The iPhone 6 – Our One Week Anniversary
A week with the iPhone 6
My first full day with the iPhone 6 and I felt a little bit disappointed with the amount of time I got out of the battery. I found myself wishing that I had bought the larger version which has the bigger battery and has been shown to last longer. The following day I wasn’t using the phone quite so much, perhaps down to a normal level and the battery lasted well enough. Certainly, I do need to get my hands on some sort of external battery that I can use to put a charge in the iPhone 6 quickly where necessary. I have got used to having a very large battery on the Samsung Galaxy S3. It was very good to have two or three days from the phone battery but it did make it heavier to carry and a little bit bulky. There are plenty of external batteries that can be bought for the iPhone 6 to top up to and gain extra longevity.
Listening to podcasts
When the campsite gets quieter and there are fewer people I get a little bit bored and I need to have something to listen to. When I need to alleviate the boredom I can’t hardly download the podcasts quick enough. Whereas during the busy time I don’t have time to listen to podcasts. So the application I have been using most this week is the application Overcast. This is the podcatcher which is in vogue at the moment and this from the same person who brought us Instapaper. The application is quite simple and can be used free for the basic task of listening to podcasts. There is an in app purchase which gives a few extra features that are worth having. The first of these useful extra features is Smart Speed and what this does is to remove the longer silences in between speech. This can save you quite a lot of time overall when listening to podcasts. The other one which I find useful is the Voice Boost which somehow uses its magic to increase the volume of the audio and it does an EQ on the voice. Both of these podcast listening features are definitely worth getting hold of. Just checking the statistics for Smart Speed and it tells me that I have saved an extra four hours beyond the speed adjustments, that you can also apply to save time. With some podcasts I listen to them at 1.2 speed, this is quite handy with people who are slow talkers.
You also get the usual seek controls which allows you to jump forward by a specified amount and I have that set up at 45 seconds whether I’m going forward or going back. A feature that I would like to see in this application is the ability to set a start time for each podcast individually. There are a number of podcasts that always have 30 to 40 seconds of adverts or intro rubbish at the beginning that I would like to jump over. Being able to set a start time for a podcast would save me having to hunt for the 45 second jump forward.
Better use of some of my favourite applications
Day One
It is, without a doubt, great to have Day One always available to quickly add journal entries. It makes it much easier if I want to take a photo and to have it as part of my journalling activities. I have also found it very handy if I want to have a photo that is coming to me from What’s App put into a journal entry, such as a picture of my grandson.
Scanner Pro
While I was over on Android I did find an application that I could use for going paperless which was pretty good. However, it is quite nice to get back to using Scanner Pro because I like the way that it works. I did have some automation setup on my Mac so that scans when they arrived in a particular Dropbox folder would be sent by Hazel App into Evernote. I haven’t got around to checking whether that still is in place. If it isn’t, then I will reinstate it and it will be great to have all of my paperless stuff going into Evernote.
1Password
1Password was coming to Android anyway and I had been trying out the beta versions which worked well enough. Using 1Password on the iPhone 6 is much better, because I can use the Touch ID to unlock it and get into whatever password protected apps I need to get into. Also there are 1Password extensions which are built into some applications that allow me to much more quickly get a password inserted into the website in Safari.
My productivity applications
In my book The Good and Geeky Writers Workflow the applications that I prefer to use are iThoughtsX, Cloud Outliner and Byword. The other application I have not mentioned is Scrivener and you never know there might be an IOS version for that at some point in time. In my writer’s workflow it is quite likely I will be in a situation where I only have an iOS device on hand with me, such as the iPhone 6 or the iPad. So I need to be able to use something like iThoughtsX or the Cloud Outliner to gather my thoughts together and my ideas. It’s important that these ideas are in a place where I can get at them easy when I’m back at my desktop computer. This is why I chose applications which worked as a pair across IOS and also on Mac OS X. So now that I have the iPhone 6, I can do work while mobile on my favourite mobile devices. I know exactly where I can easily get my hands onto anything that I have done. It will get even better when Mac OS X Yosemite is available and the continuity feature is there to be used. I will be able to walk in the house with the iPhone still in my hand carrying some of my marvellous ideas and I will be up to hand off that document directly into the sister application on my iMac on my office desk.
Audio with TwistedWave
I thought that I would be able to start using the Audioboom application to create my little podcasts. I have tested that application on my iPhone 6 and found that it isn’t up to scratch it. So I can still use TwistedWave for recording audio and easily use it for sending to Audioboo. The way that I do that is to send it as an email from TwistedWave which gives me the audio in a format which is small enough to send even when I’m still mobile. There are times when I will wait until I get back to base and in front of my iMac where I can put the audio into Amadeus Pro and give it a little bit of tweaking. In any case, I am very much enjoying having the use of TwistedWave with all of its abilities, once again.
Health, weight loss and fitness
Maybe I wouldn’t be quite so interested in these sorts of applications if it wasn’t for the fact that I have lost 14 kg since February. I lost so much weight that quite a few people have been asking me if I have been ill. Maybe I was ill, but the illness was giving up biscuits. Much of my ability to lose weight has been down to using an application called Noom on the Android phone. I used it to record my weight, the amount I was eating and it also recorded the number of steps I took her day. I was also able to record other exercise such as when I was using my bicycle going to and from work. So I definitely need something to continue keeping an eye on these things in order to keep the weight off. Luckily I found applications such as MyFitnessPal, MapMyWalk, MapMyRun, Lark, Moves and the Apple Health application. Some of these applications work together feeding all of the information into the Apple health application. It is quite handy to have all of the information collated into one place. I’ll be able to lose that other 2 kg and get down to my target weight with the help of these health and fitness applications for iOS.
