Saturday, March 06, 2021

Picture This

If you're like me, you've got sticky notes covering every inch of every service of your vast empire.

If you're really like me, those sticky notes are all virtual. Mostly they take the form of "hey Siri, remind me in an hour to do a thing." They end up in my Reminders app and I can route them to whatever todo app they belong to.

The Apple Watch makes that super convenient. Raise your wrist, speak the magic phrase (or hold down the giant button) and remember to include a time, so it will put a badge on the reminder app.

Sometimes, though, there's a glitch. From Apple, can you even believe it? If Steve Jobs were alive, this would be solved by now, but he's not, and that's just how life goes.

Uh oh, something's wrong. Please try again. Oddly enough, if you try again, it will work. But if you've said something brilliant and you're not sure you can re-create it, here's a way to capture it: Apple Watch Screen Capture.

So it turns out that if you press the two buttons on the side of your Apple Watch, it will take a screenshot. I think you have to go to settings to enable that, which you should do before you need it, right? This will show up in your Photo Library as a PNG. And now you've got your brilliant utterance, or whatever gibberish Siri thinks you said.

And if you're like me, you've got a reminder to look at your Photo Library every now and then, because otherwise who knows when you'd ever see it, right?


Update (5/14/21): for what it's worth, I hardly ever see this anymore - the WatchOS 7.4 update must have fixed whatever was causing so many Siri problems. So thanks, Apple!