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iOS and iPadOS 26 brought with them something a little unexpected this year. The Preview application found its way to the mobile platforms! Whilst it doesn't bring with it all the features of its desktop counterpart, it's a more than adequate application for annotating and marking up your PDFs and image files. It also includes the Forms Editor and in this video, Lee goes over the features of Preview for iPhone and iPad so you can start using it today.

The version of Preview demonstrated here requires iOS or iPadOS 26.

Acorn has been Don's go-to app for all things image creation and editing. It has a huge range of features and is perfect whether you dabble in image editing or need power user features.

With the release of Acorn 8, it's time to revisit this great app and explore some of its new features. It might be worth checking out the previous Acorn show (see Resources below) to explore the basics in detail. Join Don as he does a quick return to basics before diving in to some of his favorite new features.

Acorn will run on macOS 14 or later, and you can download a 14-day free trial of the software.

There are more options when customising your display than you might think. Resolutions, refresh rates, rotation, HDR, colour profiles, and brightness to name a few. BetterDisplay is here to condense all of those options into an easy-to-use menu bar interface.

Add individual customisation option for each connected display, virtual displays and picture in picture to the mix, and this seemingly innocuous app stands out as a powerful yet approachable way to manage your displays. Join Darcy as he walks you through BetterDisplay's configuration options and features in this short video.

BetterDisplay requires macOS 12 or newer.

You can buy a Pro license to unlock all features for a one-time price of $18 or 18 euros.

In the Notability Foundations installment, Allison taught you how to use many of the tools in the toolbox, how to convert or search handwritten text, how to draw geometric shapes, how to use Templates for your virtual "paper" and more.

In this tutorial she’ll walk you through some more advanced features covering many ways Notability can be a great companion whether recording lectures (or even Apple keynotes!), more handwriting using Apple Pencil and Zoom View, using the versatile ruler for more precise drawing of lines and shapes, and a lot more. Get ready to take your Notability skills up a few notches.

Notability for iPad requires iPadOS 16.0 or newer.

Notability is a long-standing note-taking app for iPad, iPhone, and Mac, that seems to have no boundaries. In this new foundational tutorial Allison teaches you the nuances of the first half of the tools for creating notes from free-form drawing to vector shapes. You learn about basic templates, and how to share notes.

Allison then continues by showcasing Notability's ability to read and search your handwritten notes or convert them to typed text. Finally, you get to see a few examples of how she uses Notability to capture her ideas and help with a favorite hobby of hers.

Infinite canvas apps are great for brainstorming and idea development, but they become even more powerful when you link them to your existing library of notes. In this screencast, Mike walks you through using Obsidian Canvas to make more of your notes and ideas inside your Obsidian vault.

You learn about the basic features, including the different types of media that can be added to Obsidian Canvas. Mike also introduces you to a few Community Plugins that make Obsidian Canvas even more useful.

Keynote like many of the stock Apple applications just keeps getting better over time.  With a significant amount of new features launching since our last video, we thought it was time to take a fresh look at the Mac version.  Join Darcy as he walks you through the basics of creating a presentation in Keynote, as well as some recently added enhancements to the app.

Web development has certainly been a hot topic over the decades with apps coming and going, overall making it easier to design your own website. Follow along with Darcy as he shows you Sparkle, an app that integrates AI-generation into a website builder. Simply type in the core idea of your website and a fully fledged and individualised template will be generated with multiple pages, layouts, buttons and even contact forms. You also learn how to use the many navigation and structural elements Sparkle offers.

Pages, Apple’s long standing word processor is more robust than you might realise. Starting with file management and templates, Darcy walks you through two word processing scenarios. Modifying placeholders in existing templates and creating your own for continued use. You discover how to make your projects come to life using multimedia, reader mode for examining projects, and how to collaborate with each other.

Shift provides people with complex workflows requiring many apps a platform to combine them all. In this video Darcy showcases how to add accounts from Slack, Dropbox, Airtable and more into a streamlined interface, allowing you to increase ease of access between them and a more focused environment for your projects. Shift is a great way to declutter your desktop of windows by bundling them all together into one, with dozens of apps available to integrate. You also learn how to add extensions within Shift.

Retrobatch, from the creator of the well-known image editor Acorn, is a highly capable image manipulation tool that uses drag-and-drop nodes to build workflows. In this tutorial, Allison starts by making a very simple workflow that adds a border to a group of images very quickly, then walks through the interface using this as an example. You then go through a more complicated example with Allison of how Rules and JavaScript (part of the Pro version of the app) helped her solve a real-life problem. You will surely think of multiple ways Retrobatch can assist you in processing your images.

Midjourney is another AI-powered service that allows you to create a huge range of stunning images, including photo realistic landscapes, people, cartoons, sketches, logos and more. It's fairly simple to operate, but not as straightforward to get started. So, in this tip, Don walks you through the entire process of creating your Discord and Midjourney accounts, along with generating your first images.

With the recent updates across its operating systems, Apple have finally released Freeform, a new way to collaborate and brainstorm ideas on all devices. Don takes you through the basic concepts of adding and organising the various objects available on your Freeform board.

TouchRetouch is an iOS and Mac app that is designed to help you remove unwanted objects from your photos. With a touch-first interface, it is trivially easy to remove things like power lines, smudges, and even fences forming a mesh. In this video, Allison shows you how the app works, mainly on iPad, but also on iPhone and the Mac. TouchRetouch is an amazingly capable app and worth well more than its $4.00 price tag!

Xnapper (pronounced "snapper") is a new utility for grabbing free-form selections and full window screenshots on macOS (with an iOS version coming soon). Having recently come out of beta release—and now a part of the Setapp collection—Xnapper has some useful features which make it stand out from its competitors, such as the ability to locate screen captures' version history as well as exporting for a variety of specific social media formats. Lee shows you all of it in his screencast.

If you find yourself having to teach friends, family, or co-workers how to perform functions on their computer, you know how powerful sending screenshots can be. We have a lot of options for taking and annotating those, but when you need multiple screenshots to explain a longer process, a specialized tool might be in order. In this tutorial Allison shows you a dedicated program on the Mac (and PC) called Folge. You learn how to create guides using screenshots and an exhaustive collection of tools to enhance your instructions. Once your guide is complete, Allison shows you the different export formats, including her favorite, Rich HTML.

In the second part of this series, Lee continues his walkthrough of OmniGraffle on the Mac. Where the first video looked at the basics of the interface and populating the canvas with objects, Part 2 introduces topics like Object Stacks, Layers, using Stencils, as well as exporting your finished product.

OmniGraffle is a diagramming and visualizing application from the Omni Group that is used by web designers, architects and project managers the world over. It's a feature-rich application with a fairly steep learning curve.

In the first of this two-part series, Lee breaks down the interface into four distinct sections to make it easier to understand. You also learn about objects, how to get them on the canvas, and how to format them so they look just right.

Despite having used Acorn for many years, this is the first time Don has covered it on ScreenCastsOnline. Acorn is a powerhouse of an image editor but is also capable of doing some simple, basic functions, which is how he tends to use it.

In this episode, Don takes a look at some of the basic features of Acorn 7 and how he uses it for some typical image editing tasks.

In this tip show, Rosemary shows you how Annotable, a flexible annotation and markup utility for iOS. It offers a variety of useful tools, from a simple crop to a flexible loupe, as well as the ability to obscure parts of your image with blurring or pixelation.