The first episode of the In the News podcast for 2022 is now available. After talking about Apple’s 15 years of supporting PRODUCT(RED), Brett and I discuss one of the big themes from CES this past week: new home automation products, including products that work with the new Matter and Thread protocols. Brett and I look forward to a day (hopefully soon!) when all of your home devices can talk to each other regardless of whether they are part of the Apple, Amazon, Google, or Samsung world. We also discuss the latest news on Find My with new ways to find lost AirPods, backpacks, and wallets. We then discuss Apple’s latest video, showing that an Apple Watch can help you call 911 in an emergency. And we also discuss a brand new feature for the Readdle’s PDF Expert: conversion from PDF to Word and other formats.
In our In the Know segment, Brett shares a tip for sending a PDF file via the Messages app. I share a tip for quick access to the most important folders and mailboxes in the Mail app.
Apple has now been working with PRODUCT(RED) for 15 years, making special versions of its products that are red. When you buy these products, a portion of what you pay goes to fight AIDS. According to this page, Apple has raised nearly $270 million for (RED) during the past 15 years. A new short video celebrates that partnership and notes that part of fighting AIDS today is fighting COVID, which I suppose makes perfect sense when you are trying to treat people around the world. And now, the news of note from the past week
Mobile, Alabama attorney Carter Hale wrote an excellent article on using technology to give presentations at trial in the Winter 2021 edition of the Tennessee Defense Lawyers Association Journal, and his article is packed with tips for using TrialPad on an iPad. You can click here to see an electronic version of the issue, and the article starts on page 8.
I often link to articles written by California attorney David Sparks of the MacSparky website. In this post, David explains that he has decided to stop practicing law so that he can devote 100% of his time to helping people use technology, through his MacSparky site, his video field guides, etc. That should mean that there are even more interesting articles written by David for me to mention here on iPhone J.D. Good luck to David as he begins this new chapter of his life.
Federico Viticci of MacStories reviews Remind Me Faster, an app that helps you to very quickly add an entry to the built-in Reminders app.
At the CES convention this week, Belkin announced that its upcoming smart home products would work with Matter and the Thread mesh protocol, a new smart home standard that Apple created with Amazon, Google, and Samsung to eventually replace Apple’s HomeKit and other technologies. Michael Potuck of 9to5Mac shares some of the details.
I’m typically a big fan of Apple’s Memories feature. It almost always shows me pictures and videos that bring a smile to my face, and thanks to the Photos widget, I don’t even have to open the Photos app to know that there is something new to see. But as Stephen Hackett of 512 Pixels notes, sometimes Memories can be less desirable, such as when it resurfaces a painful event such as January 6, 2021, or when it shows pictures of someone who you no longer want to see.
I’ve heard of some people placing an Apple AirTag in a wallet to find it if you lose it. I understand the desire to do that, but the AirTag is rather large for that purpose. Chance Miller of 9to5Mac discusses the new Chipolo Card Spot, a thin card that works like an AirTag (including Find My compatibility) but is easier to fit in a wallet.
Speaking of Find My, Glenn Fleishman explains in an article for Macworld that if Find My indicates that a device is in one location but that seems wrong, it may be because a Wi-Fi router was relocated.
Patrick McGee of Ars Technica notes that this past week, Apple became the first company to ever hit a market capitalization of $3 trillion (the price of a stock multiplied by the number of outstanding shares). Just as impressive, Apple’s value rose by $1 trillion in less than 16 months. Even if you don’t own Apple stock (I don’t), this matters to users of Apple products because it helps Apple to retain its best employees, who receive a significant portion of their income through stock options that vest over time. Thus, this milestone is indirectly responsible for us getting even better products from Apple.
Dave Mark of The Loop shares a video from Apple with advice for finding lost AirPods. As he notes, there are lots of details in that video that you probably didn’t know about.
And finally, here is a powerful ad produced by Apple called 911 about three people who were able to get critical help during an emergency because they called 911 using their Apple Watch. Federico Viticci’s tongue-in-cheek proposed title for this video is “you’re gonna die if you don’t buy an Apple Watch.” Of course, we all hope that none of us ever need to call 911, but the reality is that if you do, there are circumstances in which having an Apple Watch makes that much easier.
Weather apps are great when you want to know the forecast, but only if you will remain in the same location. What if you are driving across the country on a road trip? To find out what the weather will be like in a few hours, you need to know where you will be in a few hours. And while you could do all of this manually—guessing at the city where you will be and then looking up the forecast for the hour that you think you will be there—that is a lot of work. The Weather on the Way app does all of this work for you.
I mentioned this app about 18 months ago in an In the News post, noting that I would use the app the next time that my family takes a road trip. Because of COVID and a number of other reasons, my wife and I decided to drive from New Orleans to New York to visit family for Christmas instead of flying, and it was a perfect reason to use this app because of the dramatic change in temperature along the way.
When you start using the app, it works like a map app. Your current location is listed in “A” (change that if you want) and then you place an ending location in “B”. The app shows the most direct path from A to B along with the weather at selected locations along the map and the approximate time you will be in each location.
You can tap an icon to choose whether the map shows you the temperature, amount of precipitation, wind speed, or wind gusts at each location.
What if you have multiple stops? That works too. Just enter another stop as “C,” “D,” etc., and that will be added to your route.
If you want more details about the weather on the way, tap the Show Timeline button.
An icon at the top left of the map lets you update the radar so you can see where the bad weather is located in relation to your route.
If you have flexibility on when you leave, you can use this app to plan the best time/day to leave to get the best weather along the way, up to seven days in advance. Simply tap the departure time just above the map and then a slider appears at the bottom of the screen. Slide to adjust your departure time and you can see what impact that has on the weather at the different locations on the route.
The Weather on the Way app is free to download, and for your first five trips, you get all of the PRO features of the app for free—features like changing the departure time and alternate routes. After that, you pay either $2.99/month or $16.99/year for the PRO features. This generous pricing model makes it easy for you to try out the app for a number of different road trips before paying anything at all. And then when you do want to use the app, you only need to pay $3 for each of the months in which you will be on a road trip, or $17 for a full year if you plan to take lots of trips. You can also pay $39.99 for a lifetime subscription.
I’m very impressed by the Weather on the Way app and I found it useful during my recent road trip. I’ve tried out lots of different weather apps on my iPhone, but I haven’t seen any other app that does with this app does. The next time that you take a road trip, I encourage you to try this one out.
To help ring in the new year, Brett Burney and I released a new episode of the In the News podcast, one in which we look back and look forward. We look back 25 years to when Apple first acquired NeXT … although in retrospect, it was almost like NeXT acquired Apple. We also discuss the rise and fall of BlackBerry. Looking forward, we talk about what might be coming to AirPods in the future, improvements to Apple Maps, and issues related to COVID.
In our In the Know segment, Brett shares a tip for the Microsoft To Do app that you can probably use with any task manager. I provide tips for using the text replacement feature of the iPhone and iPad.
