I had the best time recording this week’s episode of the In the News podcast because Brett Burney was in New Orleans so we could record together! I know that most folks just listen to the audio version of the podcast, and that’s how I normally listen to most of my podcasts too, but for this episode, I recommend that you also check out the video version on YouTube. My law firm, Adams and Reese, has a small recording studio that we use for lots of different purposes for our clients and for internal communications, and Brett and I took advantage of that to record this episode in the same room, which was a first for us.
After beginning the episode with a short recap of what Brett has been doing in New Orleans this week, we then discuss the upcoming Qi2 standard which will take advantage of Apple’s MagSafe wireless charging technology. It is fun to speculate on what great new products we will be seeing soon as a result of this move. We then discuss an oven that connects to your iPhone, GPS in the new Apple Watch models, games that you can play on an Apple Watch (and which are better than you might think), one of the latest examples of using an AirTag to track down lost luggage, Wi-Fi on plane flights, Apple TV+ shows, and more.
In our In the Know segment, Brett and I share tips that you can use when traveling. Brett explains how you can share your iPhone’s Internet with others in a family and explains why you might want to do so, and I discuss the great Flighty app that I reviewed a few days ago.
I hope that you have been having a Happy New Year so far this week. One thing that we may start to see more of in the coming years is MagSafe wireless charging. I saw that because, as Jason Cross of Macworld reports, Apple is sharing its Magsafe wireless charging technology with the Wireless Power Consortium, which maintains the Qi wireless charging standard. The implication is that MagSafe will be used across the industry for future generations of Qi charging. I’m sure it will take some time to develop, but down the road, ths has the potential to make MagSafe-style charging more common and less expensive. Hopefully, this will result in more, better charging options for iPhone owners. And now, the news of note from the past week:
In an article on Law.com, Isha Marathe analyze how Apple’s new Advanced Data Protection option for iCloud might complicate some e-discovery efforts in litigation.
When the iPhone 14 Pro uses its always-on display, how much battery power does it drain? Michael Potuck of 9to5 Mac reports on a study finding that it drains less than 1% of the battery per hour. It’s great to learn that it really doesn’t make much of a difference on battery life.
Amber Neely of AppleInsider reports on a story that went viral over the holidays. United Airlines lost a woman’s luggage, but she was able to track it and locate it using an AirTag, which revealed that the luggage was not at a distribution center but instead, bizarrely, at an apartment complex.
If you want a refresher on all things HomeKit, Bradley Chambers of 9to5Mac wrote a beginner’s guide to HomeKit.
Eli Blumenthall of CNet reports that, starting February 1, everyone who is a Delta SkyMiles member will get free Wi-Fi on Delta flights thanks to T-Mobile—even if T-Mobile is not your cellphone carrier.
Zac Hall of 9to5Mac reports that one of the changes in the new Apple Watch models (Ultra, Series 8, and SE 2) is that they use their own internal GPS to determine their location, even when an iPhone is nearby. Older models use the iPhone’s GPS when possible to save battery life.
Speaking of the future, will Apple release an AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality) headset in 2023? All we have are rumors for now, but Wayne Ma of The Information provided a detailed report on what he thinks Apple has planned. If you don’t subscribe to The Information, you can read a summary of the article by Hartley Charlton of MacRumors.
One of the newest iPhone accessories is an oven. Mitchel Clark of The Verge reports that Samsung has a new oven called the Bespoke AI Oven that uses an internal camera to recognize certain foods and help you cook them. You can also use your iPhone to watch a live stream of what is inside of your oven on your iPhone, set timers, and preheat the oven.
During last week’s episode of the In the News podcast, my co-host Brett revealed that his favorite Christmas present was an Ember Mug2 that his daughter got him—a coffee mug that keeps your beverage at a precise temperature, which you can set with your iPhone, for a very long time. Andrew Orr of AppleInsider reports that Ember has unveiled an updated model of the travel version of that mug, the Ember Travel Mug 2+, which works with Apple’s Find My app so that you can locate your mug and even make it play a noise so that you can find it. I’d love to see more products with built-in Find My support.
And finally, I just finished watching the second season of the show Slow Horses on Apple TV+ and it was excellent. I loved the first season as well, and I think that the second season was even better. Here is a very short video showing a short discussion about the show between two of the stars—Gary Oldman and Jack Lowden—which doesn’t contain any spoilers for season 2 or season 1, but does give you a little of a sense of the show. If you haven’t watched this one yet, I recommend that you put it on your list.
There have been times during my career as a lawyer when I needed to do a lot of airline travel. Fortunately, those days have been behind me for a while, but even for more occasional travel, I still appreciate tools that improve the experience of airline travel. One of my favorite such tools is TripIt, which I first reviewed a decade ago. Even if you just use the free version of TripIt, it is a fantastic resource for managing all of a travel itinerary: flights, hotels, restaurants, car rentals, etc. I reviewed TripIt Pro back in 2017, and it offers even more features, including useful and quick notification of airline cancellations and delays. I consider the service so valuable that I have paid for it ($50/year) ever since then.
Flighty is another travel app that I’ve heard good things about since it debuted in 2019, and the app received lots of buzz over the last few months because of its improved notification features that make the app even more useful on your lock screen or in the Dynamic Island at the top of the iPhone 14 Pro screen. You can download the app for free, but as I explain below, you need to make an in-app purchase for the Pro version to take full advantage of what makes this app special. The Pro version is $50/year, but you can also subscribe for just $5.99 a month through an in-app purchase, which means that you can choose to only pay for the app during the months that you are traveling. There is also a $90 Flighty Pro annual plan for an entire family. The rest of this review assumes that you are using the Pro version of Flighty.
I used both Flightly and TripIt Pro during recent trips to and from New York for the holidays. No, I didn’t fly Southwest and experience that disaster in late 2022, but I did have my return trip on a Delta flight canceled, so I was able to see how Flighty handles travel disruption.
Getting data into Flighty
TripIt is great because you can forward to plans@tript.com the booking confirmation email from your airline, hotel, etc., and TripIt will automatically decipher the key detail and create an itinerary for you. I was delighted to learn that Flighty works with TripIt and quickly imported all of my current and past trips. If you don’t already use TripIt, you can configure Flighty to import that information from an email, or you can add trips manually.
Notably, Flighty does not keep track of hotels, restaurants, meetings, car rentals, etc. Thus, Flighty does not in any way replace TriptIt as a service for managing itineraries. Flighty’s focus is only on your flights.
Once Flighty knows about your flights, you can see your upcoming flights in a list.
Flighty also shows you information about your historical flights. You can see the information either in a list or in a fun “passport” mode. It was interesting to learn that over the past decade that I’ve been putting data into TripIt, I’ve flown the equivalent of going around the world 7.6 times.
Flight information
When it is time to travel, the information that Flight provides is excellent, and better yet, the way that it presents the information is fantastic.
When I am waiting for my plane to arrive at an airport, I often find myself wondering where the plane is coming from and whether it is on-time. Flighty provides this information for the past 25 hours, so you can start to see where your plane is—and whether or not it is on schedule—the day before you leave. This is a great way to get an early indication if there may be a delay or other problem with your flight.
Flighty also gives you an incredible amount of detail about your plane flight. The key information like flight number, gate, and scheduled/actual times is prominently displayed at the top. But other information is included like weather forecasts, detailed information about the plane, a detailed timeline, your travel history on the same plane, etc.
The information that you can get from Flighty is more detailed than what you get from TripIt Pro, although both services provide you with the most important information.
Notifications
As I noted in my review of TripIt Pro, that service often sends you useful information in an email, such as a connection summary so that you can the gate where you are landing and the gate to which you need to travel for your connecting flight. TripIt Pro also uses the iPhone’s notification system to push certain information to you. It works well.
But Flighty notifications are much better. First, Flighty doesn’t use email at all, which I consider a plus. When I am traveling, I often receive a large number of emails while I am in the air, so an email from TripIt Pro can sometimes get lost among the other emails. Also, it can be cumbersome to have to open the Mail app to see the information that TripIt Pro has sent to me.
Flighty’s notifications are all iPhone notifications: both traditional iPhone notifications and the new Live Activities notifications on the iPhone. And these notifications typically contain more information than TripIt Pro’s notification. For example, when I landed in New York before Christmas, TripIt’s traditional notification told me my gate of arrival and the baggage claim number, which is the most important information. But Flighty’s traditional notification also told me how long my taxi to the gate would be (which can sometimes be lengthy at an airport like LaGuardia) and told me how early I was arriving (nice to know if someone is meeting you at the airport). Flighty’s Live Activities notification provides even more information in numerical and graphical format, including a countdown timer until gate arrival.
Let’s talk about those Live Activities notifications from Flighty. They are amazing. If you have an older iPhone, as soon as you turn on your screen, the Live Activities notification will provide you with the key information about your flight right on your lock screen. If you are using a new iPhone 14 Pro with an always-on screen, you can clearly read that information even if the screen is dimmed. Flighty is even smart enough to put things like your next gate number in a yellow box that is obvious even on a dimmed screen.
Better yet, if you are using an iPhone 14 Pro, the Live Activities information goes into the Dynamic Island. Thus, while you are doing other things on your iPhone such as looking at email before you get on your plane, you can easily glance up and see key information such as how long before your plane leaves and the gate number. Hold down your finger on the Dynamic Island and the notification will expand to show you even more information.
I really cannot emphasize enough how useful this multitasking feature is. I love the ability to work on something else on my iPhone while always being able to glance up and see details on the upcoming flight.
It even works while you are on the plane. During your flight, you can see how long you have until you land in the Live Activities notification in the Dynamic Island. Hold down on the Dynamic Island for more information.
Live Activities also show up on your lock screen, so you can see them even if your iPhone doesn’t support the Dynamic Island.
If you are connected to the plane’s Wi-Fi system, this information is updated during your flight. Better yet, for airlines such as Delta, you don’t even have to pay for in-flight Wi-Fi to keep Flighty up-to-date. Delta offers a free in-flight tier that lets you text message someone using the Messages app. Because that service communicates with Apple’s servers, and because those same Apple servers handle app notifications, If there is a change in your flight arrival time while you are in the air, Flighty’s Live Activities notifications will update as well. That’s a nice feature.
It was interesting to see that both Flighty and TripIt Pro are excellent at providing updated information. If something changes about your travel such as a gate change, both Flighty and TripIt Pro provided me with the update at the same time, and they did so before—sometimes long before—the airline’s own app did so.
Both apps also notify you immediately if your flight is canceled. I had originally planned to fly home from New York on December 26. On the afternoon of December 25, after I had already checked-in for my flight and gotten my boarding pass, both Flighty and TripIt Pro simultaneously told me that my flight had been canceled. In this circumstance, Delta also alerted me via text message at about the same time. However, I have had situations in the past when TripIt Pro told me several minutes before I was alerted by my airline, and that extra time can be critical when you want to be among the first to book an alternative flight. I presume that Flighty is similar to TripIt Pro in this regard because I suspect that they get their information from the same sources.
One can argue that perhaps Flighty gives you too much information in notifications. For example, two days before one of my flights, I received a notification that my airplane was still an Airbus A220-100, but a different plane with a different tail number would be used. At the time that I received that notification, that change didn’t seem all that important to me. That turned out to be the flight that was cancelled, but I have no idea if the tail number change had anything to do with the cancellation less than 24-hours later.
Free vs. pay
You can use Flighty for free without paying for a Pro subscription. And if you do so, you can look up live information on flights for unlimited flights with no ads.
But you need to pay for the Pro subscription to get the standout features that make this app so special such as the amazing notifications, information on your plane’s prior locations 25 hours before your flight, lock screen widgets that update live (the free version has limited refreshes), TripIt sync, email forwarding, etc. If you are looking to check out Flight, my recommendation is that you don’t pay much attention to the free version and instead just pay for one month of the Pro service.
Conclusion
I was incredibly impressed by the Flighty app. It provided all of the key and latest information about my flights, just like TripIt Pro. It also provided additional information not provided by TripIt Pro, some of which you might not use, but other information that is incredibly valuable such as the past few flights of your upcoming plane. And best of all, the way that Flighty uses the iPhone’s notification system is best-in-class, including the app’s fantastic use of the Live Activities feature. This makes Flighty a fantastic app because the information that you need is always and quickly accessible. If you are using the iPhone, you can just glance at it. If you are not using your iPhone, just glance at the lock screen.
Flighty doesn’t replace the TripIt service because it doesn’t seek to manage your entire itinerary. But it does replace many of the best features of the TripIt Pro service. If it wasn’t for the fact that I already have a paid TripIt Pro yearly subscription, I would seriously consider using the free TripIt service and then paying for a monthly subscription to Flighty only during the months that I am traveling.
Having said that, it seems obvious that TripIt could update its TripIt Pro service to match the superior notification features provided by Flighty. I hope that it does so soon. For now, however, Flighty is the app that I recommend using for the best flight notifications on your iPhone.
Happy New Year’s Eve! Whether you are getting dressed up tonight to celebrate the end of the year in style or just taking it easy and watching TV until midnight, I hope that you enjoy this last day of 2022, and I wish you nothing but the best in 2023. Brett Burney and I finished up the year by recording Episode 81 of the In the News podcast. We start the episode by explaining the problems with the LastPass password manager in light of recent reports that the hack from a few months ago was even worse than previously revealed, and we explain why 1Password is a safe alternative that we recommend for storing your passwords and other important information. Then we talk about the iPhone 14 Pro, using an Apple Watch as a remote control for the iPhone’s camera, the FindMy system, the Apple TV+ streaming service, and the Apple Watch Ultra.
In our In the Know segment, Brett and I share Christmas stories. Brett discusses his favorite Christmas present: the Ember Mug2. I discuss a HomeKit problem that I encountered while I was traveling for Christmas and provide a tip for solving similar HomeKit errors in the future that you might encounter.
As we look back on the year 2022, I realize that I have been incredibly impressed by the content on Apple TV+ this year. It may have even been my favorite of all of the streaming services because it was where I watched my two favorite shows in 2022: Severance and the third season of For All Mankind. And while the pitch for Apple TV+ has always been quality over quantity because it did not start with a back catalog, the number of shows that I have enjoyed watching on Apple TV+ this year is huge. In addition to Severance and For All Mankind, I enjoyed watching (roughly in the order of how much I enjoyed them) Slow Horses Seasons 1 and 2, Shining Girls, Tehran Season 2, Causeway, Spirited, Trying Season 3, Five Days at Memorial, The Afterparty, Black Bird, WeCrashed, Mythic Quest Season 3, Loot, Physical Season 2, See, and Suspicion. I watched the movie Palmer in 2022, although it came out in 2021, and I enjoyed it. I was so-so on the anthology Roar, but there were some specific episodes that I particularly enjoyed including The Woman Who Was Kept on a Shelf and The Woman Who Disappeared. If you have been focused on other services like Netflix in 2022 and haven’t signed up for Apple TV+, Sami Fathi of MacRumors reports that you can now watch the first season of a number of Apple TV+ shows for free until January 3, 2022. The list includes four shows that I enjoyed: Ted Lasso, Trying, Mythic Quest, and The Morning Show. Kudos to Apple for doing such a great job with the programs on Apple TV+. I look forward to seeing what new content we see in 2023. And now, the news of note from the past two weeks:
Let’s start with something serious and important. I believe that anyone comfortable enough with technology to be reading iPhone J.D. should be using a password manager to protect themselves from the bad guys looking to take advantage of you. For a decade, my password manager of choice has been 1Password because it seems to do just about everything right and performs especially well on the iPhone and iPad. Full disclosure: 1Password was a monthly sponsor of this website a few years ago, but I was a fan long before that. A major competitor to 1Password is LastPass, but LastPass has had issues over the years, including a major security breach this year. We first found out about it months ago, and then more recently we found out that the breach was even worse than many had suspected. As Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac reports, 1Password has now addressed the issue and has pointed out that as a result of LastPass’s recent breach, a hacker would only have to spend about $100 on password-cracking tools to start decrypting passwords. Now obviously, 1Password is a competitor of LastPass so you don’t expect them to say something nice about a rival, but 1Password fully explains its reasoning and also points out why 1Password is designed differently to avoid the problems of LastPass. I realize that some people will read the news about LastPass, assume that all password managers are the same and thus all are equally vulnerable, and use this as a justification to not use any password manager at all. I hope that folks reading this are smarter than that. Password managers are essential for anyone who takes their security seriously, and in this day and age, you need to do that. If you are ready to start using a password manager now, I recommend that you start with 1Password because there is nothing else out there that offers the same features and security. It is not just me saying that; in the Wirecutter review of password managers that was written by Andrew Cunningham and Thorin Klosowski a few months ago, 1Password was their recommendation as well. Moreover, if you have been using LastPass, and you used it to store passwords that you created yourself instead of passwords with random letters and numbers created by LastPass, in light of the recent news I recommend that you change your passwords.
Password security is not the only technological concern in the news. After recent admissions by the Chinese parent company of TikTok that some of its employees were spying on users, including spying on journalists who were reporting on TikTok, many folks have concluded that the Chinese government itself is collecting data on folks around the world who use TikTok. Is this true? I don’t know, but the threat is serious enough that the federal government and many states are now banning the use of TikTok on government-issued phones, as reported by Mike Pearl of Mashable. Virtually every teenager that I know uses TikTok, and John Hanna of the Associated Press reports that the actual number is about two-thirds of American teenagers. I sometimes use it as well; it doesn’t take long for the impressive algorithm to start showing you just the types of videos that interest you—which for me largely consists of jokes from stand-up comedians and people playing music (including amateurs who are incredibly talented)—so it is easy to understand why the service is attractive. Unlike password managers, I currently don’t have any recommendations for TikTok. I see some smart folks like John Gruber arguing that TikTok should be banned in the United States, and while I’m not there yet, I am keeping an eye on this one.
After those two heavy stories, let’s turn to some happier news. Yang Jie of the Wall Street Journal reports that iPhone 14 Pro supply is improving and starting to catch up with demand. If your Christmas or Hanukkah present was a picture of an iPhone 14 Pro to be delivered in the future, it may be in your hands soon.
Attorney John Voorhees of MacStories analyzes why the Apple Arcade service has been successful so far and what it needs to do to remain desirable.
Voorhees also posted a short review of the Belkin Mount with MagSafe that works with monitors, so that you can use the superior iPhone camera instead of the built-in webcam on an iMac or other monitor.
Jason Snell of Six Colors also wrote an excellent review that does a great job of showing how that new Belkin product works. To my knowledge, this product isn’t shipping yet (except for review units given to folks like Voorhees and Snell). I ordered one from the online Apple Store, and it is scheduled for delivery between January 20 and February 3, 2023. I don’t yet see it available on Amazon.
Dan Moren of Six Colors reminds us all that while the Camera Remote app on the Apple Watch may not be something that you use often, it is incredibly useful when you want to be included in a photo with friends or family members. I agree 100%.
I’m a big fan of Apple’s AirTags. For example, I had to check a bag on a flight home to New Orleans this week, and it was nice to be able to confirm that my luggage had also arrived in New Orleans before I even exited my plane. But there are times when I get alerts about an AirTag or other item using the FindMy service being left behind when no alert was necessary. Zac Hall of 9to5Mac came up with some good ideas for how the FindMy system could get even smarter when you leave an item in your car.
And finally, if you are trying to decide whether the Apple Watch Ultra is right for you, a number of folks at The Verge created a fantastic 23-minute video showing that watch being used in all sorts of situations: on a hike, when skiing, when running, when scuba diving, and more. The production value for this video is excellent:
I did not expect for there to be so much to talk about this late in the year, but Apple’s huge iOS 16.2 release this past week gave us lots to discuss. Brett and I start by talking about Freeform, Apple’s new whiteboard app, and we also discuss Apple Music Sing and other new features. We also discuss European Union requirement that Apple allow alternate app stores and rumors of how Apple might do that. We discuss the newest example of the iPhone 14 Emergency SOS via Satellite feature being used to save someone, and we also discuss a new iPhone mount for use with the Continuity Camera feature.
In our In the Know segment, Brett and I go deep on two new features. Brett discusses a new feature in watch OS 9.2 that lets you sort your workouts, including a way to see your prior outdoor running or walking routes so that you can try to beat your own best time. I discuss the somewhat complicated process of turning on Advanced Data Protection on your iPhone. There are more steps than you might think, but you get a nice boost in security if you go through them.
Apple’s new Continuity Camera feature lets you use the superior camera on your iPhone instead of your lackluster webcam so that you can look better on videoconferences when you use a Mac. If you use a laptop, Belkin makes a simple mount that you can use to hold your iPhone in the right position ($19.99 on Amazon). But if you use an external monitor or an iMac, then you—like me—have been waiting for a similar mount that you can use. I’ve tried other ways to prop up my iPhone next to my iMac and they haven’t done a great job of holding the iPhone in the right position (although I can attest that the camera quality was vastly better than my iMac). Wesley Hilliard of AppleInsider reports that Belkin is now supposed to be selling a $29.95 MagSafe Mount that works with monitors. As I’m typing this, it is not available on the Apple Store, and it is not yet even listed on Belkin’s own website. I’m not sure if the Apple Store sold out quickly before I first checked or hasn’t yet started selling them. Regardless, I plan to buy this as soon as I see that it is available. I’ve heard from folks using prototypes of the Belkin product, and they have said that it works well. I see that Chance Miller of 9to5Mac is reporting that the first orders won’t ship until mid-to-late January, so getting this simple device might be about as difficult to purchase as an iPhone 14 Pro right now. It doesn’t seem like this mount is all that complicated of a device, so it is a shame that we have had to wait to get this device from Belkin and there are no alternatives from other retailers. But once mounts like this are widely available, I think that these will become must-have products for anyone who uses a Mac to videoconference. And now, the news of note from the past week:
One of the new features of iOS 16.2 is the new Freeform app. Jason Snell of Six Colors provides a good review of what this app can do, as well as thoughts on what could be added in future updates.
Snell also offers a good take on the rumors that Apple will soon allow third-party app stores other than its own App Store to comply with certain EU regulations.
iOS 16.2 wasn’t the only update this week. If you are still running iOS 15, Michael Simon of Macworld reports that Apple also released iOS 15.7.2 with a dozen critical security updates.
Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports on a mac in Iowa who tried to use AirTags to stalk a woman but was caught because of Apple’s built-in safety features. Unfortunately, stalkers can purchase similar technology from companies other than Apple that lack these safety features.
If you use the Microsoft Authenticator app on your iPhone, you may have also used the companion app on the Apple Watch to authenticate a login. Filipe Espósito of 9to5Mac reports that the Apple Watch app is being discontinued next month.
Whenever I am looking to edit photos on my iPad and I want something more powerful than the built-in Photos app, the first app that I use is Pixelmator Photo. It is easy to use but packed with powerful features, including a great repair tool that I use with my Apple Pencil. Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac reports that the app now has new tools for enhancing sharpness and details in shadows, plus the subscription is now 50% off for your first year. I pay $23.99/year for this app and I consider it to be well worth it.
Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports on what is new in watchOS 9.2, including a Race Route feature that lets you compete against your previous runs, HomeKit improvements, Crash Detection optimization, and more.
Amber Neely of AppleInsider reports on the second time (to my knowledge; I’m sure there have been others) that the iPhone 14 satellite feature was used to rescue someone. This time, the victims were stranded 300 feet in a canyon in Southern California after their vehicle went off the side of the road. They were rescued with the aid of a helicopter.
Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac discusses the new Advanced Data Protection feature of iOS 16.2, a great new feature that I discussed last week.
And finally, Mike Fleming, Jr., of Deadline reports that the movie Spirited on Apple TV+ is the biggest movie ever released on the platform. I watched it with my wife and daughter last weekend, and we all give it a big thumbs up. If you enjoy big Broadway-style musicals with lots of songs, skilled and fun dancing, and a huge cast, then I suspect that you will love this movie. It was much better than I had expected, with a clever plot that provides a great twist on the familiar story of A Christmas Carol. And the songs are both funny and catchy. If you want to get into the spirit of the holidays, check this one out. Here is the trailer:
Yesterday, Apple released a pretty major update to the iPhone and iPad: iOS 16.2 and iPadOS 16.2. Going from 16.1 to 16.2 may not seems like a big increase just based on the number, but there are a large number of new features in this early Christmas present from Apple. I’m sure I’ll be discussing them in much more detail in the future, but here are the highlights:
Built-in Whiteboard
Freeform is a new built-in (and free) whiteboard app. You have a huge white canvas, and you can write or draw whatever you want. It is easy to add shapes, change your pens, insert pictures, etc. The tools are all familiar to anyone who has used other Apple apps like Notes, Keynote, etc., except for a neat new drawing tool called Blotch that lets you draw the outline of a shape and then it fills it with color that appears behind text.
Better yet, there are lots of sharing tools. For example, much like you could previously share Notes with others, you can share a Freeform board with someone else and, if you let them, they can make edits. Or you can show off the whiteboard to others in a FaceTime call, perhaps as you explain what is going on.
I can envision lots of uses of this for lawyers and others who collaborate on projects.
Karaoke
As I previewed last week, if you subscribe to Apple Music and you have a new enough device, you can now use Apple Music Sing to see improved lyrics on songs and to sing along, even turning down the vocal track as you do so. It’s an interesting feature that my daughter instantly started using as soon as I showed it to her last night … and then I had to hear her complain that her iPhone SE isn’t new enough to use this feature.
Better encryption on iCloud
Another new feature that I discussed last week is Apple’s new Advanced Data Protection. Once you turn this on, your information on Apple’s servers—such as the iCloud backup of your iPhone and iPad—can be encrypted in a way that not even Apple can access your data.
New options on the iPhone 14 Pro Lock Screen
If you use the always-on display on the new iPhone 14 Pro, iOS 16.2 adds new options such as new widgets you can use. Also, there is a new option to not display the wallpaper when the screen dims; only the time (plus widgets if you have them enabled) against a black background. This is a neat look, and I may consider turning this mode on while I’m sleeping.
AirDrop privacy
The change to AirDrop in iOS 16.2 is either a feature or a restriction, depending upon your perspective. Before iOS 16.2, you could enable AirDrop for only folks in your Contacts or you could enable it for Everyone. The Everyone function made it very easy for someone else to send you a file, which is useful when you want to use AirDrop. However, it also meant that a stranger could try to send you a file, which you could reject.
Now, when you turn the Everyone function on, it only stays on for 10 minutes. This is good for your privacy. However, if you liked the way it worked before, it is more cumbersome to have to turn on Everyone so that someone you know can send you a file. I may just switch to the Contacts selection since most folks who AirDrop files to me are in my Contacts.
There are also many smaller improvements and bug fixes in iOS 16.2. For example, once you update to iOS 16.2 and your iPhone finishes indexing your Messages app, you can search for photos that you sent or received in Messages based on the content of the photos, such as photos showing dogs. I can see this being useful when you know that a friend sent you a picture but you cannot remember when and you didn’t save the picture to your photo roll. Also, the crash detection feature for the new iPhone 14 models was once again improved.
With a brand new app, several big new features, and some nice small new features, this is a packed update for the iPhone and iPad.
Thank you to SaneBox for sponsoring iPhone J.D. again this month. I started using the service about two months ago, and it has completely transformed my Inbox. When I check my iPhone J.D. email, I now typically see only one or two messages, and they are almost always real messages from real people that I want to read. This has been a radical transformation from the past, where I would find dozens of messages in my Inbox, almost all of them messages that I would consider junk. It got to be so bad that sometimes I would miss the good emails that I wanted to see because of the unwanted messages around them. SaneBox has completely changed this for me. As a result, I am far more efficient and productive with my email, plus I know approach my inbox with a smile instead of dread. If you haven’t tried SaneBox, you should definitely check it out.
How SaneBox works
SaneBox works with any email service that provides IMAP, EWS – OWA, or Active Sync, such as Yahoo Mail, Gmail, AOL, iCloud, MS Exchange, Microsoft 365, Fastmail, Amazon WorkMail, and others. I’m currently using it with my iPhone J.D. email account, which is just a normal IMAP account associated with a domain that I own. You may have an email account exactly like this one. My inbox receives a lot of emails from lots of different sources: people reaching out to me with questions or suggestions, companies that offer valuable and relevant services, newsletters that I signed up for, but also a lot of unwanted and/or junk email that is not caught by my spam filter.
SaneBox works by analyzing the headers of your emails. That means that SaneBox sees things like the subject line, date, and who the email is from. Your emails stay on your current email server; SaneBox never transfers your emails to its own server. And importantly, SaneBox never looks at the content of your email messages. Thus, any confidential information that is in your email never gets analyzed or acted upon by SaneBox. The only way that a SaneBox computer would see something confidential in an email message is if the confidential information was put in the subject line of the email, and even then, SaneBox only reads that information for the purpose of deciding whether and how to sort that email message.
You need to give SaneBox your email address and your email password so that it can see the headers. But the security of SaneBox has been audited by numerous security firms. The service has been around since 2010, a long track record that attests to its trustworthiness.
What SaneBox does
The main thing that SaneBox does is analyze the information in the headers of your emails and then filter messages based on that analysis. For any message that SaneBox thinks is likely a normal email that you would want, SaneBox leaves the email in your Inbox. For messages that SaneBox considers less useful, such as messages that may be junk, SaneBox moves those emails to a folder called @SaneLater. Messages that seem to be mailing lists are moved to a folder called @SaneNews. Messages that SaneBox knows that you don’t want to see because you already told SaneBox (more on that below) are moved to @SaneBlackHole. And so on. I have more information on these specific folders below, but the end result is something like this: instead of going to your Inbox and seeing 17 new messages when only 3 of them are actually important, you see 5 new messages, including the 3 that are most important.
Thanks to SaneBox, I am much more efficient when I check email. I check my iPhone J.D. inbox from time to time during the day. Without SaneBox, if I pause what I am working on and see that I have over a dozen or more new messages, going through those emails becomes a chore. I need to take the time to separate the important emails from the others, and the whole process wastes time. With SaneBox, I instead glance at my Inbox and just see a few emails that are important. Based upon that, I can quickly decide if I need to read or act upon any of them or if I can get back to whatever else I was working on. Later on, when I know that I have more time to devote to email, I can pay attention to the emails that were moved into another folder such as @SaneLater. This vastly improves email efficiency.
It also saves you time. If you receive an alert every time an email comes in, the time that you waste looking at a new email only to discover that it is something unimportant and then trying to get your mind back to the task you were working on before can really add up. Every week, SaneBox tells you how much time you potentially saved by avoiding these distractions in the prior week. My most recent report tells me that I saved 1.5 hours last week by avoiding the distractions. Whether that number is 100% accurate or not, the point remains that I did save time last week, as I do every week, because of SaneBox.
Here is a deeper dive on the main SaneBox folders and other features. Note that you get to determine which of these folders and features you turn on and off, and you can typically adjust settings on each feature to fine-tune it. So for example, if you want to keep all newsletters in your Inbox instead of having them automatically moved to @SaneNews, just don’t turn on the @SaneLater feature in your SaneBox dashboard.
@SaneBlackHole
My favorite SaneBox folder is @SaneBlackHole. When I get an email from someone who I don’t want to get email from—maybe it is a spam message, maybe it is a marketing company that is of no interest to me, maybe it is a political candidate who I don’t want to see literature from, etc.—I simply move it from my Inbox to the folder called @SaneBlackHole. This trains the folder. Future emails from that same person or company will automatically move to the @SaneBlackHole folder, stay in that folder for a week, and then get deleted.
Why not just click the unsubscribe button in the unwanted email? That’s fine if you trust the company sending you the email that you don’t want. But sometimes when you click an unsubscribe button, you are confirming to the sender that your email is an active one, and they will turn around and sell your email address to other companies, which results in even more unwanted email. When you move an email to the @SaneBlackHole folder, the person or company is not alerted that you did so.
What if you make a mistake? If you put something in the @SaneBlackHole folder by accident, simply move it back into your Inbox. SaneBox will see that you did that and learn that you don’t want future emails from that sender to go into the @SaneBlackHole folder.
Is the @SaneBlackHole folder the same thing as a Spam folder or a Junk folder from your email provider? Not really. The end result is similar, but how it gets there is very different. Your own email provider provides a Spam folder feature that analyzes not only the sender and subject line but also the content of your email to determine if something is spam, phishing, a virus, etc. Spam folders are not perfect, but when they do work, they perform an important job by moving an unwanted email out of your Inbox. Even with SaneBox, you should continue to use the Spam folder feature provided by your own email provider. But as we all know, there are many messages not caught by a Spam folder even though you might want them to be. Perhaps your emial service cannot determine whether it is truly junk because for some types of messages, one person might want the message and another person may not. While you can often train the Spam folder provided by your email service provider, and you should do so, Spam folders are not always as smart as you want them to be. Thus, @SaneBlackHole works in a different way, along with your normal Spam or Junk feature, to provide a more customized filter. If you never want to hear from X again, just move one email from X into the @SaneBlackHole folder. And then you are done.
SaneBox describes the difference between a Spam folder and the @SaneBlackHole folder this way: “Keep in mind that @SaneBlackHole is not for SPAM. It is meant to be used for legitimate email from people or services that you don’t want to see or hear from anymore. Spammers go out of their way to make each email be sufficiently different so trainings like these don’t work.”
For me, the @SaneBlackHole folder has worked extremely well. Every once in a while, I’ll take a look at what is in that folder and see a huge number of emails that used to be going straight to my Inbox. I’m so thrilled to see that they went there instead and didn’t waste my time.
@SaneNews
When SaneBox detects that you are receiving something that looks like a newsletter, it moves the message from your Inbox to the @SaneNews folder. This is nice because I receive many newsletters that I signed up for and want to receive, but I don’t always want them to interrupt my workflow during the day by piling up in my Inbox. Whenever I’m ready to look at them, such as while I’m having lunch or at the end of the day, they are waiting for me in this folder.
Sometimes, I’ll see something show up in @SaneNews that I did not sign up for and that I don’t want to receive. I simply move that email into the @SaneBlackHole folder to train SaneBox to put similar emails there in the future.
On the other hand, sometimes I’ll see something that is a newsletter but it is important to me so I’d rather keep it in my Inbox. For example, perhaps you love reading the free iPhone J.D. email that goes out whenever there is a new post. (You are not receiving the iPhone J.D. newsletter? Just click here or scan the QR code to the right to sign up.) Simply move the email with the newsletter out of @SaneNews and into your Inbox to teach SaneBox that it should keep that particular newsletter in your Inbox so that you will notice it more quickly.
It is nice that @SaneNews, like all SaneBox folders, is simply another folder in your email. This means that the fact that SaneBox has filtered the email doesn’t mean that you don’t have easy access to it. It’s not like you need to go to the SaneBox website to view it or anything like that. Your current mail client, including the Mail app on your iPhone or iPad, just sees @SaneNews as another folder. Your iPhone, iPad, computer, etc. doesn’t need to know that it was the intelligence of SaneBox that moved the message into the @SaneNews folder or any other SaneBox folder, nor does your iPhone need to know that by moving a message from one folder to another folder, you are training the SaneBox service.
@SaneLater
The @SaneLater folder is a place where SaneBox puts emails that it considers likely to be less important, including messages that may be junk. If there is a type of email that you want to receive but typically don’t want to act upon right away, move it from your Inbox to the @SaneLater folder to train SaneBox to move similar messages there in the future. You can always manually move a message from @SaneLater to your Inbox to train SaneBox that this is an important type of email that deserves to stay in your Inbox.
A lot of the emails that show up in my @SaneLater email are emails that I would consider spam or junk emails and that were not caught by my Spam filter. So I will often select a bunch of them and move them into the @SaneBlackHole folder so that in the future they will go straight there instead of in my @SaneLater folder. That system isn’t perfect—the spammer may change up the “from” email address slightly to try to confuse SaneBox—but when I move a message into the @SaneBlackHole folder, at least I am trying to do something.
@SaneCC
If a message is sent to someone else but also sent to you as CC, you can have that message automatically go to a @SaneCC folder instead of your Inbox. I understand the idea here—since the email was not sent directly to you, it is potentially less important than other emails in your Inbox. I don’t have this SaneBox folder turned on because so many of the emails that I receive as a cc are just as important as the ones for which I am in the “to” field. Nevertheless, I can understand how this may be valuable for many folks.
@SaneNoReplies
Have you ever sent someone an email asking for a response, but then they don’t reply, and then you forget that you were waiting for a reply, and then you get annoyed at yourself for not following up sooner? The @SaneNoReplies folder is an optional folder aimed at addressing this situation.
Here’s how it works. You send an email to someone. Just like always, your sent email goes into your Sent folder. But additionally, within a few minutes, SaneBox puts a copy of your sent email into the @SaneNoReplies folder. When someone replies to your email, the email that you sent is deleted from the @SaneNoReplies folder because it is no longer an email without a reply. The idea is that you can glance at your @SaneNoReplies folder from time to time to see the message to which there was no reply, and that can remind you to follow up and request a reply. If you see something in there that doesn’t belong—perhaps you never expected a reply, or perhaps the other person replied in some other way like a phone call or a different email—just delete it from that folder and SaneBox will stop waiting for a reply.
Note that the @SaneNoReplies folder only acts upon emails where you sent the first email. If you are replying to an email chain, nothing that you send will go into this folder.
SaneReminders
What if you want to make sure that you get a reply within a specific time period, like three days? When you compose your email, add a bcc or a cc to 3days@sanebox.com. If three days have passed and you haven’t yet received a response, then SaneBox will put a reminder email at the top of your Inbox. What if you want to get that reminder in three days regardless of whether you get a reply? Simply add the word “keep” such as keep.3days@sanebox.com.
Pretty much anything that you can think of will work for those SaneBox reminder addresses. There is a big list of them on this page. Examples include sunday@sanebox.com, november21@sanebox.com, dec.21.2pm@sanebox.com, etc.
SaneReminders works when you are sending a message and you use that special email as a cc or bcc. It also works if you receive an email and you want to deal with it at a later date: simply forward the email to a SaneBox reminder address such as friday@sanebox.com. On Friday, at the top of your inbox, you will see an email reminding you to act upon that email. (You can configure in the SaneBox settings what time of day those emails show up.) This is a good way to move an email out of your Inbox so that it doesn’t bother you right now, but then have it come back when you will be ready to deal with it.
…and more
This post would get too long if I described every feature of SaneBox. There are lots of them. As I noted above, this service has been around for over a decade, so SaneBox has come up with lots of different features over those years. For example, you can schedule Do Not Disturb periods for your Inbox. You can create custom folders like @SaneReceipts or @SaneFamily and teach SaneBox how to move things into those folder for you. And you can do so much more.
Price
SaneBox has lots of different pricing tiers so that you can just pay for what you need, and you can try before you buy to get the service working and find out if it makes sense for you. It only takes minutes to set it up, and if you don’t like the service, simply unsubscribe. And while you can pay month-to-month if you want, you can save substantially if you sign up for one year or two years.
If you only want to use two SaneBox features, you can choose the “Snack” tier which is $7/month or $59/year or $99 for two years. The most popular tier is the “Lunch” tier which can work with two email accounts and lets you choose six features for $12/month or $99/year or $169 for two years. (That’s the tier that I paid for.) You can also get the “Dinner” tier which works with four email accounts and includes every feature for $36/month or $299 a year or $499 for two years. There are discounts for educational, non-profit, and governmental agencies.
Click here to sign up. That link includes an affiliate code that provides a small affiliate fee to iPhone J.D. if you decide to pay for a plan.
Conclusion
SaneBox is a fantastic service that makes your email better. I recommend that you check out the free trial to see for yourself how it works and the wonders that it can do for your Inbox.
The iPhone does a great job of taking pictures, but taking pictures is only the beginning. Once your pictures and video are in Photos, there is so much you can do to edit, organize, search, and share your photos and videos. There is no “help” button in the Photos app, but you can learn everything that you need to know about Photos in the new-and-improved third edition of Take Control of Photos by Jason Snell. I was provided a free review copy of this ebook, and I’m impressed. If you want to get more out of the Photos app yourself, or if you want a great present idea for someone else who loves to take pictures with an iPhone, this $14.99 ebook is a great resource. It comes in three formats—PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket (Kindle)—so it can be read on nearly any device. I read my copy in a PDF app (PDF Expert) on my iPad, and that worked great.
The Photos app can be used on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. This book covers all three platforms. Most features can be used on all three devices, but when a feature is only available on one platform or works differently on that platform, Jason explains the differences, such as in the section of the book discussing Portrait Mode Photos:
This book is full of pictures that make it very easy to see what Jason is describing. That means that you see a lot of pictures of Jason’s family and friends in this book, and it also means that what he showing off in the book is very similar to what you will see as you work with your own photo library because his example photos seem typical of a real photo library.
This book covers the basics including the Photos interface, the ways in which you can organize your library, tips for using search, and lots of advice for editing photos, such as an explanation of what all of the different light adjustments can do.
There are detailed sections on sharing photos. Relatively new additions to the Photos app covered in this book include shared photo libraries, live search in Photos, and duplicate detection.
Jason Snell has been writing a “Take Control” book about Photos since 2015, when he first wrote a book about using Photos on the Mac. In 2018, he released the first edition of the current version of this book, which covers the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, and that first version was about 150 pages. The second edition was almost 175 pages, and this edition is just over 200 pages. Page count is only a crude metric; more relevant is the number of years that Jason has been writing these books. The latest version of this book reveals his deep understanding of how the Photos app works, and he is able to explain everything in a way that is easy for anyone to understand.
If you consider yourself a more advanced user of the Photos app, then I don’t think that this book is for you. There are other resources that provide detailed editing tips on certain types of pictures, such as getting the best looking picture at sunset or in the snow or making the most of HDR photography, and this book doesn’t go deep on topics like that. Also, this book only discusses using Photos in conjunction with Shortcuts app once, when Jason describes (and shares) a shortcut for resizing photos to make them easier to share. But to be fair, Photos itself is a basic app. Once you start getting into more sophisticated projects, you are more likely to use specialized apps like Photoshop or Pixelmator, not Photos.
On the other hand, for any beginning or intermediate level owner of an iPhone, iPad, and/or Mac who has an interest in doing more with Photos, this is an excellent resource. You already know if that describes you, and that is also why I can see this being a nice gift for Christmas or another occasion if you know of someone who has an interest in doing more with the Photos app and would appreciate a well-written guide that has lots of information in one place.
If you are still not sure if this book is right for you, fortunately, you don’t have to guess. The publisher provides this link where you can download sample pages from across the entire book, and it is a generous sample: 49 pages, including the full index. Flipping through those dozens of pages will give you a good sense of whether this book is right for you.
