Thank you to SaneBox for sponsoring iPhone J.D. again this month.  I’ve heard of the SaneBox service for many years, but it wasn’t until a few months ago that I started to use the service myself, and now I’m kicking myself for not trying out it out earlier.  It is that good.   SaneBox vastly improves your email inbox by giving you tools to adjust what you see and when you see it.  And because of the way that the service works, it can work with almost any email service.  The end result is that when you look at your Inbox, almost every email that you see will be an email that is there for you to act on.  Instead of your Inbox being stuffed with newsletters, junk emails, and other items that make it difficult to see the emails that deserve your attention, SaneBox moves those emails to another location where you can deal with them later or perhaps never deal with them at all.  It is like having an assistant organize your email for you so that you can focus on the important stuff.

How SaneBox works

SaneBox works with any email service that provides IMAP, EWS – OWA, or Active Sync, such as Yahoo Mail, Gmail, AOL, iCloud, MS Exchange, Microsoft 365, Fastmail, Amazon WorkMail, and others.  Since last yaear, I’ve been using it with my iPhone J.D. email account, which is just a normal IMAP account associated with a domain that I own.  You may have an email account exactly like this one.  My inbox receives a lot of emails from lots of different sources: people reaching out to me with questions or suggestions, companies that offer valuable and relevant services, newsletters that I signed up for, but also a lot of unwanted and/or junk email that is not caught by my spam filter.

SaneBox works by analyzing the headers—but never the body—of your emails.  That means that SaneBox sees things like the subject line, date, and who the email is from.  But SaneBox does not see what the email says in the body of the email.  Based on its analysis of the headers, SaneBox keeps the email on your own email server—SaneBox never transfers your emails to its own server—but moves some of the emails from your Inbox to another folder. 

You need to give SaneBox your email address and your email password so that it can see the headers.  But the security of SaneBox has been audited by numerous security firms.  The service has been around since 2010, a long track record that attests to its trustworthiness.  Moreover, if you want to avoid giving SaneBox your normal password, you can turn on two-factor authentication and create an app-specific password with many services so that the password you give SaneBox is specific and unique to SaneBox.  Click here for more information on this process.

You can also use two-factor authentication with the SaneBox service itself.  That way, you can be sure that your SaneBox dashboard is completely private and accessible only by you.

What SaneBox does

The main thing that SaneBox does is analyze the information in the headers of your emails and then filter messages based on that analysis.  For any message that SaneBox thinks is likely a normal email that you would want, SaneBox leaves the email in your Inbox.  For messages that SaneBox considers less useful, such as messages that may be junk, SaneBox moves those emails to a folder called @SaneLater.  Messages that seem to be mailing lists are moved to a folder called @SaneNews.  Messages that SaneBox knows that you don’t want to see because you already told SaneBox (more on that below) are moved to @SaneBlackHole.  And so on.  I have more information on these specific folders below, but the end result is something like this: instead of going to your Inbox and seeing 17 new messages when only 3 of them are actually important, you see 5 new messages, including the 3 that are most important. 

Thanks to SaneBox, I am much more efficient when I check email. I check my iPhone J.D. inbox from time to time during the day.  Without SaneBox, if I pause what I am working on and see that I have over a dozen or more new messages, going through those emails becomes a chore.  I need to take the time to separate the important emails from the others, and the whole process wastes time.  With SaneBox, I instead glance at my Inbox and just see a few emails that are important.  Based upon that, I can quickly decide if I need to read or act upon any of them or if I can get back to whatever else I was working on.  Later on, when I know that I have more time to devote to email, I can pay attention to the emails that were moved into another folder such as @SaneLater.   This vastly improves email efficiency.

It also saves you time.  If you receive an alert every time an email comes in, the time that you waste looking at a new email only to discover that it is something unimportant and then trying to get your mind back to the task you were working on before can really add up.

Here is a deeper dive on the main SaneBox folders and other features.  Note that you get to determine which of these folders and features you turn on and off, and you can typically adjust settings on each feature to fine-tune it.  So for example, if you want to keep all newsletters in your Inbox instead of having them automatically moved to @SaneNews, just don’t turn on the @SaneNews feature in your SaneBox dashboard.

@SaneBlackHole

My favorite SaneBox folder is @SaneBlackHole.  When I get an email from someone who I don’t want to get email from—maybe it is a spam message, maybe it is a marketing company that is of no interest to me, maybe it is a political candidate who I don’t want to see literature from, etc.—I simply move it from my Inbox to the folder called @SaneBlackHole.  This trains the SaneBox service.  Future emails from that address will automatically move to the @SaneBlackHole folder, stay in that folder for a week, and then get deleted.

Why not just click the unsubscribe button in the unwanted email?  That’s fine if you trust the company sending you the email that you don’t want.  But sometimes when you click an unsubscribe button, you are confirming to the sender that your email is an active one, and they will turn around and sell your email address to other companies, which results in even more unwanted email.  When you move an email to the @SaneBlackHole folder, the person or company is not alerted that you did so.

What if you make a mistake?  If you put something in the @SaneBlackHole folder by accident, simply move it back into your Inbox.  SaneBox will see that you did that and learn that you don’t want future emails from that sender to go into the @SaneBlackHole folder.

Is the @SaneBlackHole folder the same thing as a Spam folder or a Junk folder from your email provider?  Not really.  The end result is similar, but how it gets there is very different.  Your own email provider provides a Spam folder feature that analyzes not only the sender and subject line but also the content of your email to determine if something is spam, phishing, a virus, etc.  Spam folders are not perfect, but when they do work, they perform an important job by moving an unwanted email out of your Inbox.  Even with SaneBox, you should continue to use the Spam folder feature provided by your own email provider.  But as we all know, there are many messages not caught by a Spam folder even though you might want them to be. Perhaps your emial service cannot determine whether it is truly junk because for some types of messages, one person might want the message and another person may not.  While you can often train the Spam folder provided by your email service provider, and you should do so, Spam folders are not always as smart as you want them to be.  Thus, @SaneBlackHole works in a different way, along with your normal Spam or Junk feature, to provide a more customized filter.  If you never want to hear from X again, just move one email from X into the @SaneBlackHole folder.  And then you are done.

SaneBox describes the difference between a Spam folder and the @SaneBlackHole folder this way:  “Keep in mind that @SaneBlackHole is not for SPAM.  It is meant to be used for legitimate email from people or services that you don’t want to see or hear from anymore.  Spammers go out of their way to make each email be sufficiently different so trainings like these don’t work.”

For me, the @SaneBlackHole folder has worked extremely well.  Every once in a while, I’ll take a look at what is in that folder and see a huge number of emails that used to be going straight to my Inbox.  I’m so thrilled to see that they went there instead and didn’t waste my time.

@SaneNews

When SaneBox detects that you are receiving something that looks like a newsletter, it moves the message from your Inbox to the @SaneNews folder.  This is nice because I receive many newsletters that I signed up for and want to receive, but I don’t always want them to interrupt my workflow during the day by piling up in my Inbox.  Whenever I’m ready to look at newsletters, such as while I’m having lunch or at the end of the day, they are waiting for me in this folder.

Sometimes, I’ll see something show up in @SaneNews that I did not sign up for and that I don’t want to receive.  I simply move that email into the @SaneBlackHole folder to train SaneBox to put similar emails there in the future.

On the other hand, sometimes I’ll see something that is a newsletter but it is important to me so I’d rather keep it in my Inbox.  For example, perhaps you love reading the free iPhone J.D. email that goes out whenever there is a new post.  (You are not receiving the iPhone J.D. newsletter?  Just click here or scan the QR code to the right to sign up.)  Simply move the email with the newsletter out of @SaneNews and into your Inbox to teach SaneBox that it should keep that particular newsletter in your Inbox so that you will notice it more quickly.

It is nice that @SaneNews, like all SaneBox folders, is simply another folder in your email.  This means that the fact that SaneBox has filtered the email doesn’t mean that you don’t have easy access to it.  It’s not like you need to go to the SaneBox website to view it or anything like that.  Your current mail client, including the Mail app on your iPhone or iPad, just sees @SaneNews as another folder.  Your iPhone, iPad, computer, etc. doesn’t need to know that it was the intelligence of SaneBox that moved the message into the @SaneNews folder or any other SaneBox folder, nor does your iPhone need to know that by moving a message from one folder to another folder, you are training the SaneBox service.

@SaneLater

The @SaneLater folder is a place where SaneBox puts emails that it considers likely to be less important, including messages that may be junk.  If there is a type of email that you want to receive but typically don’t want to act upon right away, move it from your Inbox to the @SaneLater folder to train SaneBox to move similar messages there in the future.  You can always manually move a message from @SaneLater to your Inbox to train SaneBox that this is an important type of email that deserves to stay in your Inbox.

A lot of the emails that show up in my @SaneLater email are emails that I would consider spam or junk emails and that were not caught by my Spam filter.  So I will often select a bunch of them and move them into the @SaneBlackHole folder so that in the future they will go straight there instead of in my @SaneLater folder.  That system isn’t perfect—the spammer may change up the “from” email address slightly to try to confuse SaneBox—but when I move a message into the @SaneBlackHole folder, at least I am trying to do something.

@SaneCC

If a message is sent to someone else but also sent to you as CC, you can have that message automatically go to a @SaneCC folder instead of your Inbox.  I understand the idea here—since the email was not sent directly to you, it is potentially less important than other emails in your Inbox.  I don’t have this SaneBox folder turned on because so many of the emails that I receive as a cc are just as important as the ones for which I am in the “to” field.  Nevertheless, I can understand how this may be valuable for many folks.

@SaneNoReplies

Have you ever sent someone an email asking for a response, but then they don’t reply, and then you forget that you were waiting for a reply, and then you get annoyed at yourself for not following up sooner?  The @SaneNoReplies folder is an optional folder aimed at addressing this situation.

Here’s how it works.  You send an email to someone.  Just like always, your sent email goes into your Sent folder.  But additionally, within a few minutes, SaneBox puts a copy of your sent email into the @SaneNoReplies folder.  When someone replies to your email, the email that you sent is deleted from the @SaneNoReplies folder because it is no longer an email without a reply.  The idea is that you can glance at your @SaneNoReplies folder from time to time to see the message to which there was no reply, and that can remind you to follow up and request a reply.  If you see something in there that doesn’t belong—perhaps you never expected a reply, or perhaps the other person replied in some other way like a phone call or a different email—just delete it from that folder and SaneBox will stop waiting for a reply.

Note that the @SaneNoReplies folder only acts upon emails where you sent the first email.  If you are replying to an email chain, nothing that you send will go into this folder. 

SaneReminders

What if you want to make sure that you get a reply within a specific time period, like three days?  When you compose your email, add a bcc or a cc to 3days@sanebox.com.  If three days have passed and you haven’t yet received a response, then SaneBox will put a reminder email at the top of your Inbox.  What if you want to get that reminder in three days regardless of whether you get a reply?  Simply add the word “keep” such as keep.3days@sanebox.com.

Pretty much anything that you can think of will work for those SaneBox reminder addresses.  There is a big list of them on this page.  Examples include sunday@sanebox.com, november21@sanebox.com, dec.21.2pm@sanebox.com, etc.

SaneReminders works when you are sending a message and you use that special email as a cc or bcc.  It also works if you receive an email and you want to deal with it at a later date: simply forward the email to a SaneBox reminder address such as friday@sanebox.com.  On Friday, at the top of your inbox, you will see an email reminding you to act upon that email.  (You can configure in the SaneBox settings what time of day those emails show up.)  This is a good way to move an email out of your Inbox so that it doesn’t bother you right now, but then have it come back when you will be ready to deal with it.

…and more

This post would get too long if I described every feature of SaneBox.  There are lots of them.  As I noted above, this service has been around for over a decade, so SaneBox has come up with lots of different features over those years.  For example, you can schedule Do Not Disturb periods for your Inbox.  You can create custom folders like @SaneReceipts or @SaneFamily and teach SaneBox how to move things into those folder for you.   Just recently, SaneBox introduced an Email Deep Clean feature to help you clean up an Inbox that has gotten too big.  And you can do so much more.

Price

SaneBox has lots of different pricing tiers so that you can just pay for what you need, and you can try before you buy to get the service working and find out if it makes sense for you.  It only takes minutes to set it up, and if you don’t like the service, simply unsubscribe.  And while you can pay month-to-month if you want, you can save substantially if you sign up for one year or two years.

If you only want to use two SaneBox features, you can choose the “Snack” tier which is $7/month or $59/year or $99 for two years.  The most popular tier is the “Lunch” tier which can work with two email accounts and lets you choose six features for $12/month or $99/year or $169 for two years.  (That’s the tier that I paid for.)  You can also get the “Dinner” tier which works with four email accounts and includes every feature for $36/month or $299 a year or $499 for two years.  There are discounts for educational, non-profit, and governmental agencies.

Click here to sign up.  That link includes an affiliate code that provides a small affiliate fee to iPhone J.D. if you decide to pay for a plan. 

Conclusion

SaneBox is a fantastic service that makes your email better.  Even if you are not sure that the service is for you, it costs you nothing to try it out.  SaneBox can also work especially well if you have an alternative email service that you use for making purchases and other purposes but that you don’t check throughout the day.  With SaneBox working to keep the Inbox clean and tidy, you can be much more efficient when you check that Inbox.  I recommend that you check out the free trial to see for yourself how it works and the wonders that it can do for your Inbox.

Click here to try SaneBox.

Many of the topics in the latest episode of the In the News podcast address putting new things in historical perspective.  Brett and I discuss the new Apple website and how much it has changed over the decades.  We talk about the new Apple financial report and explain how the iPad can be doing better than ever right now at the same time that it is disappointing many folks who have been following the iPad for a long time.  We talk about the new version of Myst on the iPad and how far it has come from the version many of us played on Apple computers in the 1990s.  And we talk about how the newest HomePod compares to the original version released years ago.  On top of all of that, we talk about CarPlay apps, the Camo app, and HomeKit smartplugs.  It is a jam-packed episode, but you can take your time with it because we won’t be able to record an episode next week.

In our In the Know segment, Brett explains how you can fix an Apple Watch if the Digital Crown doesn’t turn as well as it should.  I explain how you can fix an iPhone if it doesn’t want to wake up—spoiler alert: push volume up, push volume down, then hold down the power key—and we explain why you should do your best to remember that combination.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just use your podcast player of choice.  You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

This week, Apple debuted a new look for the Apple website. There are still tabs at the top devoted to topics like iPhone, iPad, and Mac, but now you can hover your computer mouse over each tab, or tap once on a tab on an iPad, to see a large list of pages associated with that tab.  There is a somewhat similar layout for the iPhone, but it is based on a menu button at the top right.  It’s a nice design change that makes it easier to get to the specific part of the Apple website that you want.  Additionally, many of the pages on the website have been spruced up with graphics that animate as you scroll down the website.  For an interesting look at past Apple website home pages, check out this page from the Version Museum, which covers 1994 to 2020.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• I added a new paragraph to my recent review of Camo, the app that lets you use your iPhone as a webcam, to note that I initially had some difficulties using Camo when my iPhone was connected to my Windows computer using a cord.  I solved that problem by updating a driver, and it helped Camo to work much better.  I’ll discuss this issue in more detail when we record today’s episode of the In the News podcast.
• What do people who pay attention think about Apple’s performance in 2022?  Jason Snell of Six Colors released the latest version of his annual Report Card to answer that question.  Folks were happy with wearable technology like the Apple Watch and AirPods, but more grumpy about HomeKit and developer relations.
• Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac compares the original HomePod to the new model.
• If you want to use HomePods in a stereo pair, they need to be of the same generation.  Unless you use a workaround, described by Chance Miller of 9to5Mac in this post, which involves using the Airfoil app on a Mac.  If you own a single original generation HomePod and a single new HomePod, it might be something worth trying to see what you think.
• Anthony of CarPlay Life recommends apps that car owners should install.
• Nathaniel Pangaro of AppleInsider reviews the Meross Smart Plug Mini, a simple HomeKit-compatible smart plug.
• Amazon is selling the second-generation Apple Pencil for only $89.99, a substantial $40 discount.
• Aidan Pollard of Insider tells the story of a couple whose luggage was lost by Air Canada after their honeymoon. Thanks to an AirTag, the couple was able to track the bag for months, and they finally recovered it after learning that their ID tag had become disconnected from the luggage and then the airline donated the luggage to a charity.  AirCanada says that the owners should have put identifying information inside of the luggage to account for the possibility of the tag outside of the luggage becoming detached, but I suspect that most people don’t do that.
• I don’t play a lot of video games, but I have fond memories of loving the game Myst when it came out on the Mac in 1993; the graphics were incredible (considering the technology of the day) and the puzzles were fun to solve.  Juli Clover of MacRumors reports that a newly remastered version of Myst is now available for the iPad and iPhone called Myst Mobile.  It is free to play, although you eventually need to pay $9.99 to unlock the entire game.  For devices with an M1 or M2 chip, the games defaults to “Epic” settings to allow the graphics to look as good as possible.
• And finally, Apple released this video three weeks ago to advertise the new HomePod, but I hadn’t seen it until last night, and it does a good job of promoting the key features.

A few days ago, Apple released the results for its 2023 fiscal first quarter (which ran from September 25, 2022, to December 31, 2022, and did not actually include any days from calendar year 2023) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results. This is typically Apple’s best quarter of the year because it includes holiday sales.  One year ago, it was the best quarter in the history of the company, with an all-time revenue record of $123.9 billion.  This  year, it was the second best quarter in the history of the company, with revenue of $117.2 billion. 

Most of us would be happy to report over $100 billion in revenue in a quarter, and most of us would be happy to report a second best quarter ever.  But for most of the time since the iPhone came around, Apple’s fiscal first quarters have been better every year.  Why not this year?  Apple identified three reasons.  First, Apple pointed to “foreign exchange headwinds.”  In countries like China, Apple sold more this year than last year.  But because of the strength of the U.S. Dollar, when China sales are converted to U.S. currency, the revenue from China was actually down compared to last year.  Second, Apple pointed to COVID shutdowns at the factory (also in China) that made the iPhones.  And third, Apple pointed to the overall macroeconomic conditions: inflation, war in Eastern Europe, the pandemic, and other issues that cause people around the world to spend less money now than they used to.  As you can see, Apple’s overall message was that Apple itself is doing a great job making wonderful products that people want to buy, but external factors softened the overall revenue.  I think Apple makes some good points, but others will see doom-and-gloom because it wasn’t the best quarter ever.

As always, I’m not all that interested in the financial details.  What interests me is that this is one of four times a year when Apple answers questions from a bunch of analysts, so I’m always curious to see what Apple has to say about the iPhone and iPad and related technologies.  If you want to get all of the nitty-gritty details, you can listen to the audio from the announcement conference call on the Apple website, or you can read a transcript of the call prepared by Jason Snell of Six Colors.  Snell also created a number of useful charts that put Apple’s financial announcements in perspective over time.  Apple’s official press release is here.  Here are the items that stood out to me.

iPhone

• iPhone revenue was $65.8 billion.  That is down from $71.6 billion a year ago, but it is still the second-best iPhone quarter ever, up just slightly from $65.6 billion two years ago.
• Apple CFO Luca Maestri said that the installed base of active iPhones is at an all-time high across all geographic segments.
• Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the shutdown of factors in China due to COVID significantly impacted the supply of iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, and this lasted through most of December.  We all saw how difficult it was to get a high-end iPhone if you wanted one in your hands by Christmas or Hanukah.  Fortunately, Apple has gotten past that.  Right now, you can order an iPhone 14 Pro and—in many big cities—have it in your hands only two hours later.
• Cook mentioned the Emergency SOS via Satellite feature that is available with all iPhone 14 models, noting that “it is incredibly heartening to get emails from people describing the life-saving impact our new safety features have had on them.”
• Cook said that many people “are willing to really stretch to get the best” smartphone they can afford because it is so “integral into people’s lives.”  “It contains their contacts and their health information and their banking information and their smart home and so many different parts of their lives, it’s the payment vehicle for many people.”  I interpreted that statement as an explanation of why the Pro models of the iPhone are so popular, but Mark Gurman of Bloomberg speculates that Cook could be signaling that Apple has plans for an even higher priced iPhone model in the future—an iPhone Ultra?—to sell an even more expensive iPhone to those willing to pay more.

iPad

• For much of Apple, last quarter was about getting the silver medal, but for the iPad, this was the gold medal quarter, the best iPad quarter of all time.  iPad revenue grew 30% to $9.4 billion.
• Maestri provided two reasons for the great iPad quarter.  First, this time last year, Apple experienced significant supply constraints, while this year they had enough supply to meet demand.  Second, there was a lot of interest in the new iPad and iPad Pro models introduced last quarter.
• Apple no longer reveals the specific number of iPads sold or in use, but Maestri did say that the iPad installed base reached a new all-time high.

Other

• If you are old enough to remember the iPod, you may also remember people talking bout the “iPod halo effect,” the idea that once a customer bought an iPod and loved it, they would have more interest in buying other Apple products like a Mac computer.  More recently, Apple has been talking about the number of active devices.  If you own an iPhone and then replace it with another iPhone, that doesn’t add to the total number of active devices (unless you give your old iPhone to someone else).  But as people who already own one or more Apple products buy even more Apple products, and as other people buy their first Apple product, Apple’s potential future growth increases.  Folks with even more Apple products are even more a part of the Apple ecosystem and more likely to purchase services from Apple such as Apple TV+ or Fitness+.  And of course, customers buying their first Apple product have the potential to spend even more money on Apple products and services in the future.  Cook was proud to mention the number of active devices when he spoke to analysts a few days ago because he announced a new milestone: two billion active devices.  It was only seven years ago that Apple announced that it had one billion active devices.  Apple was founded on April 1, 1976, so it took Apple almost 40 years to sell the first billion devices, but only 7 years to sell the second billion devices.  You can do the math and see that this paints a picture of a bright future for Apple.
• Apple saw $20.8 billion in revenue from services in this past quarter, the highest ever.  This included records in many services categories including cloud services, payment services, and music.
• After Steve Jobs died in 2011 and Tim Cook took over the company, one of the changes instituted by Cook was a Giving program.  Cook announced that during those 11 years, more than $880 million was donated to humanitarian efforts, disaster relief, childhood education, and more.
• When asked about Artificial Intelligence, Cook said that it is a “major focus” of Apple because of the ways that “it can enrich customers’ lives.”  He said that “you can look no further than some of the things that we announced in the Fall with crash detection and fall detection or back a ways with ECG.  I mean, these things have literally saved people’s lives.  And so we see an enormous potential in this space to affect virtually everything we do.  It’s obviously a horizontal technology, not a vertical, and so it will affect every product and every service that we have.”

The new HomePod from Apple is now available, so Brett Burney and I begin this episode by digging deep into the reviews on this new/old product.  We also talk about the pros and cons of security camera, note taking apps, AirTags on planes and poodles, the latest rescue thanks to the iPhone 14’s satellite SOS feature, and the Motif app. 

In our In the Know segment, Brett discusses why you might want to install additional (and free!) fonts on your iPad and an easy way to do so.  I discuss some of the settings in the Home app that you might not know about, including the ability to let your family members see only the live stream from a HomeKit security camera or also recordings.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just use your podcast player of choice.  You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

The new HomePod is now available in stores, and early pre-orders should start arriving today.  Brian Heater of TechCrunch interviews Matthew Costello, Apple’s vice president, Hardware Engineering and Operations, to discuss the new HomePod.  Costello says that the new HomePod provides “immersive, room-filling sound users love.”  The initial reviews that came out this week back up that assertion.  Chris Welch and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy wrote an extensive review the new HomePod and conclude that while the sound is similar to the first generation, the new model is better all around.  It sounds great on its own, and amazing in a stereo pair.  Britta O’Boyle of Pocket-lint also wrote an in-depth review of the new HomePod, as did Billy Steel of Engadget.  Reviewers also noted that if you pair two HomePods with an Apple TV 4K, you get a great home theater setup.  Connect the Apple TV 4K to the eARC port on your TV and any other source plugged into the TV can have sound come through the HomePods, including game counsels, cable TV, etc.  I hope that the re-introduction of the HomePod is the beginning of Apple paying even more attention to devices that are designed for the home.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• I mentioned earlier this week that the note-taking app GoodNotes added the ability to take audio recordings as you take notes.  A competitor to GoodNotes, Notability, also got a big update this week, as noted on that company’s blog.  The new tool is called Pencil.  Many similar apps have a pencil tool that makes it look like you drew with a graphite pencil.  But Notability’s new tool is vector-based, so you can resize or change colors without any loss in quality.  It is also pressure sensitive, and you can shade if you tilt your pencil.
• If you want to draw with a stylus that looks like a Mont Blanc pen, Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac reviews the new Star stylus from Adonit.
• I’ve had very good experiences with Eufy security cameras, which I first reviewed in 2021.  As I explained on the In the News podcast last week, my cameras helped the police to catch the criminal who recently burglarized my house—and since that experience, I’ve ordered two more cameras.  One of the selling points of the Eufy cameras is that the video was stored locally and encrypted, reducing the risk of an unauthorized user watching your camera stream on a website.  But The Verge reported on a bug in this system, and after a lot of deflection from Anker (the parent of Eufy), Sean Hollister of The Verge reports that Anker has finally admitted that there was a flaw in its software that it is now fixing, plus the company is making other changes to try to stop something like this from happening again.  Bravo to The Verge for pursuing this story, and I’m glad that Anker/Eufy are now doing the right thing.
• Felipe Espósito of 9to5Mac reports on a traveler who lost his wallet on an airplane. Because had an AirTag in his wallet, he was able to track his wallet as it traveled to 35 different cities, even though the airline said that it couldn’t find the wallet on the plane.
• iOS 16.3 came out last week.  iOS 17 will likely be previewed at Apple’s developer conference this Summer, but what is left to be added to iOS 16?  Chance Miller of 9to5Mac came up with a list of features that Apple has already announced and that we should be seeing soon.
• Miller also reports that the iPhone 14’s emergency satellite feature helped two women get rescued after driving into a wall of snow in McBride, Canada.  Part of the search-and-rescue team called this feature a “game changer” because instead of searching for people in a wide search area, rescuers can get to them more quickly.
• I reviewed the Motif app in 2019, an app that makes it easy to create photo books on your iPad.  I’ve been creating these books at the end of the year since my kids were little, and even though they are now teenagers and no longer inherently cute, there are always lots of great pictures to put in the year-in-review book every year.  Adam Engst of TidBITS reports that Motif was purchased by its competitor Mimeo.  For now, you can continue to use the Motif app as always, with Mimeo creating the books.
• Amazon is currently selling all models of the Apple Watch Series 8 for $50 off, such as the 45mm model with a Midnight Aluminum Case and Midnight Sport Band for $479 instead of $529.
• As you can tell from my review of the Flighty app, I’m a fan.  Gunnar Olson of Thrifty Traveler feels the same way, calling it his “single favorite travel tool” and “the most valuable resource to have in your pocket on the day you fly.”
• Dalvin Brown of the Wall Street Journal warns that if you put an AirTag on a dog collar, there is a danger that the dog could eat the AirTag, which is dangerous.
• Apple requires apps to give you the option of not being tracked, but there are lots of other ways that companies can track you.  Consumer Reports released a new, free app called PermissionSlip.  The app can tell the type of information that companies can gather about you, and you can use the app to have Consumer Reports act on your behalf and tell companies to stop selling your personal information.
• And finally, one of my favorite Apple TV+ advertisements ran about a year ago: a video called Everyone but Jon Hamm.  It’s worth watching if you haven’t seen it before.  Apple now has an updated version of the same concept.  This one is titled Call Me with Timothée Chalamet, which is below.  There is also a follow-up called A Taste with Timothée Chalamet .

If you have an iPad and an Apple Pencil, GoodNotes is a fantastic app for taking digital notes.  I use it extensively in my law practice.  I also use it frequently when my kids ask for help with homework or studying for a test; one of us can work out a problem on the iPad while sharing the screen to an Apple TV, and the other person can follow along on the big screen.  One feature that has long existed in other note taking apps (such as Notability) but not in GoodNotes was the ability to record as you take notes.  That feature was added recently, and it works well.

To begin a recording, just tap the microphone icon at the top left of the screen and start taking notes.  Press stop when you are done recording.

When a notebook has audio notes, a waveform icon appears next to the microphone icon. 

If you want to listen to the recorded audio as you review your notes, you can tap that waveform icon to play the recording.  On the screen, you will see a dimmed version of the notes you took, and each part will change from a dimmed version into the normal version as the audio progresses to show you the notes you were taking while that audio was recorded.

Alternatively, if you are having trouble reading or understanding your notes, you can long-press on a word to play back the audio that was recorded at the time that you wrote the note. 

Click here for more information on this new feature from the app developer.

As an attorney, I rarely find myself in a situation in which I would want an audio recording associated with my notes.  My thought has been that the existence of a recording it likely causes more trouble than it solves.  For example, I wouldn’t want a portion of a recording of a witness to be used out of context by my opponent.  And I certainly wouldn’t want audio recordings of attorney-client privileged meetings or work product.

On the other hand, I can easily imagine situations in which this would be useful—such as if I was in a classroom environment where it was acceptable to create an audio recording.  I may not use this feature often, but I like that it exists.  And for others, such as students, who consider this to be an essential feature, now GoodNotes supports it too.

Click here to get GoodNotes 5 (free, $8.99 to unlock all features)

We begin this week’s episode of the In the News podcast by discussing why I’m very happy to have security cameras installed at my house.  We then talk about additional security that you can obtain with iOS 16.3 thanks to the support of Security Keys.  We also discuss checking the temperature in a room using a HomePod, the new Ivory and timing.is apps, the updated Things app, iPhone privacy, and more. 

In our In the Know segment, Brett discusses creating signatures with images on the iPhone or iPad, and I explain how to designate a single HomePod in a stereo pair as the one that should speak to you when you talk to Siri.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just use your podcast player of choice.  You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

This time last week, I noted how upset I was that Twitter had banned third-party apps such as the excellent Tweetbot app, one of my favorite apps for many years.  Fortunately, the folks behind Tweetbot released a new app this week called Ivory.  Ivory looks very similar to Tweetbot but works with the Twitter alternative Mastodon—which has become the new home for many folks who left Twitter over the last few months.  I’ve been using Ivory for the last few days, and it is a fantastic app already, plus the developer has plans to make it better than Tweetbot ever was.  Here is a good review of the Ivory app by Federico Viticci of MacStories.  If you have used Twitter in the past, I encourage you to check out Mastodon and the Ivory app in particular.  For a great explainer of what Mastodon is all about, I recommend this article by Amanda Silberling of TechCrunch.  If you want to follow me on Mastodon, you can do so at @jeffrichardson@mastodon.social.  If you want to follow iPhone J.D. on Mastodon to receive a new post on Mastodon whenever there is a new post on iPhone J.D., you can do so at @iPhoneJD@mstdn.social.  And now, the other news of note from the past week:

• iOS 16.3 came out this week.  Juli Clover of MacRumors discusses some of what is new.  For example, Advanced Data Protection, which I discussed in this post, is now available to all users around the world.
• iOS 16.3 also adds support for Security Key—a small physical device that you carry around to confirm your identity instead of using digital two-factor authentication.  Andrew Orr of AppleInsider identifies some of the best Security Key products.
• If you have a HomePod mini, or the new version of the HomePod, you can now find out the temperature of the area around that device as a result of a software update Apple made available this week.  Tim Hardwick of MacRumors explains how to install the update and to see the temperature readings in the Home app on an iPhone or iPad.
• Why did Apple stop making the HomePod only to come back almost two years later to re-introduce the product?  That’s rare for a company like Apple.  I always assumed that the original HomePod was discontinued because not enough people bought them, but the flaw with that theory is that I always heard people talk about how much they enjoyed the big HomePod, quickly buying old units on eBay when they become unavailable from Apple.  John Gruber of Daring Fireball has a different theory: the original model had some sort of design flaw that made them unreliable.  Thus, Apple went back to the drawing board, took what it knew about the HomePod mini (which apparently avoided that flaw), and eventually Apple came out with the HomePod 2.0.  Nobody but Apple knows for sure, but Gruber’s theory does explain a lot, so I think he is on to something.
• David Neld of The Ambient lists 30 things that you can do with a HomePod or HomePod mini.
• Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac provides additional details on using these temperature sensors, including an explanation of how you can create an automation to make something else happen whenever the temperature reaches a certain point.
• Chance Miller of 9to5Mac notes that iOS 16.3 fixes a bug in CarPlay that made it difficult to locate someone using the Find My service.
• I use the Things app to keep track of certain items that I need to do, and the app works well for me.  But unlike some of the software that I use, when it comes to Things, I’m the opposite of a power user.  I just keep a single list of items and I check things off as I go.  If you are—or you want to be—a more sophisticated user of the Things app, attorney John Voorhees of Macstories explains how you can take advantage of the latest feature added to Things: expanded support for Shortcuts.  His post includes some examples that you can download and try for yourself.
• If you are looking for something else new in the world of to-do apps, timing.is is a new iPhone app that combines your calendar and your to-do items with an interesting interface that is supposed to help you focus on or plan activities.  I prefer a more traditional approach to calendars, but I suspect that this app will appeal to lots of people.
• Justin Meyers of Gadget Hacks reminds us that, in a pinch, you can use an iPad to recharge an iPhone and certain other devices.
• And finally, tomorrow is Data Privacy Day, so hopefully you have something special planned to celebrate the occasion.  One way to do so is to watch an amusing video released by Apple this week called A Day in the Life of an Average Person’s Data, in which Nick Mohammed (the actor who plays “Nate the Great” on Ted Lasso) teams up with an Apple Store Specialist to show you how to enable features on your Apple devices to keep your data private.

In yesterday’s post, I explained the advantages (and disadvantages) of using an iPhone as a webcam, and I also explained how you can use the Belkin iPhone Mount with MagSafe to mount your iPhone so that it has a secure spot atop a monitor.  In today’s follow-up post, I am reviewing Camo, software that lets your iPhone act as a webcam on a Mac or a PC.  I’ll also compare Camo to a free alternative on the Mac: the Continuity Camera feature.

Starting Camo

Camo consists of two sets of software that work together.  On your iPhone, you simply launch the Camo app and then put your iPhone on the Belkin mount or in another location so that the camera on the back of the iPhone is looking at whatever you want on your webcam. 

Note that when you are using Camo, you won’t actually see the screen on your iPhone because you will almost certainly be looking at the superior battery on the back of the iPhone.  (I say “almost certainly” because Camo gives you the option of selecting which camera to use, so you could opt to use the front-facing camera if that made sense for some specific use, but I suspect that use would be rare.)

On your Mac or PC, launch the Camo Studio software.  The very first time that you use Camo with a computer, you need to follow the on-screen instructions to pair your iPhone with the computer.  It is very simple, and basically involves scanning a QR code.  After that, if your iPhone is connected to a Mac with a cable, the Camo Studio software will automatically see the iPhone.  If your iPhone is connected to a PC with a cable, and if you are running iTunes on the PC, then the Camo Studio software should work the same way, although I didn’t test that configuration.

In the alternative, you can skip the cable and just have your iPhone and your Mac or PC communicate via the same Wi-Fi network.  For this configuration, start the Camo app on the iPhone.  Then start the Camo Studio software on  your Mac or PC and click the button in the middle of the screen that says Connect a device.  Camo Studio will find your previously-paired iPhone in just a second or two.

The developer of Camo says that a cable connection can be better, but I’ve been using Wi-Fi for most of my video conferences for several weeks, and it has worked great.  The only downside I’ve experienced is that, very rarely, the video will pause for a second or two.  But I only notice that once out of dozens of uses, and it fixed itself quickly.  Having said that, I suppose if you don’t have a good Wi-Fi connection, you may see worse results, so using the cable might be a superior option.

[UPDATE 2/9/2023: Shortly after I published this post, I started to have very occasional problems with the Wi-Fi connection, very short hiccups in the video, and at the time I didn’t have Camo configured to run via a cable.  For example, in Episode 85 of the In the News podcast, right around 3:20, the video started to get out of sync with my audio for just a little bit.  Brett and I paused the podcast, and I switched to a different webcam.  I have since switched to using a USB-to-Lightning cable with Camo, and this problem has gone away.  Note also that when I first tried using the cable, I couldn’t get it to work.  The problem was that the Windows drivers for the connection to my iPhone were not updating because of security configurations at my law firm.  After temporarily disabling that configuration, I was able to update Apple’s driver software, and then I could use Camo with a cord.]

Using Camo Studio

Once the Camo Studio software is running and communicating with your iPhone, the software will take the video that it is capturing from your iPhone’s camera and announce itself to other programs (such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams) as another camera called Camo Camera. In the following screenshot, Camo Studio is running on my PC, but the interface is virtually identical on the Mac.  There are lots of settings that you can change if you want to (more on that below), but you don’t have to do so.

Now that Camo Studio is running on your computer, start your video conference software of choice—I’ve tested Camo Studio using both Zoom and Microsoft Teams—and select Camo Camera as your camera.  For example, in Microsoft Teams on my iMac, I see the following list.  Besides Camo Camera, my other choices include FaceTime HD Camera (Built-in), which is the camera that is part of my iMac, and Jeff iPhone 14 Pro Camera, which is the Continuity Camera feature that I will discuss below.

If Camo Camera was the camera that you used when you last used your video conferencing software, it should default to Camo Camera again the next time that you use the software.

Here is a screenshot from a video conference that I was attending in my office.  In this first picture, I was using a Logitech HD Pro C922 webcam.  I have pale skin in real life, but as you can see from my thumbnail photo in the top right, my skin seems to be even more pale with the Logitech camera.

Next, I clicked the three dots that say “More” in Microsoft Teams and I switched my camera to Camo Camera.  Thanks to the iPhone, my skin tone looked more natural, and the iPhone automatically slightly blurred items in my background, which also made the picture look better.

For more comparison photos, check out my review from yesterday of the Belkin iPhone Mount with MagSafe.

Why use Camo?

If you want to use your iPhone as a webcam on a PC, you need to use software like Camo.  I say “software like Camo” because I know that there are alternatives on the PC, but I have yet to come across one that gets great reviews.  Camo, on the other hand, gets very favorable reviews, and it has worked incredibly well for me.

If you want to use your iPhone as a webcam on a Mac, you don’t need Camo.  You can instead use Continuity Camera.  Continuity Camera is better than Camo in some ways: it is free, and it starts automatically without having to first open a special program like Camo Studio.  But after using both for a few weeks, I prefer using Camo on a Mac. 

First, I prefer to initially launch the Camo Studio software because that way I can see how I look on camera before I even start Zoom or Teams.

Second, there are lots of settings that you can adjust in Camo to adjust how you look.  For me, there is only one of them I typically change, but it is a nice one.  In the bottom left of Camo Studio, you can Zoom the camera.  I prefer having my face take up a little more space on the screen so that it is easier for other people to see me, so I keep it at 125%.  An advantage of zooming is that you can drag the rectangle at the bottom left of Camo Studio to determine which cropped area of the screen to use.  This makes it super easy to center your face within the image.

If you have a built-in camera on your display, or if you have an external webcam sitting on your monitor that never moves, you probably already know exactly where you need to sit to remain in the center of the screen.  But when I put my iPhone in the Belkin mount to place it on top of my display, it always seems to be in a slightly different position than the last time.  But by taking about two seconds in Camo Studio to adjust the position of the crop area, I can quickly get my face in the best spot without having to fiddle with either the iPhone or Belkin mount.  This is quick and easy, and a big advantage over Continuity Camera.

Other options available in Camo Studio, but not Continuity Camera, include the ability to apply templates to the image.  If you want your name and company logo below your face, or if you want to display your phone number or some other information, you can quickly create an overlay.  This feature is currently only available on the Mac, with PC support planned for Summer 2023.  On the PC, you can currently only display a watermark.

You can also turn on or off the light used by a flash for the iPhone and you can adjust the percentage of the flash level.  It’s much better to use natural light, of course, but it is nice to have the option to use the flashlight in a pinch if necessary.

I mentioned above that the iPhone automatically adds a nice, slight background blur.  If you want even more background blur, Camo Studio has a portrait mode feature that can make the background blur more pronounced.

You can make lots of adjustments to the picture quality: exposure, white balance, hue, saturation, etc. In my tests in lots of different lighting conditions, the iPhone did a great job adjusting this manually, so I saw no need to change anything.

Finally, Camo has lots of features that, to me, are just silly, but perhaps they would appeal to others.  For example, you can change your face to an Emoji face.  Or to a Jaguar.  Or you can put a moving virtual cat on your head.  My video conference use is just about 100% for professional purposes, and I don’t need to be the next lawyer cat, but if you want to be more creative, you can do that with Camo Studio.

So in short, if you use a Mac, the advantage of Camo over Continuity Camera is that you have a lot more options.  Even though I only find a few of those options useful, I miss them quite a bit when I use Continuity Camera.

Pricing

You can use Camo for free and take advantage of most of its features.  To take advantage of all features, you need to pay either $5/month, $40/year, or $80 for a lifetime license.  Some of the key advantages of the paid version are:

• Use on more than one computer.
• Use 1080p instead of just 720p
• Use the Zoom, pan, and crop feature that I find very useful

You can see all of the differences described on this page.

Conclusion

Apple’s Continuity Camera feature is great, in part because it is so simple.  Plus, it is free.  But if you use a PC or if you want more precise control, you should check out the free version of the Camo app to see if you prefer it.  It didn’t take me long to figure out that I really like the Camo software, so I paid $40 to use the Pro features for a year.  If I don’t see a better option this time next year, I will either pay for another year or just buy the lifetime version.

Click here to get the Camo app on the iPhone (free).