Over the holidays, Destin Sandlin from SmarterEveryDay released a video demonstrating how many popular smart home devices (like Google Home, Amazon Echo, and even Siri) can be fed voice commands from afar with a laser. If you haven't seen it yet, go give it a watch — it's a fascinating video. Importantly, as Destin points out, this exploit likely doesn’t present much risk to the average consumer — precisely aiming finely-tuned lasers, converting a voice message into the correct beam sequence, and having proper line of sight to the target device’s MEMS microphone all present roadblocks that make this strategy pretty impractical. That being said, understanding what access your smart assistants have to your light switches, locks, and garage doors — and how secure those assistants are — is important information you should equip yourself with. So, let’s see what options we protect Siri and your iPhone from attacks like this one, as well as others.

Disabling “Hey Siri” (or Siri Entirely)

The way the laser exploit in Destin’s video works is by targeting the MEMS microphone that listens for the “Hey Siri” summon phrase and the subsequent command. Naturally, the easiest way to prevent this laser hack — or just prevent someone with a similar-enough voice from activating Siri — is disabling “Hey Siri” entirely. This means you’ll have to long-press the side button to activate Siri manually, but nothing less than physical access to your device will allow someone to trick Siri into unlocking your doors. Navigate to Settings > Siri & Search and turn the "Listen for Hey Siri" toggle off. Now, even a precisely aimed laser with encoded voice instructions aimed at your phone won't be able to trigger any action by Siri. If you are extra concerned about someone misusing Siri (despite it's many useful features), you can also disable it entirely by toggling off both "Hey Siri" and "Press Side Button for Siri".

Disabling “Hey Siri” (or Siri entirely) will also protect you from anyone hijacking your voice assistant.

Limiting Access to Your Locked Device

Siri already restricts certain actions and requests if your phone is not unlocked — for instance, asking “Where is my wife?” to find their location using Find My always requires your iPhone to be unlocked. As Destin found out in his video, unlocking a smart lock or opening a garage door also requires your iPhone to be unlocked — the operating system understands that access to a physical location is being requested, so it rightly asks for some authentication.

These toggles will allow you to restrict access to certain features of your phone while it is locked.

When it comes to less sensitive requests (like turning on a smart lightbulb), Siri is more lax by default. Luckily, some granular control exists if you’re worried about covert efforts to dim your lights. If you navigate to the “Face ID & Passcode” page in Settings, there is a section called "Allow Access When Locked" with various toggles for different tools and features. As you might guess, toggling any one of these off means that feature cannot be accessed while the phone is locked. If you toggle "Home Control" off, voice commands involving smart home devices will require you to set up a HomeKit pin to control the devices with Siri — that is, unless you unlock your phone. Disabling HomeKit access from the lock screen prevents malicious actors equipped with either laser beams or good vocal impression skills from adjusting your thermostat without permission.

(While you're flipping these toggles anyway, consider securing your device further by turning off USB Accessory access.)

There is no shortage of diet and nutrition apps on the app store — apps designed for specific and rigorous dieting systems, services that harvest all of your dietary data to sell to third parties, and calorie-counting cudgels that all too often brow-beat their users over the smallest deviations from Ideal Intake™. Moderation — developed by Dominic Williams — is a food diary app that removes all of the least-pleasant aspects of diet tracking apps and focuses in on one simple question: Was your meal healthy or not?

Logging meals is as easy as tapping “Healthy” or “Unhealthy” — whatever that means for your goals.

Removing the Friction from Meal Tracking

Moderation's best feature is its simplicity — no need to scan barcodes or record calorie counts after every meal; all you do is click "Healthy" or "Unhealthy" in four daily categories (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and Snacks). What you consider to be a "Healthy" meal vs an "Unhealthy" meal is completely up to you and your diet tracking goals. For example, I have been trying to reduce the amount of sugar I add to my coffee every morning, so lately I have been rating my Breakfasts as "Healthy" or "Unhealthy" based on that metric. Folks who are trying intermittent fasting might rate a meal as "Healthy" if they ate nothing, and folks trying a plant-based diet might rate a meal as "Unhealthy" if they sneak in a little bacon. That's the beauty of Moderation: you can self-evaluate your daily meals based on what changes you are trying to make in your eating habits, or what dietary system you are trying to follow. This relieves much of the pressure that other diet and nutrition apps put on their users to meet a certain target, or stack up against some arbitrary standard — the same pressure and sense of judgement that so often causes people to give up on making healthier diet choices.

Useful features like rich notifications and Siri Shortcuts support make logging your meals as low-effort as possible.

Moderation also makes it easy to log your meals with custom-set reminders, rich notifications to quickly record a meal, and Siri Shortcuts support that allows you to integrate meal tracking into any of your custom Shortcuts routines. I often find myself struggling to consistently use habit-tracking apps because, well, I don't get into the habit of tracking my habits. Moderation's built-in reminder system has made it easy for me to quickly log a meal right from the notification, and Siri Shortcuts support has helped me make sure I log my healthy (or unhealthy) eating habits every day.

Design Aligned with Purpose

Moderation's simple and straightfoward premise is packaged with an appealing, elegant design as well as intuitive, clear feedback mechanisms. Each day in a month-view calendar is given a gradient from green to red based on what proportion of that day's meals were rated as "Healthy" or "Unhealthy". Streaks of all-healthy days are celebrated in the month-view, and used as a goal to beat in the "Keep Motivated" section (notably, "Unhealthy" streaks are not as prominently displayed, in keeping with the apps positive and encouraging style). Even the button design for each meal reaffirms the relaxed nature of Moderation, with clever use of Emoji to visually represent both "Healthy" (🥑,🥗,🍲,🍏) and "Unhealthy" (🙈,🍕,🍔,🍩) meals.

My worst eating day tends to be Friday, because Friday night is D&D night — AKA fast food and candy night!

Basic metrics are maintained on-device to give you insight on what days of the week you often struggle to eat healthy, and which meals usually trip you up on any given day. A running percentage of healthy meals provides a quick glimpse of your eating habits over the last seven days and the current month. Importantly, Moderation has a user-first privacy stance; all of the data you log in Moderation is kept on-device, and there are no ads or other data-harvesting components in the app — making it a great choice for the privacy-conscious.

"Moderation in All Things"

I've been using Moderation for about a month to track my own diet, and I've never had more success with habit tracking in any other app. However, there are some features (some apparently on the horizon) that I wish Moderation would add to really flesh out the experience. Repeating reminders (like those offered by Due) would make it even harder to forget to log a meal. Additional data visualization options, custom goal setting, and the ability to export your data would all be welcome additions to an already excellent app.

There are many good diet tracking apps out there — Moderation is a great diet tracking app because of the uniquely positive, balanced, and affirming way in which it is designed. Scanning food barcodes is laborious, counting calories often brings feelings of shame and failure, and strict definitions of "Healthy" and "Unhealthy" often don't fit with a person's unique goals. Moderation avoids all these pitfalls while still delivering useful metrics for self-evaluation and motivational encouragement to continue improving your diet. Tracking your eating habits has never been so easy, or more importantly: so painless. Moderation is available for free on the app store.

On Episode #5 of Adapt, Federico challenged Ryan to find two apps capable of searching very large PDFs using Optical Character Recognition (OCR for short). OCR is a really handy tool for reviewing long manuscripts that are often in PDF form — I use OCR in one form or another quite often, and it has saved me a hefty amount of time.

In the episode, Ryan set himself a rule: He didn’t want to spend any money on this challenge. In doing so, he found two scanner apps that allowed him to complete the challenge by way of 30-day free trials. I also didn’t want to spend any money on this challenge, but unlike Ryan I remembered that I already paid for an app that supports PDF search using OCR: GoodNotes.

An OCR App With Built-In Note-Taking

If you haven’t heard of GoodNotes, suffice it to say that it is perhaps the best note-taking app available on iOS (Notability is it’s equal — aesthetic preference is often the only tie-breaker) — custom templates, fluid handwriting, and extensive features like automatic shape drawing set it apart from nearly all its competition. But did you know that GoodNotes can make a 900+ page PDF searchable in mere minutes with OCR?

GoodNotes has long had a search feature in its app that allows you to quickly find text in individual notebooks (and now across all notebooks) via OCR. It works blazingly quickly, and I use it often to find specific details in my handwritten meeting notes or in annotations on lecture slides. However, if you combine this OCR search with GoodNotes’ support for both scanning and uploading PDFs you can easily turn large documents into searchable PDFs using OCR.

GoodNotes was able to index all 974 pages of the Affordable Care Act using OCR in under two minutes.

For my testing, I wanted to go a little bigger than Ryan’s ~400 page PDF — I figured more than doubling the page count with a copy of the 974-page Affordable Care Act would do the trick. Even with such a large document, going from import to searching keywords took under five minutes using GoodNotes’ built-in OCR. Perhaps more impressive is that GoodNotes apparently does all of this magic using Apple’s native Vision and Natural Language Parsing tools, because I ran a test while in Airplane Mode and got the exact same speedy results.

More Than Just PDF Search

Beyond the already-useful feature of creating searchable PDFs, GoodNotes has some extra tools to give you even more flexibility when working with OCR’d documents. Highlighting OCR’d text not only allows you to easily copy and paste snippets from the PDF, but GoodNotes allows you to highlight or strikeout the OCR’d text as well. In addition, GoodNotes supports character recognition in 17 languages, expanding access to this feature across the globe. Lastly, GoodNotes seemingly allows you to export an editable version of this PDF (optionally including your annotation if needed), which in theory means that you can revise the PDF document in a program like Adobe Acrobat or the like (though I have not been able to test this).

Highlighting and adding strikethrough to OCR’d text, full PDF export support, and support for 17 languages makes GoodNotes an excellent OCR app.

Adapt #5 Challenge, Evaluated:

Although I didn’t adhere to Federico’s requirement of finding two OCR apps, I think I accomplished the spirit of this challenge by finding a new use for an app I already use daily. Working primarily on an iPad sometimes requires you to use the wrong app in an unexpected way to get something done — GoodNotes will probably be my go-to app from now on for using OCR on large PDF documents (while remaining my favorite note-taking app as well!), even though that isn’t the main purpose of the app. You might say I’ve adapted it to my needs.

Editor’s Note: You caught me — I’m skipping some of the Adapt Challenges. I’ve decided (partially from getting so behind on the podcast) that I’ll try to accomplish the ones I find are the most useful as learning tools for the average iPad user (especially students).

As ambient noise machines find their way into more corporate offices, retail spaces, and infant nurseries, ambient noise apps have also grown in popularity. Joining that list today is Dark Noise for iOS — an excellent ambient noise app developed by Charlie Chapman.

Why All The Noise?

Ambient noise machines and apps like Dark Noise have numerous uses and benefits. Some people find that they or their infants sleep better when playing ambient noise. Others, myself included, find that ambient noise helps them to focus on the task at hand, or remain productive in a noisy environment (for the nerdy: here is one of the many studies highlighting the cognitive benefits of ambient noise).

Dark Noise caters to these needs with a comprehensive list of over 30 sounds to choose from, and a simple UI that lets you pick a sound and get back to what you were doing — be it sleep or work. While beta testing Dark Noise, I have experienced first-hand the productivity benefits of ambient noise; Dark Noise has quickly become one of my most-used apps.

Integrations and Customizations

Although at its core Dark Noise is just a list of looping soundbites, it supports many useful features and integrations that satisfy the needs of power users as well. As you might expect, Dark Noise has an optional sleep timer with both countdown and fixed-time support, a Favorites feature to keep your most-used sounds easily accessible at the top of the list, and AirPlay support (with full AirPlay 2 support on the way).

Beyond the basics, Dark Noise also has a customizable widget that allows you to quickly start any noise from the Widget page (or perhaps the iPadOS home screen). In addition, each sound in Dark Noise has its own action in Siri Shortcuts, allowing you to integrate Dark Noise into any number of your Shortcuts routines. I myself have used the Shortcuts actions to incorporate Dark Noise into my simple Bedtime shortcut, kicking off ambient Campfire noises before I head to sleep.

Sleep timers, Siri Shortcuts support, and a customizable Widget each add a useful way to interact with Dark Noise.

Not Just Nice on the Ears

A good ambient noise app has a quality selection of sounds to choose from — a great ambient noise app has a beautiful design to match. This is where Dark Noise distinguishes itself from many other apps in the category — the developer has invested so much time and care into the artful details of this app that you can't help but appreciate them. Dark Noise has eight custom Themes and 22 custom app icons (many of which are creative takes on some of my favorite podcasts' artwork), and the developer doesn't seem eager to stop adding new ones any time soon.

All eight of Dark Noise’s custom themes, with no signs from the developer that the list will stop growing.

However, it's the little things that I've appreciated most about Dark Noise's design. For example, when favoriting a sound the Favorite heart is filled with a subtle but whimsical animation. Each sound has a unique minimalist icon designed by Charlie himself — but by far my favorite details are the animations on the Now Playing screen. Each of the custom-designed icons also have custom animations that move almost rhythmically as the sound plays in your ears. I only wish iOS supported animated lock screen thumbnails so I wouldn't have to leave my phone unlocked to enjoy them.

Each sound icon has its own custom animation that pleasantly loops on the Now Playing screen.

Wishlist and Outro

I can't overstate how much I've enjoyed adding Dark Noise to my workflow (and sleepflow!), and I'm looking forward to some of my wishlist items making it into future releases. For example, an upload feature for adding my own sound files to the app would be a welcome addition. Folders and/or collapsible sound categories would also be a nice touch to clean up the main table view, especially as the list of out-of-the-box sounds naturally grows with each update. Perhaps my most wished-for feature are some spooky dungeon sounds to use as ambiance during D&D sessions — the moment I gave Dark Noise a try I knew it would be a killer addition to my Dungeon Master toolkit.

Dark Noise is a simple and elegant ambient noise app that strikes just the right balance between beauty and function. The developer has also done an excellent job at communicating with his beta testers and incorporating that feedback into the app — foreshadowing similar responsiveness as the app is pushed out to a public audience, which I find incredibly valuable. Dark Noise has been an incredible addition to my home screen, and has single-handedly refocused my attention on many pressing projects over the last few weeks — perhaps it could have the same effect on your productivity. Dark Noise is available today for $3.99 on the app store.

Dr. Drang over at leancrew.com just wrote up an excellent article assessing the randomness of James Thompson's new app Dice by PCalc (which I have been running the beta of since around launch). In the post, they give a nice explanation of the Chi-Square test and how he used it to test just how random the app's dice rolls were. You can check out the post (and the results!) here.

Now it was time to analyze the data. First, I cleaned up the data by searching for all the newline characters and deleting them. That gave me one long string of numerals that I could paste into my Python analysis script.

The purpose of the script is to count all the occurrences of each number. We can then use the chi-square test to see if the counts are close enough to equal to be considered uniformly distributed.

This is both a fun test of a dice app's randomness in a statistical sense, as well as a good example of how the Chi-Square test assesses if differences from an expected value are the result of chance or not.

Like most students, on any given day I have a long list of to-do items related to my coursework, research goals, and life in general. In the past, I have used the stock Reminders app on iOS for my many to-do items — but the problem I ran into was that I didn't actually complete the tasks after the reminder popped up. I found that I often read the notification and quickly went back to whatever activity I was doing at the time, completely disregarding the thing that I needed to do. That is, until I found Due.

Due's Distinguishing Feature

Due is a reminder app with a unique feature that sets it apart from its competition: persistent reminders. When you set up a reminder in Due, not only do you set the time you want to be reminded, but you also set up an Auto-Snooze time — the time interval you will be re-reminded of the task. In other words, Due reminders pester you until you acknowledge them in some way, either by actually marking the task as complete or snoozing it to a later time. This feature has significantly reduced the number of reminders I get a notification for but then immediately forget about on my lock screen.

Due’s key feature is that reminder notifications repeat until you snooze or complete them.

The nature of Due's pestering notifications means that I tend to use it for time-sensitive reminders or reminders for things I really don't want to do, and less for general tasks and events (which tend to wind up in Fantastical, my calendar app of choice). For example, I often use Due to remind me when an assignment for a class needs to be submitted online so I don't accidentally space it off — this has saved my bacon on more than one occasion! Full support for repeating reminders in Due also means that daily, weekly, or monthly reminders like taking my morning allergy pill or paying our rent don't slip through the cracks.

The Fine Details

Beyond its full support for typical functions like repeating reminders, Due also offers a wide variety of customizations and other useful features to its users. For example, Due uses natural language processing when creating reminders rather than relying entirely on date and time scroll wheels like many other apps. I have found that adding reminders with natural language processing is far faster and intuitive than scrolling through three different wheels to set a reminder for a specific time.

Due’s natural language parsing allows for quickly creating a reminder via text alone

The Notification Snooze menu seen when tapping a Due notification can be customized to your heart's content, allowing you to set up multiple custom snooze durations as well as set times of day that the current reminder can be postponed to if needed. The Auto-Snooze duration (i.e. how long until each reminder pesters you again) can also be set for all newly created reminders, or manually adjusted for each reminder as you create them.

Due’s settings menu allows easy customization, while it’s notification snooze options allow for quickly triaging new reminders.

Due natively supports syncing its reminders via iCloud, and can also pull its list of reminders from specific lists within the native Reminders app. Lastly, custom sound effects, haptic feedback controls, and a Dark Mode toggle are excellent user experience options baked right into the app.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Due is an excellent iOS reminder app that can be finely tailored to your preferences, and uniquely solves the problem of ineffective reminder notifications. Since I started using Due, I've missed fewer deadlines, more consistently journaled at night, and less-often kicked myself for forgetting my allergy medicine in the morning. Due is the perfect reminder app for procrastinators and "space cadets" like myself who need a little extra prodding to actually do the things on our to-do list — I certainly would be far less productive without it. Due is $4.99 on the App Store.

Airmail, a very popular email client for Mac and iOS, announced this week that it was reshuffling its pricing strategy — the app is now free to download, with numerous "optional" features locked behind a new subscription ($2.99/month or $9.99/year). I say "optional" because included in this list of pay-walled features are notifications — something most consider an essential function of any email application. Another damning component of this rollout was the fact that users were notified in the app the day the changes went into effect — no forewarning or advanced explanation of the reasons behind this change took place. Naturally, many users of Airmail are incredibly frustrated with both the way these changes were announced as well as the changes themselves. Although I don't use Airmail personally, I'm still frustrated with how this went down because it muddies the waters for other independent developers also considering subscription pricing.

There have been a lot blog posts and podcast segments about this situation (and yet here I am adding to the pile) — but I think the conversation that best captures how I feel was on this week's episode of Connected. Stephen, Federico, and (half of) Myke excellently explain the blowback to this pricing change, and even share some advice that developers considering subscription pricing plans might benefit to hear. Stephen hits the nail on the head as to why this decision hurts so badly:

Stephen Hackett sums up my feelings on this Airmail situation on the latest episode of Connected.

When your strategic advantage is being a thoughtful, independent developer with a devoted user base, mistakes like this can easily be deadly. Hopefully Airmail reassess this decision and considers what steps they can take to regain their users trust — and hopefully other developers will learn from Airmail's mistake.

On episode two of Adapt, both Ryan and Federico had a challenge that they each had to report back on — Ryan had to use a third-party HomeKit app to control his smart home devices, and Federico had to write and publish an article entirely using Apple Notes. Given the fact that A. I do not have very many smart home devices, and B. the Apple Notes challenge seemed more interesting to me, I decided to only tackle that challenge for the purposes of this article.

To accomplish this challenge, I attempted to write and publish my recent review of the Microsoft Universal Foldable Keyboard entirely using Apple Notes. Here's how it went:

Manual Markdown's Mediocrity

Typically, I write my posts in Markdown using Ulysses — I find its minimalist interface combined with its live Markdown preview to be very useful when adding links or formatting to a post. Apple Notes, however, does not support Markdown in its text editor — you either need to write using rich text or enter the Markdown formatting manually in plain text in order to get the results you expect. For a moment, I considered writing the post using rich text (since I use Microsoft Office so often, this is just as natural for me), but ran into an issue fairly critical to writing a blog post: links. To my knowledge, there isn't an easy way to give a URL a title in Apple Notes — a non-starter in a medium that thrives on in-text links. So, manually typing out the Markdown was the way to go.

Manually typing out Markdown syntax turned out to be easier than dealing with Rich Text while writing an article in Apple Notes.

Once I was set on manually typing out the Markdown syntax in Apple Notes, writing the article actually wasn't so bad. As it turns out, most text editors can handle most of the text-editing you throw at them. Yes, I did miss the live Markdown preview that Ulysses provides, but if you spend enough time commenting on Reddit you get pretty accustomed to looking at plain text Markdown and translating it. In addition, Federico was kind enough to provide a universal Preview Markdown Shortcut that takes anything written in plain-text Markdown and preview it with HTML in a pop-up web view. This gave me the option to at least check my work, in case I had misplaced a bracket or parenthesis while typing.

Using the Preview Markdown shortcut that Viticci shared allowed me to find small typos in my text — like the missing space after my Title header!

Using Apple Notes also didn't impact the way I embed images in my posts. I use a custom Shortcut to upload image(s) from my Cameral Roll, add alt text and a caption, and generate HTML text that ultimately displays the image on my website. This works just as well in any text editor, since what I insert is plain-text anyway.

Federico also mentioned an issue he ran into with the way Apple Notes deals with URLs — specifically, Apple Notes can show you a “card” of the URL rather than the plain text URL needed for Markdown links. I did not run into this problem while copy/pasting links into my Notes document. One theory I have is that this “card” view only occurs when you drag and drop URLs from an app into Apple Notes. I probably avoided it since I habitually tap the Safari URL bar to manually copy the text anyway.

Between a Rock and a Squarespace

Although I didn't have any problems writing the post itself in Apple Notes, the challenge dictates that I also have to publish from Apple Notes as well. Federico accomplished this using a Shortcut tied into his WordPress back-end — a logical approach, considering how well-integrated WordPress is with so much of the web. Unfortunately for me, Peer Reviewed is a Squarespace site, which significantly limits my options for automating a blog post. The only streamlined way to publish a blog post on a Squarespace site is using a bookmarklet they provide — which really just opens the typical blog post menu and doesn't help me publish from Apple Notes. So, this is where I failed this Adapt challenge. However, in the spirit of Adapt, I still published the article entirely on my iPad using the Squarespace app (which was significantly improved just in time for Safari on iPadOS to render it useless).

Publishing a post to Squarespace from their iOS app has significant limitations, but gets the job done.

Transferring my Markdown text from Apple Notes to Squarespace's Markdown editor was easy enough, but the settings menu for the post was lacking in features I've grown to expect on the desktop site. The post URL did not follow my site-wide URL format and had to be manually modified, and I was unable to add any Tags or Categories that didn't already exist in my list. Other than those gripes, the article did get published so at least the Squarespace app could manage that.

Adapt Challenge #2, Evaluated

Although I failed this Adapt challenge, it still got my wheels turning on improvements to my writing workflow (and my website hosting choices). I'm already pondering Shortcuts that might streamline the publishing process even more for future articles, and may do some write-ups on them another time. That being said, I'm already back to writing in Ulysses and relegating Apple Notes to grocery lists and "notes I might need in a year".

Editor's note: At some point while writing this article, the Universal Foldable Keyboard has been removed from Microsoft's online store. I think they may have discontinued the product, though you can still find used ones online.

When you chose to replace your laptop with an iPad Pro, you are instantly faced with additional decisions to make and trade-offs to weigh. One such decision is what keyboard you plan to use with your iPad, and the trade-offs involved are many. Do you favor the slimness, portability, and feel of Apple's Smart Folio Keyboard? Do you prefer a more stationary yet more beautiful option like Matt Gemmell's favored WASD mechanical keyboards? Personally, part of why I enjoy using the iPad Pro as my primary device is its slimness and portability, which means those factors weigh heavily on my choice of keyboard. However, I can't stand the Smart Folio Keyboard. It's keys feel like mush to me, and the way the new design looks while folded — keys facing out for the world to see? Disgusting.

My current keyboard of choice is Microsoft's Universal Foldable Keyboard. I had never heard of this product until I saw a fellow student in a lecture hall using it with his iPad Pro, and immediately knew I had to give it a try. At the time, I was using Apple's Magic Keyboard as my daily driver, so I'll be primarily using that as a benchmark in this review.

Prioritizing Portability

As you might guess, the very fact that I am using a foldable keyboard means that I’m a big fan of compactness — and the Microsoft's Universal Foldable Keyboard really hits this mark. It takes up an incredibly small space for what unfolds to be a full-sized keyboard, all while compromising very little on overall quality of life. While folded, the Universal Foldable Keyboard is about the same thickness as the larger side of the Apple Magic Keyboard — but with half the footprint. In addition, this unique folding design also allows for a unique pairing system: Unlike the Magic Keyboard (which needs to be physically turned on and the keys mashed to pair), the Universal Foldable Keyboard is automatically powered-on and paired when you unfold it. The logic behind this is so obvious when you think about it, but the best comparison I have for this intuitive implementation is the same magic that AirPods have — the action of taking the device out automatically gets it ready for use.

The Universal Foldable Keyboard is about as thick as the Magic Keyboard when folded, but takes up half of the space.

The crucial design element that enables its compact form factor is a split keyboard layout. There is a physical gap between each half of the keyboard (between 6 and 7 on the number line) that creates a crease where the thin leatherette material can fold in half. This design choice significantly changes how you type while using the Universal Foldable Keyboard, and it really does take a while to get used to. When I first purchased the keyboard and gave it a test run, it felt like I was back in 2nd grade learning how to type using the home-row. However, after a few days of frustrating practice with the split layout, I was back to my usual typing speed.

Design and Build

Overall, the Microsoft Universal Keyboard has excellent build quality. The chicklet keys feel very much like the ones on Microsoft’s Surface Pro line, and even in this slim design have excellent key travel and tactile feel. The leatherette exterior lining of the keyboard is pleasant to the touch and claims to be “moisture resistant” (though I can’t say I have tested this myself). According to Microsoft, the battery should last three months of regular use, comparable to the Magic Keyboard's quoted battery life. Unfortunately, the Universal Portable Keyboard charges via MicroUSB, adding another cable to my every-day-carry.

Microsoft’s Universal Foldable Keyboard includes media control keys and a toggle between two paired Bluetooth devices.

The keys themselves are full-sized, with very little spacing between them — habitual users of the Magic Keyboard might initially notice that the keys feel cramped in comparison, but I quickly got used to the tightly packed arrangement. As this is a universal keyboard, Microsoft includes an “Alt/Option” key, a “Fn/⌘ Cmd” key, and a toggle that allows you to indicate which operating system you are using (iOS, Android, or Windows) — which, importantly, impacts what keyboard shortcuts are recognized by the device you are using.

Of note, the Microsoft Universal Keyboard can be simultaneously paired with two devices at once via Bluetooth, and has hardware keys dedicated to toggling between each device. This is especially useful when multitasking with both my iPad and my iPhone — I can by writing an article in Ulysses on my iPad and quickly toggle the keyboard to my iPhone to respond to an iMessage conversation without lifting my hands from the keyboard. I could easily see many users pairing this keyboard to both a Mac/PC and an iPad to eliminate the need for two keyboards at a desk.

The keyboard also comes with hardware Home, Search, and Lock keys; though I typically use ⌘+H for Home and ⌘+Space for Search on my iOS devices. The Lock key aside, I would much rather this real estate be dedicated to what this keyboard is lacking, specifically a hardware Siri key (like the popular Brydge Keyboard has) and the “Eject” key found on Apple’s Magic Keyboard. I can hardly fault Microsoft for not integrating Siri directly into its universal keyboard, but I do sorely miss the Eject button when I am using the keyboard and want to quickly bring up a software keyboard like Yoink or the Emoji keyboard. Although Ctrl+Space does allows you to scroll through software keyboards on iOS, I’ve had mixed luck with this command actually ejecting the keyboard on the screen. My current solution (when I’m feeling lazy) is to use the Bluetooth device toggle to disconnect the keyboard from my iPad, resulting in the software keyboard ejecting as expected.

Final Comments

Overall, I’ve greatly enjoyed switching to the Microsoft Universal Foldable Keyboard as my go-to device for working on my iPad. The nature of my workflow means that portability carries a high premium, making the small size of this keyboard a huge win. What I enjoy most about the iPad Pro is its flexibility — in one moment it can be a glass slate for capturing ideas with the Apple Pencil, and in another it can be propped up with a folded Smart Folio and instantly paired with a keyboard I just slipped out of my bag. Although the Magic Keyboard allowed me to do this as well, the small reductions in friction allowed by the Universal Foldable Keyboard’s unique pairing strategy combined with being 50% the physical size makes it an easy winner, even in spite of my minor complaints.

Over at MacStories, Federico Viticci and Ryan Christoffel have started a new podcast on RelayFM called Adapt — a podcast entirely dedicated to their love of the iPad. A key element of this new podcast are the "challenges" that the hosts give each other to stretch the boundaries of what they can do on iOS (iPadOS? This transition is going to be difficult). Since I also consider my iPad Pro my primary productivity device, I've decided to participate in the challenges presented on each new episode of Adapt. In episode one, Ryan challenges Federico to add a third-party iOS keyboard to his workflow, so I've done the same by trying out Yoink's third-party iOS keyboard for the first time.

Yoink is a clipboard manager/"shelf" app for iOS and the Mac that allows you to store snippets of text, URLs, images, and even files for easy access when you need them. Although the app itself is fully-featured and incredibly useful, I'll primarily be focusing on it's third-party keyboard integration in this article.

The Keyboard for All of Your Content

Yoink the app and the third-party keyboard both serve the same basic purpose: to deliver content you need to where you need it. If you frequently use a large snippet of text, you can store it in Yoink for easy access. If you're constantly sharing the same file with a team, toss it in Yoink and it'll always be handy. If you regularly send the same meme, well, you get the picture. Prior to using Yoink, I had never used a snippet manager of any kind (such as the ever-popular Text Expander) — but after using Yoink's third party software keyboard for a couple of weeks, I'll never be able to go back. Even though my current snippet collection is relatively small, Yoink and its software keyboard have already saved me enough time and energy to justify the one-time purchase price of $5.99.

My primary use-case for Yoink's software keyboard has been text snippets. As part of my work I have to access the same app on my iPad Pro upwards of 20 times a day, and due to the nature of the app, a specific URL needs to be entered every time (in addition to traditional login credentials). Although only about 25 characters long, typing in this URL is often the most tedious part of my day. Thanks to Yoink's software keyboard, this repetitive headache has been completely eliminated — now I can simply two-finger-tap the appropriate text snippet and the text field is auto-filled with the URL. Yoink also supports drag-and-drop on the iPad, but in most situations I find the two-finger tap to be faster.

Quickly inserting a snippet into a text field is easy with drag-and-drop or a two-finger tap on iPad.

I also moderate a few subreddits, so sending canned responses using Yoink's software keyboard to common rule violations or lost Redditors has been a big time-saver as well. The snippets can be modified to include Markdown formatting as plain-text, which Reddit quickly translates into its "Snoodown" format — catching all of the URLs and subreddit links I want to include.

Using Yoink to quickly send canned responses on subreddits I moderate is another useful timesaver.

As I mentioned above, Yoink is definitely not limited to just text snippets — images, files, or any other attachments you can think of can just as easily be accessed from Yoink's software keyboard. Though I haven't found a file or image I send frequently enough to justify keeping it in Yoink, I ran a quick test with a picture of our dog. As expected, accessing the image was just as fast as using the Photos iMessage app, but without the need to find the image since it was already stored in Yoink. Just tap the image or file to copy, and paste it into the iMessage text field to send.

Sending images and files with Yoink’s software keyboard is a breeze — just copy and paste.

Opportunities for Improvement

Although Yoink is already an incredibly feature-rich app, I have some suggestions for further improving its software keyboard. First and foremost: Please, for the love of God switch the position of the Device Switcher and the Keyboard Switcher ("Globe" icon) on the iPad — I still habitually tap the sample location to quickly switch between software keyboards, and this tiny difference ruins that process. Quite honestly, all software keyboards should be required to place the Keyboard Switcher icon in the same space to avoid this confusion. It's just the decent thing to do.

Second, a feature I found while searching the app store for other third party keyboard options was a system for postioning the cursor after a text snippet is inserted — for example, if the text snippet says:

The quick ** fox jumps over the lazy dog

it would be nice if Yoink could recognize the two asterisks and automatically place the cursor in between them and delete them from the snippet. This sort of "placeholder" text for the cursor would make some of my snippets even more useful, as currently I have to manually place the cursor in areas of the text that need individual customization after pasting. Obviously, the placeholder characters would need to be considered carefully to not break existing text snippets, but I think this feature has some serious potential.

Adapt Challenge #1, Evaluated

Although I didn't look much further than the show notes to find a software keyboard for the first Adapt Challenge, trying out Yoink was definitely worth my time. I am a little late to the game when it comes to using snippet manangers on iOS, but I think Yoink has just the right level of complexity for my needs. Although it lacks some of the features of more robust software (Text Expander again being the prime example), all I really need in my snippet manager is to quickly paste words into a text field. Yoink covers these needs quite well, despite my wishes for custom cursor placeholders to be added.

Since downloading Yoink for the purposes of this challenge, I've quickly adopted it into my workflow and often use it multiple times a day. Seamless storage and insertion of frequently-used text snippets makes Yoink an incredibly useful app for just about anyone using an iPad or iPhone to get things done.