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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.

As this dot release of iOS comes with some great new features, we thought we’d dedicate a tip video to it to get you up to speed as soon as possible! With the 17.2 release the long-awaited Journal application makes its debut on iPhone, allowing users to record activities, thoughts and feelings in a secure, portable manner.

Lee does an "unboxing" of the app before your eyes, and he also touches on other nice 17.2 features: updates to the Action Button, recording Spatial Video (iPhone 15 Pro only), Messages, and a favourites playlist in Music.

Drafts has long been a favourite third-party application of the ScreenCastsOnline team. You can use it on its own as a note repository, or send text to other applications, meaning it can be as complicated, or as simple as you need.

If you want to use it as a storage space for all of your notes and ideas, it's important to file them correctly and that's where tagging can be a great help. In this video, Lee walks you through the nuances of tagging in Drafts and how you can use advanced tags, such as Scoped Tags, to file (and find) your notes efficiently.

For those who love novel writing or magazine creation, Plotten offers a simplified, modern experience. Designed to get out of the way and let you write, this app has all the tools you’ll need to write such as file structuring, basic text customisation, image editing and exporting options. Join Darcy as he takes you on a tour of Plotten on iPad.

In show 1281, Lee covered Bear 2.0 on macOS, showing off some of the new features that bring it back up as a serious contender once more in the crowded note-taking space.

As taking notes on iPad is a wonderful experience, Lee show you how you can use Bear on the go, sync it to your iCloud account and secure it on a mobile device, whilst using your Apple Pencil to write and draw.

Goodnotes is out with a major new version that adds AI superpowers to an already phenomenal analog note-taking app. In this visual tour of of what's new in Goodnotes 6, Mike walks you through the fancy new features like analog spellchecking, Word Complete, and AI Math Assistance, so you can decide for yourself if it's worth the upgrade.

Our resident Obsidian expert is back! This time around, Mike explains how the new Properties feature can help in your day to day use of Obsidian by making it a breeze to add more information in the form of mediate to your notes. Properties does this in an intuitive and interactive way. You also learn how to display that information in the sidebar.

Previously covered in 2017 by Todd, Curio has received a lot of updates over the years. Today Darcy takes you through many of them and shows you how one of the most robust researching apps on the market has become even better. Learn more about journalling, working with PDFs in multiple spaces, tagging, using web archives in your work, syncing figures, and so much more.

After receiving an Apple Design Award in 2016 on its first release, Bear has seen a lot of competition from other Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) applications.

With a re-engineered design, Bear 2.0 is here and it's added a number of features that fans of the app have been asking for. These include tables, nested Styles, folding of text and auto-hiding Markdown when it's typed. Add to that support for footnotes, link and PDF previews, image resizing, and more. This is a worthy update and Lee walks you through it in this screencast.

Elephas uses the power of ChatGPT with its own customisations to help users with all their writing needs. It offers features such as intelligently generating press releases, marketing material and email responses, with minimal information provided. Darcy shows you in this screencast how the app goes beyond robot replies and truly generates writing that feels like it's from a real person. Whether you're using it for work or take advantage of its powerful smart brain to index and query your own PDFs, Elephas has you covered.

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.

The Gmail web interface has long been a preferred email destination for productivity enthusiasts because of its unparalleled speed. Using Mimestream, you can access Gmail's powerful features directly on your Mac. Combining Gmail's powerful keyboard shortcuts and server-side filters with the beauty and speed of a well-made native mac app, Mimestream allows you to move through your email effortlessly. In this episode Mike gives you a comprehensive tour of the app, along with many examples that include setting up a filter as well as replying to an email using a custom template.

With all the buzz and noise around ChatGTP it can be hard to really understand its use case. How can this amazing technology help in my day-to-day life? In this tip Darcy walks you through Typing Mind, an app designed to simplify the ChatGPT experience with features and customisations that make it feel even more like interacting with a professional. No matter your goal, Typing Mind will help you on your journey. Besides the macOS version available via a Setapp subscription, you also learn about its web app, along with the various pricing options depending on your needs.

Following last week's introductory episode, this second screencast delves deeper into the various apps and services being built around ChatGPT. As well as subscription-based web services, Don looks at MacGPT, an excellent native Mac and iOS app that integrates fully with ChatGPT using the inexpensive pay-as-you-go API. You get to see the app in action using both spoken as well as written out prompts from Don.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is accelerating at an unheard-of pace, with new apps and services being released and updated almost daily! It's all too easy to become swamped and not even know where to begin.

In this episode, Don starts your AI journey with an introductory look at one of the most popular AI services: ChatGPT. From creating an account to generating your own prompts and building on them, you are guided through some real-world examples to whet your appetite and give you an appreciation of the potential of this amazing technology.

Daily Prompt offers a fresh take on building a creative writing habit. Instead of just sending you notifications and pestering you to write like many other apps, you’re given prompts in the form of small writing challenges or images that act as a starting point. This way you never run out of inspiration to write, and can simply focus on being creative. Darcy shows you how it all comes together in this tip.

Safari Extensions are extremely popular at the moment, with developers filling the App Store with a wide variety to suit your needs. Apple Mail extensions, however, are more difficult to find. ReplyCube is a solid entry in this space that allows you to create canned (template) emails and access them from the Compose window, making repetitive batch jobs a lot easier. Lee shows you how it all works in this short tip.

Following on from the recent Mastodon tutorial, this update show brings a new announcement from ScreenCastsOnline plus a look at some new innovative clients for iOS and the Mac.

ScreenCastsOnline members can now join a safe, moderated Mastodon instance run by ScreenCastsOnline - you'll find an invitation link in your member profile on the ScreenCastsOnline website. In this episode, Don takes you through accessing the new instance as well as giving optional instructions on how to migrate if you so desire. In addition, Don introduces you to three Mastodon clients: Mastonaut for the Mac along with Ice Cubes and Ivory for iOS.

Following on from the recent Craft Update show (1225), as promised, Don brings you information on the Craft AI Assistant. This is a tool based on GPT-3 artificial intelligence that "helps you write faster, generate ideas, proofread your work, translate text into any language, summarize documents, and find information contained within your Craft space, in seconds."

In this tip video, Don takes you through some of the standard options as well as exploring some of the extremely powerful features of the built-in Craft AI Assistant. 

Craft is your ultimate writing companion. It's an intuitive, customisable tool that works hard to help you craft any document and keep it organised with ease - perfect for those creative projects!

Lee Garrett originally covered Craft in 2021, not long after receiving an Apple Design award. The application was impressive then, and it's continued to improve and add additional functionality ever since. In this week's tutorial, Don refreshes the basics of Craft on the Mac, focusing on the new features rolled out over the last 24 months.