California attorney David Sparks has been producing great educational content for an incredibly long time. His iPad at Work book was groundbreaking when it came out over a decade ago, and he then moved on to electronic publications in iBooks and then more recently to online Field Guide courses. This latest iteration is the best format yet. Each Field Guide features incredibly well-produced videos in which David explains and shows you exactly how to use an app or service. His Field Guides always come with fantastic examples, and you get a transcript along with the video which makes it easy to find exactly what you need. I highly recommend his Shortcuts Field Guide and his more recent Shortcuts for Mac Field Guide for anyone looking to take better advantage of Shortcuts, regardless of whether you are an absolute beginner or a power user looking to do even more.
Now that David has given up his law practice to focus on creating tech-related content, he has been releasing so much great and helpful stuff. Yesterday, David released his latest Field Guide, this time focusing on the powerful app Obsidian. It is called, as you might expect, the Obsidian Field Guide. Obsidian is primarily used on a Mac or PC, but it also works on the iPad and even the iPhone. It is a note-taking app, but unlike many other note-taking apps, it makes it fast and easy to have your notes cross-reference each other. With Obsidian, you can jot down lots of different ideas and then the app can help you to organize and make sense of it all. If you have heard of Roam Research, Craft, DEVONthink, or Notion, they are all somewhat similar, but Obsidian is noteworthy for the comprehensive set of tools that it gives you to work with, including plug-ins.
I’ve heard about Obsidian many times, but I haven’t yet used Obsidian myself. In part, this has been because I was a little intimidated by the app, and in part, this has been because I wasn’t sure how the app might be a good fit for one of my projects. I suspect that many of you would fall in the same camp. David’s new Field Guide is perfect for people like us because it does a fantastic job of explaining the projects for which an app like Obsidian excels and then providing great advice for using this app. This includes not only using the basic app but also how to work with tons of different plug-ins that bring advanced functions to the app. Follow along with David’s examples and before you know it, you will be a power user.
David gave me a free preview version of this new Field Guide a few days ago, and I’ve enjoyed starting the course. The quality of his videos is excellent, and the Field Guide is well organized. There are 78 video tutorials, about six total hours of content, and tons of workflows and usage samples.
Want even more? David is also selling a “plus” version of his Field Guide that gives you access to live online webinars with David that you can attend and/or re-watch later.
The cost of the Field Guide is $49, or $99 if you want the “plus” version. However, for a limited time you can use the discount code OBSIDIANLAUNCH to get 10% off.
If keeping track of information, organizing information, and using information is a part of your life, then Obsidian may be for you, and David’s new Obsidian Field Guide is the perfect accessory to the Obsidian software.
Apple announced yesterday that it will hold an event on September 12, 2023, at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, every year since 2012 (except for 2020 due to COVID), Apple has held an event in early September to announce the new iPhone, so I am quite sure that Apple will use the September 12 event to introduce the world to the 2023 versions of the iPhone, presumably the iPhone 15 line. One change that seems likely to come is a switch from Lightning to USB-C on the iPhone, which John Gruber of Daring Fireball discusses in this post. I suspect that we will also see updates to the Apple Watch, but beyond that, I don’t know what Apple has planned.
The page on the Apple website for the event features an interesting version of the Apple logo with metallic (titanium?) dust coming off of it to announce the event. It sort of reminds of of the opening credits of the Apple TV+ show Foundation. It’s a pretty neat animation. Do those colors have anything to do with the colors in the next iPhone? We’ll see.
Select members of the press received invitations to go to Apple’s campus to watch the (presumably) prerecorded announcement, and the tagline on those invitations said: Wonderlust. Read into that single word what you will.
The Messages app on the iPhone, like other apps, can provide you with a notification when you have a new message. Use the Notifications section of the Settings app to control what types of notifications you get, including, as we all know, a red badge on the app itself to show you the number of unread messages.
Sometimes my app shows me that I have a few unread messages. I suppose at some point over the years I may have had as many as a dozen or so unread messages, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than that.
My daughter recently spent about two weeks at summer camp. When we picked her up at camp (in another state), I brought her iPhone because I figured that she would be eager to catch up on text messages etc. in the car ride home. But what I did not expect to see was this:
How is it even possible to have 1,800 unread messages? I’m not sure that I have ever received that many messages in my entire life. My daughter informed me that most of it was from large group texts where there can be dozens of new texts every minute. When I told her that I cannot even imagine taking the time to catch up on that many messages, she told me that all she would need to do is a quick skim to get a sense of whether she missed anything important.
So anyway, my public service announcement for today is that—in case you were curious—yes, the Messages notifications badge does support numbers that are four digits long. I hope that I never have a reason to see that it can support five digits too.
When is it a good time to purchase a new Apple product and when should you wait? That’s the question that Brett and I address first in this week’s episode of the In the News podcast. We also address the Apple Vision Pro, potentially getting 5% Apple Cash using the Apple Card, the large number of features in the Notes app, and cleaning and charging an Apple Watch.
This episode is sponsored by SaneBox, so Brett explained some neat things that SaneBox lets you do with attachments, and I talked about how to get SaneBox working on one or two email accounts. Go to sanebox.com/inthenews to sign up for a free trial and get a $25 credit toward a SaneBox subscription.
In our In the Know segment, Brett discussed managing shared notes, and I provide an 18-month later update on Wordle and similar word games that are free and fun to play.
If you are interested in Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro headset—like I am—then you are probably especially interested in what app developers will come up with to take advantage of this new device. Apple is letting developers who are working on upcoming apps try out their apps on prototype versions of the hardware, and Apple published a story on its website in which a few developers describe the experience of developing for the Apple Vision Pro.
How long has Apple been working on the Vision Pro? Patently Apple reports that Apple just had a patent granted that it applied for back in 2007—the same year that the original iPhone launched—describing a Virtual Reality Headset that could present users with 3D environments. I wouldn’t have guessed that Apple has had folks working on the project for that long.
Michael Potuck of 9to5Mac reports that select users of the Apple Card credit card can get up to $1,300 Daily Cash on travel and dining expenses thanks to a 5% Cash Back promotion. I haven’t seen this offer in my email Inbox, but I would definitely use it if Apple tells me that I’m selected.
Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac reviews the qCharge 2.0 ($59 on Amazon), a tiny Apple Watch charger that can recharge an Apple Watch two or three times.
MacRumors has a buyer’s guide that typically does a good job of letting you know whether an Apple product seems to be new enough that you should be safe to get it while minimizing buyer’s remorse whenever the next version comes along. Joe Rossignol of MacRumors identifies the five oldest products that Apple is still selling today, and they include the AirPods Max, the HomePod mini, and the Apple Pencil. I’d love to see a new Apple Pencil with more features, but as Rossignol notes, there are no credible rumors of a new Apple Pencil yet.
And finally, when Apple TV+ first started, there were four main shows: Dickinson and See (two shows that are now finished), and For All Mankind and The Morning Show. There were also some kid shows, like Snoopy in Space. For All Mankind was my favorite, and indeed it is one of my all-time favorite shows from any network. But it always seemed that The Morning Show was Apple’s favorite, the one that it hoped would put Apple TV+ on the map, long before people were thinking about Ted Lasso. So for that reason, it is notable that The Morning Show is about to start Season 3 on September 13. Perhaps also notable is that Apple previously ran a series of funny ads with the tagline Everyone But Jon Hamm, and of course, Hamm will be on the upcoming Season 3. This week, Apple released the official trailer:
If there is a theme to this week’s episode of the In the News podcast, it is the future of the streaming video industry. We dig deep into the rumors that Apple might buy Disney. Yes, it’s crazy, and we ultimately don’t think it will happen, and yet just maybe it could for lots of different reasons. We also talk about why cutting the cord is not what it used to be anymore. And we talk about future Apple TV+ shows that may include a 3D component made especially for the upcoming Apple Vision Pro. We also take the time to say Happy Birthday to the iMac, which went on sale 25 years ago. Oh yeah, and it also helped to save Apple from destruction and led to the name for the iPhone. And we discuss other interesting topics such as the latest version of Goodnotes.
In this week’s Where Y’at? segment, we talk about how an AirPod will only help you to recover a stolen item if the thief doesn’t know about it.
This episode is sponsored by SaneBox, and Brett and I explained two great features of the service: the Daily Digest and the @SaneNoReplies folder—a great reminder for when someone was supposed to reply to your email but has not done so yet. Go to sanebox.com/inthenews to sign up for a free trial and get a $25 credit toward a SaneBox subscription.
In our In the Know segment, Brett discussed preserving settings in Camera mode to make it faster to take a picture or video. I discussed an easy way to find links, pictures, documents, etc. that you have shared with another person in the Messages app—a great tip that can save you a ton of time.
Will Apple buy Disney? The idea would have been ridiculous 10 years ago, 20 years ago, etc. But the idea has been kicked around quite a bit recently. John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes a persuasive piece on why Apple doesn’t seem to have the interest and Disney will want to stay independent. On the other hand, Jason Snell of Six Colors thinks the idea isn’t that crazy. Large technology companies are trying to purchase content companies more and more, and Disney itself faces an uncertain future. If any tech company is going to buy Disney, Apple seems like the best fit. As Snell notes, Disney CEO Bob Iger suggested in his memoir that had Steve Jobs lived, the two companies might have combined. I have no idea what will happen, but if at some point soon my monthly Apple One subscription also gets me a Fast Pass to Space Mountain, I’d be fine with that. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Why is the iPhone called the iPhone? Back in 2009, I provided the answer in a post called Why the “i” in iPhone? That post still gets a lot of readers to this day. In short, the answer is that Apple first used the “i” when Apple introduced the iMac in 1998. As Jason Snell writes in an article for the Verge, it was 25 years ago this week that Apple released the iMac—a cute but powerful computer that saved Apple from bankruptcy. If Apple had not made it through that period in its history, there would have been no iPod, no iPhone, no iPad, etc. Thank goodness for the iMac.
John Voorhees of MacStories reviews Mercury Weather, which looks like a great weather app for the iPhone and iPad.
Jonny Evans of Computerworld suggests a few iPhone features that you may not know about. For example, as my In the News podcast co-host Brett Burney pointed out all the way back on Episode 23 in 2021, if you hold down the mute button for a few seconds you can place the rest of the call on hold—which means you cannot hear the other person, and if there are multiple people on the phone, they cannot talk to each other.
If you use a third-party app on your Apple Watch to monitor for common symptoms of Parkinson’s (Tremors and Dyskinesia), there was a bug in watchOS 9.6 that prevented those apps from working. Apple fixed the bug in watchOS 9.6.1 released this week, as explained by Chance Miller of 9to5Mac.
A woman in Vancouver was not able to recover her stolen car, even though it had an AirTag, because the thief found the AirTag and attached it to an Evo Car Share vehicle, as reported by Malcolm Owen of AppleInsider. So when the woman traced the AirTag to a winery, she was disappointed to find out that her car was not there.
One upcoming streaming video show on Apple TV+ is a Godzilla TV series. Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac reports that parts of the show are being filmed in Apple’s Immersive Video format, which means that you will be able to watch them in spatial 3D using the upcoming Apple Vision Pro.
And finally, while excessive heat has made life difficult for many of us lately, don’t forget that heat makes it tough for your iPhone, too. Joann Stern of the Wall Street Journal has a helpful video showing why heat is bad for your iPhone’s batteries, and she also provides hints for preserving battery life:
An iPad (especially with an Apple Pencil) is a fantastic replacement for a legal pad or pen and paper, and I have been using my iPad to take notes for a very long time I first reviewed the app GoodNotes in 2012, and while I have tried similar apps over the last eleven years, I have always found GoodNotes to be the best writing app for me to use in my law practice and when I take notes for personal reasons. (The folks behind the app sponsored iPhone J.D. back in 2019, but haven’t done so since then.) A few weeks ago, the app was updated to version 6. One (slight) change was in the name: the “n” is no longer capitalized. So the new app is called Goodnotes. The icon is also slightly changed; you can tell you are using the latest version because the line at the bottom of the icon forms a smile. But of course, the major changes are seen once you launch the app. Here is what I like about this new version. Not everything is perfect, but this is still a nice set of new features.
New interface
The app has a fresh new interface that I think works much better.
First, when you are looking at all of your notebooks, instead of having tabs at the bottom, those different categories are now on the left side: Documents, Favorites, Search, Shared, and Marketplace. Part of the change was to make space for those last two categories, but this is the same layout used by many other professional iPad apps, and I prefer it.
Second, there is a fresh coat of paint, so to speak. When you are in the mode where you look at your folders containing notebooks, you can now assign colors and icons to folders. This makes it so much faster to quickly see and select the folder that you want. There are only 21 icons to choose from (I wish there were more) but I was able to find ones that work for me. I have a folder that I use for notes that I take in a CLE class, so I put an apple on that folder, which makes me think of school. I put scales of justice on two of my law-related folders. I put a happy face on my folder for family documents.
When you have a specific notebook open and you are taking notes, the interface is refreshed and makes better use of the top of the screen, even if you have multiple tabs open.
Faster selection of items
There are a number of new gestures in Goodnotes 6, but by far my favorite is the new selection gesture. I often write some notes, then realize that I want to go back and add something else above, so I need to move what I just wrote further down the page. In the past, I would select the lasso tool, then draw a circle around the text (or graphics or images or whatever), then use a finger to draft the contents in the lasso to a new location. In Goodnotes 6, you don’t have to switch from the pen tool to the lasso tool. Just draw a circle around whatever you want to select and then hold down one finger on the outline of the circle for about a second. The circle will change into a dotted line (just as if you had used the lasso tool to select) and you can move to a new location. You save a few steps, and thus you can get back to taking notes more quickly.
This is a great new feature that never even occurred to me as something that would be more efficient. Kudos to the designers for coming up with and implementing this one.
Scribble to erase
This feature is a great idea in theory, but I am having trouble using it in practice. The idea is that when you want to erase, instead of switching to the eraser tool or double-tapping the side of your Apple Pencil to switch to that tool, you simply use the same pen that you used to write to scratch out the word, or even part of a word, and what you scratched out disappears. This reminds me of a gesture used on the Apple Newton back in the 1990s.
I like the idea of erasing without taking the time to switch tools. But this feature has only worked about 20% of the time for me; the rest of the time, Goodnotes just adds my scribble on top of the word. Perhaps there is a trick to getting this feature to work more reliably, and hopefully I will get the knack of it soon. But for now, I’m just sticking with double-tapping my Apple Pencil to erase.
Spellcheck and autocomplete
This is certainly interesting, although I haven’t yet decided how useful it is. Goodnotes 6 now uses AI to look at what you are writing as you write so that it can let you know if there are spelling mistakes and so that it can offer to autocomplete a word. When it can offer help, Goodnotes puts red dots under a word. Tap the dots to see a pop-up list of suggestions.
When you suggest a word, Goodnotes will write the word and even attempt to mimic your own handwriting by looking at the handwriting that you used on the rest of the page. I don’t think that it is a very close match to my own handwriting, but it is more than adequate to get the job done.
I virtually always take handwritten notes for my own use, not to share, so if I have a few typos in there, I don’t really care. But the fact that this feature works at all is pretty darn neat, and it may grow on me in the future.
Whenever I think about using AI to get work done, I always think about security. For example, I wouldn’t want to share anything confidential with ChatGPT because anything that you type can become a part of its central knowledge base. But the developer of Goodnotes addresses this on its website, explaining that the AI respects your privacy: “AI handwriting features like Spellcheck and Word Complete that are based off our proprietary ML model are run entirely on device and the data is not sent anywhere so no one—including GoodNotes—can access it.” That is reassuring.
…and many more
Those are the new features that jumped out at me, but there are many more. There are new tools for students who use Goodreader. There is a way to convert handwritten complicated math into typed math equations. Goodnotes can use AI to suggest additional sentences. The other new features don’t interest me as much as the ones I mentioned above, but I’m sure that others will find them quite useful.
Goodnotes is also doing more with its marketplace, where you can download notebook templates and stickers to add in your notes. I do have a handful of stickers that I created myself that I use frequently in my notes, so I do like the stickers feature, but I myself don’t have much interest in downloading additional templates or stickers. But I do understand the appeal of adding stickers to notes to make them more interesting or easier to work with. I’m reminded of when I was in grade school and students would sometimes add stickers—or even cooler to me when I was younger, puffy stickers—to their notes. If you want to check out the marketplace, there are lots of free stickers and templates that you can download just to get a sense of how it works.
Other devices
I talk about using Goodnotes on my iPad because that is where I take my notes. But Goodnotes also works on the iPhone and the Mac. I often find it useful to pull up my notes on my iPhone when I am on the go, on when I am working on my Mac.
Cost
Upgrading to version 6 or paying for version 6 for the first time lets you use version 6 on the iPad, iPhone, and Mac.
The prior version, GoodNotes 5, cost $7.99. If you own GoodNotes 5 and you don’t want any of these new features, you can continue to use that app without paying anything more. If you want to upgrade, there is a discount based on how long ago you purchased the app.
If you are paying for the app for the first time, Goodnotes 6 costs either $9.99 a year or a one-time purchase of $29.99. The last big update was over four years ago in early 2019, so if it takes another four years to come out with Goodnotes 7, then the one-time purchase may be the cheaper way to go. But I opted for the $9.99 a year option because I like the idea of paying something to the developer every year considering that I use this app just about every day. If I end up paying slightly more this way, I have no problem with that.
Goodnotes 6 costs more than prior versions of the app, which were always a one-time purchase of less than $10. But if you want to take handwritten notes or use an Apple Pencil to annotate notes on PDF files, Goodnotes is such a fantastic app that the new price seems more than fair to me. I’ve loved using the app for over a decade, and I hope that I can continue to use the app and see more features added for at least another decade.
Conclusion
Whenever I am asked to name my favorite and most useful apps on my iPad, Goodnotes is always on the list. The new Goodnotes 6 adds some great new features, even if at least one of them—scribble to erase—doesn’t seem to be working well for me yet. Moreover, I love that the developers are starting to think about how AI can be used to make the app even more powerful.
We are only a month away from a brand new iPhone model and the new iOS 17, so Brett and I spend much of this week’s episode of the In the News podcast talking about that. We also discuss why you should not trust companies that purport to list the top apps in the App Store, the new Callsheet app that you can use to look up information about actors, movies, and shows, the bizarre temperatures that some folks are seeking when then use Foreca as a weather source, and more.
In this week’s Where Y’at? segment, we talk about using an iPhone to escape from the fire in Hawaii and using an AirTag to track down luggage lost by an airline.
This episode is sponsored by SaneBox, and Brett and I explained two features of that service that we love: the @SaneNews folder and the @SaneBlackhole folder. Go to sanebox.com/inthenews to sign up for a free trial and get a $25 credit toward a SaneBox subscription.
In our In the Know segment, Brett discussed why you may or may not want to use the Offload Unused Apps function. And I explained why you should be using the Shortcuts app on the iPhone.
When will Apple announce the 2023 version of the iPhone? Apple has previously announced new iPhones on the Wednesday after Labor Day in 2022, 2016, 2015, and 2014. The announcement was the Tuesday of the week after Labor Day in 2021, 2019, 2017, and 2013. In 2018 and 2012, it was the Wednesday of the week after Labor Day. (The 2020 introduction was in October because of delays due to COVID.) Given that history, I would expect Apple to announce the iPhone 15 line on Wednesday, September 6, Tuesday, September 12, or Wednesday, September 13. Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, who has a good track record with rumors, tweeted earlier this week that he is hearing that it will likely be on September 12. I mention all of that today because it means that we are likely only a month away from the announcement of a new iPhone. Woo-hoo! So now is the time to start to get excited about what new features will be included in the different models. And now is NOT the time to buy a new iPhone, so try to avoid dropping your phone in the toilet for the next few weeks—and if you do, try these tips before you rush out to buy a replacement. And now, the news of note from the past week:
I love this article title by Stephen Hackett of 512 Pixels: According to Foreca’s Weather Data, Everyone in Memphis is Dead. The issue is that when an app like Carrot Weather uses Foreca as a weather source to estimate the feels like temperature, the Foreca estimates can be crazy high. Because it has been so hot this Summer, I’ve been checking out the feels like temperatures, and because I was also using Foreca, I saw some crazy high numbers in New Orleans too. Don’t get me wrong, it was seriously hot down here, but not THAT hot. After reading that article, I switched my weather source to Apple Weather and I’ll see what I think of it after using it for a while—but so far, so good.
When you see reports about how popular different apps are, you should always remember that nobody but Apple knows all of the data, and the ways that others come up with estimates are highly questionable. John Gruber of Daring Fireball wrote a great analysis of one such company, Sensor Tower, and after reading his article, I doubt you will ever trust these supposed statistics again.
The wildfires in Maui have been horrible, and my thoughts are with everyone affected. In any tragedy, it is nice to see any good news, so I was pleased to see Felipe Espósito of 9to5Mac report this week that one family in Maui was rescued thanks to the iPhone Emergency SOS via Satellite feature. The picture of the chat between the people rescued and the conversation via Satellite with emergency services brings the story to life.
We’ve seen lots of stories of people reclaiming lost luggage after a flight thanks to an AirTag, but this story from Julia Buckley of CNN is particularly interesting. When United Airlines was of no help, the owner took matters into her own hands when she could see that her bag was at baggage claim in Chicago O’Hare: she took a day off of work, booked a ticket to Chicago (using miles), and once there, found her bag in 30 seconds. As the article explains, that someone dramatic solution wasn’t just because the bag had $2,000 in lacrosse equipment, but because it was impossible to get a replacement for her daughter before the next tournament.
Dawn Gilbertson of the Wall Street Journal recommends five good travel apps you should consider using.
When you are watching a movie or TV show, do you ever pause so that you can look up an actor or actress to figure out what you know them from? If so, you may do so using the IMDB app, but this week, Casey Liss released a much nicer app called Callsheet (great name) that taps into The Movie Database (a competitor to IMDB). You can try out the app for free, and if you like it after 20 free searches, it costs $9 a year. Not only is the app well-designed, it has some great features. For example, you can avoid spoilers by hiding certain information such as character names, episode counts, episode titles, or episode thumbnails. What a great idea. I didn’t even wait until I had done 20 searches; I paid for the app right away. Jason Snell of Six Colors wrote a positive review, as did John Voorhees of MacStories.
And finally, with new iPhones coming next month, that means that iOS 17 is coming soon too. Marques Brownlee has a good video showing off and explaining some of the top features coming in iOS 17:
