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My Favourite iPhone XS Apps

2018-11-01 · Tech review, setup or bag tour · Ali · recording, 19:20 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Tools, apps and tech · mode: Review and recommendation · tags: Sponsor segment present, His medical past, His own numbers

Junior doctor Ali tours about 30 apps on his iPhone XS Max in six categories, from Outlook, Fantastical, Things, Google Drive and 1Password to Quizlet, Kindle, Bear, Evernote, Day One, Audible and Filmic Pro, saying why he uses or pays for each.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Ali introduces the apps on his iPhone in six categories

  • ★ Ali takes viewers through the apps on his iPhone, in six categories. — 00:00:00 · iPhone

00:00:29 — Organisation and productivity: Outlook, Fantastical, Things, Google Drive, 1Password

  • ★★ Ali's email client is now Microsoft Outlook: he had used Inbox by Gmail until Google announced it would retire it, then switched on The Verge's recommendation of the best iOS email client, and he really likes it. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Ali likes the calendar app Fantastical, a paid app for iOS and macOS, for its natural-language input: typing "pathology lecture tomorrow at 10 a.m. at LT1" creates the event with its place and time. — 00:01:00
  • ★★ Ali's to-do list app is Things, which he finds really well designed and built on the Getting Things Done approach; he sorts it into areas of his life such as work, SixMed, his online courses and YouTube. — 00:01:30 · Things 3, 6med
  • ★ Ali says Getting Things Done is a good book that viewers should read. — 00:01:30
  • ★★ Ali is more than happy to pay for premium apps, such as Things, that he thinks add a little value to his life in productivity and organisation. — 00:01:30 · Things 3
  • ★★ Ali has stored almost everything he has done for the last eight years on Google Drive; he pays £80 a year for its 1 TB option and has used about 300 GB of it. — 00:01:59 · Google Drive
  • ★★ Ali highly recommends Google Drive to anyone not using some kind of cloud backup. — 00:02:28 · Google Drive

00:02:57 — Education and learning: Rosetta Stone, Quizlet, Anki

  • ★★ Ali thinks his 1Password password-manager subscription is worth every penny, because a compromised account could be really bad for anyone whose whole life is on the internet. — 00:02:57
  • ★ Ali pays about 40 pounds a year for his 1Password subscription. (hedged) — 00:02:57
  • ★ Ali has been learning Japanese with Rosetta Stone, the video's sponsor, for the last few months, on and off, and is trying to build a habit of a little Japanese practice every day. — 00:02:57
  • ★★ Ali is reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, which he calls very good and tells viewers to check out. — 00:02:57 · Atomic Habits, James Clear
  • ★★ Ali has recently switched his flashcards from Anki, which he used at medical school, to Quizlet: it feels better designed and makes going through his cards more fun, while he used to find Anki a chore. — 00:03:47 · Quizlet, Anki
  • ★ In his preclinical years one to three, Ali used Anki to memorise anatomy and the lists of drugs in pharmacology, and found it really good for that. — 00:04:16 · Anki
  • ★★ All of Ali's books are on Kindle: he no longer uses physical books and has gone completely paperless. — 00:04:16 · Kindle

00:04:25 — Reading: Kindle, Pocket, Medium, Reader, Tweetbot, Goodreads

  • ★ Ali loves the Kindle app on his phone: he can turn its brightness right down so it does not strain his eyes. — 00:04:59 · Kindle
  • ★★ Ali recommends Pocket, which he uses to save articles to read later and has used since secondary school. — 00:04:59
  • ★ Ali subscribes to Medium for about five pounds a month and gets its daily digest email. (hedged) — 00:05:28
  • ★★ Ali recommends an RSS feed aggregator to anyone who follows a lot of blogs: rather than checking each website, he opens the app Reader about once a week to browse new articles. — 00:06:22
  • ★ Ali's Twitter client is Tweetbot, which he says does what it should. — 00:06:22 · Twitter
  • ★ When Ali first made a Goodreads account a few years ago, he spent a few fun hours adding every book he could remember reading, rating each out of five. — 00:06:50
  • ★★ Ali recommends Goodreads for tracking the books you have read: the initial setup of adding everything you have ever read is worth the time and quite fun. — 00:07:19

00:07:46 — Writing: Notability, Bear, Evernote, OneNote, Day One

  • ★★ Ali manages his hospital to-do list with Notability on the iPad; when the iPad ran out of battery during a shift, he added jobs on his phone and the synced note updated automatically. — 00:08:16 · Notability, iPad Pro
  • ★★ Ali says he will make a video at some point on how he uses Notability to manage his to-do lists. — 00:08:16 · Notability
  • ★★ For writing on the fly and drafting pieces for his email newsletter and blog, Ali uses Bear, a nicely designed app in which you write in Markdown. — 00:08:45 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★★ Ali, who had switched from Evernote to the minimalist Bear, has decided to give Evernote another try: he thinks it more full-featured, which he wants for notes for his upcoming postgraduate medical exams. — 00:09:14 · Evernote
  • ★★ Ali says he will report back once he has tested more iOS note-taking apps, such as Evernote, Bear and OneNote, and decided which is his favourite. — 00:09:14 · Evernote, Microsoft OneNote
  • ★★ In Evernote Ali has notebooks for the parts of his obstetrics and gynaecology syllabus, such as clinical skills and governance, and plans a separate note for each topic within them. — 00:09:43 · Evernote
  • ★★ Ali moved away from OneNote, which he used all through medical school, over a few little things he did not like, but keeps it on his phone to refer back to his medical school notes. — 00:10:13 · Microsoft OneNote
  • ★★ Ali keeps his journaling habit in the app Day One, which he really loves. — 00:10:42 · Day One
  • ★★ Day One makes adding to a journal very easy, which matters because, as Ali read on The Sweet Setup, quantity is what makes quality in a journal: the more you add over time, the better it is. — 00:10:42 · Day One
  • ★★ Ali journals in stints, posting every night and then going weeks without; he keeps separate Day One journals for his personal journal, for photos of memorabilia such as birthday cards, and for nice comments from YouTube and Instagram. — 00:11:09 · Day One, Instagram

00:12:03 — Audio and music: Spotify, Audible, Overcast, Ultimate Guitar Tabs

  • ★★ Spotify is Ali's music app: though fully an Apple fanboy with three HomePods, he hates Apple Music, having tried to switch to it twice and hated its user experience each time, and thinks Spotify a better product. — 00:12:03 · Spotify, Apple
  • ★★ Ali is listening to Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson, the second book of The Stormlight Archive, and recommends it. — 00:12:32 · Brandon Sanderson
  • ★★★ Ali says Audible has changed his life: he no longer dreads a long car or train journey, because he just puts on an audiobook. — 00:13:02 · Audible
  • ★★ Ali's recent favourite podcasts are The Ground Up Show by Matt D'Avella and The Tim Ferriss Show, which he has listened to for years, and occasionally he likes Sam Harris's podcast. — 00:13:31 · Matt D'Avella, The Tim Ferriss Show
  • ★★ Ali tells anyone who has not tried podcasts to check them out: they make long drives pleasant and you learn a lot; Overcast is his favourite podcast app so far, though he has tried few others. — 00:14:05
  • ★★ Ali learned to play the piano with the Ultimate Guitar Tabs app, which gives the chords for almost any song you type in. — 00:14:05
  • ★ Ali says the app lets you transpose a song that is too high, such as Shawn Mendes's In My Blood, which he practised that day, down by as much as eight semitones for a bass voice like his. — 00:14:40

00:15:09 — Photo and video: Preview, Lightroom, Spark Post, Filmic Pro, CutStory

  • ★ Ali uses the app Preview to plan his Instagram feed; at one point he tried to keep it to a consistent aesthetic theme. — 00:15:09 · Instagram
  • ★★ Ali edits his photos in Lightroom and likes that its iOS app has a lot of the desktop app's features. — 00:15:53 · Adobe Lightroom
  • ★ Ali finds the Lightroom presets he uses a lot nicer than the filters built into Instagram. — 00:15:53 · Adobe Lightroom, Instagram
  • ★★ Ali uses Adobe's Spark Post almost every week: it is how he makes all the thumbnails for his YouTube videos. — 00:16:22
  • ★★ Ali thinks that pretty much anything that reduces the friction of doing things in content production is worth it, such as making thumbnails in Spark Post instead of opening Photoshop. — 00:16:51 · friction
  • ★★ For vlogging on his iPhone, Ali's video app is Filmic Pro: he usually films at 25 frames per second and can switch to 1080p at 100 for slow motion; it is less good than a standard camera but fine for vlogging. — 00:17:50 · iPhone
  • ★ For Instagram stories Ali uses CutStory, which automatically cuts an uploaded video, such as one of him singing, into segments to post one after another. — 00:17:50 · Instagram

00:18:40 — Sign-off: more tech videos to come

  • ★★ Ali wants to make more tech videos like this one: he loves talking about tech and apps. — 00:18:40

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Audible · Google Drive · iPhone

Also: People: Brandon Sanderson · James Clear · Matt D'Avella · Sam Harris · Shawn Mendes

Projects: aliabdaal.com

Works: Atomic Habits · Getting Things Done · In My Blood · MRCOG · The Ground Up Show · The Stormlight Archive · The Tim Ferriss Show · Words of Radiance

Organizations: 6med · Apple · Instagram · The Sweet Setup · The Verge · Twitter

Concepts: friction

Products: 1Password · Adobe Lightroom · Adobe Photoshop · Adobe Spark Post · AirPods · Anki · Apple Music · Bear · Boosted Mini S · CutStory · Day One · Evernote · Fantastical · Feedly · Filmic Pro · Goodreads · HomePod · Inbox by Gmail · Instapaper · iPad Pro · Kindle · LastPass · Medium · Microsoft OneNote · Microsoft Outlook · Notability · Overcast · Pocket · Preview · Quizlet · Reader · Rosetta Stone · Spotify · Things 3 · Tweetbot · Ultimate Guitar

Only in the description or credits: iPhone XS Max

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