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If you are looking for an elegant dashboard-style app for controlling your HomeKit devices, Todd has got you covered in this week's tip. HomeDash brings a dashboard filled with widgets to your iOS device. Those widgets are customizable and create a look and feel that is not only beautiful but also quite functional, especially on iPad. Todd walks you through HomeDash's features and how to set up a dashboard. He also shows you his setup so you get a better feel for what this app can bring to your smart home experience.

In this tip video, Don looks at two excellent Mastodon clients to run on your iPad or iPhone: Metatext and Mammoth. You learn how they work and what features they offer to make your Mastodon experience fluid.

Earlier in the year, in show 1134, Lee covered an app on iOS called Albums that centred around recommending and playing albums in Apple Music in their entirety. Whilst this is great for looking at individual albums, we all love to have that shuffle factor that a playlist can bring. SongCapsule (formerly known as Next) fills that gap. A cross-platform application, it uses a feature called MagicDJs to look at your play history and creates a number of different playlists based on artist and genre automatically, as well as offering the ability to create your own. In this video, Lee walks you through the iOS version of the app.

Due to recent changes to Twitter, many people have started looking for alternative social media platforms. The one that looks to be most popular is Mastodon. In this introduction, Don takes you through the basic structure of Mastodon, how to set it up and how to use its standard features. You also learn how to discover people to follow and configure your notifications so you get the most out of your experience.

Book Tracker for iPhone, iPad, and Mac helps you manage your reading list. If you like to read, this handy little app will help you catalog your library, track your reading progress, save your favorite quotes, and more. Mike demonstrates why he feels this is an essential utility for all bookworms, regardless of the type of books they read.

One of Apple's welcome new enhancements to the Photos app is the ability to share selected photos automatically with people you choose, using the newly introduced iCloud Shared Photo Library. This goes beyond Shared Albums in the way it's designed with important differences and advantages. Darcy shows you how to set it up, then goes over the useful features of the iCloud Shared Photo Library, including setting up the Camera app for automatic sharing.

In this video, Lee takes a look at a really useful multi-platform unit conversion application, Morpho Converter. Using the iPhone as his device of choice, he shows you how to perform simple conversions and configure the home screen with quick access conversions of your choice. You also learn about accessing country-specific units and currency information to help with your travels, and much more.

Once upon a time, having a smart home was something people only dreamed about. Having the option to have devices run on their own or be fully customizable in your house is the perfect blend of real life and tech. This week, Todd shows you Apple's Home app's new look. He walks you through basics of the application from initial setup to adding devices, and goes over some of the control and automation features that take your smart home experience to the next level.

In this tip you learn about another app that assists you in making your smart home and HomeKit experience a lot smoother, and that's HomeCam for HomeKit, by indie developer Aaron Pearce. It focuses squarely on your Wi-Fi cameras and allows you to monitor them as a group, as well as control other HomeKit-compatible accessories alongside your camera. HomeCam adds some unique features and functionality as well, which Todd covers in this video.

As a music lover, there are lots of apps that Lee has recommended here at SCO to help you build your music library. However the most used app has gone uncovered—until now. Shazam allows you to identify the title and artist of a song that is currently playing. More than this, it can automatically add this track to a playlist in either Apple Music or Spotify, as well as view similar music, track concert information for artists, and more.

After using his original Synology NAS for about 5 years, Don decided to upgrade it to a newer model when his unit started exhibiting some performance issues. There have been a lot of changes and improvements since we first covered Synology hardware back in 2017, so in this episode Don takes a fresh look at features that are part of the operating system. After going over the basics, you discover options like setting up Time Machine backups, as well as setting up Synology Drive on both Mac and iPad.

As a productivity coach, Lee has always been mindful of the fact that downtime is as important as uptime. He loves applications that allow him to make the most of this. Reeltime is a movie and TV show tracker that keeps a log of everything you have watched, informs you of upcoming releases, and helps you discover content from your favourite stars. In this video, Lee show you how to set up the app on iPhone, sync it with a Trakt account, and maintain lists of your preferred media titles.

This week Darcy showcases an app that can assist you in visualising and organising you holidays on your device. With Tripsy you can enter all information related to your trip such as flights, accommodation and locations, into a single event which you can then view on an interactive map. Darcy demonstrates how to collect information from emails as well as import travel documents. You also learn about calendar sync and templates.

In a departure from the type of app he usually covers, Lee looks at a practical application to help with the maintenance of his garden. PictureThis can help any gardener, from beginner to expert, care for their plants and greenery. In this short screencast, you look at how PictureThis is able to identify plant types using the iPhone camera and create care plans for them. You also learn how to set reminders for watering and fertilising, and take a look at the vast amount of resources available in the app.

In the second video in this three-part series on Numbers for Mac, Lee focuses on organising the data contained in your various tables. When working on particularly complex spreadsheets, with many rows of data, finding the information you need can be tricky. In this video, you learn how to sort, filter and categorise your information so that you only see what is relevant. Lee also walks you through conditional formatting down to an individual cell and demonstrates how it can help you visually.

Today's HomeKit-driven smart home invariably includes many devices of various types, each with their unique code, serial number, and related information. This is normally not something you need unless one device stops working as expected and needs to be reset. Aaron Pearce's HomePass for HomeKit utility comes to the rescue by storing all the information you need for your devices and making it easily accessible. In this tip show, Todd walks through the process of adding your smart accessories to the app in two ways, and shows you how to properly organize and back up your database.

Matter is a relative newcomer to the Read-it-Later app space. Using either an iOS share extension or a Safari extension on your Mac, this free service allows you to collect articles, newsletters, Twitter feeds and PDFs all in a single place, and syncs across all of your devices. It is also accessible via a fully-featured web app. Optimised for organising, reading, and discovering new authors and sites, you'll wonder how you lived without it! Don takes you through the many features of this excellent service on iPad, and gives you a peek at the web app as well.

Sometimes an app comes around that you didn't know you needed. With a proven pedigree in app development around media, thanks to releases like MusicHarbor and Play, Marcos Tanaka gives us MusicBox, a music application based on the premise of a Read-it-Later service. In this video, Lee shows you how to add music into MusicBox from a variety of sources, organise it with tags both manually and automatically, as well as create Smart Searches.

There are a number of Twitter clients available these days, and one of our favorites is Tweetbot from Tapbots. In this screencast Todd shows you many of the features of Tweetbot 3 for the Mac, including Lists, Columns, and Search, and he shows you how to connect multiple Twitter accounts right within the app.

In this screencast, Judy introduces you to Jacquie Lawson and her online greeting card service. Each one of Jacquie's cards is a work of art that combines painting, animation, and music. Using the Jacquie Lawson Ecards app on iPad, Judy shows you how to create and send a card, and shares her favorite one, along with a bonus iPad tip.