📱💻 Finer Tech Newsletter ⌚️📺 Speech to text, a time zone utility, Keynote and Watch tips, and more

Greetings all you finer readers. I hope life is treating you and yours as well as it can in these upside-down times. This week I have a mix of iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Watch tips, as well as some good videos and links for you.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this issue on Mastodon, Tumblr, Micro.blog, or email. If you know people who would enjoy my newsletter, I’ll owe you a beverage if you recommend it to them.

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You know that little microphone button at the bottom of Messages, the one that does speech-to-text transcription? In iOS 13, Apple made that feature available in many more places.

I see it the most in search boxes in nearly every Apple app, including: Spotlight, Mail, Settings, Notes, and even Safari Tab View (pictured above).

Nope, not a food delivery app. CalZones is a clever utility for visualizing time zones and creating calendar events at exactly the right time for everyone involved.

My favorite feature is that, once you set up a few time zones in settings, CalZones displays them all stacked together in a grid (shown above). I work with a few international clients, and I also play Destiny and other games with friends across zones and continents. CalZones has been the perfect tool for me to make sure I don’t leave anyone out.

Long-tap, wait a beat, then start dragging. Keynote treats it as a selection box, allowing you to wrangle up everything you drag across.

To see this in action, check out the quick video Redditor u/bbernz posted to r/iPad where I got this tip

Raindrop.io is my bookmarking service of choice for a variety of reasons, including multi-word tags, a great overall design, polished iOS apps and extensions, and support for automation through tools like IFTTT.

One useful feature is the ability to share a collection of bookmarks with a collaborator or publicly. You can check out some of my public collections to get an idea.

To share a collection: 

Members is where you can add direct collaborators. Fortunately, free accounts can use sharing and collaboration. If you subscribe to Raindrop Pro, (which I do), you’ll unlock a bunch of great features like nested collections, full-text search of saved webpages, a permanently library (Raindrop keeps a copy even if a site or article goes down), a tool for finding duplicate and broken links, and more.

No, this isn’t a sponsored post. I just really like Raindrop.

You can quickly share your current location in Messages, right from your watch. Note that if you want to share your ongoing location for the next hour, until EOD, etc., you’ll need your iPhone or iPad.

watchOS 7 (currently in beta)

By default, phone calls ring both your Apple Watch and iPhone. But if you know you want to answer it on your iPhone, tap the (…) menu in the call screen on your Watch and tap Answer on iPhone.

This answers the call on your iPhone but puts it on hold. Siri will ask your caller to wait a moment while you grab the call on your phone.

How did you like this issue? Was it useful and bite-sized enough? Are there certain kinds of tips or apps you’d like to see here? Let me know what you think on Mastodon, Tumblr, Micro.blog, or email.