A Review of the iPhone 11 Pro Battery Case, Turning Ideas into Action, and More

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The iPhone 11 Pro Battery Case Review »

Despite the massive year-over-year improvements in battery life of the latest iPhones (all three, the 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max), there are still those who somehow find a way to crush their battery on a daily or semi-daily basis. I don’t know how they do it, honestly — I could be on my phone for what feels like an entire day and still come away with enough battery life to get me through the night.

How to Take Great Holiday Photos »

Holiday photos are all about mood. It’s a warm and bright season with so many fun get-togethers, events, colors, and lights. In many places around the world, it’s also colder and darker, which means shooting lots of photos indoors. Here are my tips to capturing beautiful memories that reflect this cozy and festive time of year.

Turning Ideas Into Action »

In this Mindfulness Monday post, we talk about how to use your technology to develop your ideas and turn them into action.

One of the biggest motivators for me in applying intentionality to my technology is creating the time and space to think. By purposely turning off the fire-hose of information, I’m able to process and develop my ideas. Sometime those ideas turn into articles, like this one. Sometimes they become a new course or product.

But without regular thinking time, they almost never see the light of day.

Apps for the Holidays »

It’s that time of year once again when we like to bring you a few of our top app and gear picks to help get you through the holiday season in one piece. From recipe gathering to trip planning, photo editing, and various kinds of audio distraction entertainment, this handy list has a bit of everything.

Things 3.11 Brings Big Improvements to Quick Find Feature »

The Things team may be one of the hallmark reasons for a wide swath of iPad-focused keyboard features over the last year to year-and-a-half. Ever since that huge Things 3.6 update back in late May 2018, the team at Cultured Code has always put iPad keyboard support at the top of the feature list.

One of the core elements of advanced keyboard support is Quick Find — a feature that allows you to simply begin typing anything, at any time, to begin a powerful search query across the entire app. Today, Things 3.11 boosts the power of Quick Find and perhaps paves the way for more advanced sidebar features in the future.

Take Control of Shortcuts for iOS with Rosemary Orchard’s New Book »

If you’re looking to take your iOS automation game to the next level, Rosemary is definitely qualified to help you. She’s written several automation posts here at The Sweet Setup on automation, like how to start your day automatically with Keyboard Maestro, and how to automatically clean up your desktop with Hazel. She even put together a collection of 15 simple one-action Shortcuts with download links to help get you started, even if you’ve never used Shortcuts before. She lives and breathes this stuff, and co-hosts the Automators podcast with David Sparks (if you’re not already a subscriber, I highly recommend you check it out).

How to Pick Up Playback From Your HomePod or See What’s Playing »

I often just tap my HomePod to start music playback, or tell it to play some music, which frequently leads to me wondering, “what song is actually playing right now?”

For a long time I left this mystery unsolved, but this weekend I was trying to figure out which version of the Grease soundtrack was playing and, aside from asking Siri, I couldn’t think of a way. I may be into gadgets but I’m frequently entirely too lazy to talk to them, and this was a problem that had to have a solution, right?