At the August meeting, held on the 11th, DaveK showed us how he uses the surprisingly powerful Apple Notes app to make more time for himself.
Notes
Dave showed us how he uses the checklists feature of Notes to make daily “to do” lists which can be reset and re-used each week. Using Notes in iCloud these checklists are synced between his devices. He prefers Notes for this task as additional supporting information such as comments and links can be added to the notes.
A useful tip he gave was to use emoji in note titles to make them instantly recognisable (such as a clapper board on a note about films) and to prefix note titles with punctuation (such as an exclamation mark) to make them come to the top of the alphabetical list.
He showed us a number of Notes features including:
- Organising notes into folders.
- Adding URLs to Notes documents using the share option in Safari, this adds a preview of the web page to the Note rather than the text of the URL.
And features coming to Notes in iOS 11/Mac OS High Sierra:
- Pinned notes which allows you to keep important notes at hand.
- The document “scanner” feature in iOS 11 which uses the camera and automatically straightens the document.
Tips
Apple has warned that some older applications that haven’t been updated will be incompatible with iOS 11. Ben mentioned that there’s an easy way to check if you have any apps on your iOS device that will be affected. To do that, go to Settings and then Choose General -> About -> Applications. IBTimes had an article explaining this in more detail.
iMac
During our Q&A session a member asked for advice on specifying a replacement for his 2009 iMac. We went through the available options discussing the specifications required for his usage, what to buy up-front and what could be upgraded later if required.
News
In our news discussion we talked about:
- Apple discontinues the iPod nano and shuffle leaving only the iPod touch in production.
- Adobe will end support of the Flash browser plug-in in 2020.
- Apple’s annual “Back to School” offer is available.
- Carpool Karaoke: The Series begins on Apple Music with Will Smith as the first guest, here’s a clip:
We also looked at videos highlighting developer’s early augmented reality experiments using ARKit: