iOS Today 789 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on iOS Today, Rosemary Orchard is out, but don't worry, I've got Dan Moran here to talk about our favorite Safari extensions. Here we go. Stay tuned for iOS Today.

Dan Moren [00:00:13]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is—.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:22]:
This is iOS Today, episode 789, with Dan Moran And me, Micah Sargent. Recorded Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026 for Thursday, February 12th, 2026. Our favorite Safari extensions. Hello and welcome to iOS Today, the show where we talk all things iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, HomePodOS, and all the OSes that Apple has to offer. All the devices, gadgets, and gizmos, and our suggestions therein. I am one of your hosts, Micah Sargent, and today, Rosemary Orchard is feeling a little unwell. So if you would like, you could send a little get well message. By the time she gets the— by the time you hear this, and by the time she gets it, it'll be many weeks in, you know, down the line, and she'll be feeling better, I'm sure.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:11]:
But it'll still be nice to have. In the meantime, though, I am very happy to be joined by Dan Moran of Six Colors. Welcome back to the show, Dan.

Dan Moren [00:01:22]:
Always a pleasure to be here, Micah. I am happy to talk about every And all OSes. OSes. Awkward to say. Always awkward to say.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:33]:
It is indeed. Um, so I thought today would be a great time to chat about, I think, a really important thing that, at least for me, I kind of forget is there and happening in the background, and I just sort of move on. Uh, and that is the extension game. I feel like if you're a major Chrome user, um, major Chrome, reporting for duty. If you're a major Chrome user, you probably Or maybe even Firefox, I would say. There's a heavy sort of— Opera, you.

Dan Moren [00:02:02]:
Know, maybe Opera too.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:03]:
You know, maybe those other browsers, I feel like extensions are such a big part of it. And Safari, for me, that has never been sort of first and foremost what I think about when I think of the Safari browser. Um, however, big Safari user with those other browsers coming in clutch when I need to do something that Safari doesn't seem to be able to handle. And so because of that, I think extensions for me kind of fall to the background and it's nice to check in and see. What's going on in the world of extensions and if we've changed what we're using, if we've updated what we're using, if we're still using, because that I think is also important. Hey, these are the extensions that still work for me. So I wanted to start, Dan, first by talking to you about just before we get into actual extensions, tell me about your extension game. Are you regularly on the lookout for new extensions? Do you have a lot of them? Have you like pared down over time? What's, what's your, what's your extension story?

Dan Moren [00:02:59]:
You know, I feel that I, have pared down over time, in part because, you know, we've all run into that thing where you are, you know, using a web browser and something suddenly feels like it's going awry and you're like, is this one of my extensions causing problems? And you go through that dance of like turning off all the extensions and then turning them on one by one. At that point you're like, why do I have so many extensions? Am I really using these things? So I have sort of trimmed back to kind of my essentials. The other thing I think ends up being the sort of major inflection point for me with extensions is every major OS release, I think Apple always does something to change its extension setup, at least in recent years. I think in iOS 26, they kind of were working on making it easier to build extensions even if you're not in the Apple ecosystem, which has been a real nonstarter for a lot of people building extensions from Chrome for Chrome and other browsers, is that there wasn't an easy way necessarily to move that to Safari. And Apple has, I think, worked pretty hard insofar as they can to make that easier and easier with each subsequent update. And so usually around those times I'm always like, oh yeah, extensions, I should go see if there's anything new. What's the state of the art in extensions? But I honestly feel like overall it doesn't change that much. I've identified the handful of ones that really do things that I find useful every day or, you know, frequently.

Dan Moren [00:04:26]:
And so I kind of tend to stick with those until somebody eventually mentions, oh, by the way, did you know there's this extension? And I'll go check it out. But yeah, it doesn't change that much. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:04:36]:
Um, I have also trimmed back. I used to have quite a few extensions just to, yeah, give them a try, give them a shot, give them a try. And then I get, I kind of went, A, I don't need all of these. B, I find myself toggling them off so much as you kind of talked about. And C, um, these I know work very well and why add more complications to it. So let's talk a bit about accessing extensions, what we can do before we dig into our favorites. So if you're on your phone, and of course the process is very similar if you are, you know, using your, your iPad and a little bit different if you're on your Mac, but this is iOS today after all. So we'll, we'll figure it out here together.

Mikah Sargent [00:05:23]:
Now it used to be that you could get to the Safari settings pretty easily if we're sort of diving down into menus, but first and foremost, understand that there's a search bar at the bottom and you can just type in Safari if you want to, but let me show you the long way. So if we scroll all the way down to the bottom, we'll see the section marked Apps in the settings. And then on the right side, there is a set of letters, the alphabet, if you could believe it. And if we take our finger and we place it on there and we just swipe down until we get to S, then we can pretty quickly find Safari. We tap on Safari and we scroll down until we get to the extensions section, and that's under General. We tap on Extensions and boom, here we can see the list of extensions that are either installed as extensions or are part of an app that does other things that also have some sort of Safari extension built in. Now I can scroll down. This is what I want to show you.

Mikah Sargent [00:06:25]:
First and foremost, actually, let me mention that these are the extensions that I currently have active or inactive on the device. And let's tap into this one called Focused Work. Um, it tells me what the app is called. It also happens to be called Focused Work. It gives me a description about this extension and it then also lets me allow or disallow the extension and shows me the permissions therein. So at any time you can get to this page and you can turn off extensions. I have a secret though. It's a lot easier to disable extensions a different way.

Mikah Sargent [00:06:57]:
Yeah. If you can believe it. And we'll talk about that soon, but Scrolling all the way down to the bottom now, we've got this option— well, near to the bottom, we've got this option that says share across devices. This is important because what this will do is it allows for you to sync with other devices that also have this toggle turned on to say, yes, I want the extensions that I have on one device that are enabled or disabled to be the same as the extensions that I have on other devices enabled or disabled. And if at any time you don't want that happening, I I find this is something that I, I like some, I like them to share across iOS, but I don't want macOS to be part of it. And so that's something to be mindful of. It also has this whole list of annoying recommendations that I very rarely find helpful. But the thing that I really wanted to show you all is that again, you heard me, I kept saying scroll down all the way to the very bottom.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:56]:
Now we're here. Down at the very bottom is the best button ever, which is the more extensions button. This takes us right to a page within the app store devoted entirely to your Safari extensions. So from here, you can see the one, the extensions that Apple suggests, uh, as sort of essential. You can see the top free extensions. You'll notice that many of these top free extensions come from apps, uh, and then top paid extensions are underneath that. So being able to get to that page, uh, from Excuse me, this screen is very simple to do. So between disabling or enabling extensions, changing permissions for those extensions, and sharing across devices, those are all the options that you have in there.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:43]:
Now, it's important to understand something when it comes to extensions. An extension by its very nature, particularly extensions that make changes to a page are going to need to have some level of access to that page. So, there will be a permissions requirement involved. So, if you have something that sort of changes the, you know, the CSS of the page, meaning that it changes the look and feel of the page, that is something that needs to be able to see what you are— it's not really like It's kind of, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is, it is seeing and taking in what you are browsing, but it needs to be able to have access to what you are browsing in order to go, okay, I can see what I am able to adjust and then make those adjustments. So just be mindful of that when you are using extensions that it does need to have pretty hefty access to your browsing experience. And therefore I always recommend, um, at least perusing some privacy policies or some— hopefully the site will have, you know, sort of a summary of its privacy policy just to get an understanding of what kind of data is being collected, if there is any, and how that, you know, would impact you. So with the settings portion out of the way, let me show you the other way to access the extensions section on your phone. So Here we are.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:16]:
Oh, on this lovely page, sixcolors.com.

Dan Moren [00:10:19]:
Oh, I know that page.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:20]:
And down at the bottom, I have a, my menu bar, my, you know, search bar, the browse functionality for Safari. And in the URL section to the left, I can see a puzzle piece icon and two lines. If I tap on that puzzle piece icon and two lines, that is the webpage settings menu. And so from here, We can search within the page, we can change the text size. We've got the, uh, my, you know, Micah's favorite button, my favorite button, the three dots for more, but we can also use, um, the, the built-in tools for distracting items. That is kind of a, it's almost like a, uh, built-in Safari extension that Apple has added. And then the ability to turn off content blockers, which are technically an extension, but that's not what I'm trying to show you. I want to show you the part underneath where we can also manage extensions and also access extensions that we have enabled.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:21]:
So tapping on manage extensions will bring up a screen, a modal dialog where you are able to go through and enable or disable the different extensions that you have. And you'll notice this page looks a lot like that settings page in Safari, or rather the Safari page in settings. That's because it is pretty much the same. Although you'll notice that the browse extension section looks a little different because it's got the little App Store icon next to it. Why are those different? I don't know. Ask Apple, don't ask me. Um, but here it's very easy to, instead of having to go in and choose on and off from that next page, the toggles are right there. So it's actually a lot faster than doing it the other way.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:05]:
Now, this is the last thing I'll say before we get into the fun stuff of talking about our favorite extensions. Um, in this section, the Safari extensions that have extra options or toggles or what have you will also display here. So I could tap on Noir, for example, and up will pop the settings for Noir where I can say, do I want to have the 6 colors web page? By the way, Noir is a, is a, an extension that I'll talk a little bit more soon, but it changes the look of a page and it lets you change how a page appears. And so, I can go ahead and make settings changes and give it a— ooh, that's— oh, I think I might leave that. For people who aren't watching and are instead listening, I've just sort of oldified, sepiafied the 6 colors page. And now it's giving old-school Macintosh, and I'm kind of digging it. So, that is the That is the way of not only accessing and managing extensions within Safari, but also how you to, know, enable and disable them. Okay, this episode of iOS Today is brought to you by Shopify.

Mikah Sargent [00:13:28]:
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Mikah Sargent [00:14:20]:
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Dan Moren [00:15:09]:
Yeah, this is actually a relatively new addition for me. It's called Wipr2, W-I-P-R. Number 2, and this replaced for me a longtime extension I was using, which was OneBlocker, which many of you may know. It's an ad blocker and all that. I found myself increasingly frustrated with aspects of OneBlocker, and so I wanted to look, and I saw this. This was mentioned at one point as a great, you know, simple blocking app. That handles all the common use cases. What I appreciated about it in particular, the thing that, that, that appealed to me was first of all, it's a one-time purchase and it's universal.

Dan Moren [00:15:52]:
So it works across all your Apple devices. And secondly, it's made by an independent developer. Um, so there is an aspect of that, which I thought was very attractive to me. I wanted to support someone. And like I said, I had gotten a little frustrated with some stuff working in 1Blocker, plus it was a yearly subscription I was paying for and all of that. That. And I stumbled across this, thought, oh, you know, I'll buy it and give it a try, and I can always renew my 1Blocker subscription if I change my mind or whatever. Um, and you know what, I've ended up using Wipr2, and I haven't gone back.

Dan Moren [00:16:24]:
Um, you know, it's not like the most complex in terms of, you know, what it's doing, but it's just straightforward and it works. Like, that is the thing that, that really kind of resonates for me is I'm not somebody who is zealous, overzealous about blocking ads and stuff, but there are a lot of things on the web these days that obviously are frustrating or deleterious to the experience of browsing the web. And I find that while Wipr doesn't necessarily 100% eliminate all of those things, it does a lot to reduce the amount of clutter and crud that you're seeing while you're browsing. So for me, putting all those things together, it's an easy choice. And I love that it's one thing that I've got everywhere. And yeah, it's pretty straightforward.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:14]:
I got to say, deleterious to the experience is— that is delicious.

Dan Moren [00:17:20]:
Those are my rap lyrics.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:21]:
Yeah. And they're good. Thank you. So I also use Wipr2. I was also a 1Blocker user. You could pretty much copy and paste what Dan was saying when it came to my— There's probably an extension for that. It probably is for my 1Blocker experience. I switched over to Wiper 2.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:38]:
It is— I like that it just, it really does sit in the background a lot better than I got with the 1Blocker experience. And that made me like it. Plus, as you mentioned, not having to continue to pay over and over again is also nice. And so, yeah, all of that together made me go, you know what? I think this is the right one for me. Did I talk to myself a little bit like a hybrid between Kermit and Miss Piggy? Perhaps I did, but that's none of your business. And so yeah, I think that it is a great little app that everybody might want to check out, frankly. Yeah. All right, moving along, the next app that I want to talk about is one that I mentioned during the, during kind of the setup of this.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:37]:
And it's a little app called Noir. Noir, at first, I will be honest with you, I, I am very cautious about my extensions because of the fact that they have to access your web browsing. And so I don't Often it takes a lot for me to kind of trust one. The fact that Noir has regularly and continually been a top of the App Store, top of the charts, top of the, you know, App Store editor list has made me feel a lot more comfortable about using Noir. And it is just nice, particularly so one thing that people may or may not know, a little behind the scenes here is that right now in front of me, I have from Elgato, a little mount, sort of camera mount, where my, it's a prompter. And so my camera is behind a mirrored screen. And there's a mirror that is like I can see through it can see through the mirror. I can't see through the mirror and the mirror is reflecting right here a little screen.

Mikah Sargent [00:19:55]:
So I'm actually looking at myself right now on this screen and it's allowing me to look directly into the lens of the camera. But what I noticed is that some of the pages that we use for the work that we do with our sponsors and stuff, very bright pages.. And when the, uh, when our, our, our technical director was switching back and forth between, um, my screen, my view and something else, the brightness of that page was actually causing a cast to form on the lens. And so I needed a way of basically dark moding whatever page I was on. And that's where Noir came in., to help me out. And so with Noir, you basically, it can be a set it and forget it, or it can be a set it and don't forget it, make changes. So, with Noir, you have these different options. So by default, you can set it up so that it's on auto.

Mikah Sargent [00:20:57]:
What that means is that when dark mode is enabled on the device, then Noir enables in the browser. You can set it to on so that it always darkens websites unless you've set up a specific webpage where you don't want it to darken. And of course you can set it to off, which says don't darken a webpage until unless I tell you specifically to do so. Then you can change the theme. So there's dark, there's black, there's gray, and there's sepia by default. And some advanced settings like being able to, um, determine what auto actually means, if it's based on what the system is set up or a special schedule. And then also the ability to, um, ignore all built-in dark modes. What does that mean? It means that when it detects that the website has a built-in dark mode, then it will not darken the page.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:49]:
However, sometimes it's the case that.

Dan Moren [00:21:55]:
It.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:55]:
Thinks that there's a built-in dark mode and there's not. And so this just says, hey, leave that, leave, don't pay attention for built-in dark modes, don't use that, just ignore those. Let me be the one that determines what it is. And then last but not least, you can— on this page, you can set settings for specific things. So like for Six Colors, where I now have the Sepia theme turned on and will for the rest of time because it looks so cool. The themes section lets you create themes. So you can go in and you can make adjustments and it'll show you how this works. You can change the brightness of a page, you can change how grayscale it is, so you could actually pull color out of images on a page.

Mikah Sargent [00:22:37]:
You can give it special names, you can change the text color and the background background color. And then there's also a theme library, like, uh, the 6 colors, if you will. And so you could, as I will now, add a green. There are editor themes like Dracula and Nord, and I don't know why they all have this accent, but they do. Solarized. Yeah, uh, there are moody options, fruity options, and of course Matrix. Heck yeah. So then we could go to 6 colors and instead of this beautiful sepia, I could go into Noir and change it to the Matrix.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:23]:
Follow the multicolored rabbit. So that's a look at Noir, which is just a dark mode editor. For Safari. All right, Dan, what's next on your list?

Dan Moren [00:23:37]:
Uh, this is going to be along a theme, I guess, but the next one I use is Stop the Madness, uh, which is just a great name. Stop the Madness. Um, and this is, it's a little bit like a blocker, but it's more specific to what it does, which is to say it is a, a control panel for dealing with all the little things that might irk you when you're browsing the web. For example, let's say you're in, you know, you've been in Google Docs or something and you don't like the way that it hijacks when you right-click and it puts up its own menus so you can't use the system menus. You can use Stop the Madness to stop it from doing that. Um, you don't like the way that like your contextual menu when you copy stuff, it copies, uh, you want to copy the link title or not the link, you can add options like that. YouTube, you want skip video ads. Sometimes it's got behaviors that it's just got all these little tiny tweaks that you can change.

Dan Moren [00:24:38]:
You could create specific rules. So stuff only applies on specific sites. You can basically set up redirects to go to different, like, you know, URLs if you don't like the way it's doing. And again, you can do this all on a sort of case-by-case basis. And so that can be extremely useful because, you know, even though the web is a universal platform, there are things that often don't play well with a specific browser or with a specific platform. And that can be frustrating at times. So I have found it over the years to be very useful to help get rid of things like link trackers or, you know, pages where text selection doesn't quite work well. And again, what's nice about this is that if you have something where this does run into an issue, with a site you're using, you can just sort of add things to a, a list and just be like, no, don't, don't change anything on this site.

Dan Moren [00:25:36]:
Um, and so yeah, I've, I've used this for a long time. Uh, it's got a bunch of things that I appreciate that just make the experience a little bit better when dealing with many of the sites on the web. Um, and you know, there's a lot of power in it if you're somebody who really gets into the nitty-gritty of being— making sure that like, oh yeah, this site, I don't like the way that it checks, um, you know, the way that I click on things or select text or drag and drop or copy and paste. Like, all of those things are definitely, uh, you know, potential annoyances in places. And so having something where you can specify that, uh, is great.

Mikah Sargent [00:26:14]:
I agree. Um, I have used various forms of Stop the Madness in the past, and at times I had found it to be I didn't have enough insight into what it was doing. And so this new form, this new version, this updated version that has all of these checkboxes and stuff, I will definitely be trying this out. I think it looks great.

Dan Moren [00:26:35]:
It's a little overwhelming when you go right into it, when you dive right into it. But it's one of those things where if you have ever browsed the web and ran into something like, why did the site do it this way? This is just annoying. Stop the Madness can probably fix it.

Mikah Sargent [00:26:46]:
Awesome. The next one is one that Dan and I both use quite a bit, and it's a very simple one. That I think, again, this is just, it's kind of just a, it's a no-brainer. And that is the extension called Keyword Search. Keyword Search is just a little tool that lets you create kind of custom shortcuts for searching different things. So for example, instead of having to from whatever page you're on, go to amazon.com and then do a search for whatever you're looking for. I can simply type semicolon A and then space and then type in a search thing and it's going to automatically take me to the Amazon page and do a search there. But you can set it up for whatever you want.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:42]:
So I've got the AP Stylebook because yes, I always have my copy editor hat on. It's grown smaller and sort of rests on the back right corner of my head now. It's not the full thing, but the copy editor hat is still there. Um, one of my favorite ones, semicolon ASUP. Um, that is, uh, I was wondering if Dad could guess from just that. Uh, semicolon ASUP.

Dan Moren [00:28:07]:
Semicolon ASUP.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:09]:
Let me give you a hint first. I'll say A-S-U-P. A-S-U-P. Uh, a.

Dan Moren [00:28:16]:
Superman. You're searching for a Superman.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:18]:
It's Apple Support. So it's the direct search to the Apple Support page. Um, I've also got the, I think this one was a default one, uh, the archive.org Wayback Machine. Um, and then specifically for the work that I do, uh, I often need to search our Google Drive from work. And so I have a specific search for our, uh, work Google Drive. Now, when it comes to this, what's super cool is you can actually— no, Dan, I'll let you talk about your use of, of, uh, keyword search. Cause this is one that we both use and I'm curious. Yeah.

Dan Moren [00:28:54]:
Tell me about this extension for years in various forms. Uh, I can't remember if it's the same developer now who originally made this, like it was like a decade ago. Uh, cause it used to be a thing, like a particular type of plugin that, um, is no longer allowed under security things, but eventually got converted to a Safari extension. And so this was such a part of my muscle memory that I was so happy when it, uh, came about for Safari. Um, and so I have a few in here that just end up being critical for, for me. Um, I'm always searching for archives of in things that I wrote. So I have one for Six Colors, so the type SC and then some phrase, it just searches Google but limited to Six Colors. I had one for Macworld when I used to work there, IMDb, Wikipedia.

Dan Moren [00:29:37]:
Those are ones that I use literally every day, um, and I just find them so incredibly helpful because even though Safari does something kind of like this, but it's not nearly as reliable and it doesn't quite work the way that I want it to, which is like I literally just want to type IMDb space, you know, the name of an actor and then look them up and it takes me right to their IMDb page. That to me is worth the price of admission in and of itself. So I love this and I love especially that it now exists as an extension because it means it works on iOS and iPadOS as well as on the Mac. And that is like literally the only thing that was a downside of the, the pre-extension version was that it only ran on the Mac and now it runs on both and it works just as well. So I, I love this extension. I've, I've exchanged correspondence with the developer a few times over the years. But it's, uh, yeah, it's really, really solid, really solid piece of software.

Mikah Sargent [00:30:37]:
All right, um, and then let's round things out here with the last two. Um, Implosion— if, if you all follow the work that I do, then you will probably be familiar with the developer Christian Selig. Christian Selig, uh, of course, is the developer who created the wonderful Reddit app Apollo. And I've had him on Tech News Weekly a few times to talk about that experience and the stuff with Apollo or with Reddit and how that all played out. Christian has made some other apps, including Amplosion, which lets you— basically, Google has had these, these supposed, these supposed to be quick-loading web page versions that quickly gain you access to, you know, text and images and are supposed to be kind of better for your browsing experience. But AMP pages lose some of the content that you might be looking for. There's also the fact that it sort of shifts how Google looks at the traffic, and then there's just that implication therein that, you know, Google is gobbling up more of the web. And so there are many reasons why you might not want amplosion— or excuse me, an AMP page as part of your experience.

Mikah Sargent [00:32:03]:
What amplosion does is it keeps the browser from going to the AMP version of the, you know, the web page, and instead takes you to the actual webpage. So, it's just an automatic redirect to the true original webpage by way of a Safari extension. And it is one of two extensions that Christian makes. The other one is called Achoo. And I love Achoo because I am nosy when it comes to looking at webpage HTML. And that's That's really what it is. It's a kind of inspector view that's handy when you're not on your Mac. Because on my Mac, I'm, you know, view page source all the time.

Mikah Sargent [00:32:56]:
But when I'm not on my Mac, when I'm looking on an iPad or an iPhone and I want to see the page source, it's a little bit more difficult to do. Unless you have Achoo, in which case, boop, you can do that. And it lets you make some subtle changes to the page as well. Tell us about Pippifier before we head into the rest of the show.

Dan Moren [00:33:14]:
Yeah. Pipifier isn't the only solution for this, but it's the one I like the best. It basically turns any video that's running on a webpage into a picture-in-picture window. So there is some ability to do this now built into, I believe, Apple's platforms, but I have not always found it the most reliable. Stop the Madness can also do this, but I think it sometimes has some other issues in the way that it wants to do things. Pipifier, I have found to be extremely reliable and straightforward. And it basically just like anytime you're on a page with some video and you're like, boy, I wish I didn't have to sit on this page, you can just tap the button or click the button in the menu bar and it pops the video out into a little picture-in-picture window that you can move around that uses the standard controls and stuff from the system. It's just, it's kind of a one-trick pony, but it does that trick extremely well.

Dan Moren [00:34:04]:
And as a result, it's been something that I've I've, you know, never eliminated from my workflow because it's, it's the, it just does what it does so well. It doesn't get in my way.

Mikah Sargent [00:34:15]:
Alrighty. With that, it is time to move along to the end of the show for today with our app caps. So we will cover those next with Rosemary out. We'll have Shortcuts again, Shortcuts Corner again next week, but I'm excited to hear about Dan's app or gadget pick. All right, here we are in the AppCap segment of the show. This is where we round out the show by telling you about the apps and gadgets we love, that we think are great, that we want to share with all of you. Dan, tell us about— well, maybe, maybe not necessarily think are great, that's true. So tell us about your app or gadget pick, and you know, Spare no, no feelings on it.

Dan Moren [00:35:00]:
Uh, you've probably heard about at this point, if you are a frequenter of the gadget blogs or any of the other sort of tech news sites, but my pick is the XT Ink X4, which is a tiny little e-ink e-reader that costs like $70. Um, it kind of first started making waves because they built in, uh, like a magnetic connection on the back. So in theory you could MagSafe it. To your iPhone. Unfortunately, one of the things that is a downside to this particular one is that on my iPhone 17 Pro, it's too big. So the only way you can MagSafe it on is horizontally, which I— is not as helpful as I thought it would be. But that said, I still kind of love this gadget, even though it has numerous issues that I will go through. But what I love about it is that, A, it is tiny.

Dan Moren [00:35:54]:
Is, is really small. I mean, it's smaller than an iPhone by far. Um, it is very lightweight. Um, it's very, as I said, very affordable at under $100. Um, and it's what makes it really cool, honestly. And I know this is a thing that gets a lot of people kind of wary, is the built-in firmware for it is not great. Uh, this device is, I think, predominantly manufactured in China, and I think the, uh, the, the first experience of using the built-in firmware, not great. However, there is a vibrant open-source project called Crosspoint, which is a replacement, drop-in replacement firmware, uh, and I will tell you, it's very good.

Dan Moren [00:36:40]:
Um, I installed this, you know, getting this device and sort of immediately was like a, a listener of one of my podcasts recommended it, and I was like, oh well, you know, I'll give that a try. And so I ended ended up installing that basically without even spending time with the built-in software. And it's fantastic. Uh, it does a great job of kind of dealing with the limitations of the device, which is its size and interface. It doesn't have a touchscreen. It's just got these tiny little rocker buttons at the bottom. I can't even show you, they're really small. Um, but you know, the fact that this is such a tiny light device that you can just throw in your pocket and take places, I think, you know, a friend described it as the equivalent of like an old mass market paperback that you would just shove in your pocket and then when you had a spare moment, you pull out your paperback when you're waiting in line or you're in a doctor's waiting room or something like that.

Dan Moren [00:37:24]:
And maybe you don't want to read on your phone, or you don't want to have the temptation of, I'm just going to start scrolling social media. I love the ability to just have like a tiny little e-ink reader that you can take with you. I have read entire books on it. I downloaded— you can see, uh, for those on video, I have the, uh, the Maltese Falcon, which is a you know, the public domain ebook that I downloaded and just transferred onto here. Um, you know, it's, it's small, but it's like once you start reading on it, you kind of just get used to it. I would say probably the biggest ding to it is that it doesn't have a backlight. So if you're looking for like a little, you know, in-bed reading while your partner or significant other goes to sleep, it's probably not going to cut it there. Um, but it's sort of the excitement about it I'm hoping does continue to drive development, maybe a refinement The device, as well as, like I said, the software in this open source project is being updated pretty frequently.

Dan Moren [00:38:17]:
In fact, I just, as we were recording the early part of the show, I installed the latest version of Crosspoint Reader, which improves its communication with Calibre, the open source ebook library app. So it's now very easy to transfer your books if you have a Calibre library, library back and forth. You know, the other thing that I think is kind of the biggest thing against it is that that because it relies on DRM-free ebooks, if you are reading books via your Kindle reader or Kobo reader, it's not easy to say keep the same book in both places and sync it. I don't feel that's really the fault of the developers of this device or software since that's more of a limitation built in by the stores. But I just, I don't know, it's been a really fun sort of hobbyist device for me to play around with. And if you're the kind of person who just gets into like little weird E Ink devices, or you like reading books everywhere you go, uh, I recommend checking it out. It's, it's pretty cool. Yeah, but like, again, there are some asterisks and caveats, but if like you know that going in, I think there's still a lot to like here.

Mikah Sargent [00:39:23]:
All right, well, there you go. I— you know what, E Ink is just cool.

Dan Moren [00:39:27]:
It's just cool for that. It's just cool.

Mikah Sargent [00:39:29]:
Yeah, yeah, it is, frankly Definitely. All right, my pick is— I needed on my phone a way to display a full-screen timer, or yeah, the timer would be the countdown, the stopwatch is the count up. Yeah, I needed a way to display a full-screen timer on my phone and just be as simple as possible. And I came across an app called Full Screen Clock. Fullscreen Clock, believe it or not, lets you create a full-screen clock or a full-screen timer on your phone, and you can change how it looks. I didn't need it to. I just needed it to be big white text on a black background there on my phone, and this did that. There's, there are ads in the app, but you can pay a one-time in-app purchase of— I am forgetting now what it was— and in doing so, then you will no longer have ads.

Mikah Sargent [00:40:36]:
It is an in-app purchase of— come on— $0.99. So for a dollar, no more ads, and you've got your full-screen clock. It can be a flip clock, as I said, or just plain old clock.

Dan Moren [00:40:50]:
Clock.

Mikah Sargent [00:40:51]:
And I— the built-in timer app for iOS is probably fine for most people for most cases. But the problem with the built-in timer app is it didn't have the side— the sort of landscape view that I wanted. And so being able to show the countdown big on my phone was what I was after. And that just is not there within the Timer app. So yeah, that is why I went with, um, Full Screen Clock. Folks, that is going to bring us to the end of this episode of iOS Today. If you have a favorite Safari extension that we didn't talk about during the show, email us iOstoday@twit.tv is how you can get in touch and let us know. Um, if you would like to join our club to gain some— gain access to some pretty awesome benefits, well, head to twitch.tv/clubtwit.

Mikah Sargent [00:41:49]:
When you head there, $10 a month, $120 a year to join the club, you will gain access to, first and foremost, you will gain access to our multiple feeds, including our feed that has special clips and bits from our shows, behind the scenes, before the show, that kind of a thing. You'll also gain access to to our feed that has live coverage of tech news events, live commentary, and access to our third feed, which is a kind of fire hose of all of the shows that we do in the club, including my crafting corner, the D&D campaign that I ran recently in the club, or adventure rather, that I ran recently in the club. And we've also got Stacy's book club, plus so much more. All of that is available in our club. And by way of those feeds. You also gain 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. So if that sounds good to you, again, twit.tv/clubtwit is where you go to sign up. We're always seeing new people pop in.

Mikah Sargent [00:42:51]:
It's so fun to go into the welcome section and say hello to Music90. 84. Hello to JL Pollock. Hello to Keith Steiner. Hello to Atomic Z06. And hello to Brain P 007. Welcome to the club. Really, it is so fun to go in and go, wow, you've— wow, look at all these people.

Mikah Sargent [00:43:23]:
You got to be part of the fun. You got to be part of the club. There. Okay, new people all the time. Um, so check it out. In fact, Dustin is messaging right now in the club to say, hey, seems like that TechWoven case is holding up well. Dustin, indeed it is. I'm very happy with the TechWoven case, and I would probably be staying with this case except that in March, when I finally get my hands on that new Spigen case that I showed you all a couple of weeks ago, I have to change to that because it's just really cool.

Mikah Sargent [00:43:51]:
Uh, Dan, I don't know if you if you saw this fly by your radar, but it's the one that makes your phone look like it's sort of a vintage Mac. Um, and it was just, I'll send you the link. It was just too delightful to pass up. And so, yeah, there you can see we've pulled it up on screen. Um, and so I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of that, but in the meantime, my tech will, and honestly, as far as I, for all I know, I'll end up back in TechWoven territory just because I do like the green and I like the color. So yeah, if you want to be able to have your, your commentary shared on the show and all that kind of stuff, twitch.tv/clubtwit, sign up. We'd love to have you. All right, Dan Moran, I want to thank you so much for being here.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:38]:
If people would like to keep up to date with all the great work you're doing, where should they go to do so?

Dan Moren [00:44:43]:
Well, you can find everything I write about tech over at sixcolors.com. I am on the many social medias generally as @dmorrin or some flavor thereof. You can catch me every week with Micah over at Clockwise and Reel FM, and you can buy my books and find a link to everything I do over at dmorrin.com.

Mikah Sargent [00:45:03]:
Awesome. If you're looking to follow me online, I'm @micasargent on many a social media network where you can head to chihuahua.coffee. That's chihuahua.coffee where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Thank you so much for your support, and we'll catch you again next week for another episode of iOS Today.