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In Part 2 of our Pages 2026 series, Lee picks up where show 1571 left off and takes you deeper into understanding what Pages can do. You learn how to work with images — inserting, styling, cropping, and removing backgrounds — as well as shapes, text boxes, and lists. Lee covers page setup including margins, columns, and paper size. He then moves on to sections, showing how to control headers, footers, and page numbering independently across different parts of your document. The video also covers building a Table of Contents, adding bookmarks and footnotes, and using the Track Changes and Comments feature for document collaboration.

Whether you're writing reports, collaborating with colleagues, or creating designed documents from scratch, this episode gives you the tools to get the most out of Pages on your Mac.

Lazy is a macOS capture tool that lets you clip just about anything without context switching. Using a single keyboard shortcut, you can clip text, articles, tweets, videos, PDFs, and more into a central inbox and make connections with other notes (or cards) in your collection.

In this screencast, Mike demos how to use Lazy to clip things from various sources, how to make connections between your notes (or cards), how to use Lazy as a lightweight read-later app, and how to publish cards publicly to the web so you can share information with others.

In this episode, Mike explores the latest features in MindNode, one of his favorite brainstorming tools.

Discover its handy iOS widgets, Shortcuts integration, and Apple Watch companion app. Mike also demonstrates real-time collaboration using the newly launched MindNode Next.

MindNode requires macOS 15 and newer, iOS or iPadOS 18 or later, and watchOS 9 or later.

Markdown is a powerful and yet simple markup language that allows you to create formatted text documents, all while writing in plain text. These plain text documents can be opened and read in any text editor.

In this tutorial from Allison, you learn the basics of the Markdown syntax, like bold and italics, as well as making checkboxes, create links, and even embed image links, to name a few. Allison also shows you several applications that support Markdown, including her favorite, Typora, plus TextEdit and BBEdit (with Brett Terpstra's Marked as a companion renderer). She plays around with Markdown in Meta's Messenger, Apple's own Notes, and much more.

Ever wish you could have Notion-like databases inside of your plain-text Obsidian notes? Well, now you can. With the release of the Bases core plugin in version 1.9.10, you can now use property metadata to filter and sort your Markdown notes using different views.

In this screencast, Mike helps you get up and running with Bases and shows you all of the different ways you can use this game-changing feature inside of your Obsidian vault.

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.

A lot has changed with this episode's app in the last 4 years, but one thing remains the same: Ulysses remains a great writing app for the Mac. In this screencast, Mike walks through the major new features since ScreenCastsONLINE last covered Ulysses back in 2021.

You see useful features in action, including the ability to post directly to a handful of social media accounts, linking to other sheets internally, create great-looking equations, generate a table of contents (TOC), and more.

Ulysses runs on macOS 13 or newer; iOS or iPadOS 17 or later.

When Bear v2 came out in the second half of 2023, we released two shows covering the changes as it had undergone some major updates, which were extremely well received. Well the team at Bear hasn't rested on its laurels and has been providing its users with incremental feature updates since we discussed them last. In this video, Lee gives you a tour of the new additions you can enjoy in Bear.

He walks you through how to use Quick Open, open notes in Read-Only mode, enjoy new cosmetic changes, as well as his favourite feature: Callouts within notes. Bear is certainly one of the most aesthetically pleasing applications on the market today.

Bear runs on macOS 12.4 (Monterey) or newer; iOS and iPadOS 15.6 or later.

Many apps are built around the actual writing of a screenplay or novel but neglect the story behind the story.  Anyone involved in creative writing knows the backstory of their characters, the locations of their stories, events, and an endless amount of information that informs what you eventually come to write. Untold Novel accounts for all this information, providing seperate categories to organise everything and allowing it all to be viewed in context to each other. Over time you’ll build out a rich backstory to begin writing your main one.

Large language models (LLMs for short) have been making lots of waves in the past year especially, but Google's NotebookLM takes a different approach. It does so by providing answers based on only the sources you choose to upload to it. This gives you responses that are much more specific and relevant.

In this episode, Mike covers the new iOS version of this one-of-a-kind research assistant. You get to learn how to create notebooks, have a chat with your source documents and files, create a two-host podcast based on your sources, and much more. Mike also points out the differences between the iOS version and NotebookLM on the web.

NotebookLM on iOS requires iOS 17 or newer.

AI tools are all the rage recently, but most of the time, their focus is on eliminating or automating mundane tasks. In this episode, Mike shares two AI-enhanced capture tools for iOS that are designed to assist in the distinctly human creative process. He guides you through the features and benefits of Whisper Memos and VoicePal, which give you a lot of useful tools to help you capture ideas on the fly.

Whisper Memos runs on iOS 16.1 or newer; VoicePal requires iOS 15.1 or newer.

A Whisper Memos subscription is $39.99 per year.

Access to VoicePal Pro is $9.99 monthly, or $89.99 annually.

Gamma is a web service that utilises cutting edge AI to both lay out and create content. You can use existing files, blog posts, or documents to generate stunning presentations or websites. AI prompts can also be the starting point to creating detailed cards and slides that can be shown in a live presentation or turned into a website.

Gamma also allows you to host a website on their platform with your domain, giving you full control over your content. Join Don as he introduces you to Gamma and shows you its presentation mode. You also learn about building a web site, as Don walks you through his pet project, yourbitcoinjourney.com, step by step.

We've covered Pages several times in the past on ScreenCastsONLINE, so this tip video focuses on some of the aspects that some of you may have missed. You learn several ways to get more out of this great app with Don as your guide, including using Styles, customizing a template, and more.

The version of Pages used in this video runs on macOS 14.0 or later.

Automattic's Day One is a long-standing journaling app that has stood as a benchmark over the years as other similar apps have come and gone. Over the years it has continued to be updated with terrific additions like Shortcuts integration, several export options, dictating of entries on Apple Watch, and Shared Journals. In this video created on iPad, Darcy recaps the basics of creating new entries and adding all forms of data like text, photos, video, audio and documents. He then covers some of these new additions, and wraps up the show by creating two useful shortcuts.

Day One runs on iOS 17 or later, macOS 14 or later, and visionOS 1.0 or newer.

You can download a 1-month trial so you can follow along with Darcy.

The social media landscape has become severely fragmented over the last couple of years. For nerds like us, there are a few platforms where people tend to hang out: Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.  Maintaining a social media presence on multiple platforms, however, can be time-consuming.That's where Aaron Vegh and Ben McCarthy's Croissant comes in, a simple app for iOS and macOS that lets you crosspost to all three services at the same time. In this episode, Mike shows you how to write once and publish everywhere, including how to mention people on multiple platforms, create threads, and more. Croissant runs on iOS 18 or newer, and macOS 15 or later. Subscriptions are $2.99 per month, $19.99 annually, or you can purchase a lifetime license for $59.99.

There are third-party tools you can buy on macOS that provide dedicated clipboard management, however if you use Alfred with a Powerpack license, you may not realise that you already have the excellent Clipboard History feature. Lee shows you in this video how he uses it daily to copy and paste text, images, and files between locations using keyboard shortcuts, of course. You also learn how Alfred Snippets integrate with Clipboard History to make typing even more efficient.

Alfred runs on macOS 10.14 (Mojave) and newer.

In episode 1412, we looked at how Writing Tools (part of Apple Intelligence) can help you improve how your text is formed. In this video, Lee looks at two more features that have landed in the first wave of Apple Intelligence: Summaries and Smart Replies. Summaries work in Notification Centre, where your alerts can be summarised into the most optimal text, as well as Mail and Messages where you can get a summary of the information displayed rather than read through it all. With Smart Replies, Apple Intelligence can form a response to the message, for you to accept or amend as needed. Lee shows you how to set it all up in this short video.

See Resources section below for system requirements needed to run Apple Intelligence on your device. 

The first wave of Apple Intelligence has landed — in the US at least!  One of the main features that you can now take advantage of is Writing Tools. These tools help take your text and rewrite it, making it more professional, humourous, concise as well as proofread your writing to ensure your syntax, spelling and punctuation are on point. Lee walks through this exciting new feature in this video, and also shows you that you can use Writing Tools on third-party apps, Drafts in this case.

To run Apple Intelligence, you need a compatible iPhone, iPad, or Mac. (See resource below.)

Software requirement:

iOS 18.1 and above

iPadOS 18.1 and above

macOS 15.1 and above

With iOS 18 comes an update to Apple's healthiest app for your mind, Journal. Unlike other similar apps, Journal is preinstalled and updated alongside the OS, so it's easy to miss new features as they're added. This year, searching old entries is even easier with Calendar, giving you a top-down view of your streaks (which can also be tracked). Along with text formatting and Quick Actions, Journal now supports both Widgets and Shortcuts.

With these convenient new options, users can easily make written or voice entries right from their Home Screen. Join Darcy as your guide through these mindful changes to Journal.

Journal is part of iOS 18 and newer.

The developers at Icon Factory had one goal in mind when planning Tot: Create a note-taking app that offers users exactly what they need, no more, no less. And that's exactly what's on offer here. Follow along with Darcy as he outlines the simplicity of Tot's design and functionality. While on the surface it may seem counterintuitive to only offer 7 spaces for notes, as well as limited formatting, Tot takes the overhead out of note-taking.  It gets out of your way, while opening the door for creating you work with Siri Shortcuts, iCloud syncing, Widgets, and a wealth of sharing options for when your ideas go from scratchpad to production.

Tot requires iOS 13.2 or later, macOS 10.14 or later, and watchOS 9 or newer.

• Tot for Mac is a free download on the App Store
• Tot Pocket (iOS and iPadOS) is $19.99 USD
• Tot Mini for Apple Watch costs $1.99 USD