At the April meeting, held on the 21st, Robert gave us a tour of Apple’s new Clips app designed to quickly create fun videos for sharing on social media. This was followed by a show and tell session during which DavidK showed Apple’s new support app and Workflow, an app for automating tasks.
Clips
Clips is a new free iPhone and iPad app from Apple designed to help you easily make fun videos to share on social media.
Robert showed how video and photos can be easily recorded directly into a Clips project with effects, text and graphics added as they are recorded or afterwards. If you speak while recording, Clips can add text captions by automatically recognising what you say.
The app has a library of music you can use which is automatically timed to fit your clip perfectly. You can also use your own music and also optionally include the sound recorded with the video.
Here’s a (possibly funny) video Robert made with Clips:
Some useful tips from Robert:
- Save video and photos recorded in clips to Photos by tapping the download icon in the top right. They can then be used outside Clips.
- Any editing you do in Clips is non-destructive, you can always change effects or revert back to the plain video/photo you shot. Feel free to play around and try out options.
- Speech to text captions can be edited and corrected if you make a mistake or it misunderstands you. Beware however that if you make major edits the timing may be lost.
- The text in graphics and emoji you insert can be edited, simply tap the item to bring up the keyboard.
iMore has a comprehensive article on Clips if you’d like more information.
Apple Support App
DavidK showed us how logging in to the new Apple Support app with your Apple ID shows all the Apple products registered against that ID. You can then see the details of each product, the support options you have available and get answers to common questions and problems. It seems useful to have installed in case a problem occurs.
Workflow
DavidK told us how the team behind Workflow has recently been bought by Apple and their app has been made free to download.
Workflow can be used to automate tasks on iOS which usually take several actions or even add features that weren’t previously available. David showed us how he created a Workflow to save a Note from the Notes app into a file with a descriptive filename on iCloud Drive.
Workflow includes over 200 different actions and a gallery of pre-made Workflows to help you get started.
Show and Tell
DavidB mentioned a couple of useful iOS apps he’s found recently:
- iMore app - App for the popular technology web site which is kept up-to-date with lots of articles, buying guides and tips.
- Annotable - A useful tool for adding annotations (text, arrows, highlights etc.) to images.
Games
Several fun games for iPhone and iPad were also came up in conversation:
DavidB recommended:
DavidK recommended: