iOS Today 812 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 calculating. Well, calculators that do the calculating. Stay tuned for this episode of iOS Today. Podcasts you love.
Rosemary Orchard [00:00:15]:
From people you trust.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:19]:
This is TWiT. This is iOS Today, episode 812, with Rosemary Orchard and me, Micah Sargent, recorded Tuesday, July 14th, 2023. for Thursday, July 23rd, 2026. Calculators on your phone. Hello and welcome to iOS Today. This is the show where we talk all things iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and all the other OSes, the various platforms. I say my allergies are really getting to me and then I try to do high notes. This is the show where we help you make the most of your devices by teaching you about features and settings and apps that you can use use to make it even better.
Mikah Sargent [00:01:06]:
I am one of your hosts. My name is Micah Sargent.
Rosemary Orchard [00:01:11]:
And to add to that, I am Rosemary Orchard. So Micah plus Rosemary equals iOS Today.
Mikah Sargent [00:01:17]:
Oh my goodness. Oh, I love it. And we will multiply the value of this show today. Okay, so we wanted to take some time to talk about the various calculators that are available to you because of course there is the built-in calculator. I think it was back when, of course, Apple shipped the original iPhone, uh, there was a calculator that came on the phone. The iPad, however, went 17 years, I believe it was. That, that it's hard to believe that, that there have even been 17 years. But in, uh, well, yeah, is that, is that correct? Yeah, 17, 10, 2, or maybe it's— Does that add up?
Rosemary Orchard [00:02:01]:
I get lost, honestly, with all the numbers.
Mikah Sargent [00:02:04]:
You know what, the calculator. It was a long time. It was 2024. So let's see. I can actually do some math on my calculator. 2024 minus 2007 equals 17. That's right, 17 years ago, or rather 17 years, the iPad did not have a calculator and finally got one in iPadOS 18. IOS 20, because the calculator has, you know, gone through various changes over time.
Mikah Sargent [00:02:32]:
And with iOS 26, one of the complaints that people had about the iOS calculator of before was that it didn't have the— they got rid of the little AC button, that CAC button. iOS 18 replaced it with a backspace key. And even The Atlantic wrote an article about how it was annoying that it didn't have the CAC button. Well, don't you Don't worry, iOS 26, of course, added it back. Added it back. What I love is that right to the left of it is a little delete key. So C will clear your current string of numbers, AC clears everything, and then that delete key, of course, will kind of delete character by character. Also in iOS 26, the mode switcher changed.
Mikah Sargent [00:03:21]:
So it used to be a little icon in the bottom left corner. It has now been moved to the top right of the screen where you can change the mode by tapping on it between basic, scientific, math notes, and convert. Along with that, let's kind of talk about some of the basic features. The first thing to understand is that actually before iOS 18, if you were in portrait mode, it would cap the digits at 9. Now I can keep typing and those digits keep on keeping on. So, you know, let's see, 7856214369 times 2. 5,823,7412 equals— boom! A huge, huge number. So you can see here that we've got the— actually, let me, let me go back to typing out a number that just kind of goes off the screen.
Mikah Sargent [00:04:21]:
If you move your finger along there, then you can scroll to see the full number. And look, that delete key works as we expect. It's deleting character by character by character. If you Type in a number and you multiply. Tapping and holding on that number lets you copy it. And so then you can also, you know, let's see, minus 25 equals. And if you tap and hold on any of the values, you're able to actually copy those as well. Past calculators are able to be— past calculations rather— are able to be seen in the Recents area.
Mikah Sargent [00:05:00]:
So you can tap on that little calculator and see, or rather the history in the top left corner, and see the different calculations that have been run. So I did, uh, in May I did 0.88 times 8.5 to get 7.48, for example. Don't remember what that was about, but it's there. And you can always go back and copy those results if you need them again. So that's kind of the, uh, the basic calculator and of course being able to access history. But as As I mentioned, this is not just a simple calculator. It also does have scientific mode. With scientific mode, if we switch in the top right corner— remember, that's where the mode switcher is— we can go to scientific mode.
Mikah Sargent [00:05:45]:
Holy moly, this suddenly becomes a lot more complicated. Algebraic, exponential, logarithmic, trigonometric functions, all there. Oh, I'm not gonna go into all the things that you can do with this because it's been a long time since I took math classes, so I don't quite remember the things I could do. But I think one of the best parts about this, and I think practical daily use math, is the conversion area. So if we tap on convert, oops, and change it to basic again, you can see that we have values here. inches at the top, meters at the bottom. But I could change this to— let's see, we've got energies like calories or the BTU, British thermal unit. We've got angles, we've got area.
Mikah Sargent [00:06:38]:
Let's see, do we have— I was hoping— oh, look, gigabytes, petabytes, terabytes. I was hoping we would have— there we go, temperature, so that we can change between Celsius and Fahrenheit when Rosemary is talking about the temperature there and back. Now with this, you can use conversions in both basic and scientific modes, and there are about 105 currencies you can convert between, about 110 measurements that you can convert between— angle and area and pressure and temperature and time and volume. And what's great is that it doesn't need you to type in values.
Rosemary Orchard [00:07:21]:
Mm-hmm.
Mikah Sargent [00:07:22]:
Basically, if you type in a value and you switch between different things, it will just keep those values and do those conversions automatically. So anything that you've already entered will convert automatically, and you can also use operators. So I could do 8,963 degrees Celsius minus 2,300 degrees Celsius and hit equal. I see the value up top, but it also is doing the conversion at the bottom to show me what that temperature is in Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit, and then tapping on either of these will let you change the value. 12,000—that's interesting—that the Kelvin and does that make sense? Is that a bug? Are Kelvin and Fahrenheit that closely related? I didn't think that was the case. Anyway, somebody that knows more about Kelvin have to let me know. It's really nice though when we're doing like currency conversion because it does keep things updated.
Mikah Sargent [00:08:17]:
So if I want to see right now, let's. Let's do a value for, oh, I don't know, let's go with— and it uses Yahoo Finance for this. Let's go with yen as the currency to the euro. Sure. So if I have— I wanted to switch it so that it's euro up top, but I guess— oh, there we go. €2,000, that's equal to about ¥371,000, for example.
Rosemary Orchard [00:08:50]:
Okay.
Mikah Sargent [00:08:50]:
Now, along with the conversion ability, you may have noticed that if we hit that mode option in the top right corner, we also have a category called Math Notes. And Math Notes is a different kind of, different kind of set of features. It's a little bit like a calculator meets a notes app because you can type an equation and have that solved in place. So let me create a new math note here and we'll do 2x 3 12. Okay, that should have— in theory, that's supposed to give me— well, I guess I haven't given a value for x, have I? But no, but the value for x should be— figured out. Is it because it's the— it might be because I made that the heading of the note. Let's see, 2x 3 12. Why is that not working? All right, you know what, it's supposed to.
Mikah Sargent [00:10:06]:
Let me just— I'll give a value for x, okay? And let's see if it does it then. Instead of 2x +, let's just do x 3. Movies equals 7. Okay, you know what? The point is, this is supposed to work. You should note that I am running beta software, and so it's very likely that that is playing against it. But when you hit— when you type in the equal sign, it is supposed to solve it in place.
Rosemary Orchard [00:10:35]:
Right.
Mikah Sargent [00:10:36]:
And so you could do dinner equals 57, movies equals 24, and then you could do dinner plus movies, and it will total them. So if you were doing bills, for example, you could do bill splitting this way. If you wanted to do y equals x squared, you can create a graph and actually have it charted right there in the notes. And what's great is that Math Notes lives in both apps. So it's actually in the Notes app, but it's also in the calculator as you're seeing here. So both places, all there. So you can start one from calculator's mode switcher or use it in any note in the Notes app. And again, it works from, from both sides.
Mikah Sargent [00:11:14]:
On your iPad, you're actually able to handwrite equations with your Apple Pencil. and it will solve them. And what's kind of neat is it tries to mimic your handwriting. And so it will actually show you the results in its estimation of your handwriting. So those are some of the ways that you can use the Math Notes feature for this. Now, there aren't many, I will say there aren't many settings for the calculator. If you head into the Settings app and look at the options, it's pretty much just language preferences and Siri and search.
Rosemary Orchard [00:11:48]:
Yeah.
Mikah Sargent [00:11:51]:
Features on your iPad. You can do, of course, split view. You can do Stage Manager to have math kind of pulled up alongside, for example, your— near the Numbers app or something like that. And of course, you can touch— you can tap to copy, but you can also touch and hold it to bring over your results as well. So that is a look at the built-in calculator app that over the course of time has become more powerful, but has also become what people expect a calculator to be in terms of having some of those, you know, original ideas of what we know a calculator to be, the C and the AC, for example, those being brought back. But now being able to do those conversions right there, know that these things are updated in real time, having all of that packed in, a lot of people think the calculator is just there to, Run basic calculations. No, it is. It is an incredibly powerful app, and I will say for myself, I'm rather guilty of just.
Mikah Sargent [00:12:58]:
I mean, it's not a bad thing, but I do often just swipe down from the home screen and use the calculating functions in Spotlight because typically I'm running super simple calculations. You know, 87 minus 43 or something, and so I or you know 46 divided by five, and I don't need to open up the calculator. App for that. So bear in mind that you can use Spotlight to run calculations, but if you want to keep track of those calculations— because when I looked in the history there, a lot of the calculations that I do regularly, those aren't showing up in the history. So if you want to keep track of those calculations, if you want to work between your Notes app and the Calculator app, then you do need to, uh, use the actual app itself. So that is a look at the wonderful Calculator app from Apple, which of course is installed by default and is available in the App Store if you've somehow deleted it from your phone or iPad. All right, moving right along, Rosemary, would you care to tell us about the better calculator?
Rosemary Orchard [00:14:12]:
All right, so I'm gonna tell you folks about Peacock. Now, I am gonna mention as an honorable mention before I dive into Peacock, there is also also PCalc Lite, because James Thompson, the fabulous developer of PCalc and one of the 2 people behind TLS Systems, actually does offer a completely free version of this that you can download and play around with. But of course it doesn't have as many awesome settings, but trust me, it will still do 6 times 7 equals 42, because I am in the beta program and every single time James releases a new version, I just run in there and make sure that the state of the universe is still the constant that we need it to be. So This is the basic PCalc layout, and one of the things that I love about PCalc is the number of settings. So I'm going to come back to the calculators one, which is right at the top, in a moment, because I think that you should understand the number of settings that you can have to understand why you might want different calculators. So you can change the number of decimal places that you want, and you can also change it to scientific, engineering, accounting, or fractions as well. You can turn on reverse Polish notation, which is where the operators follow the operands. Yes, I've got the Wikipedia page for that in front of me just in case I mess that up.
Rosemary Orchard [00:15:29]:
You can have multiple memories, you can have thousand separators, you can show ticker tape, which is amazing. So now I've done 6 times 7 and then I do 42 divided by 6 and I can see the history of what I've done there, which is pretty awesome. I can change the theme. There are many, many colors. I can change the digits. I can actually change the display as well so I can see, say, see how set how many lines I would like to see. I can have labels on the lines, I can show more info. There's lots and lots of options here.
Rosemary Orchard [00:16:03]:
If I go into every single option in the display, we'll be here until, well, about 6 months' time. Now then, we get to layouts. So at the moment, I have the classic Peekout layout. There is a default layout, which, don't get me wrong, I do love, and there There's an engineering layout. So if you're doing engineering, that might be more useful to you. There's the KeyCalt Lite layout if you, you know, came from KeyCalt Lite. There's a programming layout for people who are, you know, more into computer programming, easier for that. There's a retro layout.
Rosemary Orchard [00:16:39]:
There is a tape layout. But then just in case you're like, I don't know, like this basic layout, that seems pretty good, but there's one button I'm missing here.
Mikah Sargent [00:16:48]:
Yeah.
Rosemary Orchard [00:16:48]:
here. There's one button I'm missing. I asked James, and this is actually his favorite feature. You tap and hold on a button, you can start editing, and you can change the layout. And so if you want the 5 button for some reason— don't ask me why— to be half the height, you can do that. Why would you do that? I don't know why you would do that, but you can change the layout of the, the app. So for example, if you keep hitting Backspace, uh, and Clear really, really often by accident, then maybe you want to like move them and stick them off somewhere. And then you can, you know, go ahead and add another button in here and you can specify what you want that to do.
Rosemary Orchard [00:17:32]:
So, you know, yeah, there's lots of options here and honestly I find it pretty great. If you double tap on it, then you can insert, you know, a custom button name and all sorts of things, make it do whatever you want. So if there's a particular formula that you need to reuse again and again, well, I mean, that button may not be the way to do it, but Uh, actually, you know, you can— I'm just gonna reset that layout because otherwise I'm gonna be confused as heck later when I come back into PCalc. That is also what I've done before. I turned on RPN and was very confused for about 3 days until I realized what I'd done. Um, but you can specify different horizontal and vertical layouts. Um, and then also there's a whole bunch of app icons. So there's all these beautiful colors.
Rosemary Orchard [00:18:14]:
There's light wooden, dark ones, minimalist ones, metal ones. And then there's this section called, uh, Spectrum.
Mikah Sargent [00:18:20]:
Oh, yeah.
Rosemary Orchard [00:18:21]:
Um, and I know it's not Pride Month anymore, but it's always Pride Month in our hearts here. Um, and all of these— well, all of these, yes, I believe all these are, uh, for various different Pride flags. Now, they're not called that just in case somebody picks up your phone and goes messing around and dives into the Peacock settings to try and figure out what on earth is this color set. Uh, but also very important, none of this data is stored anywhere. So like, there are no statistics about how many people are using the pool icon or the Caesar icon or the Helms icon and things like that, which, you know, that's very important to James. I do know that. There are of course a bunch of shortcuts for this as well, so you can do all sorts of things in shortcuts. But what you can also do is you can have a new calculator.
Rosemary Orchard [00:19:07]:
So I might have a new calculator and call it Mica, and then what I can do with the Mica one is I can have a whole different theme. I can change the layout, so I can have multiple different calculators. So depending on which hat I'm wearing, maybe if you're studying something that's heavy in mathematics that you university, you might find that in certain classes you need the sin, the cos, and the tan all the time, and there's another class where you need logs all the time. So you can have custom layouts for those classes and switch between them, and one of those calculators can have RPN on and the other one might not. Whatever it is you need, I honestly think that this is just a fabulous, you know, way to do things. It's also really useful to have multiple calculators because you can switch between like, okay, I'm in the middle of doing this calculation, but actually I need to go back and rework this over here. So I'm going to switch to a second calculator. I'm going to rework that bit over there, make sure that my mathematics is correct here, my calculations are correct.
Rosemary Orchard [00:20:04]:
And now I can take the output of that, go back to the first calculator, input it, and keep going. And honestly, yeah, I love PCalc. It's one of those things that when somebody is passionate about something and passionate about making a really good app, it shows. Yeah, I mean, who doesn't love having a green calculator or a purple calculator or, you know, whatever kind of calculator you love and need? I, yeah, I find I'm using PCALC for all sorts of things. It has a bunch of functions that aren't— that I haven't shown you. So I will actually just change my layout one moment and I will go to the default layout. It has conversions, so much like the regular calculator app, it can convert Peacock's been doing this for a really long time, I should say. So for example, if you wanted to convert 5— oh, maybe not force, maybe fuel— and miles per gallon liter into miles per gallon UK, you'd actually find out that it's close.
Rosemary Orchard [00:21:01]:
It was just over 6 miles per gallon in the UK. Yeah, it's got all sorts of really cool features hidden in here. There's, yeah, everything that you could possibly need in a calculator app. And of course, if there's a fancy new feature, James will be working on it. The About screen got so big with all of the exciting things that he was trying and playing with that it's become its own application. So if you wanna just play— have a game, Made By Calculator App, About By PCalc. If you need dice which aren't in PCalc, there's Dice By PCalc. But PCalc is the best calculator app that I constantly use all the time.
Rosemary Orchard [00:21:38]:
So yeah, I highly recommend it. It's $9.99 to download and buy it on the iPhone, so it's not going to break the bank either, but it's going to have a whole bunch of features for you.
Mikah Sargent [00:21:49]:
Absolutely. After PCalc, the other one that I wanted to talk about today is an app called Solver, S-O-U-L-V-E-R. And it's basically Math Notes before Math Notes and so much more powerful than Math Notes. It's a notepad calculator, so you can type plain sentences. It works like my brain works. You can type plain sentences in, you can mix words and numbers, and then you get these kind of live results in a column. You don't have to worry about an equal button, you don't have to worry about hitting enter to get the, the result to show up. And really, it's made for the, the practical math, so budgets and tips and trips and time zones.
Mikah Sargent [00:22:38]:
It's not not a scientific calculator sort of situation. There is a— for the latest version of Solver, Solver 4, there's a one-time non-subscription purchase of $59 on the App Store. It'll give you— because Solver just switched over to a universal app situation with the 4th version, and you get that across Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It ends up being 20% more affordable because they were sold separately per platform. You can also though, if you just need the iPhone version, purchase it for just $15. And it also is on Setapp. I just wanted to mention some of the places that you can get this because it is a little confusing how it's set up at first. But they do give you a huge 60-day no-commitment trial.
Mikah Sargent [00:23:31]:
So let's kind of start with some basics for Solver. I'll switch over here to my phone and you can see the basic sort of view of Solver, especially on a phone. It's— I frankly feel like it's a little bit crowded. On an iPad, it's even better though. So let's do— we're going to do something simple. $19 for breakfast plus $22 for the Uber.
Rosemary Orchard [00:24:05]:
Okay.
Mikah Sargent [00:24:08]:
And you can see that down at the bottom, boom, 41 is the total. It ignores all of the text. It shows that the, the numbers, they show up in blue. The, in my case, the dollar sign shows up in magenta. And you may notice that I didn't follow my own convention of adding the dollar sign before 22, and yet it still was able to do that. So it It's really great because what I like about this is, remember earlier when I showed you my calculator app and I hit that history button and I went back and I looked and I said, I don't remember doing these weird little 8.41 times 0.88 calculations. What are those about? I look at this and I go, oh, that's right. When we had breakfast and we took an Uber to the event, I can see what's going on here.
Mikah Sargent [00:24:59]:
And what's great too, We can change these. So instead of $22, oh, I forgot that we did— we had a good— we put a— we gave a tip. And so it was actually $30 for the Uber total. So then it becomes $49. Nice. Percentages are really nice because think about something like this. If the bill was $120 and I know I wanna give a 30% tip, Mm-hmm. I can just type in 120 plus 30% and get the answer here of 156, as opposed to 120 plus 30, which of course is $150.
Mikah Sargent [00:25:48]:
So it's on the fly changing from what at first seems like, oh, is he doing a currency value? No, he's doing a percentage. You can also do something like— because percentages get a little confusing. for me, I'll be honest. So let's do 30% of 700, for example. And that's how I think about it. What is 30% of 700? Yeah, in this case, it's 210. And then what if I have a, you know, I'm hoping that I can use this coupon that I have for 25% off. And I— and look, I'm typing in 25% off.
Mikah Sargent [00:26:26]:
So I'm not saying What I'm not about to type in a value and then say minus 25%. I'm saying 25% off of, and let's say the total bill was $85. So I can see— oops, I forgot to write off.
Rosemary Orchard [00:26:45]:
Off.
Mikah Sargent [00:26:45]:
And look at that. The— I changed all— for people who are listening, I changed the word of to off. And it instantly changed the value to let me know what I'm actually trying to ask. So very easy to see that it is following the way that you likely think about numbers and talk about numbers with other people. Let's go ahead and of course do our standard fun currency conversions. So €100 in— whoops.
Rosemary Orchard [00:27:16]:
Oh, sorry.
Mikah Sargent [00:27:19]:
US dollars, $114.34. And you can pin favorites with the— with currency as well. Unit conversions. So let's— of course, we've got to do— so let's see, what's the temperature right now? It is 69 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and we want to change that to Celsius.
Rosemary Orchard [00:27:43]:
Celsius.
Mikah Sargent [00:27:44]:
That's about 21 degrees Celsius is my current temperature here. And then you can also do, and I love this, this is so cool. Let's say you get a quote for a job that you're going to do. I don't know what work you're doing. Let's just say that you get told that you're going to get paid $30 a day and you are doing this job for the next year. I can do that. $30 slash, so that's per day, and I could type per instead. And then watch this, I'll say is what per year, and it actually updates the value to $10,957.28 per year right there.
Mikah Sargent [00:28:35]:
Oh, I love that. But it also tells me Hmm, if I'm spending $30 a day on something, even if I— let's just say I spend $5 a day on coffee. What is that per year? Well, that's $1,826.21 per year. Now, I want to think about it. And then you can also do something like this. $20 a day plus 3— whoops, not, not times— $20 a day plus $300 a week. And it tells me that that is $440 per week. We can also do date and time math.
Mikah Sargent [00:29:22]:
And so let's say that this is big too. I think a lot of people— I know I struggle with date math. Somebody says, hey, 3 weeks from now we need to get together. So I say June 12th plus 3 weeks, and it tells me, okay, that's going to be July 3rd. Oh no, that's already happened. I'm late to this. I can also do times as in specific times. So 7:45 AM minus 4:30 PM, that's 8 hours and 45 minutes between those 2 times.
Mikah Sargent [00:29:56]:
I can also just do a quick time in London. 5:48 PM currently, where, uh, roundabout where Rosemary is, I think. Um, and then also I could do 4 days from now, uh, but then I do comma day of the week on January, uh, 24th.
Rosemary Orchard [00:30:27]:
Okay.
Mikah Sargent [00:30:31]:
1984 was, of course, a Tuesday. So, you know, we could just do this, day of the week on January 24th, 1984. Turns out that was a Tuesday. Isn't that cool? You can also do trip planning. So if you mark a line with like a date and a time as a time point, so you, you actually will tap and hold on it and then it will show that as a date and time. And so, for example, you could say your flight has an 8:35 AM departure time. That's a time point. And then you do your kind of prep steps, and it will tell you, okay, you need to be up at this time if you want to make your flight.
Mikah Sargent [00:31:12]:
So you can say, you know, I know that my flight's at this time, and this takes me 45 minutes. This takes me this much. This takes me— it will say, okay, here's the time that you need in order to do that. It's specifically a new feature that is trip planning, or newer feature that is specific to trip planning. You can also declare variables. So let me start a new sheet. I could say rent equals, let's just say, $4,000. Utilities equals, I don't know, $200.
Mikah Sargent [00:31:50]:
Wouldn't that be nice? And then you could combine those together. So I could say I can also say rent plus utilities, and it will give me that full value there as well. And then of course, changing any of those is very easy to do. So you can easily switch between, you know, that, that value of rent to something different depending on what you have. And you can also tap on If you select a variable, it will show you the value in the, uh, the little menu that pops up too. It's very easy to do. Um, you can also tap the empty cell under your last line to add a subtotal. So if you're kind of doing a budget line by line, then you are able to do that as well, uh, to kind of keep things going.
Mikah Sargent [00:32:44]:
And then swiping left and right, uh, will let you switch between keyboards. So I've got the the scientific keyboard and then your normal text keyboard. So I can type in numbers. And if you hold keys on the number pad— whoops— then you can get certain values. So I've got K, M, and G here. I've got percentage of, as a percentage of, percentage off, as a percentage off. I've got values for— or I've got the pound sign, commas, colons, etc. So there are all sorts of little little tools that I can access depending on which of the keyboards that I'm using.
Mikah Sargent [00:33:26]:
You just look for the 3 dots in the top right corner of that key, and then you know that that is one that will let you do that. So really cool stuff. There are subscriptions that you can get that will add even more. So for example, weather, if you were to type in, if you were to have the feature, I don't have this on, but if I were to say weather in Portland and I had the subscription, then it would give me live updating weather. Stock prices can be added. There's also a knowledge assistant that uses Wolfram|Alpha. So these are special kind of things that, like the length of a cheetah, and you type in equals question mark, and it will use Wolfram|Alpha to pull that value and be able to show that as well. Love being able to think in the way that I think and use this app to do the calculations that I need to do.
Mikah Sargent [00:34:22]:
It's a really neat app and one that I have for the longest time. I had it and felt like it was something that I would use but didn't use it. And I finally started using it and said, what have I been doing this whole time? Solver is so fantastic. So that is my app, or that is, that is the next app. Let us move along to Your next pick, Rosemary.
Rosemary Orchard [00:34:50]:
My next pick, Micah, is also my last pick, and it is the Open Bracket Not Boring Close Bracket Calculator. Not Boring make a whole bunch of apps. They make weather, calendar, all sorts of things, and their intention is just simple but good simple apps, and this calculator is one of them. It pretty much does exactly what you can see here. There are some settings that you can get to, or I could get to just now, and I'm currently unable to see. But you can do things like, you know, change numbers. So for example, there is a backspace, so I can go back and I could change that to 7 times 8. I can hit equals.
Rosemary Orchard [00:35:30]:
I can go, wait a second, I got this wrong. Something you can do, you can tap back into any number in your calculation. So I can change this to 6 times 7, and then hit equals, and it will recalculate and come out as 42.
Mikah Sargent [00:35:43]:
Woo!
Rosemary Orchard [00:35:45]:
It, you know, it's got your positives and your negatives. It does have a couple of settings, not a huge number. It does not support brackets or parentheses, as they're sometimes called. It is literally just exactly what you see here. But this can also just be a really great way of, you know, especially if you've got younger children who are just learning how to use calculators and so on. Physical calculators, I don't actually own one anymore. And so if I was trying to share a calculator with somebody who was just learning, this is the app that I would open to give it— give to them. It's free.
Rosemary Orchard [00:36:25]:
There is a $14.99 in-app purchase for lifetime of the app. There's also a subscription to get all the Not Boring apps, but I have played with this app for multiple days and don't— I, I've not found a need to, uh, subscribe other than— or to buy the lifetime other than to get, uh, the themes and things like that. And honestly, I quite like the basic theme as it is. It's not boring, but it is boring, but in a good way. So yeah, I, I recommend the Not Boring Calculator if you would like that one.
Mikah Sargent [00:36:57]:
Awesome, awesome. So that's a look at some of the calculator apps available in the App Store. Um, there are of course many, many more, and hopefully one of caught your eye today. If there's an app that you use that we didn't mention, you can always email us. iosday@twit.tv is how you get in touch, and we'd love to hear from you. Moving along, let's head into the news segment because I don't know if you've heard, but public betas are here. Rosemary, what's the difference between a developer beta and a public beta? And if we have people tuning in for the first time who maybe have heard the word beta, But aren't quite sure what it means other than maybe that fish that you used to buy at grocery stores that looked really sad and was in a small little plastic container. Can you tell us? I don't know.
Mikah Sargent [00:37:49]:
Are they called betta fish in your neck of the woods or is that—
Rosemary Orchard [00:37:52]:
Yeah.
Mikah Sargent [00:37:53]:
Okay. That's good to know.
Rosemary Orchard [00:37:54]:
Yeah. Betta fish are a thing. I don't keep them in a small tank, folks. Fish need filtration and things like that. If you're going to get a fish, you got to look after it. Similarly, if you're going to beta any software, you need to look after it and your data. There we go. Very good.
Rosemary Orchard [00:38:11]:
I made that work somehow. Uh, so yeah, so Micah throws me the weirdest hooks sometimes. I've just got to figure out how to work with them. Uh, but that's fine because I love it. It's a good challenge. Uh, but essentially what it is is, uh, Apple's OS 27— so that's iOS 27, iPadOS 27, HomePodOS 27, tvOS 27, macOS 27, visionOS 27— all of those will come out in September. September for the new iPhones. However, there is a period of time where you can test it over the summer, and there's a developer beta round and a public beta round.
Rosemary Orchard [00:38:46]:
Now, the developers are expected, slash, really strongly told by Apple— and I know there are a number of folks who don't do this— uh, to have a dedicated device for testing, because the developer betas in particular could include extra logging. Things may just straight up not work. You noticed, you may have noticed earlier in the show when Micah was playing with math notes in the calculator, something wasn't working there. Uh, this is something that can happen with any beta, uh, software at all, but in particular it's more likely to happen with the developer beta because the developers get the beta. And so as we record this, uh, we've— the developers have had the beta of iOS and macOS and everything for about a month. We're on our 3rd version of it. And then as we go to the public beta, the developer beta comes out, and essentially it's a, cool, we're gonna throw this at people and see if everything gets set on fire. Cool, we didn't hear any wildfire reports.
Rosemary Orchard [00:39:50]:
It's not like the entirety of everybody using this is causing— having severe issues. There's nothing majorly wrong with it that we didn't find internally. We're gonna roll this out to the public beta. But with any beta, is you do have to be aware you need to back up your data, carry an extra charger with you because there will be logging and background processes running that maybe won't be running in the, in the release version and things like that. So it is basically you are volunteering to be a software guinea pig. You can roll your device back. However, some data that you have upgraded may or may not be lost. It may just disappear until the new release comes out.
Rosemary Orchard [00:40:32]:
But yeah, there's always the possibility of things not going perfectly smoothly. And as I mentioned, carry a battery pack with you. This is the Anker one. I picked this as my app cap on a recent episode. I have 2 of them here. There's another one in my house. But yeah, there are things that could go wrong. You can also get cool new features and learn about things before other people.
Rosemary Orchard [00:40:56]:
And so if you are the person in your family who everybody is gonna ask to update their phone when September rolls around, then maybe you do wanna install the beta and have a good play with it. But just because it's come out right now does not mean you need to do that. You could wait until the end of August and then download it and play with it for a week before, uh, or, or 2 weeks even potentially before it comes out to everybody. And probably with a lot less heartache, uh, because there are definitely some things I've noticed recently not working. I filed feedback on it, which is your responsibility if you're testing it, uh, Yeah, developer betas and public betas, very, very similar, but slightly different. And yes, if you're gonna run the developer beta, please have a backup device. And if you're running any beta, please back up your data.
Mikah Sargent [00:41:44]:
There you go. So I know that this is a great opportunity, of course, for not only people to check out the public betas, but it also, of course, means that we have the opportunity a little bit more to talk about the next version of iOS. I know we've gotten some feedback in the past that when we lean too heavily into the new OS before it's fully out there, people can feel a little bit alienated. And so we've done— we've been mindful, I think, this year of talking about new features but not making them the center of the show, except whenever, you know, they're first announced. So you will continue to see sprinklings of some of the new stuff, but we will be mindful of the fact that a lot of people won't even be installing the public beta and will instead wait until the fall to rock the final versions. That is, I mean, is there anything else that you wanna say in terms of the news and the updates? I think, you know, there's a lot there. We've talked in the past about what Apple announced at WWDC. Again, we'll continue to cover it, but Um, yeah, the features are there.
Rosemary Orchard [00:42:59]:
Yeah, the features are there. Uh, one thing I will say is if you're downloading this to try out Siri AI, please remember you need to sign up to try that out in Settings. Uh, so yeah, open the Settings and have a poke around and make sure that you've got that. And if you, uh, are testing it, enjoying it, that's fabulous. If you find anything that's broken, Feedback Assistant, it's installed on every device. Uh, it's just hidden on non-beta devices. But yeah, please file feedback if you find something that's not working as you expected or is broken.
Mikah Sargent [00:43:30]:
Alrighty, uh, that is going to bring us to 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. Uh, the App Cap for me, I'm— this is a new feature in iOS 23. 27, or I should say in the 27 updates, that lets you in Safari monitor web pages for updates. Okay, so this is an upcoming feature that you will be able to use that essentially, let's say you are— this, this was one instance. Right now it's hard to buy storage of any kind, whether you're buying SSDs or HDDs, they're pretty pricey and they are few and far between. And so sometimes there will be prices that are more acceptable and sometimes not. Or perhaps you're hoping to get a ticket to a venue the moment that it's available.
Mikah Sargent [00:44:35]:
You can, in iOS 27, have Safari keep an eye on a webpage and look for changes to that webpage so that you're alerted and notified the second that something happens. One place that I have I think I've even mentioned it on the show, but I had hoped to be able to. There's a musical that I love called The Color Purple, and they have, as many different musicals and other theatrical productions do, they have a site where you can purchase the rights to perform and put on whatever the production is. The cool thing about it is that means that me, as a person who wants to go see it, can keep track of where these performances are. Are showing up. And so I set a notify me on the page to let me know when it's updated and I can check for a new location. And lo and behold, it is coming to my neck of the woods in January. And I was notified of the update and was able to, you know, get very excited about that.
Mikah Sargent [00:45:43]:
In the meantime, if you are looking to have your— to be able to sort of track a webpage for changes, there is an app in the App Store that you can use, and I've used this in the past. It's called Distill Web Monitor, and it is honestly, it's a more full-featured version of the Notify Me feature. It is, it lets you select specific elements on a page. It lets you change how often it's checking for updates, and what's great about it is, They can do it directly on your device or use the cloud service to do so. And so it is kind of a relatively foolproof design and sort of implementation. So if you are looking for something to keep track of a web page, prepare yourself for the 27 updates. But in the meantime, Distil Web Monitor can come into play. So that's my pick this week.
Mikah Sargent [00:46:46]:
Rosemary, tell us about yours. Okay.
Rosemary Orchard [00:46:48]:
Uh, yeah, my pick, Micah, is, uh, one that a bunch of people have probably already tried using, and that is Microsoft Copilot. Um, so I do need to mention there are 2 different apps for this. There is the M365 Copilot, which is for those people who have an organization account with access to Copilot on their mobile devices, and then there's the Microsoft Copilot app where you can sign in with Apple and, you know, things like that. So I had a bunch of screenshots of, uh, data to go camping. So this is part of my camping packing list, but I wanted to share this, uh, specifically on paper with the other people who I'm going camping with in a week or so. And I wanted to get all this out the app. Unfortunately, the app I picked, the one flaw with it in an otherwise excellent app, is data export not really a thing, uh, because I was just gonna export it as a CSV, manipulate it in Shortcuts, and so on and so forth. So instead, I took screenshots of a bunch of the data.
Rosemary Orchard [00:47:52]:
Now, something that's kind of messy here, and it's a bit difficult to see, is, uh, there's a games column and then there's a kitchen column that starts, and then the actual screenshot has the kitchen column on the next page. And then there's things where I've gone through and I've screenshotted the same column in multiple places. But because the column scrolls, not the whole thing, it was basically a really messy dataset. I could have tried to stitch this together using something like Pixo and then done text recognition, all those things. I was like, this is way too much work. I can do it. I can also sit there and manually copy every single one of these out. But I don't want to do that.
Rosemary Orchard [00:48:34]:
I don't want to do any of this work. I want to say it was about 10 screenshots in total. and I threw them into Copilot and said, hey Copilot, format this and create this as a nice document for me so that I can actually print this. And so now I have— not there. There we go. It seems a little bit crazy. It formatted it for me. It added emojis to the title and things like that.
Rosemary Orchard [00:49:05]:
I will say I've done a little bit of massaging of this and reformatting things to suit my font preferences and all those things and so on and so forth. But Microsoft Copilot was perfect for this. And there's a whole bunch of things that AI can do for you where it is a good use of an assistant, okay, a virtual assistant essentially, but it's like a computer-based assistant, obviously. And so yeah, you know, I'm not expecting everything to be perfect here. But the good news is, is it was screenshots of type typed text. So it's not like it's got handwriting recognition issues to go with. It has just got, you know, other recognitions. I particularly appreciated the fact that you used paw prints, um, next to our dog's name, uh, for everything, because I'd added, uh, like a paw print as the tag icon.
Rosemary Orchard [00:49:54]:
Um, and so yeah, it did a really good job with this. And yeah, there's a bunch of things that AI can be really great for. If you're going to get it to generate a packing list for you, please—
Mikah Sargent [00:50:03]:
Yeah.
Rosemary Orchard [00:50:04]:
Uh, don't check it once, don't check it twice, check it thrice. Uh, also because the last thing you want to do when you go camping is forget something critical like your tent or tent pegs— stakes, uh, for the Americans— or a ground sheet or your sleeping bag, things like that. Um, so, you know, make sure you're, you're double-checking, uh, the output of all these things. You know, they can still hallucinate in some pretty intense manners. But Copilot is great for all sorts of things. I literally just opened up the app on my iPad and I went. That was it. Super simple, free to use to a certain extent anyway.
Rosemary Orchard [00:50:39]:
And I left it specifically on the smart option. You can choose in Copilot which version of the assistant you would like to use. And yeah, I have. So there's smart, which basically it calculates it based on what the prompt that you give it is. Think deeper, study and learn, and so And all of these have got descriptions underneath them to help you choose correctly. But yeah, I left it on the smart one because that's what I tend to do most of the time. And I find that it is pretty smart about picking the right assistant to help me solve my problem.
Mikah Sargent [00:51:15]:
Lovely. Folks, that is going to bring us to the end of this episode of iOS Today. Thank you so much for tuning in today. We appreciate it. Of course, you can email us iosToday@twit.tv. Rosemary Orchard, if people would like to follow you you online and check out all the great work you're doing, where should they go to do so?
Rosemary Orchard [00:51:35]:
Uh, the best place to go is rosemaryosha.com, which has got links to apps, books, podcasts that I am or have been involved with. And, uh, of course there's also links to my social media there. The only place not included is Discord, 'cause you'll find me hanging out in the Club Twit live chat during the show. And of course the iOS Today forum after the show.
Mikah Sargent [00:51:55]:
If you're looking to find me online, I'm @micasargent on many a social media network where you can head to chihuahua.coffee. C-H-I-H-U-A, huhua.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Thank you so much for being here today, and we'll catch you again next week for another episode of iOS Today. Bye-bye.
