alerts

The other day I was walking with music blasting through my AirPods when I almost stepped in front of a speeding ambulance.

Luckily, the magical Sound Recognition feature on my iPhone was turned on and my AirPods recognized the wailing sirens. They silenced the music and piped the sirens into my ears instead, saving my bacon. It was amazing and quite magical.

Your iPhone can also listen and alert you for crying babies, running water, knocks on the door, barking dogs and more.

Here’s how to use it.

Apple said in a statement Thursday it will update AirTags item trackers with new privacy warnings, better warning sounds and smarter Find My tracking. The efforts comes as the company tries to improve security in the wake of criminal activity involving the devices, such as theft and stalking.

It’s the latest of several privacy updates Cupertino announced for AirTags since releasing them last year.

You’re going to L-O-V-E this tip. You know how sometimes you see a folder on your iPhone’s home screen, and there’s a red notification badge on the folder itself? That badge is a summary of all the unread notifications of the apps inside the folder. Of course, at this point you just ignore it, because you don’t want to swipe through the pages of never-used apps inside the folder, just to see which apps have unread alerts.

But what if there was a way to quickly see which apps in that folder have outstanding notifications. Well, there is! And you’re going to kick yourself when you see how easy it is.

Your iPhone could send out a pair of alerts this afternoon, but they aren’t ones you’ve set yourself. Instead, they’re from the U.S. government, and both are test messages.

The goal is to try out a pair of systems set up to notify the public of emergencies. Again, these are only tests.

The iPhone’s Do Not Disturb feature really is great. It silences your phone on a daily schedule, so you never need to worry about being woken up by a Facebook alert, or some other useless beep. But maybe you want to be disturbed by certain people. Maybe your teenage kids are out late, or your better half is away on a trip. Is there a way to let their calls and texts punch through the Do Not Disturb shield? Well, yes, there is! It’s called Emergency Bypass, and here’s how to enable it.

The Dark Sky app — famous for its crazy accurate weather predictions that give you down to the minute details on everything — has been updated to version 5.0 today, bringing with it an awesome new design and feature improvements.

Among the most noticeable differences is a new vertical timeline that dispenses weather predictions over the next 24 hours. It’s also adjustable so you can view precipitation, temperature, wind, humidity or the UV index.

I just moved to Germany, which means that I get a lot more weather than when I lived in Spain. There, a quick once-a-week check was plenty to know whether you should get the umbrella from the attic. In Germany, I check every time I want to leave the house.

And now there’s a great app which will will let you customize your own weather notifications, right there on your iPhone.

The people behind Vybe are calling it a “smart bracelet,” because it’s missing a key element included in all smartwatches: the screen. Instead of relaying information through a display, Vybe vibrates, nagging you to look at your phone.

A device that repeatedly requires halting your current activity seems to defeat its own purpose — namely, untethering you from your phone. It’s also strange that Vybe’s promotional clip suggests you pick up your phone while driving, which is illegal in many states — including California, where WearVybe, the bracelet’s maker, is based.

Google has updated its Google Maps apps for Android and iOS to add real-time incident reports from the Waze community. This means that when Waze users — or “Wazers” as they like to be called — report accidents, construction, road closures, and other delays, the alerts will be displayed inside Google Maps as well as Waze.

One of the wacky things you may notice if you’ve just gotten a new iPhone is the default double alert whenever you get a text message, whether iMessage or SMS. Why Apple has this as the default, I’m not sure, but it kept freaking me out before I figured out how to turn it off.

However, I’m willing to see that you might want the double alert, or more (shudder), and there’s a simple way to make that happen, as well.

Here’s how.

Before every iOS app in the App Store began sending you push notifications — whether you want them or not — the best way to stay on top of your alerts was with Boxcar, a free app that delivers push notifications on behalf of a huge catalog of apps. In its App Store description, Boxcar boasts about delivering over 1 billion notifications since its debut in July 2009. But it seems the service may have finally ended.

The iOS 6 beta has been available for four days now, but we’re still stumbling across new features that Apple didn’t mention during WWDC. One of those is the ability to receive government AMBER and emergency alerts automatically on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

The new iOS6 Mail app gets a great new feature that isn’t obvious just reading the spec-sheet: Per-person and per-account alerts. Now you can let mail stay silent, and ping you only when a certain person sends you an email.

Now here’s a tip that should save me a bit of sanity. I hope it does for you, too. I use Google calendar for much of my scheduling needs, but nothing beats iCal for a quick, offline calendar that runs on my computer. With the calendar info coming in from Google, though, I get reminders on my iPhone, my iPad, and my Mac via iCal. I really don’t need iCal to remind me about things, since I mainly use it as a quick calendar I can launch on my Mac and be done with it. Sometimes, I’ll open my Mac at home only to find a bunch of old reminders on it from iCal. I wish I’d known today’s tip sooner.

While repeated alerts for our text messages are helpful sometimes, other times they’re just downright annoying. If you find that they frustrate you more than they help you, here’s how to turn them off and receive just one alert per message.

It’s nice to know when you receive the latest urgent text message from your significant other, but seriously do you need a reminder after each one comes in after receiving the first alert? I don’t think so and you’ll agree if you are like me, since I receive a lot of text messages.

If you find yourself in a quiet environment like a meeting or at the doctor’s office you’ll usually silence the ringer on your iPhone. The iPhone will then vibrate when you get incoming calls.

Although that sounds great, the iPhone will vibrate the same way for every caller. But it doesn’t have to do that. You can actually create a customized vibration pattern for every contact in your address book.

Our heads are spinning with all the new little features that are packed into iOS 5. Our heads also might be spinning from the new “LED Flash for Alerts” feature found under the Accessibility settings which we just enabled. While it currently only works on the iPhone 4, this neat little feature enables your phone to send out a few pulses of light from the LED Flash every time you get a new Text or Phone call.