iOS Today 745 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, head to space and talk about apps that can help you, you know, keep in touch with what's out there. Stay tuned Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit tweet. This is iOS Today, episode 745, with Rosemary Orchard and me, micah Sargent, recorded Tuesday March 25th 2025 for Thursday March 27th 2025. Space discovery. Hello and welcome to iOS Today, the show where we talk all things iOS, ipados, watchos, homepodos and all the other OSs. Apple, you know, serves up to us on our glass and metal platters. This is the show where we help you make the most of your devices by talking about the apps you can download, the settings you can change and the things you can do on those devices. So let's talk about it today. I am one of your hosts, micah Sargent.
01:15 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
And I am your other host, Rosemary Orchard, and I am ready to rock it because that seems appropriate for today.
01:23 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I dig it, I dig it, I dig it, I dig it. Well, I guess I'm not digging because you know we're going. Anyway, we want to talk about some apps that, will you know, help you get in touch with the cosmos. There are many, many apps on the App Store, I think in the science section, but some of my favorite do exist in this particular location, in our category, I guess, in the app store, and I think one of the best apps it's great that it's, you know, I think, become a pretty popular one, and it's one whenever we talk about space, whenever we talk about even going outside, comes up because it's just that good, and the app is called Night Sky. Night Sky is an app that helps you figure out the stars, and Rosemary's actually showing it right now. You'll notice that, as Rosemary's moving around her phone, it's actually adjusting to the night sky Ha, the night sky and can help you find the constellations. So, rosemary, tell us a little bit more about the Night Sky app.
02:34 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Yeah, I should note that it is currently just gone 4pm here in the UK, so it's not actually night sky outside, it's cloudy, but if there weren't clouds, these and it was night, these are the constellations that I should be able to see if I were looking up. So what I'm just doing and I'm using the free version of night sky here, not night sky plus uh with uh or any of the net purchases but I I'm just pointing my phone upwards, um, and then it's showing me what's around. So, in theory, if I looked over to my right, then I should be able to see Jupiter, and then, if I can look over to my left, then I should be able to see Mars, as well as Canis Minor and is that a crab? That looks like cancer? It is indeed, and what I really love about this is it overlays a sort of image. It's not an opaque image, it's a translucent version of you know whatever the thing that is for the constellation.
03:34
So, for example, for Gemini here, which is currently behind Mars, it's got two, it's got twins, which is you know what Gemini stands for? And yeah, I just feel like this. Which is you know what gemini stands for? And yeah, I just, I just feel like this is, you know, uh, really nice. Now there's a whole bunch of different modes that you can use. Here. I've accidentally launched, uh, starlink mode, which was not what I intended to do, um, but uh, there we go. Now I can go back, uh, to showing it off, um, so, yeah, there's all sorts of things going on, uh, now, if I turn it around behind me, I don't actually know what is there, but it looks like there's some constellations over there as well, and obviously this is really great if you're lying in a park at nighttime and you're like so what is that constellation up there? Anyway? Ooh, that one looks cool, and then you'd be able to find out.
04:39 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So we've got Lacerta, which is the lizard, and then something else which I can't read the name of right now because it's off behind me. But yeah, I really love this just for sort of space events that are going on. Celestial events that are going on is really cool as well. I remember being outside during the in Northern California. It was possible in some locations to see the Aurora Borealis, and in other places as well, and so we went out there, and while we were out there we were having trouble seeing the Aurora Borealis, but we were able to see lots and lots of stars because of where we were. And so we had a young one with us and he was a little disappointed not seeing what we had gone out there to see.
05:26
So I pulled out the phone and started talking about the different constellations that were in the sky, and so that was kind of a little uh moment saved, which was, uh, quite delightful because of what night sky is able to do. So, uh, chicken head 21 in our chat also mentioned something that's kind of cool where you can get in touch with the other side of the world, because, yes, our world is not flat, but it is indeed a marble in space, and so, pointing your phone down and sort of looking around, you can see what the people on the other side of the planet or the other you know sort of opposite from you are able to see as well, which is kind of neat. Yeah, it's a way to say, okay, those stars are there right now. You know, this is what they're able to view from their location.
06:18 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Yes, and as well as stars, I feel like I should mention it includes satellites.
06:23
So if you want to know what satellite that is that's kind of like moving overhead then you can see those as well, and you can turn on and off satellites. And if you turn them on then you can also turn off Starlink satellites if you would like to. That can be quite useful because those tend to be in lower orbit, so they're a little bit more visible to a lot of us. But once you've turned those off, it gets a little bit clearer, though not all that clear, because, guess what, there's still a heck of a lot of stars out there, which is pretty darn cool, uh. But yeah, there's a whole bunch of options that you can turn on and off and there's also, uh, some different uh sort of color modes, uh like an infrared mode, um, microwaves and and so on, where you can see um and the radio one. It looks like the Aurora Borealis, which is pretty cool, especially when you can find a keela, which is a bird, and that bird in Aurora Borealis mode, our radio mode is pretty darn amazing.
07:18 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Absolutely All right. So that is Night Sky. I wanted to mention while perhaps you get Solar Smash ready the app in the US. Well, it's available in many places, but some of the features are only available in the US. It's the NASA app. Our NASA app has quite a few features that are built into it and it is available for free on the app store. Within the app you can check out news so you know what's NASA talking about. Lately In this case, I'm looking through the app and I can see NASA is to launch three rockets from Alaska in a single.
08:07
Oh, we were just talking about Aurora experiment, so you can stay up to date there. It also has notifications about it. The experiments let's see experiment that seeks to reveal how auroral substorms affect the behavior and composition of Earth's far upper atmosphere. You can also see live and upcoming events as well, so you can plan for events that are coming up, like the space station crew actually talking to Richmond Hill High School, where you can tune into that, the cargo resupply, and also NASA astronaut Anne McClain talking with a news channel in Seattle. Loads of images so we can see the SuperCam targets, leo Trio, the Hubble spotting of a spiral and a star videos, of course, podcasts, missions, so you can keep up to date with the different missions. That includes images, videos and news and, in some cases, ar models. So if you are working with a specific rover or something like that, you might get an AR model of that object and get to see what it looks like, learn all about what the type of the mission is, which, in this case, it's a crude surface landing expected to launch in mid-2027. Artemis 3 will be one of the most complex undertakings of engineering and human ingenuity in the history of deep space exploration, where they are exploring the lunar south pole region.
09:48
Um, and, of course, citing opportunities. Now you can set up notifications in the app so that you are notified when there are opportunities for citing things like the international space station. Uh, you've got news tabs. Nasa Plus, of course, the television station, sort of streaming platform, dealie, and there's also and I'm not going to tap on it because it will start playing music, but there's a special radio station that NASA has where you can listen to space adjacent music, I guess, sort of music that perhaps makes you think of space. So up at the top of the app there's a little radio, well, a little music icon and tapping that will let you listen to some music. So that's the NASA app, again available for free in the app store. And of course you know, we in the US know NASA to be the home of space exploration, so it's no surprise that this app is packed full of really cool information and images and video about space. All right, let's hear about Solar Smash.
11:01 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Yeah, so this is something I stumbled across while doing preparation for the show over the last week and I thought it was really interesting. So Solar Smash is a planet destruction simulator, so if you would like to learn how we could destroy the planet with a variety of things including nuclear weapons, lasers, monsters, spaceships, asteroids or, in fact, any of the planets then this could be a really interesting way of finding that out, without actually becoming, you know, some sci-fi villain, because I would prefer if you could not do that, please. You know there are some not so great things in the world, but there are also amazing things in the world, so let's focus on the amazing and instead just destroy things virtually. Now, this is a free app. There's three in-app purchases that you can pay for, and they are purchases, not subscriptions. But you can also play for free, and so when you play, there are two modes to start with. So there's Planet Smash or System Smash. So Planet Smash you're taking out one planet. System Smash you're trying to take out an entire system. Yeah, that's how that works. So, planet Smash as you can see, there are some ads and you can pay I think it's $3.99 to remove those.
12:08
Now I can actually choose which planet I would like to destroy. So I could do Mercury, venus, earth, mars, ceres, jupiter, saturn, uranus, neptune, pluto, and then the sun is locked at the moment, and then at the bottom I can choose a variety of weaponry here. So I'm going to send I think I'm going to send a battleship yeah, level five sounds good and then I choose to where in the world I would like to send it. Ooh, maybe if I go here, that could be good. Or I could choose something else like an asteroid they go here, that could be good, or I could choose something else like an asteroid, um, and then, yeah, I fire it at the uh earth which I'm firing a couple there.
12:53
You can't see them super well because that was the back of the earth which isn't very lit up. So let's uh send there we go, that's a little bit easier to see. Um, and now I'm going to send maybe a planet killer uh rain after that asteroid and see what happens. And I'm feeling that this is going to send maybe a planet killer rain after that asteroid and see what happens. And I have a feeling that this is going to potentially destroy the planet. But you could do really cool things in it and I kind of like the way that this is a science experiment type application as well. As you know a game, you know how much does it take to destroy the Earth? Apparently, it takes more than one planet killer to destroy the Earth.
13:28
Oh wait no, it just took a little while to explode. So there we go, I smashed the planet and you can get experience and you can level up and so on. That is another thing that you need to pay to unlock if you would like to unlock levels and achievements. That's $2.99. There's also a $ 2.99 healing pack, which I have not yet come across needing, um. However, I've been playing this for free. I found it to be quite fun and I think it's just really interesting figuring out, like, what is it going to take to destroy our planet, because sometimes it takes a lot and sometimes it feels like just a carefully placed asteroid could do it. Um, which actually we know to be a truth. So, yeah, I I thought Solar Smash would be an interesting one for people to try out, especially as it's free.
14:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I dig it. I absolutely dig it. You know, maybe choose Neptune or something, Leave Earth alone. I hate the way Neptune looks at us. I tell you, no, very, very fun. Now what if I wanted to take a trip through space and wanted to sort of test my mettle when it came to to spaceflight? Is there any option for that, Rosemary?
14:38 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Yes, yes, there is. So there is a another free app called Space Flight Simulator where, if you would like to see if you can do better than NASA or SpaceX or whatever, then you can build a rocket and simulate a space flight, and so I have gone back and set it up as a tutorial mode and it is reminding us that rocket science is hard, which is something I personally didn't need reminding of. I'm well aware it's tricky, but, yes, basically you just have to keep trying and then at some point you might get there. So, to start with, I am building my rocket so I can add my control. I might stick a heat shield behind that that seems like a good idea. Staging they probably want a landing pod. I think we might need that. And shield behind that that seems like a good idea. Staging they probably want a landing pod. I think we might need that. And then some fuel tanks. Um, I'm just gonna add all the fuel tanks in order. Um, this seems like a really good idea. Uh, an engine? Uh, yeah, that seems good.
15:38
I need one of those, probably, oh yeah, apparently I might need separator or need stage separators between layers. Oh okay, that could be good actually.
15:50
Sounds good, yeah, so that when bits break off, then yeah, okay, I don't know if I actually need all of these separators. How badly could this go? It's probably going to go really badly and I'm going to kill the one astronaut that's there. Right, I've got my landing pod, so they shouldn't actually die, I hope, by the way, I'm going to. Okay, the engine has no fuel source, so I may have missed something here. Okay, like the utility section. Is that what I need there? Maybe I probably don't actually want this part there, but yeah, I need to actually build my rocket and it's helping, but it's not helping all that much because I'm not 100% certain exactly what it is I need. Engine still has no fuel source. Was that just because I had the? Yeah, there we go. Oh, okay, so I had the yeah, there we go.
16:49 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Um, okay, uh, so I've crashed there, we go. Well, you were able to recover most of the the yes, I think I probably didn't need the uh staging parts, uh, between the uh the levels, uh.
16:59 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
But yes, either way, I built a rocket. I did really badly with it, but you know I tried and so I can clear my debris and maybe I will revert to my build stage and just see. Yeah, so I have a feeling that the staging sections, I probably didn't need those between the fuel capsules, so maybe I'll just try that instead. Okay, I think I needed to, perhaps Look, it's not rocket science, oh wait. It's not rocket science, but it definitely is.
17:36 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I think I need to press a particular button when I go to that?
17:45 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Yeah, I think I need to that. Yeah, I think I need to press a particular button. Either way, is this what happens when you have reset it to the tutorial and you're now at a really early stage where you've forgotten everything. But either way, this is a fun way of figuring out whether or not you can launch your own rocket, to which the answer is, apparently, I'm not very good at it, but that doesn't mean to say that you won't be, and I'm sure you good at it, but that doesn't mean to say that you won't be, and I'm sure you can do better than I have done here. But yeah, if you want to simulate your own spaceflight without having to leave the Earth because getting on planes at the moment seems kind of tricky, so, you know, maybe take rockets with a little extra care Then yeah, you can do that without leaving your home or your iPad or your iPhone.
18:24 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
All right. And then, of course, there are some options for those of you who have Apple Watches to kind of get in touch with space. There is the Astronomy Apple Watch Face. This one will actually show you 3D models of the Earth, the Moon and the solar system 3D models of the Earth, the Moon and the solar system. And if you tap on the watch face and then scroll the digital crown, what it does is it moves forward and backward in time to show you you know the sun setting or you know how the rotation is changing. And also, with the solar system, it will show you the position of the planets based on time moving through. For the moon, of course, it shows you the phases of the moon, so you can change it to any of those the earth, the moon, the solar system, or random, so that whenever you lift it you can see each part of it. It also has different styles to show you the full 3D model of that object or a random version of it, so it can be kind of at the side every time you lift it up, and so that will be there as well.
19:33
And then one more that kind of gets you in touch with things is the solar option. With the solar option, as you might imagine, it is tied to the uh phases of the well, not phases, but the actual sun. And so there's the solar analog option and the solar dial option and the solar graph option with the, and we'll scroll down to get to the solar analog. What you have here, um, is the. This is the solar dial, and so it shows the 24 hour kind of movement of the sun and that way you can see, you know, here's, here's our sunset, here's our sunrise, based on the location of the little yellow sun along that dial. The analog option is actually showing you kind of lights and shadows throughout the day, so the color will sort of shift as you move through the day and will give you some understanding, although people I've heard lots of complaints about solar analog, where it's kind of like I don't know it's a little hand wavy, um, on where, on how it kind of affects it's. It's hard to kind of grok what it's trying to tell you, but I think it's a cool watch face regardless, like it looks cool.
20:59
And then, um, solar graph, solar Graph, which is not I think it's not available on later versions of watchOS, but it's essentially like oh there, it is Solar Graph. It's part of solar for me. It will show you a graph of it. Looks like it's a bell curve, pretty pretty much the arc of the sun as it's above the horizon and then below the horizon throughout the day.
21:32
So you'll see these kind of all in solar, where you've got the two solar dial options and then, lastly, you've got the solar graph option and, based on your current location and time of day, it will display the sun's position in the sky. So it's tied to which is nice the location, and then you can also tap the watch face and then move the digital crown to see where the sun will be throughout the day, which, outside of sunrise and sunset, it's kind of easy to tell where it is. So that is a look at some of the solar options in the for the Apple Watch, and I think Rosemary is going to tell us about some other celestial options for the iPhone yeah, so on the iphone, uh, if you are on the home screen, you tap and hold, um, or the lock screen, and you tap and it's unlocked.
22:23 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
You tap and hold, then you can add new lock screens, um, and this includes some weather and astronomy ones. So the weather one just shows you the weather, uh, and I have this on my ipad. It's quite nice looking at it. Sometimes, though, recently it's been raining a lot here in the uk and that's not so nice, just picking, picking up my iPad and being like is that a piece of dirt or lint that's falling down my screen? Oh, no, that's rain inside the screen, but virtually not in a sense that there's moisture inside my iPad screen.
22:50
But as far as backgrounds go, as well as weather, we also have astronomy faces with all the different planets, including the solar system, all the different planets including the solar system, and personally I really love the Earth one, especially when I'm traveling on a plane, because it adjusts to where you physically are in the world and it also changes the planet based on night and day.
23:10
So as the sun goes down, it changes where you are on the planet to be in a dark mode with lights coming up, and as the sun rises, then you see that coming up over the planet, which is just really cool, and I really love these faces. I feel like Apple's done a lot of put a lot of attention to detail in there and yeah, it's, it's really cool. So I just recommend checking those out, the Solocitum one in particular really great on a 13 inch iPad screen or top of 9 inch iPad screen, like. It's actually genuinely one of my favorite things. But it works even on the smaller size. It's just obviously if you're squishing onto an iPhone screen, it's a little bit smaller than it would be if you put it on a nice big screen.
23:53 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So that is a look at some of the space discovery apps and features you can get access to. If you have different space discovery apps you know tools that you use, please do let us know about them. We'd love to hear about them. But it is time for us to move along to the rest of the show, the news segment up next. All right, one bit of news that I wanted to mention Apple on the 24th so yesterday as we record this show on the 25th put out a press release saying hey, by the way, if you have the new AirPods Max, so the one that has the USB-C option, then you should know that a feature will be added that brings lossless audio and ultra low latency audio to the AirPods Max. So this is what Apple says With the included USB-C cable, users can enjoy the highest quality audio across music, movies and games. And then they sort of focus this on music creators, saying that they can experience significant enhancements to songwriting, beat making, production and mixing. So with the update, it will unlock 24-bit, 48 kilohertz, lossless audio, and that, of, of course, is even through Apple Music, where much of the music there offers a lossless feature. Again, this requires the cable in order for it to work. Lossless audio and ultra latency audio enable music creators to fully utilize AirPods Max throughout their entire professional workflow on Logic Pro. You will be able to use this to create and mix in personalized spatial audio with head tracking, so that way, if you're wanting to, you can kind of hear what this would sound like for someone sort of in a you know a final version of it and then, with that high resolution lossless digital audio, you can record and mix with AirPods Max without worrying about kind of the difference between the two. And then, of course, last but not least, ultra low latency audio for being able to play games on the machine or also doing live streaming. That's very important as well. Now this says lossless audio and ultra low latency audio will be available in April as a free firmware update with iOS 18.4, ipados 18.4, and macOS Sequoia 15.4 for AirPods Max with USB-C.
26:34
So again, you have to have that AirPods Max available for $549 and the USB-C to 3.5 millimeter audio cable is $39. So you use that to connect the AirPods Max to 3.5 millimeter audio sources. You know an audio outport so that you're able to do it there. These are incredibly expensive headphones that have not been updated in a long time other than to make them USB-C. That said, I know people love them. I believe I can see a pair on Rosemary Orchard's head right now. So hey, if it's for you, then this is something. Are you excited about this, or do you have the free USB-C pair?
27:20 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
I have the lightning ones and, honestly, you would think that being a podcaster like this is the thing that would make me upgrade to the USB-C ones.
27:28
But headphone technology doesn't change all that much and I kind of feel like they could have just released this as a firmware update to these ones. And, yeah, I'm fine with these ones. I only wear them for podcasting because they are too heavy for my head for anything longer than recording a podcast episode or two. So yeah, unfortunately, as good as they are, you can get really great headphones for less. So, yeah, if somebody is looking at them and going, I was thinking of buying them. Anyway, it's a great upgrade. It is not the upgrade that would make me recommend that you spend your cash on them, though I feel like you could spend your money in other ways. Uh, and you know, get more enjoyment out of it as well as get some great headphones.
28:14 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
All righty. That, uh, brings us to the end of the news, so let's head into our feedback. Um, that brings us to the end of the news, so let's head into our feedback. Feedback comes in from Carson, who writes Hi, mike and Rosemary, I was thrilled to hear you featured geocaching a few episodes ago.
28:27
I've been a geocacher since 2005, and I love introducing new people to the game. I wanted to suggest that your listeners may be interested in my geocaching app of choice. It's called Cachely C-A-C-H-L-Y. It's a $4.99 one-time purchase with some subscription options to support more advanced features. I've been a user and beta tester for several years now and I highly recommend it as an excellent alternative for casual and power users alike.
28:56
That is well worth the cost of admission and that is Cachely for geocaching. You may find it as Cachely hyphen geocaching in the App Store, and this app has, you know, the ability to search for geocaches wherever you are. Some more information about it, so a hint, if you need it logs of other people who've been there, images you can also add personal notes to kind of keep track of it yourself and also being able to download different maps without needing to be connected so that you are able to find them that way. And you know, it occurs to me now that I live in Portland, if there's one city that I think is definitely, I feel like Portland, is going to have a lot of geocaches.
29:48
A lot of geocaches yeah.
29:49 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
I feel like there may be something to encourage you to get outdoors, as the weather is improving up there.
29:55 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Absolutely. Yeah, I just downloaded Cachely, so thank you, carson. Absolutely yeah, I just downloaded Cachely, so thank you, carson, for the suggestion. I will be giving that a go and of course, we will include a link to Cachely in the show notes. Now, that is strictly as an endorsement from Carson, not yet an endorsement from us, but could very easily become one. So that's Cachely geocaching in the App Store. All righty folks, I can hear the music. It's time for Shortcuts Corner. Welcome to Shortcuts Corner, the part of the show where you write in with your shortcuts requests and Rosemary Orchard, our shortcuts expert, provides a response. Carson, the geocacher, has written in with a Shortcuts Corner request. Carson writes I've recently gotten into 3D printing and I wanted to set up an air filtration system to make it safer to run the printer in my house.
31:07
I found a filter kit I liked, but it is designed to be manually controlled by a toggle switch on the filter unit itself.
31:14
Since it's possible to remotely start a print, I was hoping to find a way to automatically power the filter on when starting a print and then power off an hour or so after the end of each print.
31:26
My idea was to do this with a pair of smart plugs one that stays on all the time to monitor the energy consumption of the printer itself Interesting, and a second one to turn on power to the filter when the printer is drawing enough power to print. So I purchased an Eve Energy smart plug that supports energy monitoring. I can use the Eve app to see the current energy consumption of the printer, but I can't see any way to use the current energy consumption of the first plug as an automation trigger or condition. I found some reports online that this was not supported in the home app but could be achieved using third-party apps, but I tried a couple and even paid for one or two without finding a solution. Am I missing something or am I just out of luck? I can always use one of the apps to manually toggle the filter when starting a print, but I was just hoping for a slightly more clever solution. Thanks, carson.
32:22 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Well, this is a really interesting question and, unfortunately for Carson, I no longer have an Eve Energy smart plug. I used to have one, however, it was very old. I'm talking like. This was probably like when they first came out, that I bought it and over time it just got overused, abused and eventually died on me. But it did take a very long time to do that, so I don't think you should take that as a negative.
32:48
However, the Eve app itself actually does have some things in it which may help here, and feeling that controller for HomeKit is giving my recommendation. However, before we get into that, I do just want to uh mention a few things. Number one air filtration great idea. Not strictly necessary unless you have a resin printer. If you have a resin printer, it does need to be in a very well ventilated area, folks. Uh. So please be very careful with those. I do not want anybody dying. Uh, that will be really, really bad, um, uh, you know, similarly just damaging your lungs and all that also not good. But if it's a regular printer that's printing PLA filament, you should be fine, assuming that there is some ventilation in your house so you don't need to go too crazy on it. But this is a good idea. Secondly, I am going to make a recommendation for OctoPrint. That's Octo as in octopus, but then print at the end, which is a system that you can download and install on a Raspberry Pi, and it's designed to do a whole bunch of things with a lot of 3D printers, including things like, if you have a smart plug, powering off the smart plug when the print is done, which is just really cool, and then obviously you know you could use an error after that as the trigger for the plug turning off, and you could also say, hey, when a print starts, turn on the other smart plug, because you can integrate things that way, which is nice. But you asked how we can do this with HomeKit, and the answer is we should be able to, but we can't do it with the Home app. However, these rules will appear in the Home app. We just have to configure them or modify them elsewhere.
34:22
So, to start with, I'm just going to show, using the Eve app, how we should be able to do this. So in the Eve app, I have my actual home on the left. I've got rooms and automation at the bottom, I've selected automation and gone to rules at the top and I'm going to add a rule, and then I tap triggers and then I add a trigger, and these options that appear here are not what we are looking for. What we are looking for is other value, and then in other value, we can choose various things. For example, I could choose the PM2 density from the air purifier in my living room. I could choose the tilt on the living room patio blinds and say, hey, at 85 degrees, do this, and so on and so forth. So there are a whole bunch of options here.
35:10
However, I personally find that this app is not the easiest to see these things in. So instead, my personal choice for this is controller for HomeKit, which allows me to do things like add an automation here and again, I have a whole bunch of options, including iBeacon triggers, which is quite nice. But then I can select an accessory and then I can go and choose something like, for example, I'm going to choose my hallway overhead light and then I'm going to select brightness and then I can say, hey, when value of this the brightness is greater than equal to, and then I could actually type something in. I'm just going to say 75% and I save that. Then I can, you know, add conditions to this. This is something you can't do with native HomeKit actions, and then I can say, okay, then do this. And now, in this particular case, I'm just going to say, hey, turn on the bedroom fan, because that seems like the easiest thing to do there for this particular scenario, because my smart plugs aren't actually in HomeKit, and I love control of HomeKit. It lets you make HomeKit rules which are smarter and automations that just work a little better by accessing properties and things that aren't available directly through HomeKit automation triggers.
36:29
That said, as much as this is great and probably a good option, you may still struggle to do exactly this because HomeKit automations unfortunately do have limitations. So I would try setting this up using controller for HomeKit. You need the accessory trigger to do this, but what I will just do is I'll set this as 3D printer example. That's not how you spell the word example. There we go and I'll save this, and then, if I pop into the home app just to show folks that automation is here, now I can see here it says there are no scenes or accessories. It is really important to remember if you've set this up through another application, don't mess with it in the home app, because otherwise everything will go wonky and have to be set up again in the app that you use to set it up, or just another app that has options to access more of these properties.
37:27
If you are looking for considerably more powerful home automation options where you can still use all the kit that you've currently got, I highly recommend Home Assistant, which is free to download, but you have to set up a little machine that's running Home Assistant, which is free to download, but you have to set up a little machine that's running Home Assistant to do all the things on it as well, instead of having an Apple TV or a HomePod that can run all of those things. It is a lot more involved, but it can very easily integrate with a whole bunch of things, including possibly, your 3D printer, depending on the model. Or you can try using something like controller for HomeKit, which should be able to do all of this for you, and hopefully it can. But yes, so OctoPrint controller for HomeKit or Home Assistant are, I think, your choices there, carson. So thank you for writing in.
38:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yes, indeed. Thank you, Carson. All right, that is going to bring us to the end of this episode of iOS Today. Of course, I remind you email us, iostod ios today at twittertv. That's how you get in touch with your shortcuts, corner requests, your questions, etc. And we'd love to hear from you there. I want to remind everybody out there who is listening that you can become a member of club twit and in doing so, you gain access to some pretty awesome benefits. For just $7 a month, you gain access to the ad-free versions of all of our shows. Also the TwitPlus bonus feed that has extra stuff you won't find anywhere else Behind the scenes. Before the show, after the show special Club Twit events and 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. We'd love to see you there as well. Twittv slash Club Twit Rosemary Orchard. If people are looking to follow you online, where should they go to do so?
39:12 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Well, the best place to go is rosemaryorchardcom, which has got links to apps, books, podcasts, etc. Where you can find me, and, of course, it's also got a list of all of my social media places where I exist on the internet. And you can find me in the Club Twit Discord, where folks post during the show as we do a live recording, and also we have threads for every single episode after we post them, as well as the General iOS Today discussion channel. Micah, where can folks find you?
39:37 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
If you're looking to find me online, I'm at Micah. Where can folks find you? If you're looking to find me online, I'm at Micah, surgeon 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. Thanks so much for being here with us this week. We'll be back again next week for another episode of iOS Today. Bye-bye.
