iOS Today 798 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-free version of the show.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on iOS today, Rosemary Orchard and I, Micah Sargent, talk about how you can stay secure on your Apple devices. Stay tuned.
Rosemary Orchard [00:00:13]:
Podcasts you love from people you Trust.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:17]:
This is TWIT. This is iOS Today, episode 798 with Rosemary Orchard and me, Micah Sargent. Recorded Tuesday, April 14, 2020 for Thursday, April 16, 2026. Stay secure on your devices. Hello and welcome to iOS Today, the show where we talk all things iOS, iPados, WatchOS, HomePod, OS and so many other O S's. That is what we love to talk about here on the show. Help you make the most of those wonderful Apple devices you have. I am one of your hosts.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:56]:
My name is Micah Sargent.
Rosemary Orchard [00:00:59]:
And my name is Rosemary Orchard. And I hope that we can help you keep all of those things locked up that you would like to.
Mikah Sargent [00:01:06]:
Yes, indeed. This is a wonderful time where Rosemary and I sort of gather together in our message chats and we put forth some ideas for episodes to do. And today's episode has come from Apple's own editorial team, which I really like. I love the opportunity to sort of essentially collaborate with the team because they're always going through and finding great apps and it helps to inspire what we want to talk about here on the show. And so today, you know, there are built in tools to help you be able to protect yourself, both sort of in virtual space, but also in physical reality. And these apps and services help you make use of some of those features and tools. So let's kick things off by talking about some of the built in stuff that you have on your phone that you can set up if you haven't. And if you have set up, just a nice reminder of what's available out there.
Rosemary Orchard [00:02:21]:
Yeah. So first things first, I'm not gonna actually open this one up on my iPhone because it'll reveal a whole bunch of personal information about me, you know, some of which you already know, but some of which I would prefer to keep to myself. But setting up your medical id Setting up your medical ID does a little bit more than just allow people to contact other people in case you are, you know, in some kind of health related accident. If your phone is lost and then somebody finds it, assuming they are good Samaritan and they don't just immediately chuck it into the nearest dumpster, they can actually use the emergency health contacts to contact somebody and say, hey, so I found this person's phone and I would like to return it to them and actually help you get your device back. So there are a whole bunch of reasons for setting up your Medical id, but especially if you or anybody you know, takes regular medication of any kind, is currently experiencing any kind of health issues or just changes to their health, and that's including pregnancy, FYI. Then you can note all of this in the health app for your medical id and this could mean the difference between life and death in case of an accident for you. Now, I hope none of you listening to the show and nobody you know ever needs to use this for its intended purpose. It would be amazing if everybody set up the medical ID in their health app and kept it up to date.
Rosemary Orchard [00:03:48]:
Very important update there or a side note, and never needed to use it. That would be the ideal scenario. But on the off chance that something happens, I would really love you to all have that information updated, please. So for, for me personally, but also just a little thought, if you have pets at home worth noting that they exist because that way somebody can make arrangements for somebody to go check on your pets to make sure that they are fed and things like that and that they get the care they need as well. So, yeah, I, I would just, yeah, take a moment to double check that you and everybody you know has got that set up and has it up to date because, fingers crossed, touchwood, you'll never need it. But on the off chance that somebody does, it's really good to have that information there. And that is something that I really like because this information is available without Face id. However, Face ID is one of the many ways that you can secure apps and indeed secure your phone.
Rosemary Orchard [00:04:46]:
It is a requirement for accessing things like Apple Pay. But if you've got another app where perhaps you share your devices with friends and family members, but you don't want them to be able to get into certain apps as easily, you can tap and hold on any app icon and then tap the Require Face ID button. Now if you do this, things like notifications from the app and so on may not work quite the same way that you're used to. My grandmother accidentally did this with the phone app and it caused an absolute reign of chaos until we figured out what had gone on there. But you can add require face ID and it means that even if your iPhone phone is unlocked and say, for example, you've lent it to a kid so they can watch Bluey on the Disney app or something like that, then if they navigate out of that and they try and open another app, they're not gonna be able to get into. In this case, I've selected the fitness app, but you can require Face ID on. I Think pretty much every single application on your iPhone, which is very useful. I would also like to remind folks that there is another mode where you can set this up so that when you triple click on the side button or power button on an iPad, it can enter Guided Access mode.
Rosemary Orchard [00:05:57]:
And this can be very, very useful when you're trying to lend somebody a device for a dedicated purpose. So for example, you want to let a kid borrow your phone to watch something on, on the screen because you know there's a whole bunch of things going on right now. There's maybe a little emergency. It's like, cool. We will distract the kiddo with something safe for them to watch. You can lock your device into Guided Access mode. Um, and so to do this you would triple click. You do need to be in an app.
Rosemary Orchard [00:06:25]:
Um, and then you can use Guided Access mode to do that. And I know, Maika, you've talked about Guided Access mode before and how useful that can be. Um, so I would definitely recommend that folks get that and I'll make sure that we have a link to that in the show notes as well because I forgot to add it to the document and it is actually really useful.
Mikah Sargent [00:06:45]:
Yeah, I mean, it is. It's one of the best ways, as you point out, to just sort of quickly lock something in and not have any concern about what people are able to access. And those tools can get more involved as well. I've done episodes of Hands on Apple at the time, may have been hands on iPhones. Yeah, that sounds weird. Hands on Mac. But regardless, did episodes covering Guided Access and then the tool that escapes me at the moment, but it's a little bit more involved than Guided Access and it simplifies the device. In any case, yes, those can help to kind of securely lock down your device.
Mikah Sargent [00:07:25]:
One thing that I want to mention where it's one of the tools that they have listed in the editorial document from the App Store about using offline maps. I have to tell you, offline maps are a great way to make sure, sure that when you go somewhere where you may not otherwise have access to maps. Because it is, you know, it's a, it's a. It's a place where you may not have as much service or you are in a place where you're trying to save battery. So you don't want to use the GP or the battery. Hogging GPS maps can be helpful. But please, I implore you from someone who has made this mistake, make sure that when you get offline maps that you download the maps fully before you Go on your trip. Because I was happily, smugly walking around like this, so to speak, for people who are listening and not watching, I'm doing a goofy, smug walk because I was so proud I had downloaded these offline maps for our camping trip that we went on a few months ago.
Mikah Sargent [00:08:43]:
And ready? Oh, we need to go here, we need to do this. I pull up the map and it shows me an icon or a little notification saying that it's downloading the map. And then I realize, oh, so, Micah, you hit download map and then you did not let the process finish. And so I did not have the full map downloaded. So just do that, Just do that. What happens whenever you have an offline map? If you're in an area without WI fi, without cellular connection, these maps have business hours, which is great. They have ratings so that you can see restaurants and stuff. It has turn by turn directions, of course.
Mikah Sargent [00:09:30]:
And so there's still a lot of information that's there even when you don't have the ability to access the full updated map.
Rosemary Orchard [00:09:42]:
Yeah, I would actually say offline maps are worth downloading, even for a place where, you know you're probably going to have fairly good phone signals. So, for example, whenever I go to London, I'm probably going to have decent phone signal most of the time. I'm also probably going to have a number of battery packs with me, and so I'm not going to be worried about running out of battery. However, there are cheap stations in London. There are weird spots in London where sometimes somehow you just can't get on the Internet for some reason. And those are the points where you're there going, huh? I'm standing at a junction of seven streets and I know I need to go left, but which left? I don't know. I've got no idea. And if you've got offline maps, download it in advance.
Rosemary Orchard [00:10:24]:
So to do that, you just open up the maps app, you navigate to whatever city or place it is that you want to download, and then you tap download. Now, in this case, I've just typed in London and it's taken me to the capital city, the United Kingdom, London, not London in Ontario, Canada. But I could zoom in and just get like a very small area. I have done this before and like Micah, I was feeling very smug about myself and I somehow managed to go a little bit off the edge of the map, at which point I no longer had offline maps and everything was working really, really slowly. So I would suggest that you go with whatever their suggestion for the area Is even if it's larger, it is going to take a bit more storage space on your phone. But you can download this on your home WI Fi, which hopefully is unlim or airport. WI fi is usually unlimited. It might be limited for a time period, but usually not for a data amount.
Rosemary Orchard [00:11:18]:
But when I tap download, it will calculate it, it will go, okay, this is how much space it's going to take up. In this case 1.27 gigabytes. That's fine with me. I've got fiber, that's not a problem. I won't download it right now because we're recording a podcast. I tried to save the big downloads for later, but you know, it's worth doing that. And also if you've got maps downloaded every so often, maybe like download the map as soon as you think about it before your trip or whenever and then every so often just pop in and then go in and update. Because there's.
Rosemary Orchard [00:11:51]:
I mean not having any information is bad, but having outdated information is frustrating. So I would highly recommend making sure that you've got not only data, but updated data as well.
Mikah Sargent [00:12:07]:
Yeah, absolutely. That's a good tip to kind of go back in and make sure you can of course have multiple offline maps. So if there are places that you regularly go and perhaps you've struggled to get service there, you can set up maps for those areas. If you have devices that support it, you are able to download maps for your Apple Watch for example, so it will pass along that information to the Apple Watch. I did go in on mine. Let me see, I'll switch. I can show this. I did go in on mine and turn the settings from and Downloads from just WiFi to Wi Fi and cellular.
Mikah Sargent [00:12:45]:
I don't recommend that for everyone, but if you have a. If you have a plan that's unlimited as I do, then it is a good choice or it is an okay choice obviously as you're not using any more data. So that's where I had failed in the past was I had left the home so no longer had a WI fi connection. Thought that it was downloading background. Lo and behold it was not. So that was kind of my issue there. Speaking of maps and those apps, we of course also have apps like Find My and a third party app that I think many parents and guardians will be familiar with, which is of course life360. Now find my is Apple's built in tool for doing all sorts of finding.
Mikah Sargent [00:13:31]:
And for my purposes I find Find My to be. You can add people again due to Privacy reasons. We won't be showing on screen. At least I will be showing my screen as I have different people in here that are friends and family and also people as far away as James Thompson, who is in Scotland at the moment. I think we all have James. It feels like.
Rosemary Orchard [00:14:04]:
Yeah, I think James is actually trying to poke him on us and he's got to get them all. He's got to get everybody. So. Because James and I also have each other there. And yeah, that's just one of those things. It's really nice opening up Find My or the other thing that I do actually really like is if you've got somebody in Find My. For example, if I had Micro and Find My and Micah was messaging me right now in messages, then it would actually show where I am in the UK below my name. So I've got a vague idea of like, oh, yeah, James is in his hometown or, you know, my friend is traveling.
Rosemary Orchard [00:14:40]:
They are currently in York, for example. York, not New York, just to be clear, you know, the walled city, not the. Anyway, but it's really nice just to have an idea of where people are in the world because, you know, it can change how you plan to message them. If you've got a plan of asking them to do something and you, you know, and you realize you have a quick look at it and go, you know, they're not actually at home. Interesting. Maybe I will use the Send later feature so I don't forget to send the message. But then it does appear at a time that perhaps is a little more convenient for them, that that might be a good use of my time.
Mikah Sargent [00:15:19]:
Yes. And of course, Find My is also the place where you are able to keep track of your devices and your items. So if you have set up Find My Mac, Find My iPhone, Find My iPad, you can do that. I also have the Apple Pencil Pro and other items here. And depending, you can actually track other people's devices if they have given permission to do so, so that if their item goes missing, then you can help them find it if again, they're in the Find My Family section. So that is a great way of tracking those devices. You can set up MagSafe accessories, AirTags and keep track of all of those in the Me section of Find My. Again, we're not pulling this up because it's got my exact address on it, but you choose what devices you are able to, you know, track from.
Mikah Sargent [00:16:24]:
So for me, it's the iPhone that I. The main iPhone that I use, and then any cellular Apple Watch like the one that's on my wr. And then you are also able to customize kind of your settings for your devices. So that is very helpful as well. Now, Life360, I won't go into detail about. I do want to mention, it's always a caveat of mine. Life360's privacy policy is something that's worth reading through. There's a lot of tracking that happens in the app.
Mikah Sargent [00:16:55]:
It does require a premium subscription to be able to access some of those deeper tools. But on top of being able to do GPS kind of phone location, it does have some features that you would not have with Apple's services, including the ability to not only track somebody else's device, but also see the current battery level of it. And I think that actually is good context that can be helpful to go, okay, their phone is about to die. They haven't charged it in a while. Maybe it's better to send a text instead of call them because the battery might run dead if I do do that. And also you can send them a text saying, hey, charge your phone before you leave the current place that you're at. So that way you can get in touch if something's going on. Anything else in that section of sort of location that you want to mention? Rosemary?
Rosemary Orchard [00:17:50]:
I would just say be aware that sharing location information does, you know, it does use a little bit more data and battery. However, it can be incredibly useful for people. I have set up alerts with my parents permission so that I know whenever they are almost here for visiting me and vice versa because it just pings. And this is a native Find My feature. I won't open up Find my to show you how to set this up, but you can go into Find my, tap on a person and then say notify me or notify them. So you can set it up from both sides to say, hey, notify me when they get to this location. And you can do this just once, or you can do this regularly for every single time that they get there. And this can be incredibly useful if somebody's like, oh, hey, can you like, can, can you call me, like when I get home? You know, like, I'm gonna have a bunch of things that I'm doing, but I can answer the phone and still talk to you.
Rosemary Orchard [00:18:47]:
You know, just call me when it's convenient. And so I can. Then you set up a notification for that person for when they get home to notify me and then I'll go, okay, cool, they're home. I'll give them A couple of minutes and then I'll call them. So yeah, Find my is an incredibly useful feature and I'd highly recommend it.
Mikah Sargent [00:19:04]:
Absolutely. We've talked before on this show as well about the check in features that Apple added to messages. It's a great way to let someone know whenever you're moving between locations. What I've always liked about messages messages new check in feature is that it lets you limit the amount of information that you're sending. So you know, I in the past was not keen on sharing my location. I don't really care much now with people that I know, I mean, but certainly if you aren't keen on sharing your location, regularly Check in gives you the ability to say, hey, I am moving from this place to this place. And I just want you to know that if you stop unexpectedly, it will prompt you, hey, is everything okay? If you don't respond, then it automatically, automatically shares your location. That's where it will share your battery level and then it'll also share your route details with the person, letting them know what route you were planning on taking and you know, perhaps why you didn't end up finishing making it to the place that you were trying to get.
Mikah Sargent [00:20:16]:
So that's a great way as well. There are some third party apps like an app called Be Safe. It is a live GPS tracker and also gives you the ability to activate a fake call so that if you're in an uncomfortable situation you can get a call and answer that and then go, okay, you know, oh yeah, I gotta go, I'm sorry, sorry. It has in it as well. It's a community based app and so it will send alerts to professional security guards. There's also a button to request assistance. It's got SOS alerts and also automatic audio and video recording. In fact, I remember reading about B Safe a long time ago.
Mikah Sargent [00:21:06]:
I did not know that it has become this what it is now. This is much more powerful. And so I will definitely be getting Be Safe and checking that out now that it has even more features than it had before and perhaps it'll end up being a pick of mine for the end of the show. So very good work there. From B Safe on. Not just I'd kind of not written it off, but passed it along as this is Check in before Apple had Check in and then check in Sherlock to Be safe. But no, Be Safe has some cool features that are unique to it still. So that's another way to stay secure and safe on your phone any more.
Mikah Sargent [00:21:52]:
You'd like to talk about Rosemary.
Rosemary Orchard [00:21:55]:
Yeah, I'd like to talk about two sides of the same coin. WI FI assist and WI Fi calling. So sometimes your cellular signal is not great, sometimes your WI FI signal is not great. WI FI assist and WI FI calling help with the two different sides of that. So WI FI assist is basically the WI fi that I'm currently on isn't great. I'm going to use cellular as a backup. Now, this feature is on by default. So if you are on a cell phone plan that has a data limit on it, then you will probably have turned this off at some point in the past.
Rosemary Orchard [00:22:25]:
If not, now would be a good time to go and do that probably. But if you are on a reasonably sized plan or an unlimited plan, I would highly recommend having this turned on because it does just make it a lot easier when WI Fi for whatever reason is just going, nah, not today. That, that does happen every once in a while and it's not great. On the other hand, if your cellular signal is not great and you're trying to make a phone call, you know that experience, if you've ever had that before, just losing an entire sentence when talking to somebody on the phone, you need WI FI calling. And essentially what this does is it goes, oh, so the signal here is not great. Let's make the call over voice over Internet protocol instead. Kind of like Skype. Yeah.
Rosemary Orchard [00:23:15]:
Only it, it stays with your phone number and it just does awesome magic with a lot of tech infrastructures. Like there's so many different things going on there, I wouldn't even know how to begin to describe it. But WI fi calling is a really useful feature and I would recommend people actually please do turn that on because that can make the difference between being able to make and receive phone calls and not being able to make and receive phone calls. Now I do know that Apple on more modern phones does have satellite for, you know, SOS messages. I accidentally use satellite messaging to message my friend back about concert tickets the other day because I was sitting in a restaurant which had zero signal at all and I didn't realize that it was going to try and send it as a message through satellite messaging instead. Fortunately they did have WI fi, so I was able to hop on the WI fi and use that instead of the satellite messaging. But WI fi calling is good when you're actually in a built up area where you have WI fi. Like for example, at home where you may not have great phone signal from the outside, but you've got good wifi from the inside.
Rosemary Orchard [00:24:19]:
So I would recommend turning on both of those.
Mikah Sargent [00:24:23]:
All right. Ultimately, when it comes to being able to kind of stay safe on your device, there are quite a few built in tools that you're able to use, but we also wanted to highlight some of those third party options as well. Staying safe and secure, of course, also means being mindful of what's going on around you, and so we can't forget that we also have to look away from our devices for our safety and security too, as we are navigating the world. All right, I want to remind you all, of course, that if there are ways that you stay safe online that we'd love to hear about them. Iostodaywit TV is how you get in touch and we would love to hear about your methods, your apps, your services for doing so. We will look forward to those messages and it is time to move along to the news. This was a little annoyance of mine and so I was very happy to see on 9 to 5 Mac yesterday, Ryan Christophel shared an article talking about how finally Apple has removed the older versions of Pages, Keynote and Numbers. These apps were available basically when Apple announced its new lineup of the iWork suite that had Creator Studio as part of gave you new tools, but it also gave you the new icons.
Mikah Sargent [00:26:00]:
And when I went to the App Store and got these new versions, I am a big Spotlight Launcher person. So I hold down the command key, I hit space and I type in the first few letters of the app that I'm looking for. Well, for a while there, after I downloade these new apps, every time I would hit command space to type in pages, what would happen? But having the old version of Pages popping up on my screen, it was rather frustrating. And I'm very happy to say that now they have fixed this by removing the old versions of Pages, Keynotes and Numbers from the App Store so you won't go forth with downloading those. And you can also get rid of the versions on your Mac, the older versions as well. I'm curious, Rosemary, before we move along here, have you made use of any of the new features that have come packed into Numbers, Pages and Keynote?
Rosemary Orchard [00:26:59]:
Nope. To be perfectly honest, my primary use of Pages, and I'm fully aware there are theoretically better apps out there for this, but my primary use of Pages right now is for creating really large sheets where I can do a room plan plan because I'm in the middle of moving and I need to be able to like attempt to rearrange my desk and my workbench for my 3D printer and so on into my office. But I don't want to be picking up and moving all of those pieces of furniture every single time I'm trying to Tetris everything into one place. I just want to do it digitally, please and thank you. So, yeah, I've just been creating a lot of 2D room plans, so I just haven't had a use case for the Creator Studio side of things. And I think it's one of those things where every once in a while I'm gonna have a use for it, but I haven't needed to do that yet. And I mean, I'm using numbers to create like, player, like the team sheets for my Blood bowl, which is a Warhammer fantasy football league. But again, I don't need Creator Studio's help for that.
Rosemary Orchard [00:28:01]:
I can just, you know, I figured it out quite quickly by myself. It wasn't that difficult. And the only AI help that I've needed was a little bit of work from Image Playgrounds to create some. Some silly icons for our group chat. So, yeah, I haven't really needed anything yet. I'll see what happens when it comes to doing my annual Christmas slideshow for work. Maybe I'll need some Creator Studio help from Keynote there.
Mikah Sargent [00:28:26]:
Yeah, I have used a few of the features but don't regularly. I use pages numbers in Keynote for the reasons that I used it for before any of these tools came along. And so I didn't really need to have anything else. But I have played around with it just because I wanted to see some of the stuff that's available. I'm really excited about the media that's available through Creator Studio. Not the AI generated media, but actual. It's sort of a library of different media that you can access and use of photos of people and places. And so I kind of like that a little marketing marketplace that is built in that hopefully Apple will keep updated if you need stock photography and stock icons and things.
Mikah Sargent [00:29:25]:
And then of course, yes, you can then use AI to customize it on top of that. But I thought that even on its own, it was a pretty cool thing. So check your macOS and of course know that in the App Store the old versions have been removed. Moving right along, it is time for our feedback section. Our feedback section is here. All right. Someone has written in to talk to us if you would like to reach out to us. IowaD WWT TV is how you get in touch.
Mikah Sargent [00:29:58]:
Pele says, I listened to the chill episode and when Rosemary talked about the Calm app, it's worth noting that some medical companies and corporations like Kaiser Permanente and Disney offer the pro version of the app. I don't know how the pet tax works with non shortcut questions. So here is my judgmental cat. So Pele has shared a photo of the judgmental cat which I'm looking forward to seeing. Here we have a, you know, maybe judgmental mostly white cat with some orange and black and brown beautiful eyes. Perhaps that's the most judgmental part of the cat as the cat stares off into the distance. In any case, I think beautiful markings on that beautiful kitty. And yes, it is a good idea to check if your health insurance or your company through its own services or through third party services like Insperity, for example, offers calm.
Mikah Sargent [00:31:04]:
Yes. As Kaiser Permanente used to offer you a membership to or I should say I used to have membership to Calm through Kaiser. Of course my insurance changed when we moved and so I no longer do. But that is something that is available to you do UK companies and I don't know because the health insurance obviously is different there. Like does everybody where you are get access to calm because of your government's healthcare?
Rosemary Orchard [00:31:35]:
No. So government healthcare does not cover access to calm, but it does cover a whole bunch of amazing things which, you know, I'm truly very, very grateful for having availed myself of it in the not too distant past. But no, it is down to companies to provide memberships for things like calm. Another one that you might find that your company provides access to is Headspace. That's actually who my company provides access to for free. It is just a company perk. Like you know, sometimes you get free software or a staff discount. So yeah, have a good poke around on your internal docs because I'm sure folks you'll find that you're you, you might be missing some kind of benefit you can get.
Rosemary Orchard [00:32:12]:
I found out the other day I can get a discounted membership to my local swimming pool which is actually, it would be pretty pricey and with the discount it's actually surprisingly affordable. So I may be taking out swimming again soon.
Mikah Sargent [00:32:26]:
Nice. That's very cool. All right, moving along here, it is time for us almost to say goodbye. And so we are at the end of the episode where we share our app caps. These are the apps or gadgets we're using now or have been using for some time that we think are great and want to share with all of you. Rosemary, would you care to share what your pick is?
Rosemary Orchard [00:32:57]:
So something I've been playing a lot recently is Pokemon Go and it's great. It encourages walking by doing things like hatching eggs and things like that you get to walk around with at Pokestops, exchange gifts with people if you follow routes, things like that. But it does require you to have a lot of interaction with your device, which can be good. But sometimes if you're doing something like the school run is maybe not so good. So there is something that you can get for that. And there are official ones, which is the Pokemon Go plus and there's a ball and there's like a disc that you can get. They're all kind of expensive because they're official Nintendo branded merchandise. Don't get me wrong, they're super cool.
Rosemary Orchard [00:33:39]:
But actually turns out that there's other companies out there which make this look suspiciously like a Fitbit. It's not a Fitbit. This is a Pokemon Go Pocket Auto Catch by Brooke. And they make a variety of devices. So I got the wristband style, my boyfriend got a keyring one. They do a whole bunch of different ones in various price points. But the idea of this is you can connect it to Pokemon Go and it's a feature of the Pokemon Go app, to be clear. So it's not cheating to use this.
Rosemary Orchard [00:34:09]:
But it can do things like Auto Catch things using basic pokeballs. It won't use Ultra Balls or Great Balls or anything like that. It won't feed Pokemon berries, but it can spin Pokestops as you walk past them, which can be great. If you are going cool. I am going to walk to school to drop a kiddo off and then I'm going to go to the shop and get something that I need on the way home and then I'm going to come back and start work. And you don't want to be just constantly doing this on your. And phone phone the entire time. You know, there's traffic, there's things like that, but also you don't want to miss out on all the things.
Rosemary Orchard [00:34:38]:
And so this can be really useful. It also comes with an app that you can pair it with and I would recommend doing this because if you do pair it with the app then you can actually control what it does so you don't have to use all the features. Sorry, I'm just waking up. The wristband. I had it upside down, but there we go. You can auto capture known Pokemon unknown Pokemon Auto Spin, Pokemon stops. I've turned vibrate off on this because obviously this usually lives on my key ring and I don't need my keys vibrating. I have power saving mode on all the time.
Rosemary Orchard [00:35:10]:
But I do have it Disconnect Vibrate. When it disconnects, there is Auto Reconnect, but that of a funky hack where it's trying to use the, like, the magic, the accessibility feature where it can touch certain things on your screen for you. And I did not find that that was a very good idea. I didn't feel like it worked very well. So I've disabled AutoReConnect and I'm fine without that. But there's a huge number of different ones of these, and they can be pretty cheap. I think I got this for. I want to say it was maybe 25 pounds on Amazon, so perhaps $30.
Rosemary Orchard [00:35:45]:
And it's made my Pokemon Go experience a lot easier because it means when I take the dog for a walk, he doesn't get bored waiting for me to stand there. Like, waiting while I'm standing there trying to catch a Pokemon again and again. I just keep walking. And yeah, we have a much better time. And then I can sit down and have a serious Pokemon Go session as well on top of that. So I get more Pokemon in my life. And who doesn't love a little bit of extra fun?
Mikah Sargent [00:36:11]:
Nice. Nice. The app that I want to mention today, it's an app that's been around for a long time, may have even been a previous pick of mine, but it's called Pixo. And there are loads of different apps out there that will do what I'm about to talk about. But I really like Pixo for taking photos and stitching them together. And when it comes to doing this, you know, you may be scrolling through something and you want to. This is especially applicable in apps because if you do it in Safari, Safari technically gives you the ability to screenshot a full page right there in the preview of it. But if you're in an app and you're scrolling and you want to capture more of them of more than what's on screen, taking multiple screenshots that have a little bit of overlap and then opening up Pixo, what's cool is that it'll immediately detect what it calls a scroll shot.
Mikah Sargent [00:37:04]:
So I was on a website, just as an example. And up I've taken multiple screenshots of this lemon blueberry cheesecake cookie blog. And what it did automatically was go ahead and go. Okay, Okay. I see the photos that you took. I saw where there was overlap, and I stitched it together how it's supposed to be. Now, from here, I can actually go in and make adjustments to this. So you've got Your basic crop tool, which lets you crop from the top, the bottom, the left and the right.
Mikah Sargent [00:37:37]:
And what I like about Pixo is it has a unique cropping style. Usually when you crop something right, you tap on the edge and you drag the control point down or in or out to crop. With this, you tap on the part of the image that you want to crop. So let's say the top of this. And once you've tapped, you've activated crop. Now you simply scroll. So I'm tapping anywhere on the screen. Let me get this in this.
Mikah Sargent [00:38:06]:
Tapping anywhere on the screen and I'm dragging up and that is going to crop it at that point. So once you let go, then you hit check mark and it's gone. This is handy because scroll shots, typically, as is the case here, are longer. And so you want to be able to capture every part of it. Right. But what's great too is that when you have multiple images and maybe for some reason the app just did not quite capture it, or you're scroll shotting things together that don't have overlap, you can adjust each of the parts where the image overlaps the same way. You tap on that section and you'll note that if I drag this down, there's where I had the overlap. Right.
Mikah Sargent [00:38:43]:
And so I need to drag it back up and place it exactly right. I think it's right about. We'll go with there, hit that check mark. Now the next page, the other features here, more about cropping. This is one of my favorite things because you can add a. Well, you can add all sorts of stuff down at the bottom. You can add a little watermark if you want to. You can also put a watermark over the top of it.
Mikah Sargent [00:39:13]:
We won't do any of those things, but what we will do is you can put a device frame around the outside of the image. So here I currently don't have anything set up. I want to have the orange iPhone. And I love this because it's. I think it looks so silly, but it's so fun because you've got a scroll shot here. It makes the frame wrap all the way around the screenshot that you've taken. So it looks like a long phone. And I just think that's delightful.
Mikah Sargent [00:39:41]:
But you don't have to do a phone. You can turn off the device frame and instead just do a background. But you could pop this onto an Apple Watch depending. And so here is, if I just wanted to do a background and take off the phone itself, then I am able to do that I'm forgetting now, how to get just the background. Regardless, that's one option. And then there are tools like and I love this cleaning the status bar. So you'll note that it takes off any of those personal customizations that you might have. So if you've got in my case a work focus mode turned off, turned on, it gets rid of that.
Mikah Sargent [00:40:22]:
And then also if you were scrolling and accidentally left the scroll bar on the screen, this will automatically remove the scroll bar. There are also tools for creating layout options so those can be split up by section if you'd like. And tools to add sort of other background options to the image as well. You can add text on the screen as you need to and you can highlight sections or if you'd like, you can also point to things on the screen. So this is a full featured tool for being able to not only create scroll shots, but also to be able to edit those scroll shots afterwards. And then I like the share functionality as well because you have multiple options here. You can share an image, you can change the image type, you can share a PDF and you can also share slices. For those of you who are have ever done any level of web design, you are very familiar with slices.
Mikah Sargent [00:41:23]:
So very cool tool called Pixo available for free in the app store. And of course to get the expanded benefits you will need to set up or you need to to pay the in app purchase. Sorry, I'm lagging here because I'm trying to remember what it is. I think it's a, I think it's a one time $99 purchase which I
Rosemary Orchard [00:41:48]:
think it used to be and it's now changed to a subscription model relatively recently.
Mikah Sargent [00:41:53]:
That makes more sense because I was going to say $1.99 one time feels like cheating when it comes to that. Pixo is really, really powerful as you just saw there. I think the, the thing that makes it so cool is how much of it is automatic where you can from fiddle around with it if you'd like to, but you don't have to. You can just let it be what it is. And, and I find that quite delightful. So yeah, currently for me I don't have it in my subscriptions and that is because I must have purchased it when it was just a one time purchase. So that is why again I would happily pay a subscription for it. I think it's a great app and works very, very well from.
Mikah Sargent [00:42:40]:
I think it's from. Oh yeah, Yojio is the name of the developer developer company. So yes, that is mine. Pixo, available in the App Store. Folks, that is going to bring us to the end of this episode of iOS today. I want to thank you all for tuning in today, being here with us. Rosemary Orchard. If people would like to follow you online and check out all the great work you're doing doing, where should they go to do so?
Rosemary Orchard [00:43:12]:
The best place to go is rosemary orchard.com which has got links to apps, books, podcasts and much more. And also it's got links to social media that you won't find all the links there because one of the places you do find me is the Club Twit Discord, where we get to chat sometimes during the recording of the show. So somebody was just confirming the spelling of Pixo so that they get the right app because Micah's recommendation was so good. So yes, it's always lovely hanging out with listeners there. Maika, where can folks find you?
Mikah Sargent [00:43:38]:
If you're looking to find me online, I'm ikasargent on many a social media network. Or you can head to Chihuahua Coffee, that's C H I H U A H u a Coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. So be sure to check it out. And of course, be sure to tune in next week for another episode of iOS today. Thank you.
