keep track of my health records.

18:10
Rosemary, I went ahead and talked about health records and my use of that, and I did promise our listeners that you would talk a little bit about fitness if you wouldn't mind covering that topic for us.

18:24 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Yeah, fitness is one of those things that, hopefully, is something we can all work on. Whatever your goal big or small, and no matter what your starting point is, hopefully you can be doing things every day to improve your fitness, and the fitness app, which is a separate app to the health app, has some nice features inside of it. So it's got a move goal, it's got an exercise goal, it's got a stand goal, and these are the classic rings that you've seen. Now, something that I have not yet done is set up my training load, or tracking my training load, and this gives me the option to set it up here in the fitness app. And, just to remind folks, there's a fitness app as well as the health app and they have different icons and they're both there. So if I set this up, then I can see how I'm tracking, I can get effort reminders. So now when I finish a workout, it asks me to rate the effort that I put into those things and then I can get personalized summaries. But what I really like about the activity rings is there is now the option which isn't something that has always been an option, I have to say of having a pause so if, for example, you've been working out really hard and you've done really well, but you rolled your ankle and you're a runner. Well, guess what? You probably need to stay off your ankle for a while to let it heal. So if you open the fitness app and you then tap on your activity rings, which are the first thing at the top, and then you scroll down, there is the option First of all, you can change your goals, which, if you're still able to do other things, is great. But there's also pause, and I love this because there are a couple of different options here. So I can just say hey, no, you know what? I am really not feeling great today. I woke up today and I've got a massive headache and I just feel awful. I'm really not going to get any kind of health stuff done. I need to go to bed and avoid a migraine. I can just say pause it today. I can say pause it until Tuesday Now we're recording this on Tuesday, so that's a week. I can say give me a week off. I can say pause it until next month, or I can do a custom pause for you know a certain number of days, and if I scroll, scroll, scroll, then it goes up to 90 days. So in that case, because we're recording here on the 12th of November, that takes us to the 10th of February, and I can set that and that is really nice.

20:45
Now you can change your goals so you can have your daily move goal. As you can see, I had this set super low for a while because I was really enjoying getting notifications that I did this like 4,000%, but instead I'm gonna set this back to a very reasonable low number, which is 400. And I'm going to change my move goal, my daily exercise goal. I can adjust so I can say, hey, I need to do five minutes of exercise a day, or I can be aiming for an hour of exercise or even more. Now, personally, I usually aim for about 15 minutes, so I'm just going to pop that back. I overshot in the wrong direction both ways and I'll change that.

21:21
And then my daily stand goal as well. So if you're somebody who struggles with standing, then a 12-hour stand goal may not be great for you. Maybe a 10-hour one is better, or even six hours. Then that's as low as it goes. You cannot have a 24-hour stand goal, to be clear. So please get some sleep. The maximum you can go is 16. I found 10 seems to work pretty well for me and you can also schedule on all of these.

21:48
So, for example, if you have a workout pattern and you know on certain days I'm going to do more exercise than on other days and I would like to plan for that. Or on some days I am going to be working and it's a very intensive job but you need to sit down for that job and you can't get up and move around easily, then you might want to reduce your stand goal for those days and I love the fact that this is now an option and you tap on schedule in the top right to set that. Or you can just have the same goal every single day and yeah, it's pretty nice seeing those badges and things rack up. Yeah, in the activity rings you can. If you tap on the calendar at the top, you can get a little overview. As you can see, I've done pretty well most days with the red ring. I've done fairly well with the green ring as well and my blue ring. It varies.

22:39
What's really interesting is there are some days in here where I know I definitely stood up and moved around quite a bit, but it may be that I was not wearing my Apple Watch at the time or something else, so I didn't necessarily get the credit.

22:51
But yes, I have to say it's nice having all these fitness options here. And the fitness app is also where you have Fitness Plus, which, if you have a Fitness Plus subscription or the Apple One subscription, which includes all of Apple's offerings, including Apple TV and Apple Arcade, then you can get those videos in here to do your own workouts at home, which, I have to say, I've been enjoying. Some of the yoga and the Pilates videos. I've tried a few of the dance videos. My problem is is I don't like the music, necessarily Like it's great music, but it's not music that I want to dance to Like. If I want to dance, you know, somebody give me some ABBA Dancing Queen, something like that. You know it's not necessarily like a good dance that I'm going to be doing, but it's going to get me up and moving. So I need to find some workout that work for me there, but there's lots of really great options available.

23:51 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
All right, a little bit about third-party apps and systems for this. Now that we have covered the kind of built-in functionality, there's again a lot that you can do without needing to even hop into the third-party realm, which I think is one of the cool things about health right, the health app I mean your phone by itself can do a lot of tracking. When you log into your health records, you get some information there. When you give the app permission to track some of your activity, it does a lot there, but then it can be augmented on top of that with those third-party systems and suddenly your data kind of all starts to come together with a little more insight into what's going on. I, for example, use and they've been a sponsor on the network in the past Eight Sleep is the mattress cover that I have, and the Eight Sleep System basically cools or heats the bed depending on your sleep patterns, and does its best to help you get better sleep.

25:07
But on top of just helping you get better sleep, the way that it does that is by tracking your sleep and tracking your vitals over the course of the night and making adjustments to the temperature based on that. Well, all of that information is recorded and therefore can be shared with Apple Health. And so I have my sleep tracking information in Apple Health by way of Eight Sleep, which is through an integration, through an API. So it's a nice thing where I don't necessarily have to open the Eight Sleep app to keep up with what my sleep looks like. I can just go into the health app, tap on sleep and see what Eight Sleep has dropped in over the last period of time. I think that's one delightful way. But there are so many other options, some of which Rosemary has mentioned for us in the show notes, if you want to share some of those.

26:04 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Yeah, so I have gone back and forth. Sometimes I wear my Apple Watch to bed and sometimes I wear it to sleep, sometimes I don't, and increasingly, in the not too distant past, I have just ended up not wearing my watch to sleep, not because it's uncomfortable or it bothers me. It just ends up being something that I don't wear overnight. However, I do end up wearing the Oura Ring, which still tracks my health data for sleep, but sleep-wise, there is an app my parents love this and they have been using this for years literally now and the app is called AutoSleep, and so this is great if you have an Apple Watch for sleep and then it will track your data. So we can see. On Sunday I got a really poor night's sleep according to this, and I only got two hours 20 sleep in total. One hour, 25 of that was quality and 35 minutes of that was deep sleep. But if I were to go back into the past, back into the history of time, then I can see a little while ago that on the I think that was the 27th I had a really great night's sleep. I slept for 10 hours and 12 minutes. Seven hours, 23 minutes of that was quality. I went to bed at about quarter past 11 and I woke up at about quarter to 11 the next day. I got three hours 39 minutes of deep sleep. My heart rate was 64. My rating, therefore, was 100%. And then I can add little notes to this and I can actually see a nice little pattern of this data. And so, if you've already got an Apple Watch Autosleep, there is a free version, but the premium version is a one-time app purchase, upfront purchase from direct from the Apple store of $5.99. And, honestly, my parents use this every single day and if I more regularly wore my Apple watch to sleep, I would also be using this on a very regular basis.

27:58
Now I end up not using this because I have something else. I have a Wythings sleep mat. Now I believe I have the older version of this, because I was looking on the website and it looks oh no, it is the same one now. But basically, this is a little mat that you put underneath your mattress and it sort of inflates a little bit. You know where you've got those blood pressure cuffs that you put on and then you press the button and they inflate and it goes as it inflates with the air.

28:32
So you pop this underneath your mattress and it can detect a whole bunch of data. So even if I put my ring on charge, I put my watch on charge and I just pass out, because I fall asleep before my devices are charged, thinking that I'm going to read a book for 20 minutes and that doesn't happen, then I still get sleep tracking through this. This I did purchase from the Apple store originally, and it retails for $129.95. It's just a little mat that you can put underneath your mattress and that is a nice alternative as well if you're perhaps looking for tracking sleep data. So, yeah, that's a few of them and yeah, would you like to talk about any, micah?

29:15 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Well, yeah, 8sleep is definitely the one that sticks out for me as the app that I use the most. I also want to mention that Apple has a health studies app that is separate and based on the health studies in which you participate. You may find that it is requesting access to some of that data, so that's another. It's not a third-party app. It is a first-party app, but it's third parties that are running these studies and in collaboration with Apple, and so in that way, that data is being shared. But I don't really I don't have a whole lot of third-party apps, because I'm very careful about which apps actually get access to my health data. And another thing that you can sort of be aware of is the fact that you get to choose, when you use a third-party app, what data you choose to share, what data you don't want to share.

30:18
And one way that I can kind of one way that I choose to make a decision on whether an app can have access to my health data is is it only reading my health data or is it also adding to my health data?

30:31
If all it's doing is reading my health data, meaning that it's pulling from the Apple Health app but it's not putting anything into it. That gets a little concerning for me. I want there to be at least a fair exchange of information. And then I also ask myself does this app need to have this information in order to do whatever it is that it says it's going to do? So there have been some apps in the past where it promises to use some of your health information to suggest maybe like workout routines, for example. So does it need to know every part of my health data, or is it just enough for it to have you know the steps that I've taken in a day, the flights that I've climbed, that kind of thing, and then I will make a choice based on that, uh, before going forward. So yeah, but don't be afraid to kind of audit that information and make sure that you are giving permissions that you should, and you know, maybe saying no at times you know, maybe saying no at times, which is also completely acceptable yes, absolutely.

31:44 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
And speaking of being smart with your health data, especially if you know you're getting things through your health insurance company and they may or may not actually get the data sent back to them, which could be a good or a bad thing. That's entirely up to you. A lot of people previously have used MyFitnessPal for tracking what they've eaten and so on for weight loss, but turns out massive, massive company maybe wasn't doing the best of things with your data, as it turned out. So if you're still using it and you're happy with it and you've read up on all the concerns and so on, that's absolutely fine. But I would like to suggest an alternative, which is Food Noms, which is available on the App Store. It's free to download and has a seven-day trial, and then it's $39.99 a year for one person. But they also have family plans so you can get a family plan and then share that with your partner, kids, etc. And Food Noms is great. It's got a community database so it can scan barcodes and so on. I don't happen to have any food on my desk, which is not particularly helpful for demonstrating that, but there's foods, there's recipes. You can log all the data and it syncs the data to and from Apple Health and you can specify what your goal is. Is your goal to lose weight, maintain weight or gain weight? Are you trying to eat for your heart health? Are you trying to reduce sodium? Things like that, and then it can generate goals for you based on that information. There's also regional settings. So, do you do sodium or salt? Add fiber to your carbohydrates? What units do you use, et cetera. All of these are just quite nice options, and I've just seen that my units no, I measure things in milliliters, thank you. I spend entirely too much time in Europe to measure things in fluid ounces. Gosh, we mostly use liters over here in the UK. Anyway, we're very Canadian when it comes to mixing and matching these things, but either way. So, yeah, foodnoms is a great app for tracking what you've eaten and, of course, with the barcode scanning in the community database, a lot of people have already put that information in there. So if you scan, say, a box of crackers, it can already tell you the macros for that, so that you know how many of those you can or perhaps should eat, which is great.

33:52
Another app. I'm not going to demo it, because I don't actually really well start a workout at the moment. I've got a belly class later tonight. But one that a lot of friends of mine swear by is FitBod, which is a gym and fitness planner, and it's got bodyweight exercises in there, all sorts of things, and it's got free exercises and then it's $12.99 a month for the premium exercises as well, including like AI generated workout plans and so on. But a lot of people do really like this, and so it is a great option for that. But my last one my last one comes with a free app, which everybody loves free, but my last one comes with.

34:33
You do need to buy a piece of hardware to go with this, and this is a water bottle and it's blurring out for reasons I don't know, but it is from Hydrate Spark, and I would like to thank Matthew Keston-Nilley from when he was on the show for turning me on to these. This is a smart water bottle. So if I take a drink and I'm going to attempt to demonstrate this and this can probably go really badly because I don't have a table at camera level, but I'll just take a quick drink and then when I put it back onto a flat surface it should. I don't think my hand is stable enough it will light up to tell me that it's acknowledged that I've drunk some water, and then it has a scale inside of it and so it measures how much water I've drunk and then it logs it automatically to the Hydrate Spark app, which syncs to Apple Health, which means that if you're like me, you forget to drink throughout the day, this can flash to say hey, you've not drunk in a while.

35:28
You should probably drink. Yes, yes, I probably should. And also it can then log how much you've drunk into Apple Health so that you know whether or not you are hitting your hydration goals, because one of the biggest things that I have found is I tend to get sick when I don't drink enough water or enough regular fluids, and guess what? I'm really, really bad at doing that. So having a little physical thing on my desk to remind me is great. Now, they do sell these in the Apple Store, but if you go on the Hydrate Spark website, there are some of their bottles or tumblers starting from $49. And also, folks, black Friday is coming up for the end of the year, so if there's anything that you're interested in that we've mentioned today. Do keep an eye out for sales coming up, because, of course, now is the time to start capitalizing on all of those sales for Black Friday, cyber Monday, sometimes both. Sometimes you can get coupons and stack them as well. So if there's anything you're interested in hardware-wise, then that is definitely worth looking at.

36:31 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
All right, we remind you that you are able to write in and let us know about the apps that you use that have to do with Apple Health, or maybe there are some features that you think are great with Apple Health that you have sorely wished were part of our conversation. You can email us iostoday at twittv to get in touch. It is now time to move on to the feedback portion of the show, and our bit of feedback comes in from Rich, who is a member of Club Twit, and we thank you, Rich. Rich says in response to an episode great episode Rosemary mentioned that we can restore the ability to change watch faces by just swiping on the watch face itself. Does anyone know how to do that? I have looked through all the settings and I can't find anything. I would love to restore this functionality on my watch. Love the show.

37:26
Now Rich is talking about how Apple sort of undefaulted the option to just swipe from the sort of sides of your Apple Watch to switch between faces. And when that got undefaulted, many a person I have heard from have said how do I? What happened? I thought I could do this. Am I forgetting that you're never able to do that? What's going on. Yes, you can do that. So, Rosemary, can you tell us a little bit about how we make that possible?

37:59 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Yeah. So there are two ways of doing this one from the iPhone, which I'm going to show, and then there's also a way on the Apple watch. So on the iPhone, when you open the watch app, or from the watch, if you open the settings app. From both of these points onwards it's the same process. You go to the clock section and then there is a toggle which is swipe, to switch watch face, and if you turn that on, then when you grab your apple watch then you should be able to just swipe to change watch faces and then you can switch around as you like. And that's it.

38:33
It's very simple. I'm going to turn that back off because otherwise I do have a tendency to accidentally switch my watch face a whole bunch. But it was really nice that Rich was able to ask that question and also bonus because he's in Club Twit and I hang out in the Club Twit Discord he actually already got that answer pretty much the day he posted it, so he's already got that. But I thought this would be useful to share in case anybody else is wondering how they can get that feature back.

38:58 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
All righty, I believe now I can hear the music. It's time for Shortcuts Corner. It's time for Shortcuts Corner, the part of the show where you write in with your shortcuts requests and Rosemary Orchard, our shortcuts expert, provides a response. This, of course, is the opportunity to get those shortcuts in order, and this week our Shortcuts Corner request comes in from Scott. Scott writes in I feel like this should be easy.

39:45
I'm trying to make a shortcut that can take my schedule from a screenshot and then add it to my Apple Calendar. I'm using chat, gpt and an app called toolbox pro. Aha, uh. And then Scott says I've attached the way my schedule looks and I've attached a pet tax. Uh, so, for anyone who's tuning in for the first time or doesn't remember, we jokingly at one point said that your requests require a pet tax and then, of course, so subsequently said. Subsequently said no, it's not required, but we love it whenever you show us photos of your pets. So there is, uh, a pet tax paid by Scott, who has included photos of Han um and Leia. Very cute, uh, han is a white golden, a whiter golden retriever, leia is a more red golden retriever Two adorable dogs and it's really fun to get to see this photo of them. Thank you for sending that in, scott. Now, rosemary, I think you might know a thing or two about Toolbox Pro.

40:51 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Yes, yes, I do so. Toolbox Pro was made by a friend of mine. Unfortunately, he's passed away and is no longer with us, but the app company that I founded took on his apps after he died. So we're starting to maintain them or we're continuing to maintain them, and Toolbox Pro is one of those. So I do have a bit of a stake in this, but I would help Scott, whether or not I had a stake in it anyway, because of course, this is what Shortcuts Corner is about. So Scott very helpfully sent a little screenshot of his schedule and I can see this appears to be working at Walt Disney Parks and Hotels also former Disney cast member. So I love that. And it's just a full screenshot of the page with the schedule view and everything. And then we can see, if I were to zoom in, and this is from over a week ago. So we really I hopefully are not going to end up doxing Scott here, but we can see that there's a tomorrow, november 3rd, 2024, 7.30 to 4. And then we can see the acronyms, which I could translate, but I'm not going to just as a little extra preventative security measure here. So I have built a shortcut that does exactly what Scott's after.

42:00
But I think what I probably need to do first here is start at the beginning, because it's a very good place to start and it's also quite important that people understand the steps that I took and why I took them. So, to start with, we've got our photo. So I'm going to start with the select photo action because we need to grab that photo right, and then I'm going to use the toolbox pro action to get the text from the image. So if I use get text from image, then I can see there's a couple of options here. So there's correct language errors. I'll leave that on. Then. I can see there's a couple of options here. So there's correct language errors. I'll leave that. On Join text very important. I'm going to turn this off because join text essentially if you've got text on line one and then line two, it will go oh, these are supposed to be the same line and pulls them together. That is not what we're after here, so instead I am going to turn that off. And then language in this case, we know it's going to be English, so we can actually just type in English and it gives us US English as an option. So if I were to run this right now and I select that picture and I recognize the text.

43:08
Oh no, there's a bit of gobbledygook in here. So I can see that it's picked up the time from the clock. It's picked up the date from the clock. It's got some weird stuff where it said Walt Disney, it's got like a divided symbol, vn. There's some weird characters in there. Then it says schedule view and there's a couple of other weird lines before it gets onto the stuff we're actually interested in, which is the important part.

43:33
So, before we recognize the text, what I would like to do is I'd like to crop that picture Now. There is a crop image action inside of shortcuts, but Scott's already using Toolbox Pro. So I think we should use the Crop Image Manually option and if we tap on the little icon on the left and then Show the Info, then we can see that it says use a wait to return and get clipboard action to get the result. So I will pop in my wait to return and then get clipboard, because we need these, and if I could type this would be even better. There we go. So now I'm going to grab that picture manually, crop it.

44:16
So here we go. So what I need to do is I need to go down to the start of where it says tomorrow and then go up to the bottom of the last entry and I'm also just going to crop it horizontally. This isn't strictly necessary, but it just means that I can see that I've got everything in one screen. Necessary, but it just means that I can see that I've got everything in one screen. So now, if I get the text from the image, then that should, fingers crossed, give us exactly what we want. So again, I'm going to turn off join language and I'm going to set the language to English and ta-da, fingers crossed, when I run it this time, select it. So I'll pop in and I'll do that little crop to get the information that we want, and nothing else, and then recognize the text. Brilliant.

45:04
So now we've got the schedule. Okay. Now I did notice there's a little share action at the bottom and I think if you tapped on the share, you might be able to just get this as text and we could possibly, uh, skip a little bit of the, the um, the stuff that we need to do here. But either way, that's that. So I've done that, and then what we need to do is we need to figure out how to understand where the shifts are written down. Okay, so for each day it'll say something like the name of the day, or tomorrow, if it is tomorrow, and then it'll say the month followed by the date. Like you know, three for third, or 30th for 30th, and then comma 2024. So we've got a day comma, a month number, comma number.

45:51
And so what I did here after I've recognized the text, so I've used a regular expression and I'm not going to go into the details of this just because explaining regular expressions is something that will make some people's eyes glaze over. Some people will probably get very excited and interested. But either way, I'll just say what I've done is it's looking for a series of letters followed by a comma, and then more letters, space, one or more numbers, comma, and then the year, and then a new line, and then so, once it's got those, that's going to give us, for example, tomorrow, november 3rd, 2024. And so on and so forth. And so once I've got those because that's going to get every single day I'm just going to repeat over them and then I consider there's a whole bunch of ways to do this. You know, there's lots of really good ways to do this, but I didn't want to make this too complicated. It is still kind of complicated, so I hope you're still with me.

46:52
But what we're going to do is we're going to split the text based on whichever one of these dates we're repeating over. Okay, so it's going to get everything below that, and then we're going to grab just that section at the end, because we've got the stuff that was before and the stuff that was after. We just want the stuff that's afterwards. And then, if that one starts with no shifts, we're not going to do anything, because if there's no shifts, there's nothing to add to the calendar. Right, maybe you want to add an all day event to say that you're off work, but I'll let you figure out how to do that. And then what we need to do is we've got all of the lines that were underneath this, okay, so it'll start with something like 730 to 1600. And then on the next line it'll have the shift and then after that it'll have the date of the next day, and so on.

47:39
But if we just grab all this information and go split it by line, then we know our first line is the time, both the times, the start time and the end time, and the second line is our shift, like where we're actually working, and so we're going to split all this. We're going to get our first item, which is from the day onwards stuff, and then we're going to split it on a space, dash space, okay, on a little hyphen that's surrounded by spaces. So we've got our start time first and our end time second, and that's what I'm doing. I'm getting our first item and our last item and then, from going back to our list where we split it by lines, I'm just grabbing the second one and then I've added a calendar event, okay, and so it starts with our shift title and then it uses the repeat item, because that's the date, and then the start time, and then the repeat item and the end time as that, and then you set what calendar to add it to. I have not put the location in, because usually cast members have to go to a particular point to change and then go to work, and so putting a location in probably not very helpful and also translating these locations into different addresses could be kind of crazy. So I'll let Scott figure that out.

48:54
But I set my calendar here and I've turned off show compose sheet, which is gonna make this a little bit faster. So if I run this, I'm gonna end up with duplicate calendar events, because I already ran this earlier today and I didn't delete them. But that's okay, I'm just gonna crop this right there. There we go, and so I've got this information and I'll hit run and then it adds those calendar events for me and then, if I open calendar, then I should see.

49:21
Now, bear in mind that for the one that said it was November 3rd because it started with the word tomorrow, shortcut state parsing takes the word tomorrow as a priority. Okay, so it used the word tomorrow and that's why the one for the 3rd of November ended up on the 13th of November. There are some ways around this, but I tried to keep this as minimal as possible. But, yeah, the one on November 4th is there and, yeah, it should work, as you are hoping for. I hope so. Yeah, I know that these are set to appear as all day events, but that's because I have been doing something slightly silly with this. But I will make sure that that is fixed before I send that over to you, scott, or we put the link in the show notes.

50:04
So, yeah, that's how you can do some date parsing out of a screenshot, which is pretty freaking cool. And I have to say I'm very glad that Alex did all that work to add the actions for manually cropping a picture, because automatically cropping a picture, that would be really difficult to make sure that you get the right section of a schedule image. That'd be crazy. And so, yeah, I'm glad that Alex did all that work for that and also the text recognition. That definitely made it a lot easier. But I do think, scott, I'm going to give you a piece of homework. I want you to tap that share sheet at the bottom and see if it gives you the data in a text format, because if it does, I think I can do something even better for you if you send me that.

50:45 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Wow, that is very impressive. And again, where else? Where else would you get this kind of detailed information and how? To Nowhere else. That's why iOS Today rocks and Rosemary Orchard rocks. I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to this episode of iOS Today. You can email us iostoday at twittv if you would like to have your shortcuts corner request answered or you are looking to have you know a non-shortcuts question answered. Yes, we do accept feedback as well. Again, ios Today at twittv is how you get in touch there.

51:25
A quick little mention for Club Twit at twittv slash club twit. If you have been curious about joining the club, now is the time because, for a limited time, we are offering two weeks of Club Twit for free. Yes, you can get two weeks free to check it out and see the awesome stuff that Club Twit has. So all you have to do is head to twittv slash club twit to check it out. After those two weeks, it's just $7 a month.

51:50
When you join the club, you gain access to all of our shows ad free. You also gain access to the TwitPlus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes. Before the show, after the show special Club Twit events get published there. Access to the members-only Discord server a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and also those of us here at Twit and access to the video versions of our Club Twit shows, like this iOS Today. If you are a member of Club Twit and you would like to get some months free, well, there's a way for you to do that too. Yes, you can get some free months by referring your friends. Twittv slash. Club twit slash referral is the link for that to learn more. And again, we thank you for being members of Club Twit. Rosemary Orchard, if people are looking to follow you online, where should they go to do that?

52:40 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
The best place to go is rosemaryorchardcom, which has links to podcasts, books, apps etc. That I'm involved in and, of course, all the social media sites. Or you can find me hanging out in the Club Twit Discord, where people discuss the show during the recording because we do record live and after and, of course, give us great feedback and ask questions. They have requests for future episode topics or shortcuts corner or just a little thing that they didn't see in the episode that they'd love to find out about. Micah. Where can folks find you?

53:10 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
If you're looking for me online, I'm at Micah Sargent on many a social media network, or you can head to chihuahuacoffee that's C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-Acoffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online, including TikTok, there. Thank you so much for tuning in. You can check out the other shows on the network, including my show, hands on Tech, which records and publishes on Sundays. You can also watch Hands on Mac, which publishes on Thursdays, and Tech News Weekly, which I host on Thursdays, so be sure to tune in for those as well. Thank you so much for being here and we'll catch you again next week for another episode of iOS Today. Bye-bye, bye.