iOS Today 752 Transcript

Please be advised that 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, give you some ways to make sure that those photos you're taking are available to you in physical form. Stay tuned for this episode of iOS Today Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is TWIT Print out your photos. Hello and welcome to iOS Today. This is the show where we talk all things iOS, ipados, watchos, homepodos and all the OSes Apple has on offer. We love to talk about them and help you make the most of your Apple devices.

01:09 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
We being well first. Well, not first, but partially. Me, micah Sargent, one of your hosts.

01:13 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And me being.

01:13 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Rosemary Orchard and I'm ready to snap away, Micah. I think this is going to be a fun episode.

01:16 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yes, I do too. So I love the opportunity to get photos that I have taken and make them physical. And, of course, if you have a printer at home, congratulations. You're one of a shrinking number of people you are able to, you know, get some photo paper, print those out, get them up on the wall Fantastic. But many a person no longer has a printer at home and therefore needs to find some way of printing out their photos, and I have tried a lot of different photo printing apps. That is because I, as I said, am a person who does like to print out photos and make them physical manifestations, because, you know object permanence, it's nice to have them in front of me.

02:16
So the first app that I want to talk about is one that I'm actually a little sad because, if you look at it in the app store in the US app store anyway there's one review, and that one review has put it down to a one star and reasonable for the person that had the experience. You know you're allowed to not feel great about it, but it was because the app lost the project that they had created. It wasn't that the thing that was made was bad, it was just that they went back to finish the project and a bunch of the stuff that they had done was missing. So all that's to say bugginess that the person experienced resulted in them feeling very upset, and it wasn't the end product, and so I just want to make that clear. If you go, and you go to download this app, why is Micah recommending a one star app? Well, I have had a great experience with this app, and so that is why I am recommending it, and that is Social print studio. Social print studio, uh, is available in the app store. Many of these are going to be available for free, with in-app purchases, uh. But what it is is a photo printing app that has a lot of different options. Uh, you can do just straight up prints, you can create a calendar, you can do cards and stationary wall art and decor, framed prints, photo books and special gifts as well.

03:48
Now, I have used PhotoPrint Studio in two ways. One is for the magnet option, so I love the magnet option. Essentially, what happens is it'll take your photos, print them out and then place them kind of folded over a magnet and then put a plastic coating over the top of that, and then you've got fridge magnets and I have found the prices to be very reasonable. So you can get multiple. I think it's sets of, so it's six for $23, 10, and then it goes up from there. They are water resistant because they do have that coating over the top of them, and I think they are fantastic. The magnets are very strong so you can actually use them to hold things if you'd like and yes, you're right, burke, I should leave an app in the app store for this and you can see some of the stuff that people have created in the past with them, including and I love this because the magnets stick to, you know many metals. This person has a metal tree and on it they are displaying the photo magnets that they had printed. It's very simple to set this up, and then the other option that I printed were these classic square photo prints. They are on this really thick archival paper and, of course, are printed in a way that they are meant to kind of last for a long time, and I used this to create and it's been a while in a previous home of mine, previous rental home of mine a display on the wall, and I was able to then get more photos over time and swap them out, and I found that incredibly delightful.

05:41
Now a couple of things about Social Print Studio. One, the turnaround time was great, so I was very happy about that. Two, they have sales all the time, and that's the big thing. I believe that I bought the set of magnets while there was a sale going on. So if you're thinking about getting you know prints from this app, just know that you can kind of hang around for a little while and wait for a sale. If you turn on notifications, then you are able to very quickly you're able to very quickly get a notification whenever there's a sale available is the thing I'm trying to say. So I love that as well for its you know again quick ability to just pop in, get some prints done and pop back out. Now there are different ways to go about to go about using the, the app itself. Of course, when you're using the app, you'll need to give it access to your photos library and then from there you're able to kind of do basic editing, which is what you would expect from an app like this.

07:01
The second option that I wanted to mention is an app called Mpix. That's the letter M-P-I-X and the reason why I want to mention this more than anything else is because Mpix is one of the apps that has integrations with the Photos app for the Mac. So when you get this for your iPhone, you can also get it at the same time for your Mac, and what that allows you to do is never leave the Photos app and still be able to make adjustments, make edits to the actual. You know the content that you're working with. I like this app because it has a uh, it has your, your standard photo prints and wall art and cards and things like that Uh, some cool tabletop stuff.

07:56
But it also has a print club, and so it's a monthly subscription. Subscription it's $19 a month and when you do it you're able to get 19 photos that you like printed and sent to you each month, and so you'll see. If you're watching this. There's this envelope that has the month and the year, and inside of the envelope is your set of 19 photos. The 20th item in that is an actual kind of printout of all of the photos on one thing, a little sort of gallery to show you what you got printed out for that month. So that's pretty cool. Show you what you got printed out for that month. So that's pretty cool.

08:49
But I actually want to mention another product that I use. Mpix is again fantastic, for I've heard very good things about the quality of the prints from Mpix. Prices are a little more expensive, but again, it's all about kind of where you want to put the money and how much you're willing to invest and what you get out of that. So that's something to bear in mind, and it's also worth noting that many of these companies I'm not speaking to these companies specifically, but many of these companies do use a lot of the same printers on the other end of things, and they are essentially just their own services that work with these specific printers.

09:28
All that said, I want to mention the premium print series from Google Photos. So Google has a thing called premium prints, and I've used it for years now years now and what it is is a $7 a month subscription and for $7 a month you gain access to every or to 10 4x6 photos. You can choose to have them printed in matte or glossy format and you are getting them from your Google Photos library. So if you have Google Photos and you are regularly uploading photos to Google Photos, google Photos will kind of look through your library and suggest photos for you based on what it sees, and then it notifies you hey, this is what I think you're going to want for this month. And then boom mails you 10 four by six prints for that month. I have loved this service. You can make it so that each of the prints has, on the opposite side, a little kind of note card, postcard sort of print on it, so you can just send these out, which is delightful, but I have so many physical prints that I would not otherwise have because of the premium print series from Google Photos. So that's well worth checking out as well. And then Google Photos also does allow you to print books and, you know, gallery pieces and all sorts of other gifts. But specifically I wanted to mention that Google Premium Print Series because it's much less expensive than what Mpix was offering, given that it was just $7 a month.

11:22
All right, the last thing that I wanted to mention is Shutterfly. People are probably going Micah. What about Shutterfly? You know that big, well-known company? Yeah, no, it's here and I have not forgotten about it.

11:35
Shutterfly is the place you want to go If you're looking to A print in, like a bunch of photos, print in bulk, almost.

11:44
Or if you're looking to make weird things like printing out photos on a water bottle, or perhaps can I interest you in a printed wine glass, because that is also an option. Shutterfly is the place to go for those kind of odd choices that you might make, and that is where Shutterfly comes into play. And that is where Shutterfly comes into play. It's not my first choice for the smaller prints and the more standard prints, because for me, I have found that it's not as high quality. But again, when it comes to kind of the weird stuff, they've done it for a long time, so they do it best, and that has been my experience. So all of those are available for free within app purchases to kind of access that Um, and of course, these are very us friendly. Uh, app experiences, um, I don't know, rosemary, if you have any that you want to mention for the UK that you have used, or if you just kind of head down to the oh boy, what do you call it?

13:12 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
The chemist, the drugstore there for printing, yeah, so one of the ones I want to mention actually is a chemist slash drugstore called Boots, because that's where you go to buy, you know, like plasters or band-aids and stuff like that, here in the UK, because, of course, you go to a shoe shop for that. No, boots has a photo printing app which my family has used in the past. I'm not really a photo printing person, however. I asked my dad and he said if he didn't have a printer because he has his own photo printer at home, because he likes printing photos in various weird sizes for my grandmothers then he would use Jessups. That is his go-to.

13:55
They don't appear to have an app last time I checked, but they do, you know, produce decent quality prints and they have options for printing photo books as well. Both boots and jessups do so. Those are good options and, yeah, there's loads of options in all sorts of countries around the world. But I would definitely look for something relatively local to you, uh, just because that way you don't have to worry about paying import tariffs, uh, on any of your things, uh, you know when they, when they get sent to you or anything like that. So, yeah, yeah, boots or Jessups here in the UK or Jessops boots or Jessops.

14:34 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So there you go. That is a look at the apps that we use to print out photos. Of course, this is always the time where I invite you. If there are apps that you love, that help you print out photos, that you think are great, that make high quality prints, that you're thinking, oh wow, micah, you print out a lot of photos but you're not doing it right, I want to hear about it. So let us know by getting in touch. Iostodayattwittv is how you do so, and we would love to hear about what you think are the best methods for printing out photos from your iPhone. Well, not just photos, but wine glasses, even. All right, that's that. It is time to move on. I can hear the music. It's time for Shortcuts Corner.

15:42
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 request comes in from Diana. Diana writes hello, wonderful peeps, I've got a. It's very Easter appropriate. Anyway, I've got a wonky shortcut request that confused AI, so I very much hope this won't be a silly request for you.

16:03
I'm quite the reader, with heaps of EPUBs in my iCloud. I've been trying to tackle the following A shortcut that will identify every file in a single iCloud folder and move the last word to the front of the file title separated by a period. For example, in my iCloud folder, books change each, each title in the folder as thus this is my book title, hyphen John. Doe changes to Doe period. This is my book title, hyphen John. So essentially the last word gets moved to the front, then there's a period, then the rest of the title is just following that Diana says. I hope I made sense, but it's maddening not sussing it out correctly. You lot rock, diana. It sounds like we're looking at regular expressions. That's my regular expression song, Thank you.

16:55 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
Oh no, he's going to tell me no. Yes, micah, but we can do it without regular expression.

17:02 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I am shook. I didn't think this was possible. Tell me how.

17:04 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
It is totally possible. So I was just quickly looking for a folder on my phone which has some files in that we can use for our sample, and I think I have one here which it's not perfect but it'll do okay. So we need to create a shortcut and, to start with, we need to get the contents of a folder, because Diana has very cleverly put all of the things in one folder, so it's a good start. So, using all of the files actions to get the contents of a folder, that's what we're going to do to start with now. If there are nested folders inside of these so, for example, if inside of the folder there was a folder called john doe, and then inside of that folder you would have this this is my book John Doe, that's John Doe as the title then you would want recursive, but if it's just one folder with loads of files inside of it, then you don't need to change that thing. So after this, we're going to need to repeat with each, because we're going to need to go over every single file in the folder. Okay, and then what we are going to do is we are going to split some text. Okay, so we are going to split the text of the repeat item and I'm going to tap on the repeat item and just double check that that is the name. Okay, because we just want to get the name, okay. And then we're going to get an item from a list, and so there is an action called get item from list and then we're going to get the last item. Yep, that's right, okay. And then we're going to do a little replace text option, okay, so we're going to replace the text. And now here we're going to have to start by changing that last section. I'm going to do that first. So in our scroll along repeat item name, we're going to replace that last item from the list with nothing, okay.

19:07
And then we are going to use a rename action. So there's a rename file action and again we are going to change that. It defaults to renaming the updated text. No, we don't want that. We want to rename our repeat item to. And then we're gonna grab that item from list dot and then we're gonna grab our updated text, and that's it. That's all you need to do. So you know, once this is done, so our rename thing is there, we're just going to make sure that we save that file, just to make sure it's been updated and then we're done. That's it. No regular expression required, which is a little bit simpler. Just to you know, save us a little time in explaining what regular expressions are. I think Micah probably had a little mental explanation of what a regular expression is planned, slightly disappointed he doesn't get to do it this week. But that's okay, we'll save it for a future episode, micah.

20:09 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I love it. I love it. Listen, I love a regular expression, but it's fine, because regular expressions, when I first started learning about them, made things very difficult and frustrating, and so saving someone that frustration is great. Um, and that's what rosemary does. That's why I love rosemary and the work that she does. It's fantastic, diana, congratulations. Um, and I I hope that I also love when someone because I'm guilty of this all the time there'll be something that I'm working on, and it was Rosemary who kind of broke me of this habit there's something that I'm working on and instead of just telling the person who I'm asking for help what I'm working on and what I need help with specifically, I come up with like an example of a thing that I want to have done that is not part of what I'm actually doing, in the hopes that I can for some reason obfuscate what I'm doing. I don't know why I did it, but I don't anymore.

21:04 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
It's also one of these things where when you're trying to solve a problem and you're asking for help, okay, you've already done like this bit and this bit and that bit and you just need to bridge the gap. So you're trying to ask for help on the bit to bridge the gap, but if you explain the whole problem that you're having and say I've already done this bit, this bit and this bit, I'm just trying to solve this bit, then I can see, like, okay, I can see why you've broken this into four sections, but I would do it in two and that can also be, you know, quite helpful, because somebody's saying hey, I just need a really big stick. And you give them a big stick and then they go and they poke this button. That's really hard to get to place. It's like OK, but if you told me you're trying to poke the button, I could have moved the button, I could have given you a shortcut to press the button so that you don't need the stick.

21:50
So yeah, problem solving is one of those weird things where it's really good to solve the problem yourself. And if you've already started solving the problem and you're asking for help, please share what you've already done, because I may take a totally different approach. But that's okay. It's nice to see what you've already done and I can point out the advantages to a different approach or a way that your approach is actually better than what I was thinking, and so on. But yeah, detail is always appreciated, so share examples with us. We love them.

22:20 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And last but not least everyone, our very popular and recently returned App Caps segment, as we cap off the show with our picks of the week. Rosemary Orchard, what is your pick of the week? This week?

22:37 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
very exciting stuff okay, well, so last time my, my pick seemed big. Uh, congratulations, folks, I've outdone, I've outdone myself.

22:46
My pick is bigger than I am, so you can't really see it, but like this is the length of my arm, um, and better still, yeah, this is a little grab handle. Right here it unfolds to be twice this size, because this is folks, it's a 100 volt solar panel, um, and this is a portable solar panel. It's from a company called eco worthy and it is their 12 volt foldable solar panel, and the reason why I got this links to my app cap from last week's episode, episode 751, where I talked about getting a Jackery battery pack, which I happen to have here just to show off. So this solar panel is to recharge the Jackery as I'm using it while I go camping. So it is only 12 volts. If you're looking for an in-home solar setup, you're probably going to be looking for 48 volts or 24 volts at minimum, but this is intended for portable camping.

23:41
Now, there's a couple of reasons why I got this one, and I'm not going to show them off on camera, because I do not live in a mansion or gazebo, which is the kind of space I would need to put this up and show it off on camera. But it has two angles that you can set it up at, so 30 degrees or 40 degrees because it's got some legs on the back that you can unclip and then slot into the stand to prop it up correctly. It is waterproof. So the connector where the cable goes in on the back has a slide-on, screw-on part so that you don't get any water inside of that, because water and electricity yeah, remember your science classes don't mix, not unless you want problems.

24:21 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Please don't do that to yourself.

24:23 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
That would not be good for you. Even though it's only 12 volts, still don't do it. Okay, that would be bad. But yeah, this comes with a whole range of adapters. I will say I did have to buy a separate adapter for my jackery, because the jackery you get uh, my jackery, you get a usbc to dc 8020 um, and there is an adapter that comes with this that looks like it fits. It does not. It does not actually pass power through, so you need to make sure that you get the right one, which is a dc 5521 to dc 8020 um. But you know, you can figure all that out for yourself depending on what setup you've actually got.

24:57
But this, this solar panel in particular, I got because it's actually waterproof, so I can leave it outside overnight when you get a bit of dew and stuff, and catch that early morning sun. Uh, yeah, there there is a good reason for this um. A lot of the other portable ones you can get have got like fabric connectors. Uh, this one also doesn't have magnets in the handles. It's got poppers in fabric handles and I think that that might be a little bit better. It is not the lightest thing, but I can lift it up and bounce my microphone with, like that's, two fingers and a thumb, so it's not that heavy and my hands aren't that strong. I have arthritis in them. So you know I probably and my hands aren't that strong, I have arthritis in them, so you know I probably don't well be doing that on a regular basis. But, yeah, this is a great little solar panel.

25:43
Now, other solar panels do have the option of having USB-C and USB-A outputs. However, I think a lot of the time you can just get a power station to plug this into, where then also any overage from that 100 watts I'm not currently using can recharge the battery pack as I'm going and then keep things running throughout the night, which could be really nice. And I also think it's just nice to have a backup power option. Just in case you know, as we record this, the previous week there were massive power outages in Spain and Portugal and the south of France not great, um, and so if you have anything that you need to keep running, then you may want to investigate something like this.

26:21
And this being a camping setup, it is quite small and portable. I have a really low to the ground bed and I can definitely fit this under it. Um, it's the sort of thing you could stick in the back of a wardrobe and not really worry about, and then, when the day comes, you can be like, aha, I am prepared, without going fully into the whole prepper thing and having meals ready to eat everywhere. Having a little bit of solar could to just maybe, you know, keep keep your insulin chilled if you have diabetes. Perhaps that could be useful. So, yeah, I've picked some solar panels by eco worthy.

26:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Lovely. My pick is a fun little app called Days D-A-Y-S, available in the App Store. Days is an event countdown app. You can get it for free in-app purchase to kind of add more than one day, 99 cents a month or $5 a year, and what it does is it just lets you create countdowns so if you have an event coming up, and then it also you put those countdowns as widgets on your screen. So if you have an event coming up and I'll show an example here let's say there's, I don't know, lucy's birthday and I spelled birthday wrong, which is cool, but I was able to fix that. And then we choose continue, and Lucy's birthday is on the 6th of June, sure of this year. It's an all day event. And then you can give it access to your photo library and select photos from there. But you can also use online photos like those from Unsplash or Colors. So we'll choose some birthday balloons and then it's going to generate, after it downloads that photos photo itself. You can crop it, you can change by panning it what parts in focus, and now I've got Lucy's birthday. It shows that it's in 38 days. I can change the event style, so by doing that I can change the typeface that's used. I can change the color and then I can add the. When I tap add widget, it just shows you how to add a widget. So you all know how to do that. The category so in this case it knows it was smart enough to know it was a birthday and then I can tap done. Now, that is one option. You can also share this with other people so you can create it kind of as a cover. Watermark is on there If you are not a subscriber. Watermark is off if you are a subscriber.

29:06
But let me create a different kind of event. Let's see Garfield visits. So my friend Garfield is coming to visit soon. Sure, let's see. I'm going to need, obviously, a Monday, monday May 12th. So we'll go to the 12thm and we click continue. And I said Garfield. So of course Unsplash has looked at some cats. So we'll go with this fun cat that looks a little grumpy and choose continue. Now, when I do the category, you'll see here that it's an other. I could change it to travel and I'll keep it at other, but then I can also again change the type of color. That's here Now, as it gets closer, as the event gets closer here Now, as it gets closer, as the event gets closer, you are able to say I don't want it to just be days, I actually want it to be hours.

30:38
Odie Hangout, and that is today, that's going to be later today, so we'll go 6pm until 8pm, like so, and then we'll choose a beautiful dog. Look at a dog, and now you can see seven hours 25 minutes. That's a better understanding of kind of how it looks. Whenever you have a quicker countdown, at any time, this can be added to your home screen. You can pull it up in here, which is quite nice as well. And yeah, if you're wanting a little countdown, a little reminder, a friend recently came to visit and leading up to her visit, I had set up a little days countdown. So I was able to have that pop up in on my home screen, which was nice, just so that I was kind of aware of what was of whenever she was coming to visit. And let me see here. I want to show here's what it looks like on the screen. So that's the little widget. In 38 days is Lucy's birthday. Will Micah remember to remove those fake countdowns? We'll find out. But that is Days, the event countdown app in the App Store. There are quite a few out there, and I was kind of looking for one that got out of the way and wasn't too ad-heavy, and Days ended up being the choice for me. That is going to bring us to the end of this episode of iOS today.

32:22
If you would like to help support the work that we do here and get ad free versions of every single one of our shows, might I invite you to join the club at twittv slash club twit for just $7 a month or $84 a year. You out there can join the club and when you do, you gain access to some pretty awesome benefits. As I mentioned ad-free versions of all of our shows. You gain access to the TwitPlus bonus feed. That is extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show.

32:46
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 those of us here at Twit as well as access to the events that we have in the club, including exclusive events like the upcoming coverage by Leo Laporte and myself of the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. So be sure to join the club $7 a month $84 a year. Twittv slash Club Twit. Can't wait to see you there. It's going to be great. Rosemary Orchard of People would like to follow you online and keep up to date with all the work you're doing. Where should they go to do so?

33:24 - Rosemary Orchard (Host)
well, the best place to go is rosemary orchardcom, which has got links to apps, books, podcasts, social media sites and all the other things, and other than that, you can also find me in the club discord, where we hang out during the live shows. There's a live chat, and if you can't join us, then there is an iOS Today forum section with threads for every single episode as they release and also just a general iOS Today discussion channel. What about you, micah? Where can folks find you?

33:50 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
If you're looking to find 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, so be sure to follow me around the web. Thank you, thank you. Thank you for your time, for your support, for your enjoyment of the show. Remember to reach out to us iOS today at twittv and we'll catch you again next week for another episode of iOS Today. Bye-bye.