transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Coming up on iOS Today, Rosemary Orchard and I, Mikah Sargent, are very excited to be talking about Control Center. Stay tuned for this episode of iOS Today.

Speaker 2:
[00:13] Podcasts you love.

Speaker 1:
[00:15] From people you trust. This is TWiT. This is iOS Today, episode 799 with Rosemary Orchard and me, Mikah Sargent, recorded Tuesday, April 21st, 2026 for Thursday, April 23rd, 2026, managing Control Center. Hello and welcome to iOS Today, the show where we talk all things iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, HomePodOS, etc, etc, etc. This is the show where we talk about some awesome devices and also give you advice on how to make the most of said devices. I am one of your hosts. My name is Mikah Sargent.

Speaker 2:
[00:58] And my name is Rosemary Orchard. And I thought it would be lovely to talk to Mikah about, you know, controlling your device and, you know, taking charge and putting things in a centralized place. That's what we're doing today.

Speaker 1:
[01:13] Oh, boy. So if you have a modern phone, then you are probably by this point familiar with the gesture, I should say, a modern iPhone, the gesture of swiping down from the top right corner of the screen. If you've got an older device, you know, swiping up from the bottom, if you've got that home button, is going to get you access to Control Center on newer devices, including the newer iPhones, you are able to swipe down from the right side of the screen. And boom, Control Center is there. Now, Control Center has seen a lot of changes over time. And that is, I think, you know, been one of the most exciting changes to come to iOS devices because there's a lot you can do. And that's part of why I really wanted to talk about Control Center on the show today. There's a lot happening here. And Control Center has just gotten so incredibly powerful over time. Now, when you swipe down from Control Center, you are presented with your standard layout in the top right corner, there's a power button, which you can tap to swipe to power off your device. In the top left corner is a plus sign, which lets you edit your Control Center commands. And right in the middle, you should see right below the, in my case, Dynamic Island, a little bit of information about how apps might currently be using your different data and in this case, its location. So next to what the top of my phone says, Aura, which means that the Aura Ring app is using my location, I can hit a little disclosure triangle and it shows what device or what apps recently used my location. So there's a lot more in Control Center than just controls. There's also information available as well. But the big thing here, the big thing that we're talking about today is how to use and customize and manage Control Center when you are trying to decide how you want things to be set up. By default, you'll have your basic controls. A lot of your controls, you're able to access by tapping and holding. And I want to just remind people of that. Tap and hold on one of these sections, and you'll be presented with a good amount of information if the section of Control Center has more that you can do. So tapping and holding in the top left square is all of my connection stuff. So at the top, I've got airplane mode, which I can turn on by tapping on that. I, of course, turning it off will toggle off airplane mode. Tapping on Wi-Fi will allow me to change the Wi-Fi network. Tapping and holding, excuse me, tapping on it will turn it off. Tapping and holding lets you change which network. You can also make adjustments to your airdrop, depending on whether you want to only be reached by contacts or by everyone. You can adjust and switch between Bluetooth devices. You can make changes to your cellular data, turning that on and off, personal hotspot, VPN, satellite. It's all in that connectivity section. To the right of that, of course, is your now playing section, where you are able to control not just the stuff that's playing on your device, but any of the media devices in your home that support. It'll be AirPlay 2, essentially, in the background. Now, that's just the built-in basic controls that you have. But you'll notice that I have lots of little circles, and even one rounded square on my home screen, or rather on the home screen of Control Center. That is a choice that you can make as to what you choose to have in these spots. So in the top left corner of my selected items, I have a little text recognition tool that can help me be able to see what text is in front of me physically, and take that text and apply it digitally. So copy something, essentially, from a photo. I also have a timer. I've got my Apple TV remote. I've got the flashlight. I have active listening. I can't remember actually what this is called. Oh, it's all of the audio options, but includes live listening, includes system capture, background sounds. You can make adjustments there. Low power mode, screen recording, big user of that. This accessibility shortcut is set up with my most common used options including reduced white point. I also have a QR code recognize feature. A really neat thing called vehicle motion cues, which we've talked about on the show before, where it will bring up little dots that move around based on your movement in a car. And we pause it, we suggest that it is able to reduce the effects of motion sickness in the car. I have found it to be that it actually does have an impact for me. There's also my Shazam button, which lets me then quickly listen to music and go, what is this song? And last but not least, in my screen, I have the sharing icon for screen sharing. And so that is active right now because I am mirroring my iPhone to Ecamm. Rosemary, I was wondering if you wanted to share what your favorites section looks like in Control Center to see how different it is from mine. So long, of course, as you don't have any, you know, personal information there that you'd rather not include.

Speaker 2:
[06:49] Yes, Micah, I would love to show you. And there is one thing that I should note in that I've actually made my lock screen on available when my iPhone is locked because that is a feature that you can actually do with security settings. So as you can see now, I'm on my home screen rather than my lock screen, and I can show you my Control Center. Now it does look pretty busy because I have spaces for buttons. So why not put them in there? One of my favorite features that I have added to Control Center is Print Center. And this is a sneaky hidden Apple application, which you only need it when you need it, right? But every so often my printer likes to drop off the network and is not entirely doing what it's supposed to do. So if I've sent something off to print and it was there enough to receive that, but then something's not happening, then if I open up Print Center, then I can see what documents are waiting and so on and pulls them and restart them and things like that, which is a really great way to keep on top of those. I do also have, obviously, I've got my media control page, my general connectivity page, but then I have multiple home pages as well, which are currently not working because I'm in the middle of moving house. So I'm going to have to set up all of my smart home stuff again. But yeah, I've got a lot of things here that I don't really think about until I need them at which point I go, oh yeah, yeah, that's the thing that I need. And there's things like magnification. I don't need it that often, but it's really nice having that in Control Center. And thinking about it, I might actually put that on another page. The one thing I do love, right down here in the bottom left-hand corner, I'm not going to tap it right now because otherwise it's going to make my watch ping because as much as being able to ping my phone for my watch is a feature I use multiple times a day, every so often I put my watch down somewhere, usually while I'm tired and going to go out and have a shower. I forget to put it in its dedicated place or its charger, and then I lose my watch. So being able to ping my watch for my phone is one of the things I do love having in Control Center.

Speaker 1:
[08:51] All right. So now that we've gotten a look at Control Center and how we both have organized our main screens, let's talk a little bit about editing Control Center. That's the whole point of this is to show you how you can customize your controls. So on your iPhone, the first thing that you can do, and I like this, is in the top left corner, there's a plus icon. That is a way to edit. The classic way, the way that we've always done it, is tapping and holding anywhere on the screen that is not currently taken up by a control. The reason why I like the plus sign is sometimes that jiggle mode shortcut can be a little bit picky. If you accidentally do a swipe before you tap and hold, or if you accidentally have another finger slightly on the screen, all sorts of things can get in the way, and that's annoying. So having that plus icon to know if I tap there, it's going to let me edit is great. Now, when I tap on that icon, the first thing you may notice is that in the top left corner of each of these bubbles or sections or segments, there's a circle with a minus. That means remove. You can get rid of that control, but you may also notice that there's a little clear glass macaroni noodle in the bottom right corner of each of these sections. It is not, in fact, a macaroni piece, but instead is a little grab control that lets you adjust the controls that you have in Control Center. So if I tap and hold on the bottom right corner and then I move the control, it allows me to increase the size of the control. Now, importantly, it will only allow you to change the size of the control to another option that is also allowed. What does that mean? It means that this specific control, which is a QR code reader, is either a circle or it's a squircle, a square, a sort of rounded square shape. And so in between, it's not going to let me do anything. But if I tap and hold and drag it out and drop it, then it makes that bigger option. So that's something to bear in mind when it comes to these controls is that they do have certain arrangements and requirements for their arrangements. And you will need to make adjustments based on that. Now, that was a look at being able to remove and adjust the size of a control. You can also tap and hold on a control while you're in that jiggle mode and move around that specific control to rearrange it. The best part, though, is tapping the add a control button at the bottom. When we do this, first and foremost, your device will show you some of the controls that it thinks may be most important to you and some of the controls that are default controls. So here I can see I would have access to the alarm. I could have another timer button. I could have another low power mode control. Obviously, I don't need some of these. They're already there. But by scrolling down, I can see the other apps and services that have made it possible for me to use them via control mode. One section that's really neat is the capture section because what this allows you to do is directly launch the capture of a specific app. So that means that you could open up Halide immediately to a Halide capture, Instagram capture, or if you'd like, analyze a photo with Claude. And so being able to pop that in there and tap on it would then give me direct access to that capture area. I've also got some other apps including City Mapper. So if you've got that set up, you can say get me home and it'll take you right there. There's some other options. I want to show, here's a good one. Dice by PCalc. You can always count on PCalc and surrounding apps, aka James Thompson to be able to sort of make use of all of the functionality. And so it's really nice to have all of that functionality right there as well. I'm literally able to roll a D4 or a D20 from my control center, which is pretty cool. In fact, let's add that control and then tap on that. And you'll note that what it does is launch the app and immediately roll a D20. And yes, I did get a NAT 20. Thank you very much. Very exciting stuff. So that was editing and adding controls to Control Center. But this main screen is only one part of everything that you have access to in Control Center. If you swipe down, you'll see what is essentially sort of a secondary screen that has even more controls here. I've got different setups for ambient music. I've got Rosemary's Print Center in there as well. I've got a little shortcut to give me the weather from Carrot. And so I can quickly check in on the weather without having to pop open the app and go to the right page and do all this other stuff. I also have for people who are watching, you'll notice there's, it sort of looks like a street sign with four little corner points around it, or like a lollipop that's inside of a little stand. I don't know what to call it, but this is a little tool for accessing the special camera docks that are able to use the system to control them. So these are motorized docks that Apple made a little API for, and this gives you direct access to those controls. From there, you can break it out into music or now playing, home, which has all of my home controls, and last but not least, that connectivity. The sharp-eyed among you will note that the connectivity page is the same as tapping and holding on the connectivity square in the top left corner on the main part of Control Center. So those two are equivalent. It's nice to have home controls there in Control Center, and as Rosemary pointed out, being able to access Control Center from the lock screen is also very nice. Now, if you are wanting to do that, there are a few things that you want to be mindful of, and so what we want to do is, we'll hop back over to iOS, we launch the Settings app, scroll down and choose Control Center. The first thing that it'll tell you in Control Center is, hey, this is not the place for you to go and make adjustments to Control Center. Swipe down from the top right corner of the screen, and you can make edits there. But what this does have is a little toggle for whether you can access Control Center within apps, and that's important because if you were to toggle this off, anytime you were running an app, you're not going to be able to use Control Center. So if that's an issue for you, like if you were in an app and you were, oh, I need to do something in Control Center and it's not appearing, this is why at some point you've gone in here and you've turned this off and that has caused that issue. Now, for those of you who also are going, oh my goodness, there are so many options, so many choices. What do I do? What do I do? Well, don't worry. If you don't like the way the Control Center looks after you've made a bunch of changes, you can hit the Reset Control Center button, which will allow you to, as you might imagine, reset Control Center to its default mode. So don't worry about that. The last thing that I'll mention for Control Center is in the Face ID and Pass Codes section, you want to see that under Allow Access When Locked, that you want to look and see if Control Center is one of those things that you would like to, as Rosemary pointed out, have access to. You'll note that for me, the only thing I have turned off is Wallet, so that when my phone is locked, you cannot access Wallet, but everything else is able to be accessed while the phone is locked on my end. Your Control Center is also something that you can make use of on your other devices, but of course, depending on how you have things set up, you may or may not be using it on Mac OS. The Control Center mechanism, of course, has changed where it's widget-based mostly and on your desktop, but on iPad, it works the same way. You'll have access to all of your different controls, swiping down from the top right corner, regardless of the orientation of your device, will allow you to make changes there. Rosemary, anything else we want to say about Control Center, editing Control Center and accessing Control Center before we move along to the news?

Speaker 2:
[18:21] There is one little thing that I would like to quickly mention, because it's kind of part of Control Center, though not really on your lock screen. There are two controls at the bottom, and by default, they are the torch or flashlight on your camera. You can customize these to any control available in Control Center. So if you spend all the printing documents from your iPhone, you could add Print Center there. You can put whatever you like there. I often have the QR code scanner there instead of the QR code scanner, because you can just swipe to access the camera, or you can use the camera control on most modern iPhones. So make sure you have a think about those. And if you're the sort of person who accidentally walks around with the flashlight or torch on your phone on all the time, maybe take that control out and put something else in instead.

Speaker 1:
[19:11] All righty, folks. This, of course, is the time where I remind you that if you have questions, if you have methods, if you have tips, if you have tricks, you can e-mail us iostodayatwit.tv to get in touch. It is time to move along to the news. And boy, howdy, have we got a big old news announcement for you if you haven't heard. This is perhaps, I think, well, I mean, this is the second biggest change at the company in my history of following Apple. As Tim Cook has stepped up from being Apple CEO to becoming Apple executive chairman, John Ternus is going to become Apple CEO in, I believe, September. Yes, September 1st, 2026 will be when it's effective. This is again, one of the biggest moments since the, you know, unfortunate, untimely death of Steve Jobs, at which point, you know, Tim Cook stepped into that lead role and has been part of the most successful period for the company financially at the very least, but in many other ways as well. Tim Cook wrote a sort of personal letter to the community, as well as the Apple producing a press release about the change, upcoming change. I did find it interesting that Tim Cook was very specifically mentioned that in the Apple executive role would be the means of contact essentially for world leaders and for policy makers. I kind of think it's nice that John Ternus is not going to have to worry about that and is going to be able to just focus on the company, the software and the hardware, as Ternus was the chief executive of engineering, or senior vice president, excuse me, of hardware engineering, and has now moved in, or will be moving into this role. Rosemary, I don't know where you were right when this happened, but I do know that I suddenly got some text messages coming through. I look down, I see, what in the world this is happening right now? Holy cow!

Speaker 2:
[21:45] Yeah, no, I was standing at Glasgow Airport waiting to board a plane back to come home, which it's only an hour long flight. And yeah, I was standing there. And to start with, I saw another news article that Apple posted, which was about, and I'm going to butcher the pronunciation of Johnny's surname, which is Sruji, I believe, being named Apple's Chief Hardware Officer. And I saw that come in and skimmed the article and noted that it said, Incoming CEO John Ternus. And so clearly Apple knew that they were making two announcements yesterday. And so they posted them in reverse order so that if you looked at the newsroom, then the Tim Cook one would be at the top. But then there was this awkward five minutes of refreshing Apple newsroom to go, okay, so tell me about what's happening with John Ternus. Tell me what's happening with Tim. But yeah, it's one of those things of a lot of people have a lot of speculations about things that are going to change and how John Ternus is going to be better, how John Ternus is going to be worse. The reality is we won't know even the day after he takes over properly as CEO exactly what the difference is going to be. Because even if he makes a bunch of changes immediately, it will take at least six months before we see the results of any of those changes. But Tim Cook is getting older, I assume, that he doesn't appear to have some kind of magic time capsule that keeps him young. So I can understand wanting to pass the role on. I don't know, John Ternus seems like a good fit. He's been at Apple for plenty long enough to understand what the role entails, because I think that would be the biggest part of it. If somebody stepped into this role, for example, me and had no idea what they were doing, because you and I could both go, if we were CEO for a day, this is one thing we would do. And I would make the iPhone 18 Pro purple, for sure. But that's not exactly the sort of change that a CEO necessarily needs to be making. There's much bigger things with how to handle environmental policy and who do we hire to help us make sure that these things go correctly and so on and so forth. And getting the bigger view at the high level seems to be something that, from what I've heard, John Ternus will be very good at.

Speaker 1:
[24:11] Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I think a big, hearty congratulations to Ternus. And frankly, a huge thank you for the work that Tim Cook has done in the past. You know, there have been some recent requirements of the job and behaviors therein that have not been my favorite on Tim Cook's behalf. But I will say that overall, the CEO of Apple made a rather large impact on me personally. I remember when Tim Cook publicly came out as a gay man, and I remember reading his op-ed or letter or whatever you want to call it, and how much it meant to me at that time. And I remember emailing Tim Cook about how much it meant to me. And in his letter, this letter that he wrote to the community, he says something along the lines of like, I start each new day reading email and letters from people who are, you know, from customers who are changed by the technology that we make here. And I actually believe that he does do that because I wrote him this email ages ago thanking him for that letter that he wrote. Back then, and he responded and had, you know, really kind things to say. So I don't know, there's something. I think it's very difficult to have any level of down to earthedness when you are in such high positions of power. And whether it is a trained and feigned down earthedness, or if it's true down earthedness, obviously, I don't know. But I like to believe that it's real. And I think that it has come through up to the past, previous to the last few years, it has always come through with Cook. And I've always appreciated that about him and the work that he does. So yeah, congratulations to both of these individuals. And we can't wait to see what you do with it.

Speaker 2:
[27:02] Yeah, yeah. Especially with John Ternus being a hardware person. You know, I think that that is good. Tim Cook was a logistics person. And he brought in all of his knowledge and experience with logistics and all the improvements that he'd already made with Apple's logistics. There's a reason why there are so many iPhones and iPads and Apple Watches available for launch day, pickup and delivery. And that's thanks to Tim Cook. That's his legacy. He has solved that problem. There's no huge amount of stock in stores sitting there waiting to be sold, that they've accidentally over-ordered because they didn't know what they were going to do. He solved that problem. And John Ternus being an engineer, especially considering the current lack of availability of computer parts thanks to the huge rise of AI, I feel like having somebody who is an engineer at the helm, he's going to get creative and find some awesome solutions for this sort of thing, or at least I hope he is. So we'll cross our fingers and see what happens next.

Speaker 1:
[28:03] We will indeed. We will see how things play out. All right. Moving right along, it is time for the, well, the end of the show. It's time for app caps. And that means that this is the part of the show where we share with you apps and gadgets that we are using now or have been using for some time that we think are great and want to make sure that you know about them. Because, look, there are loads of apps out there that, I test a lot of apps. And there are so many apps that are sort of aimed at doing a specific task, right? Are aimed at editing PDFs. And you can find, you know, you can type in the word PDF and find dozens and dozens and dozens of apps. And I think that's one of the benefits that we have when we take the time to sort of look through what's out there and try to find something that we think is worth paying attention to, worth downloading, and worth keeping on your phone over time. Now, occasionally, what that means is coming across an app that has you kind of go, wow, you've really done the thing. I see what you did there, that's very clever. And one of those apps is a simple app called Frame. And Frame is an app for creating screenshots. Now, I have done, I've covered in the past the Pixel app that lets you create beautiful, sort of sewn together photos. But that's not the only method that is needed for being able to display a screenshot that you might have. And occasionally, I like to make a screenshot look really good. And that is where Frame comes into play, which gives you that ability to kind of make a beautiful screenshot that you can use. Sorry, I'm having trouble getting to it. Because I forget it's called Share Shot on in your apps, but it's called Frame Screenshots Share Shot in the app store. So that's where it gets a little confusing. So let me choose a screenshot that I can show here. We will go with this easy plant pairings screenshot. So on my phone, the cool thing about it is when you first open up the app, it will show you your last screenshot. So you can just tap on that, but then you can also import or pull from your library. Now, up top, you can see I've got my screenshot here. There's a little bit of a transparent background. In the bottom left-hand corner, I've got the formatting tab, which lets me do so much. I can have a clear background. I can have a background that is just a background of the screenshot. I can have a background that's a background of an image and you choose what image you want. You can do a color. What's great about it is you choose a color and then you can choose a shade of that color. So obviously, if we want to do a purple for Rosemary, we can. You can change the lighting so that it comes in on one side or the other. How much padding you have around the photo, and you can also change the type of device that you have around the outside and the color of the device. Right now I have silver. Obviously, we want to change that to cosmic orange. You can also, if you're listening to music, it's really cool because you can add a music photo album cover behind it. There are these really nice black backgrounds that have different sort of noise that you can add. There are textures and all sorts of things. So we'll go with the background that we have there. But the other option here that I like is that you can change how the image is cropped. So if I wanted a square one for Instagram, for example, hitting the plus icon in the middle will let you bring up other screenshots. And of course, we've got to check out the settings here as well, which give us the ability to export images in different ways. You can add new frames. So as new phones and devices come out, you're able to add those by making adjustments there. So I can see, you know, that's the 17 Pro Max and these variants and the 16 as well. And it is a really, really good app for adding screenshots in a way that again is very visually appealing. I think that it ends up being one of my go-to's when I am just working with a single screenshot. This will be, this is the one that I like to use. So yeah, check out, you can look up share shot or you can look up frame screenshots either or will, should get you to it. Now, Rosemary, do you want to show us your app cap this week?

Speaker 2:
[33:31] Yeah, yeah, I certainly can. And my app cap is a feature in photos that I think people kind of overlook at times. They forget it exists, but it's actually a really great way to just use the camera on your phone. So I was recently out walking in the woods. I had a dog and a small child with me as a companion, and I was being asked, what is this? To which the answer is, it's a flower. Cool, what kind of flower? I don't know what kind of flower that is, but by taking a photo on my phone, I can then use the really cool info button at the bottom, and it will actually try to identify what that is. So in this case, it's identified this flower here as Herb Robert. I don't know if that's actually right, but you know what? It seems close enough to me. If I then tap on it, then it will pop some results, including a Wikipedia page. It looks like it's a kind of geranium and show me other similar pictures. Now, some of these results are all excellent and they work, and sometimes it gets a little more generic. So this time, it's just show me plant, but then when you tap on the word plant, it's got a little arrow next to it, it shows me that it's an anemone blander, perhaps, which seems pretty cool. There is another one here that it can look up, and it reckons this is a speedwell, which interesting. It's certainly blue. What I really like about this is when you tap on that info, it slightly fades the rest of the picture, and it just highlights the part that it is focusing on. Which also funnily enough is the part that you can pick up and drag to put somewhere as a sticker if you want to. I've got some more. Those were identified, I believe, as cow slips. They were indeed. Then it can also do food. I've got a picture of some asparagus cooking here. I can see that, if I tap on it, it suggests that I was cooking a roast of asparagus with parmesan. I hate to tell you folks, that was actually butter. Now, it hasn't identified a Highland cow as a Highland cow, but it has identified it as a cow. Just for testing, because it does have a special feature with pets. Now, it has correctly identified this as my dog. But if I tap on info, it'll even show me he's a border collie. He has spent the whole day behind my chair because I was missing from him for this weekend. He was a little upset, so he spent most of the day trying to sit as close to me as he possibly can, which was very cute, but slightly impractical. But however, I did manage to get this shot of him. So yeah, I would highly recommend to use Visual Lookup to identify photos on iOS. You can also use it to identify things in videos, which can be really handy sometimes if you have managed to grab a video of something. And you want to learn more about it. So there we go. That's Visual Lookup.

Speaker 1:
[36:27] Alrighty, folks. That is going to bring us to the end of this episode of iOS Today. Yes, indeed. If you want to email us, iOS Today at twit.tv is how you get in touch. We'd love to hear from you. This is the part where I remind you about Club TWiT at twit.tv/clubtwit. Rosemary Orchard of People would like to follow you online and check out all the great work you're doing. Where should they go to do so?

Speaker 2:
[36:51] Their best place to go is rosemaryorchard.com, which has got links to all of the things and all the places you can find me, including social media, but it doesn't have a link to the Club TWiT Discord because you should sign up for Club TWiT to get access to that. So you can also find me there. We have a lovely section to chat about IOS Today as well as the live chat that Micah was mentioning. Micah, where can folks find you?

Speaker 1:
[37:13] If you're looking to follow me online, I'm at Micah Sargent on many a social media network where you can head to chihuahua.coffee.com, that's C-H-I-H-O-A, H-O-A.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Thank you so very much for being here today. We do appreciate it and we'll be back again next week with even more from iOS Today to you. Bye-bye, everyone.