iOS Today 732 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. It's the most wonderful time of the year and that means it is time for us to share our favorite apps of the year. Stay tuned Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit is Twit. This is iOS Today, episode 732, with Rosemary Orchard and me, micah Sargent, recorded Tuesday, december 10th 2024, for Thursday, december 19th 2024. Our favorite apps of 2024. Hello and welcome to iOS Today, the show where we talk about all things iOS iPadOS, watchos, tvos, visionos, homepodos and all the OSs that Apple has on offer. We love to talk about them here on this show and we love to help you make the most of your devices by talking about the settings you should change, the apps you should use, the gadgets you should buy and the answers to your questions. I am one of your hosts. My name is Micah Sargent.

01:13 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
And I am Rosemary Orchard and you know I'm very happy to be here jingling with our little summary of the year of the year.

01:28 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yes, it is a delight when we get to gather together and look back on some of the cool apps that we have used that we think are worth talking about. I always invite people to share with us the apps that they use and love as well, so be sure to reach out to iOS Today at twittv with your picks of your favorite apps of the year. But we should kick things off with the first pick on Rose's list, and this is interesting. I don't know why I didn't expect this one, but I mean, it's just. It's cool when a sponsor of the network happens to also be a good enough app that it makes Rosemary's list. So, rosemary, kick things off with your first pick.

02:11 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Yeah, so my first pick is Fastmail. Now, I am not saying this because they are a sponsor of the network. Believe me, I've been using Fastmail for a really long time, but I have recently migrated my parents over to using FastMail as well, and I am using their app on iOS. Now, I'm not actually going to open it up and show everybody all the things, because you know I've got all my email and stuff in there and there's a bunch of things I've not had a chance to process yet today. But what I really love about FastMail on iOS in particular is you've got the nerdy search options that you might want, so you can say, hey, I'm looking for where this keyword is in the subject in particular, or where this word is anywhere, or you can even search for things like mail headers and you've got access to all of the rules and so on for mail which you have set up, which run on their server, and you can configure those and run those and everything.

03:06
Snooze works. It's great. It's got all of the things in it that I actually really want and it does just work. It's got the options of themes and so on, even, and it works with light mode and dark mode too. So, yeah, I really like this. What I can do, however, is I can show folks that if you pop open the Fastmail app and you go to settings in the bottom right, then that's where you've got access to all the things like your custom swipe settings, your device settings, your notifications, your rules, and I've set mine up to work with labels, which is a little bit more Gmail-like than folders, and so I've got labels, and what I can even do on my labels is I can say, hey, I want to auto purge. So I can say, hey, after three days, I want this label to be removed from these things, and if that's the only label that something has, bye-bye email, which, honestly, that's been great for clearing out my inbox by email, which, honestly, that's been great for clearing out my inbox.

04:06 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That is, yeah, that's quite nice. I use Fastmail, the service for mail. I have not made a whole lot of use of the app, but I do use the app to quickly generate masked email addresses when I'm not using my password manager to do so, and so I've always found it a delight to hop into the Fastmail app. It's very quick and seems to be full featured, and so it's really cool again to get to see what that looks like. You know, for a person who's using it more regularly, as you know, as their choice of quickly clearing things out and doing that organization that they're after, you can get Fastmail, of course, for free in the App Store when you are a subscriber of the Fastmail service. All right. So I have to be careful about this first pick of mine because in talking about it, I might end up spending my time focused on what is on my phone, and that is because my first pick whose name I'm worried I will butcher here, my first pick whose name I'm worried I will butcher here Balatro. It is B-A-L-A-T-R-O, and it is an app that lets you play what kind of feels like poker mixed with solitaire. I think is how it's been described. Um, it is a really fun card game and, as I was talking about before the show, um, I had to take a whirlwind uh trip yesterday and so I was on a plane for um a couple of hours in total maybe you know, two and a half hours and helping to pass the time a little bit. When I wasn't listening to an audio book, I was playing this game. Now, the way that this game works is you are kind of following poker rules, but you get these little power ups along the way. And here's the thing people, I am not a card game person. I usually, when people are saying let's play a card game, I'm going oh please, let's not play a card game. I don't want to play a card game. You're going to make me play a card game. I don't like them, and this one does not fall into that boat for me. I am really excited to say so.

06:48
Let me show you, because I'm in the midst of playing right now and we're in the middle. I've earned some money. I've got twenty six dollars and I've got these different power ups going right now. So this one card it adds double the rank of the lowest ranked card held in hand card. It adds double the rank of the lowest ranked card held in hand. Excuse me to the multiplier, and we can talk about that in a moment. This one adds a plus three multiplier for each Joker card that you have. So I've got three Joker cards and then this one adds plus two to hand size hand size and then reduces by one every round so I can check to see what are available here. So if I did a three of a kind, this would level that up to give it even more points. This one adds 80 chips if I play a hand that contains a flush.

07:36
And here's the thing. As a person who is not big into card games, this has taught me what these different terms mean. I don't know poker rules and I don't know what each of the hands are and what you're after, and I'm starting to understand how poker works and what the point of it is in terms of oh, should I hold out and see if I can improve upon this hand, or should I go ahead and see if I can improve upon this hand, or should I go ahead and play what I have now? That kind of thing. It's been really exciting and fun, so let's head into the next round. And here's the thing we're kind of going up and up and up on what our, our blind is, and in this I only need to score 2000. But the problem is I'm only able to play one hand. So if I don't score 2,000 in one hand, I'm going to lose and not be able to continue to play. So I'm going to go ahead and select this, and maybe you all can help me here, because I've got one hand and four discards that I can do.

08:49
So it looks like let me sort these by rank that I have. I've got Jack, queen King, okay, but I've got two Jacks. I've also got two fives two jacks, I've also got two fives. Um, I could do a uh full house with these uh that I have here. I could do a full house with my uh, two jacks as well, um, although for some whoops, that's cause I selected the wrong one there, uh, so we'll select those. And this uh has.

09:28
I have a special three, where this one three of diamonds, um, adds three chips and it can be used as any suit. So I could also meet. No, it doesn't look like I have a um, and this is the other thing too. I can hit run info at any time and see what run options I have. So I could. I can learn what a straight flush means. Um, I can learn what four of a kind means. I can learn what a full house means, which I know now is three of a kind, and a pair uh, five cars, that five cards that share the same suit. Is a flush? Five cards in a row, even if they're of which I didn't know, of different suits, is, I forget the name now is a straight and, of course, like three of a kind, et cetera. Now, here's the thing. I'm not going to play it because I'm nervous that I'm going to lose. So I'm going to come back to that.

10:28
But Bellatro is in the App Store as an app that you can download. It's also available as Bellatro Plus or Bellatro Again, I don't know how it's pronounced. Plus in Apple Arcade. So if you have an Apple Arcade subscription, you can get it there. Plus in Apple Arcade so if you have an Apple Arcade subscription, you can get it there. That is what I did. That's where I got. It was as part of my Apple Arcade subscription. It's delightful and, again, it is a card game that I'm actually playing, which is kind of wild. That's not my typical interest, so pretty cool that something has caught my attention there. All righty, rosemary, tell us about your next pick, as I start to realize that I can't spend too much time talking about these great apps.

11:21 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Well, my next pick is something that you might use if there's a lot of snow outside, uh, to be the nose for a snowman, um, or it's a great weather app and I'm going to talk about the weather app that is, of course, carrot. Um, so carrot is a great weather app. It's had a whole bunch of improvements over this year, um, and you can have completely ignored them and just left everything the way it was, or you can have added some of the funky new options that they have. One of the things I really love about carrot aside from the fact that you have the option of having snarky weather, um, you know, the sky is overcast, because you don't deserve nice things is what it's currently telling me. You can set it to professional if you prefer, but it also integrates with my net atmo weather station, which, sitting outside, so I know that the seven degree temperature that feels like three degrees, that's Celsius. By the way, that is literally outside my front door, so I know exactly what it feels like when I'm about to step outside.

12:14
But, yeah, carrot has a whole bunch of things, including the option of when you share, which you can share the weather. You can share as a little screenshot and you can say, hey, I want to redact the location? Do I want to show the full screen or just the weather bit? Do I want to share it? As which style Do I want? Garden weather plane, which is just quite nice for giving somebody like a little taster of. If somebody says, hey, how are you and you're like I'm freezing, if you send them a picture of it being really cold, you know, then that kind of adds to it. But also, you know, then you can swap between a whole bunch of different sources. So you know, if Apple weather is not particularly accurate where you are, but open weather is, you can use that. And these are region specific as well.

13:00
And of course, there's a whole bunch of other options as well Live activities for rain. That's really useful for me, you know. Do I want things when rain starts or do I want everything automatically, and so on. And of course, then there are the other options as well, where I can, you know, rearrange this view and customize it to have whatever I want. So I've got a whole bunch of things in here, but you can try different layout styles.

13:31
So, if you want plain or card, how do you want things formatted? Do you want things to be very simple and plain, just text, or do you want something a little bit funkier? I just really like the customizability and the fact that I can say, hey, like precipitation very important to me. I live in the UK. We have a lot of it. Please tell me about the rain first, and then kind of everything else secondary. Other people may live in a very dry climate where rain is not really a thing that you really care about because it's not going to happen super often, so you might deprioritize that. And the fact that all of this is customizable and you can even sort the order of everything is great. And so, yeah, I love Carrot, even if it occasionally attempts to murder me, because it will.

14:17
As a little bonus note, there is actually a game built into Carrot where if you tap on the ocular sensor under the Carrot tab, then it will, um, yeah, start getting cranky and then it will, uh, you know, give you little missions, uh, to try and do so. I need to find a Grand Canyon, uh, by navigating around on the map. So I guess I might try and do that later um.

14:42 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
My next pick is another app that I was able to use yesterday but that I've been using a lot recently because I've had people flying to different places and so I've been able to keep track of them just as much as I've been able to keep track of myself and my flights. It's a very popular app. At this point. A lot of people have heard of Flighty, but it is a fantastic app for all sorts of flight tracking information. The great thing about Flighty is that you are often getting updates to flights long before you get them from the built-in app. I get notified. You know it's time to check in. I get notified when a gate changes. I get notified when a plane changes. I can see with an actual what is the word I'm looking for, live activity on my screen every step of the process how long the flight's going to take. Even whenever you're disconnected, it will show you the estimated time that it'll take for your flight to arrive. So I was able to check in from time to time and see, oh, my flight's probably almost there, and then, shortly after I looked to see that it was like supposed to be 10 minutes until 14 minutes, till we touched down, or whatever that it was like supposed to be 10 minutes until 14 minutes, till we touched down or whatever. Boom up pops, the sound of the pilot on the plane saying hey, we're about to start a descent everyone buckle up, kind of a thing. You can share this information with your friends as well, so they can follow along with the flights. If you have somebody picking you up from the airport who doesn't have flighty, they can still have some level of tracking of what's going on. If it's your own stuff, you can paste in your booking code and the seat that you have. You can see the arrival forecast Again, see what the plane looks like, where the plane has been before. You get detailed timetables. You get the information for your airline that you're using, so you can reach out to them if you need to. You can also what I think is cool is pop in information about your connections, and so it tells you this is a recent feature it tells you what your connection is like, whether it's a risky connection, or if it's a minimum connection, meaning that it's about 45 minutes between your flight and the next flight, or if you've got a bunch of time to make up a map of what the different terminals and gates look like, so you can make sure that you are going to the right terminal and gate.

17:33
This if you travel at all, you have got to use this app. It's brilliant and it's so feature packed. And the great thing is, even if you don't travel a lot, you can always get a. It's essentially a temporary subscription. You pay for a month of it and you can use it. You know, for that period of a month, it just so happened to be that the month when I had people flying in corresponded with the month when I was going to need to use it myself, and so I was able to kind of use it all at once. And I was going to need to use it myself, and so I was able to kind of use it all at once. So this is a really cool app that I think is worth everybody's time to check out and see if it's right for you. It's really neat.

18:16 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
I do want to just quickly mention Micah. Another great thing about Flighty is if you connect to the in-flight Wi-Fi, you do not need to pay for in-flight Wi-Fi. But if you connect to the in-flight Wi-Fi, you do not need to pay for in-flight Wi-Fi. But if you connect to the in-flight Wi-Fi, flighty can use that to grab the flight data for free and continue updating in the air as well, which is something that's really nice and I really appreciate about that because you know, especially long-haul flights, the Wi-Fi can be pretty pricey on those. But it's nice having the updates available updates available.

18:41 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So yeah, I do really love Flyteam. All right, Rosemary, tell us what's next on your list.

18:48 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Well, next on my list is something sort of elephant related. It's Ivory from Mastodon, and Ivory is a great app for people who have a Mastodon account and want to interact with Mastodon. It does awesome things like remember your timeline. I just scroll to the top and then scroll down a bit and if I tap the time then it will then scroll me back to where it was. So if I scroll down a bit somewhere and just say, okay, cool, I've accidentally tapped the time and I go back to the top, you tap it again and it scrolls you right back to where you were.

19:21
Little things like that really make it a joy to use. They've recently done a little bit of an overhaul down at the bottom with the notifications and the profile and the explore options, but there's a whole bunch of configurations that you can do so you can change that navigation bar. So do you want notifications there or do you want mentions? Do you want statistics? Your favorites bookmarks there's something you can do filters, and do you want posting to be in the navigation perhaps, instead of floating somewhere, which can be quite nice? So then you have the option to post right there, and I do really like the fact that this is always updating to support new features that Mastodon is adding, so I can specify what language I'm going to post in and who is going to be able to see this.

20:06
Is this going to be a public post? Is it going to be unlisted? So you know, people can only see if they've got a link to it. Is it something that only my followers can see? Is it only something that mentioned people can see, which is the Macedon version of a direct message? And yeah, it's just really nice. It's got a built-in GIF or GIF search, depending on how you choose to pronounce it. So I could add a little Christmas is coming there. The emoji option includes custom emoji from the server that I am on, and so on and so forth. I do just really love this app. It's great, it works really well for me and it means I can keep track of multiple accounts as well, which is something that I personally need. Maybe not all of you need, but maybe some of you know folks who do have multiple accounts. You know you've got one for your day job and one for your personal, because maybe you do social media stuff as well. It's quite nice to have those options.

21:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Indubitably All right. Moving right along, the next app that I am mentioning is kind of a sleeper hit for me. I have used this app before and have mentioned it from time to time, but it continues to be such a great app for keeping track of what's going on. Now I should mention that Shopify is a sponsor on the network, but my love of the shop app runs deep, you know, regardless of that. So the shop app is an app made by Shopify that lets you track your purchases that you have made using Shopify. So when an online store integrates with Shopify, you as a customer are able to use the Shop app to keep track of that stuff. And what's great about it is the integration can be very, very, very deep. I guess. It can be robust, it can have a lot of information, and so when you make a purchase, if they're using Shopify to tie into their inventory systems, then you get notifications every step of the way. You get notifications when the item's being packaged. You get notifications when they've ordered the label for whatever shipper they're using. Then you get notifications whenever it's actually shipped. And in the app you get all these little deals and stuff too. Now, I've not taken advantage of a lot of the deals. I'm not. That's not really why I use it. I like it for tracking packages in a way that is a little more automated than what I've used in the past. The great thing about the Shop app is and I've audited the privacy policy twice over the course of my time using it twice over the course of my time using it, and each time they make it clear that they do not use the information that they get from what I'm about to talk about for any other purpose than to help you track your packages, and that is to say that you can attach your email to the shop app and anytime a new order pops up in your email, it'll go ahead and pop it into the shop app, and so you're getting notifications of that stuff every step of the way.

23:33
I also like that I can keep track of some of my favorite brands, and so I can tap in to Succulents Depot, for example, and see what new plants they have on offer. I just recently got some from them, and it's very easy to do shopping from within the app. So that's what I did with Succulents Depot. Some of the stuff that's in here is from purchases that I made on those sites. But because it popped into the the shops app as tracking, then I was able to follow those different stores that I wanted to follow to see what their latest products are.

24:12
This is a really nice app for people who are looking again for kind of an automated way of keeping track of their orders. And I think for me ooh, predatory plants look at that, a store that sells carnivorous plants. I might have to make some purchases Not in winter, though that would be mean to those sweet plants. This is a great app for all of that. So I use this regularly to see what all is out there and to make purchases of products when I need to.

24:56
And that is the Shop app. It's available for absolutely free in the App Store, no in-app purchases or anything like that. And then, oh and then also ScooterX in the chat is saying that Scooter uses the Shop app on the Pixel phone and then uses the Parcel app on iOS. And that's funny because when I'm not doing automated stuff, when I'm just trying to track my FedEx and UPS and USPS packages that are separate from it and Amazon packages, I use Parcel for that. So Parcel takes care of my other tracking Shop takes care of any purchases I've made via Shopify, and then it also has that built-in ability of me to go in and window shop a little bit to see what my favorite brands are coming out with as of late. So that's the Shop app in the app store.

25:49 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
I also want a second parcel and I also just want to note that you can link a Google or an Outlook account to your shop account and then it will check your email looking for incoming you know emails about orders that you've made or you know tracking numbers, and then it can track those as well, which can be quite good. But I do love Parcel myself and Parcel's Amazon integration really top notch, because it will just pull in any Amazon purchases that you've made, which is great for knowing when those are coming.

26:16 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Absolutely. What's next on your list, Rosemary.

26:19 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Well, next on my list is a really great one for this sort of time of year where there might be seasonal specials of certain you know, television shows that you enjoy coming out, or you know you want to make sure that you know what's in the cinemas, and things like that, and so the app that I use for all of this is called Tractic. That's T-R-A-K-T-I-C, so this integrates with the online service called Tract. It is not their app, they have their own app, but I prefer Tractic myself, and what I really love about this is, you know, I can actually say, hey, you know like I have watched this episode of this show and keep track of it. It also integrates with Plex, in my case, which means that it can automatically sync those things, and it also gives me a calendar for shows that I'm following. So I can see that, for example, there is going to be a new special of Death in Paradise coming on the 22nd of December, which is really nice to know.

27:18
And if I were to look up, for example, another show which is from the same people, called Beyond Paradise, which I really can't type today, this is what happens when you are trying to type live on air there we go. Oh no, that's not the right Beyond Paradise either way. So if I were to look for the right show, then it would. Ah, I see what I did wrong. I did not search for a show, I searched for a movie. Because what you do is you search and then you select. Hey, am I looking for a movie, a show or a person? There we go. That's the right beyond paradise.

27:53
And then if I add that to my watched list, then it knows that I have watched all of those and then I should be able to see when the next one is coming very soon, because that will be up in here. You can also see movies. So, for example, I'm interested in the Last Showgirl that's coming out on the 13th, and then I can also get notifications for new episodes which I have turned off. But I really like this. You can have custom lists to help you keep track of you know, different kinds of things that you might want to watch.

28:22
So I've been building a list of Christmas films that I want to, you know, binge watch over the next couple of weeks and so on. And, yeah, it's also got recommendations coming from tracked, and I just really like the UI of this app. It supports light mode and dark mode. And, yeah, the only thing that occasionally gets me is the fact that when I search for something, it defaults to movies, and if I was looking for a TV show, then I might be there going why isn't this there? That's not the right thing, but then, yeah, once you found it, it's very easy to go on and keep finding all the information and see who's in this.

28:57 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Nice. All right, my final pick here is an app that came out near the end of this year, an app called Croissant C-R-O-I-S-S-A-N-T. This is an app that is very helpful for those of us who are trying to post to all of the three big non-standard social media sites that are out there, so Threads, Blue Sky and Mastodon. This app lets you post to all of them at once. Croissant is a really well-designed and well-engineered app that has added features over time based on what listeners want, and so when you you know, let's say we are going to say oh, hello, and we're going to use the greetings. So, first and foremost, it will be mindful of how this would show up on different services If you add an image to your post and you add alt text to that post. This app is designed to work with the APIs of the different services to properly upload and add the alt text to those photos on each of those services. And what's great is it also features and this was recently added a new tool Magic Mentions. That helps to. Depending on where you're posting, it helps to properly mention a person across the different social media sites. So if somebody is Twit Podcasts on Mastodon, but they're Twit TV on Threads and they're TwitTV on Blue Sky, for example then when you type in an at name in your post, you can pop up this magic mention thing and put in the proper names for each of them. So here we would do twittv. And what's great about it is that for Mastodon, the API allows for searching, so then I can see oh okay, so on Mastodon, I know that the username is at Twit. On Blue Sky, there's no search tool, Although I think, yeah, they just added a search tool on Blue Sky. That's right, and so you can add a manual one, or you can try to search for it and I'm just going to add a manual one here. And then on threads, yeah, that's right, it's the threads API that doesn't support that, so let's go with. I don't remember what we are on threads exactly, so we'll go with Twit Podcasts and then choose Use Manual Username. So now all three are done. And if I were to send this, when it posts it to Threads Mastodon and Blue Sky it will use the right username for each of those for this mention. It's so clever what it does and it's just beautifully designed.

32:31
So if you are having trouble deciding which one to post to, are you on Mastodon? Are you on Blue Sky? Are you on Threads? You don't need to be worried about it if you use Croissant to do that instead. So be sure to check out this app and give the delightful developers and designers of this app a few bucks for the app, because it's available for free to download. The in-app purchase is called Monthly, Annual and Lifetime. So, yeah, it's a subscription to be able to cross post different sites. I think it lets you post to one site for free. If you want to post to all three, then you subscribe to the service. It's just $2.99 a month, $20 annually or, if you want a one-time purchase, $60 and it's all yours. So, yeah, be sure to check that out. All right, Rosemary, what is your final app of the year pick?

33:39 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Well, my final app of the year pick is related to my previous pick. To an extent it's Call Sheet. So if you've ever been watching a show and gone wait an extent it's call sheet. So if you've ever been watching a show and gone wait, where I know this person from somewhere, I'm sure I recognize them or you're uh, looking, uh at watching, you know you finish watching a film, you're there going, huh, you know I wonder about. You know the trivia that was in it.

34:00
Well, call sheet is a great app for looking those things up. So I am currently re-watching once upon a time, so I can just search for once upon a time in here and it will pop up with tada, once upon a time. Uh, now, because this is a series and therefore I might be watching it over a period of time, I could take advantage of the pin feature up here in the top right, which then allows me to keep this on my home screen, so then I can easily pop back in as I get to the next episode and, after I've watched it, go. Oh, yes, I'd like to see. You know the trivia about that. And so there's one of the things I really love about this is the fact that it's got the ability to hide spoilers so I can specify hey, what kind of spoilers do I want hidden? Because there is nothing worse than finding out somebody has an evil twin than by accidentally seeing the imdb page and then going, oh no, this person has, you know, like this name and that name, they've obviously got an evil twin at some point. You know, you know something which you know it can be a bit of a spoiler, so you can turn off character names, episode counts, finding out somebody dies yeah, this can happen very easily as well, looking at the number of episodes that somebody's in Hiding episode titles, thumbnails and summaries as well, and that is you know the options there. So you know, I don't actually see anything at the moment for season one, episode one. Even then, when I tap on it, you know I can see hey, you know, what am I actually going to see here? Well, you know, I've got these particular settings, and this is for just this show as well, which is really lovely. If I go back to the settings, then I can actually choose what things I want as spoilers overall by default, so I can then customize it in the individual shows. But, yeah, I really love this app. It's made by a friend of mine, casey Liss, who works very hard on it, and you can also even change the language that you would prefer CallSheet to be in, which is just a nice little bonus touch there. And so, yeah, it's free to download and do, I think, the first 10 searches or so, and then after that it's a pound or a dollar a month or 10 bucks a year. But, yeah, I really love this.

36:17
There's so many like pernickety preferences. Like you can choose to show the age of an actor when you're looking at like the list of actors and so on. You can see, like, somebody's name when you're looking at the list of actors and so on. You can see somebody's name, being able to see, oh, this person was 42 when they filmed this. No, it's not that they're 65 now, that's not how old they were then. You don't have to do any maths, it just tells you and that's really lovely. So, yeah, there's just a whole bunch of really nice things. And also it can integrate with things like Plex to show what's currently playing from Plex on your local network on your device, which is really, really cool. I really love that feature and, yeah, I'm really glad that Casey has done all this and also it's got a little search history as well, so I can see the things that I've searched for previously, which is really nice. If I was like, oh yeah, no, actually I did want to go back and search for Star Trek Discovery once more.

37:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
All righty. That brings us to the end of our apps, our favorite apps of the year. If you have some apps that you think should have made the list, or they're just your favorite apps, remember reach out iOS today at twittv. Speaking of which, we're going to head into the feedback section next. All right, we had some feedback from Chris, who writes in and asks Hello, micah and Rosemary.

37:34
I have a friend who corresponds with me via email and several topics are covered. She prefers a format of running responses, which we handle by changing colors for our replies. This is tedious, as each new paragraph or line means repeating the selection for each new spot in the email On my iPad or my Mac. I find myself wishing I knew how to do it more smoothly. I went looking for a way myself, but I saw nothing about this. I'm skeptical that you can solve this, but if anybody can, it's you. My husband and I are both club members and faithful viewers. Thanks for giving this some thought, chris. Well, chris, thank you for writing in with your question. I'm curious. You know Rosemary's the automator between us, and so I would love to hear what Rosemary's thought is on this and then, depending on that, I will or will not give my answer because my answer might be embarrassing if Rosemary has a better one.

38:30 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Well, I mean, this is one of those things where it's kind of about how you prefer to handle these things. So I'm just going to start by popping open mail on my iPhone here and I've got some text spread out in the email. So say, for example, I was going to reply to banana with I don't know coconut, then I could just write coconut and then you know, double tap to select. Obviously I'm doing this on my iPhone, but the same principle applies Tap on the AA and then select the color and then we've got all of these color options.

39:01
But once I've done this for the first one, what I would probably do and this is the really simple way of doing it is just copy a word. And now, if I'm going to reply to grape, I can just paste coconut, which includes the formatting, and then I can type whatever it is I wanted to type. Now, that is my first way of doing this without getting too nerdy. My other way involves doing it using shortcuts, which is very nerdy and involves doing things like knowing what hex color it is that you're writing in. But I can show that if Micah would like to see that, or we can save that for Shortcuts Corner later.

39:40 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I think we should pop it into Shortcuts, corner. My thought was, if so, to kind of go along with that. It's a little bit of an extension on what Rosemary had suggested. If the colors are consistent, if you are regularly doing it, so that the first response is always chartreuse and the second response is always cobalt and the third response is always deep cranberry maroon and the fourth response is always whispering at sunset, then very real color for sure, then what you could do, chris, is have a little template that you can paste in that just has those four colors, right, and you can say you know you could put each line as response, response, response, response in those proper colors and then all say you know you could. You could put each line as response, response, response, response and those proper colors, and then all you have to do is, as Rosemary showed, select that first response word and start typing your message. It will be in what I say, chartreuse, and then the second one in cobalt and the third one in mar maroon, deep cranberry maroon, and the fourth one in whispers at sunset. Then you know it's locked in every time.

41:00
But if those colors change regularly, then something like that where you sort of have a template of color isn't going to work. But yeah, that was my thought on that. But given what Rosemary has just said, I believe I can hear the music. It's time for Shortcuts Corner. All righty, we are in Shortcuts Corner, the part of the show where you write in with your shortcuts requests and Rosemary Orchard, our shortcuts expert, provides a response. We had just heard from Chris, who was looking for a way to be able to use some email formatting to change the color of different replies, and Rosemary had a shortcuts suggestion to help out Chris with this issue.

41:59 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Yeah, I do, and so this is definitely one of the nerdier ones, because what I am doing here is I'm writing HTML and then I'm converting that to rich text. So what I've done is I've just created a paragraph which contains the word high with an exclamation mark. So what I've done is I've just created a paragraph which contains the word high with an exclamation mark, and then I've set the style to be the color red. Now, in this case, red, blue, green and a whole bunch of other colors. They are actually things that are recognized sort of universally within HTML. They should always appear to be the same color, and so on and so forth.

42:35
For other less regularly used colors, people tend to use something called a hex code, which is a hash followed by six digits from the hex decimal alphabet. So it's 0 to 9, a, b, c, d, e, f. But what we're doing here is we're just going to use red. So I've just put in a little paragraph with color red and high, and then I'm using the make rich text from this action and I'm copying that to the clipboard and opening mail. So if I do this, then down here I can then just pop in new line, and then I should be able to just tap Paste, and it was appearing earlier when I wrote this and tested it, but for some reason it is not now.

43:20
I have a feeling I need to reboot my iPhone again, but there are quite a few options for doing things like this. The problem that we have is that there isn't explicitly a way to create rich text within any kind of automation system to paste into shortcuts. So the other option may be trying to use something like snippety, but again that tends to end up being plain text, which is a little bit of a shame. But yeah, I will get this working once more and then I will share the link to that in the show notes for everybody.

43:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Beautiful. We also had an email in from Adam, who had written back on episode 730 about having problems with reminders when overdue reminders were piling up. How to reschedule those reminders for a later date and time. Rosemary provided a solution and Adam said this in response Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. I had spent way too much time trying to figure out how to parse out date and time. Your fix works perfectly, Adam. The number of times that I have sent Rosemary thank you, thank you, thank you for her help with some sort of coding thing is far greater than zero, and so we're all very thankful for Rosemary for this segment of the show and also for her brilliance. So good work there, Rosemary.

44:45 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
I'm just glad to hear it worked. To be honest, that's all I care about.

44:49 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And Jack has written in. Hello, rosemary and Micah, thanks for all you do for us. Iphone 15 Pro iOS 18.1, vehicle has CarPlay. Ooh, rosemary and Micah, thanks for all you do for us. Iphone 15 Pro iOS 18.1 vehicle has CarPlay. Oh, I like this, jack. You're very just, straight to the point. I've created an arrival notification. When I arrive at my home it is set to run immediately. It ran correctly once, but the rest of the time I can see it activate on the phone screen, but I hear no audio. Sometimes I'm listening to a podcast via CarPlay, sometimes listening to the vehicle radio AM, fm, xm sometimes no audio. I make sure my phone audio is on and turned up and I've rebooted the phone. I'm not sure what's going on, but I appreciate your help.

45:31 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Thanks, jack in Illinois. Well, this is something that is a little bit tricky because I'm pretty certain that the reminders quickly on my phone and then I can pop that up. So if I'm in Settings, apps, I've gone to Reminders and then Notifications. Or you could do Settings, notifications, reminders same difference here Then there is a Show in CarPlay option and that is turned on. So if we go back and then we just check on shortcuts, then we don't see shortcuts here with notifications. That is the problem. Shortcuts notifications are different, they are special, and so I suspect the problem that you've got here is that shortcuts notifications cannot show in CarPlay, which is a shame.

46:33
But I have a suggestion for you. So I'm assuming that you have created an automation. So in shortcuts, under the automation tab, you've tapped on the plus and then you've got an arrive and then you can choose your location, which I'm just going to quickly do so that I can go ahead and do that and then you've made sure it's run immediately and then you've done something with either running a shortcut or creating a new automation. I'm just going to create a new automation Now what I would do to work around this, if you're okay with having a little bit of a delay, because that is the best way I can think of this. But if you're okay with having a little bit of a delay, I would add one minute to, and then, if you tap and hold on the date, then you can select current date and then I would add a reminder, which, if I spelt reminder instead of teminder, that would be much easier. And then you can add your new reminder and then you can change it to have an alert and then pop in your new reminder, and then you can change it to have an alert and then pop in your adjusted date and time, because reminders do show in CarPlay. And so this is what I would do.

47:43
You could try using the location trigger with reminders. However, the problem with the location trigger is, if you're already at the location, it won't remind you until the next time you get there. Trigger is if you're already at the location, it will remind you until the next time you get there. Now you could also just try creating a reminder in reminders and then, having that set, have the location trigger and then all you do is just swipe it off of your lock screen when you get home and then it comes back again because you never actually mark it as done up to you. But unfortunately, yeah, shortcuts of notifications don't show in carplay and I believe that is something that they they've locked down for security reasons. You know, if instagram could send you notifications in carplay, I feel like that would be pretty interruptive and not a great driving experience. So I would suggest trying to do an adjust date action and then add a reminder with whatever it is that you want to be reminded about as your reminder.

48:42 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
There you go, and with that we have reached the end of this episode of iOS Today. We thank you for tuning in. I want to mention, with the holidays upon us, now is a great time to check out Club Twit because for a limited time, we have a two-week free trial of Club Twit at twittv slash club twit. Afterwards $7 a month, that's it, and you get some pretty awesome benefits. You get access to the Twit Plus bonus feed. You get access to every single one of our shows ad-free. You get access to the members-only Discord server. You get access to the video versions of our Club Twit shows. All of that is available to you as a member of Club Twit.

49:27
If you're already a Club Twit member, remember that you can head to twittv slash club twit slash referral to earn free months of club twit by inviting and referring your friends. So twittv slash club twit to learn more about that. And we thank those of you who have joined the club and continue to join the club. Love seeing new people pop in all the time. All righty, if you have questions, feedback, concerns etc. Send those to iOS today at twittv Rosemary Orchard, if people would like to get in touch with you or follow along with what you're doing. Where should they go to do that?

50:03 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
The best place to find me is rosemaryorchardcom, which has links to apps, books, podcasts, etc. And, of course, if you scroll down, there's all of the social media sites as well. Plus, you can find me in the Club Twit, discord, hanging out with folks who are asking questions during the recording and also after the show. What about you, micah? Where can folks find you?

50:21 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
If you're looking for me online, I'm at Micah Sargent on many a social media network, or you can add to Chihuahuacoffee. That's C-H-I-H-U-A, h-u-aco line. Be sure to check out my other shows, including tech news weekly and hands on tech. Thank you so much for your time today and we will catch you again next week for another episode. Actually, no, with this episode will publish. You will not see an episode next week. You'll see an episode in two weeks, on January 2nd, for our triumphant return. We will see you then, bye-bye.