The apps I use …

Unfortunately I’m not able to provide much insight into all platforms – Android and Apple, smartphone, tablet, laptop and desktop, MacOS and Windows – I can only show examples from the Apple world – iOS, iPadOS and MacOS. There are devices that increasingly are getting to be very good at monitoring what you’re doing, where you are, and alerting others to potential difficulties you might be in. Again, I’m unable to offer much advice and information on these – I do look at the Apple Watch and wonder whether I should buy one, but so far have resisted the temptation.

So I’ll write in generalities, hopefully give pointers to as wide a range of possibilities as I can, but please realise … it’s an impossible task to cover all bases.

Going one stage further, I could have talked about other smart devices – home hubs, SmartTVs, etc., but again that would extend the scope further than we can handle in a short presentation.

I will focus on accessing services that I think you may find useful; I hope you will find some of the information helpful. I’m not that confident of being able to sharpen your bodies or minds, but hopefully at least you’ll have a few props for our collective failing memories!!

However … a starting-point (or two)

How many of you talk to your photo when you’re not making a phone-call?

I suspect not many of you. Speech-to-text has come a long way since I first encountered it and now wherever you see a microphone icon you can press it and talk to your message app; or to your Notes or Reminders apps; or to your word-processor; etc. Give it a try, it’s easier to edit the mistakes made in the transcription, than it is to correct the annoying fat finger problems, or the incorrect auto-mistake corrections!

Then there’s the voice assistants. How many of you talk to your TV; your music system; your home heating system; your lights – you get the picture! I find them confusing and don’t replace using the Remote Controls, but perhaps you’ll have better luck. You should however try and standardise on one system whether it’s Siri, Alexa, Hey Google when selecting a new consumer good – if you possibly can.

Browsing and searching the internet (the web)

On iOS I now tend to use Safari (iPhone or iPad) to make full use of bookmarking and Tab Groups which are amazing for storing similar sites in a separate browser window. Otherwise Brave or Safari (on Laptop). The search engines I use (not Google) are DuckDuckGo (on iOS), or Ecosia.

A Note about Paying for Software

Why should you expect to get everything for free? There are a lot of very good free programmes about, but I’m continually surprised at how many people expect that all the software they use should be free. I’ve written another article on this subject which you might find interesting.

Security and Privacy

Password Manager – I have migrated away from using LastPass for holding passwords and accounts to using Apple’s Keychain and Password approach. If I wasn’t an Apple user I would probably use Google’s Password Manager, and if I worked on Windows, Apple and Android machines I would probably use 1Password nowadays. I still have LastPass running as a backstop to Keychain as not all the accounts seemed to migrate over to the Apple offering. So LastPass is the archive, and I refer to it running as an app on the desktop, or mobile device when I find credentials are missing.

If you use a password manager, just be aware of FIDO – a standard that most of the industry has adopted to move away from passwords and towards passkeys which incorporates Two Factor Authentication (2FA) and Biometrics – Apple, Google and 1Password have all incorporated FIDO into their software so that you get the benefit of both a password repository and inter-working with systems that use 2FA and biometrics.

Nord VPN – I do use this app when out-and-about to protect my device from hacking in public WiFi spaces. I need to remember to switch it off however when at home, because there the devices are secure behind the router, and also when cellular because many sites do not work off cellular with the VPN running.

Authenticator – it’s on the devices, But I rarely use it. I tend to use my device with a call-back with a six-digit number as my preferred method of 2fa (two factor authentication) when a website is not setup for biometric approval/authentication.

Adblock Plus (Apple) (Google) – probably not so necessary since I use DuckDuckGo and Brave, but I mention it because this one is the best – and I use it with Safari (and Chrome) – it’s different from another one called Adblock!

Now … let’s get onto the Apps!

Organisation

Although I use the Apple apps on my devices, they access Google services – gmail, calendar and contacts, which I tend to use, and prefer – a long-term choice.

Mail – all accounts are linked to Apple mail app. I cannot stress enough how beneficial it is to aggregate multiple email addresses into one app (or client if you’re on a desktop/laptop) – makes tracking and archiving your mail so much easier. I’m now using iCloud mail as my main personal email service.

Calendar – linked to Google Calendar. This enable me to share calendars with other family members and be able to put events into different categories.

Contacts – linked to Gmail. As above. We share one set of contacts between us using Google Contacts but linked to the Apple Contacts app.

Notes (EverNote) – I used to recommend EverNote and there’s nothing wrong with it at all. I think a good note-taking app is essential and just the place to add quick notes, link to audio/voice memos, etc. Apple have improved their app significantly so it’s just more convenient (and cheaper) to use it. I can share a Notes folder using iCloud.

Reminders – I’ve just started using this app as I recognise my memory is not as good as it once might have been. Like Notes, you can share a Reminder list through iCloud.

Information

News – I start the day by reading a couple of newspapers, or at least the headlines – I pay for a couple of subscriptions. I prefer to consume news  for myself rather than that curated for me (eg the Apple News app).

Feedly – Following quick on the heels of the newspaper I look at my RSS Reader. This is an app that presents me with a short abstract of links to websites that I subscribe to using a technology called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). You just provide the app with the URL of the websites you want to follow and you get the latest posts. I may check-in several times a day.

Pocket – If something “pops up” that I want to read later I’ll add it to Pocket which I can read later, even when I’m not connected to the Internet. Think of it as a bookshelf. I may also add a link as a Bookmark in my browser. I’ve recently discovered how much better bookmarking is now in Safari. I can setup Tab Groups – create complete windows of tabs on a specific topic, and have Folders to organise the bookmarks I want to keep.

Flipboard – If there’s something I think might be of value to any of the Cardiff u3a groups I’m involved with, I’ll add it to a Flipboard magazine (or others that I curate) for open or restricted viewing.

Weather – I like the Met Office app I must say, but the Norwegian Met Office app (yR) is also good and the interface is rather different. The Weather & Radar app is another possibility and there’s also another one with a similar name available on the Apple App Store, as well as this one – netweather.tv. Plenty to choose from!

Health

I use MyHealth Online to contact my surgery to obtain Repeat Prescriptions. Currently my practice doesn’t allow me to book appointments, and Wales is behind England in enabling access to your patient record. You should however be able to obtain a complete record of your patient record by requesting it from your GP. It will be provided in the form of a CD.

Of course there are the Health apps supplied with your device Apple and Android – although the latter appears to be just a way of connecting data from other health and fitness apps into one place on your device. Be sure to complete the Emergency Contact details on your phone – ICE (In Case of Emergency).

Sadly, the NHS app in Wales leaves a lot to be desired – nor further comment, but Bridgend leads the way in Wales with with its Trauma and Orthopaedic Care app.

Foodwise – an initiative to help you eat the right food and improve your health.

Everyday & Lifestyle

Here I would highlight the Banking apps – which I would recommend everyone to seriously consider using if they have a recent device which has biometric (ie fingerprint or facial recognition) authentication. The apps are actually more secure than browser-based banking nowadays, but it would always be wise to use VPN software in a public area.

Also the Wallet (Apple and Google) which can hold details of store cards – saving space in your physical wallet or purse, and Pay apps (Apple and Google) which (as well as PayPal) can replace having to remember your card details when paying for goods online.

Home control apps, eg Hive, to control the heating

Cardiff Gov app to check on Collection days, in Bridgend you can use this page as a way of getting to services

A calculator app

A unit conversion app

Dragon Taxis app

Voice memo app (very useful to record a consultation with a doctor), or anyone else for that matter.

A QR Reader app which will quickly take you to a webpage for instance.

Various apps too many to mention. Focus on perhaps just using one or two in any category – retail, hotels, etc. …

Amazon – need I say more

Sainsbury’s – a life-saver to do click’n’collect during lockdown

Co-Op – to get the offers once a week.

Public Transport

RealTimeTrains has been recommended to me as a good journey tracker, but it’s not an app as far as I can see.

The Stagecoach app (Google) (Apple) and the Cardiff Bus app are used by Cardiff u3a members. For Bridgend and Porthcawl there’s the First Bus site from which you can download an app.

There’s also Traveline Cymru which enables more complex journeys to be planned. It has an app you can download as well..

Travel

Getting around – Waze – members mentioned this app as a neat way of navigating around a place and avoiding traffic. I haven’t used it in while and I should really give it a go.

A new one, recommended by my daughter – City Mapper – it is both a website, or from that URL, you can download an app for both iOS and Android. It has coverage for a lot of US and European cities (including Cardiff) – https://citymapper.com/cities – and navigates you around selecting the best route from the filters you apply, and the transport mode you want to use. It even tells you how many steps you will have to climb, and where you can pick-up  a hire bike and how many it thinks there should be there.

Planning a trip – A website two Cardiff u3a members have tried out, is Roam Around. It’s an AI pattern recognition site that recovers things you might wish to do on a visit to a place. It may not be up to date however. This is of course in addition to the booking and review sites such as Trip Advisor and Expedia.

Telling someone where you are – A really great service is What 3 Words. If you’re in trouble – you’ve broken down in the car, or fallen down on a walk. If you fire-up that website or you’ve downloaded the app to your phone you can tell the emergency service (or a friend) where you are within 3m by telling them the three words that you will see on your screen. [NB – it doesn’t work without a phone signal].

Mapping

Google Maps – I could use Apple Maps, but I’m now so used to Google’s maps that I probably will not change in the short-term. I find the interface to CarPlay not that easy to follow for either of them to be honest, so tend to use the car’s inbuilt GPS.

OS Maps – my preferred mapping service. A very small charge annually gives you access to all the Ordnance Survey’s maps down to the 1:25000 scale.

Maps Ancient and ModernSide-by-side was recommended by a Cardiff u3a member as a neat way of looking at maps archived at the National Library of Scotland. It’s not an app, but a very useful reference.

Lifestyle

Entertainment

Music – a variety of choices here. I use the Apple Music service (I subscribe to that) rather than Spotify, Amazon, or others.

TV – whole gamut of streaming services: iPlayer, ITVX (subscription – formerly Britbox), NowTV (subscription), Apple TV (subscription), etc.

Members mentioned Shazam as a great little app to inform you what the music playing in the background is, that you can’t identify.

Photography

Lightroom – Adobe has a free camera/editing program but without some of the features of the full paid version (which I have). Worth looking at as an alternative to the camera app on your phone. (Apple) (Google)

Photos/Google Photos – the phone cameras are getting better and better as are the apps that you can use to do edits on your pictures. A really good basic photo-editing app on your phone or tablet is Snapseed – (Apple) (Google).

Flickr – you can publish and share with both Google Photos and Apple iCloud, but Flickr is a good choice if you want to present your creations to friends, family or indeed anyone! (Apple) (Google)

I’m about to trial using Halide for the iPhone, which seems a quite sophisticated but easy to use camera app, which turns your phone into a digital SLR. It has a relatively low-cost annual subscription, or a one-off purchase option with lifetime updates. Watch this space.

Social

Messages – on iOS/iPadOS the messaging goes by a proprietary protocol called iMessage (a Blue message). If the recipient doesn’t have an Apple device or you’re not on WiFi, this defaults to SMS Text messaging (a Green message). [A further explanation of Blue/Green messages with iMessage.]

FaceTime / Zoom – The former is Apple, the latter is what we’ve used over the pandemic. Both nice apps.

Signal – my preferred alternative to WhatsApp. Secure, encrypted end-to-end communication. Open Source. I subscribe to the service to help their running costs. I wondered about using Telegram but I feel that it’s just a bit close to Russia to trust.

What no twitter or Facebook?

twitter – I guess that my use of twitter (or X as it’s called now) will even further decline, as has my use of Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp already. I have obtained a Mastodon account but have not really experimented much with it as yet – it’s another Open Source project, and I do like Open Source!

Lr Mobile – moving on!

Following my last post on the subject – Lightroom on the move – biting the bullet – I thought it might be useful to record my experiences with using Lr Mobile and my iPad Mini 4 on a recent trip, so that if I should ever be tempted back to using Lr Mobile, I’d have a benchmark to measure the progress of the software against.

Let’s start with some background, just in case a reader (is there anybody out there – to quote “The Boss”) hasn’t read previous posts. This thread started with a post written by Nicole Young – that prompted me to try an experiment travelling without my laptop. That didn’t work well for me initially, but I determined to have another go, which I wrote up in the post – Travelling with my camera and without my MacBook Pro – which also didn’t go too well either!

Now call me a fool (if you will), but having learnt a little more about Lr Mobile (I know it’s not called Lr Mobile, but I need to call it something other than just plain Lightroom – because that’s what Lightroom Classic really is – I’m oldskool), I thought I ought to try it again.
Some starting points …

I decided to set up my Sony A7rIII to use SD-Card Slot 1 for RAW and Slot 2 for JPEG. My reasoning here was that I thought I could upload from the Slot 2 Card to my iPhone for sharing images on WhatsApp etc. This worked fine – no need for Lr Mobile at all for this. Just the SD-Card; an Apple Lightning -> SD-Card Adapter AND an iPhone 6s.

These images also automatically synced to Google Photos where I created an Album to Share with Family. Happy days!

However …

Although the upload to the iOS Photos app worked fine, my External Lacie SSD Hard Drive doesn’t seem to be working with this iPhone using a powered Lightning -> USB 3 Adapter; the drive wasn’t recognised in the Files app, thus I couldn’t Export from the Camera Roll onto the external hard drive. Is this a Lacie fault, or is the iPhone 6s too old? I have to investigate this and will report back later!

Why was this a problem? Well the JPEG Images uploaded to iPhone from SD-card Slot 2 to share from the iPhone were been merged with native JPEG images taken on the iPhone. I couldn’t distinguish where they were coming from. This might not be a problem for some people but the Sony JPEGs were not supposed to replace the RAW images that I was examining in Lr Mobile!

There doesn’t appear to be an easy way to separate them. There are no filtering options in either Apple Photos, or Google Photos. How then do I merge iPhone JPEGs into my Lr Classic catalog?

I can’t find a search on filename available on the phone – there might be in iCloud from a web browser, but I haven’t researched that … yet!

This “problem” was solved by loading JPEGs into another space on my hard disk, not into my regular Images folder, then Adding them into my Lr Classic Catalog (not Moving or Copying), selecting the iPhone photos from the Sony JPEGs using a filter, and removing the Sony JPEGs from Catalog, then Moving the remaining JPEGs into the regular Images folder on my External SSD into the newly created and correctly titled folders in my Catalog BEFORE doing the Import of the RAW image files from the SD-card that had been in Slot 1. [Not forgetting to delete the Sony JPEGS from the other location to avoid clutter!] All an annoyance that makes the workflow tedious!

I also encountered other problems ..

The keywording options available in Lr Mobile are rudimentary and I don’t believe you can create a Preset to apply metadata at the time of the RAW import into Lr Mobile. It can only be done individually to an image. This meant I had to go through the whole collection and tag separately in Lr Classic after the images had been Synced (or in my case Imported as I had abandoned Syncing for the reasons given in my concluding remarks below).  At least I could Select and Tag in Lr Classic, which I couldn’t in Lr Mobile! Another annoyance.

Even though I decided to use Compressed RAW in the camera, I ran out of space on the iPad Mini 4 – I would need to upgrade to a new iPad Pro (or a new MacBook). Also, the Lacie SSD didn’t work on the iPad either … again, is this a question of old kit, or a Lacie problem – I need to follow this one up.

I quickly ran out of Creative Cloud space – 20GB definitely not enough, even when using the “Delete folder (saved for 60 days)” trick! See below, a note I wrote to myself on table-top experiments with Lr Mobile before I left …

Quick note after using “web-enabled” Lightroom last night. It took very little time to sync both iPhone and Camera (using card reader connected to iPad) up to the cloud – 45 photos. I remembered to switch off Sync as well!!!! It took a couple of minuted to then sync to the desktop this morning. What was interesting however was that when I switched on Lightroom Classic, the application already knew how much of my Creative Cloud storage was being used – 1.59Gb for 45 pictures.

I must say now that I’ve got used to it, it’s much more straightforward than I though to use the Syncing with Lightroom Cloud. I particularly like the way that photos taken yesterday with my iPhone have been easily integrated into the workflow. One thing to note however which I forgot to cover … you need to switch off Syncing from the Lightroom Classic Collection (Albums in Lightroom) by clicking on the double-facing arrow against the Collection, and then perhaps (if you use Collections in Lightroom Classic) move the Collection to a different place. Also, your final task should be to Delete the photos from the Creative Cloud storage by clicking on All Synced Photographs (in Catalog panel) – and deleting them; as long as Sync is still enabled they’ll be deleted from your Creative Cloud storage allocation. You should then Pause Syncing. Remember however that everything you Delete will still be in the Deleted storage in Creative Cloud, and will stay there for 60days without counting against your storage allocation. That’s all. I’ll try and get round to amending the notes tomorrow to add these points.

However, unlike the experience when syncing at home, syncing in the wild was slow and not a realistic way of saving local storage. Also syncing when I got home was temperamental and I waited for some time, and then gave up, attempting to get a connection to Creative Cloud from my desktop. Things have to work smoothly and not rely on “clever” kludges or workarounds!

At one time I thought there was duplication in Google Photos due to Backup and Sync but this does not appear to be the case. It’s just a delay issue in refreshing the caches I suspect.

So a conclusion …

I would have to upgrade my Apple kit to get Lr Mobile to work for me. Does that mean a new iPad Pro? Or a new MacBook Air?? But I don’t need either as my MacBook Pro works well – it’s just heavy. I do however probably need to review whether getting a new iPhone sometime soon might be a good idea – improved camera(s), connection to external SSD, etc. A cautionary wait and see is probably in order but currently a new iPhone would seem a better way forward.

I do not like the Default Sync setting which means you have to remember to switch Syncing Off  after an upload. This also reverts back to being the default when the Software is upgraded. It is really the wrong Default and Adobe should review this.

I do not like the lack of Selection in Lr Mobile. You should be able to Select what you want to Sync – not everything. What’s the point of having the ability of selecting the Collection you want to Sync from Lr Classic to an Album in Creative Cloud, if you can’t do exactly the reverse from Lr Mobile to Lr Classic. It doesn’t make sense and the phrase “hammer and nut” comes to mind; plus of course “upgrade to more Creative Cloud storage needed”, and more dosh for Adobe!

The inability to Select and Keyword a group of images is also a drawback to me; as is the absence of Colour Labels – which I use a lot.

So I have decided NOT to sync. photos from the iPad using Lr Mobile. I could not get a quick and reliable Connection. I will however keep watching for developments from Adobe that might encourage me to have another try. I will continue to use Lr Mobile in one situation – that of integrating native JPEG iPhone Photos into Lightroom Collections. That might be a useful addition to my workflow if I get a new shiny iPhone. This “use case” seems to be what Lr Mobile should be good at!!!