If Sleep++ is telling you that you’re getting a perfect night’s sleep, with zero restlessness whatsoever, it’s probably broken. The good news is that it’s incredibly easy to fix this bug in just a few steps. Here’s what you need to do.
Tim Cook has hinted that the Apple Watch will get even greater at monitoring your health and fitness. Speaking at Startup Fest Europe in Amsterdam today, the Apple CEO said the company’s wearable may one day tell you when it’s time for a checkup.
If you’re anxiously waiting on a brand new iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus to come in the mail this week, you’re not alone.
Tracking the package as Apple’s ginormous new smart phone wends its way to you may be the internets new past time. You should have received a tracking number from Apple when your iPhone shipped, but there’s an even easier way to keep a watchful eye on that beautiful new gadget.
Reporter is a crazy iPhone app that tracks… well, everything. It pops up an alert at random intervals throughout the day and conducts a mini survey, then puts all this data together to be mined at your leisure.
Now that winter has hit the country, cycling has moved indoors for much of the U.S. That means straddling a stationary bike or throwing your trusty road or mountain bike up on a stand (or if you’re really brave, rollers).
That’s where the Xspin comes in. it’s a small box filled with sensors and a low-energy Bluetooth 4.0 radio that attaches to a crank arm and sends speed, distance and cadence data to an accompanying app — either one of two developed by its parent company, Pafers, or a handful of popular third-party cycling apps, like Strava or MapMyRide. It’ll also work with ellipticals (though it obviously attaches differently, since ellipticals don’t have cranks).
This article first appeared in the Cult of Mac Newsstand magazine
Thanks to Apple’s tireless vetting of App Store apps, it’s tricky for an app to flat-out snoop on you. Then again, the behavior of some apps could be thought of as snooping if you squint and look at them the wrong way.
Foursquare is all about location, but that’s because it knows exactly where you are. And Facebook is… Well, Facebook likes to know things about you.
But you can keep earning Mayorships and tweeting your pictures without telling everyone where you live, or letting them post your location to Facebook. Just follow our handy guide to the privacy settings of various famous apps.
DataMan was one of the first iPhone data trackers when it debuted back in 2010, after AT&T 86ed the utopian guarantee of unlimited data.
This new iteration, DataMan Next, is much prettier, but essentially does the same thing: It tracks your data usage and warns you before you spend money needlessly on data overage charges; it can even predict whether you’ll end up going over your monthly allowance. And today, it’s free.
I don’t know if you have kids or not, but one of the more difficult things to keep track of, at least for me, is their allowance. Yeah, you might say, just write it down on a piece of paper or something. While that may seem to have merit, it rarely works out in my family. Let’s say my son gets $5 every two weeks for allowance. That’s a $5 bill I need to have each and every week.
Honestly? It never works out that way. So we tried using a calendar, on which I created a repeating event, set for every two weeks, figuring we could just count it up when he needed something. Well, that didn’t really work out, either. We’d be at a store, and he’d want something, and it’d be some non-multiple of five, and we’d try to remember to write it down, and so on.
Suffice it to say that I am doing a poor job at helping my kid keep track of his allowance, and an equally poor job of prepping him for real life money management.
So imagine my joy when I saw Allowance Manager for iOS, a Universal app that basically does what we need: tracks allowance on the iPhone or iPad. Win!
Apple has warned developers for nearly a year that apps should not use UDIDs, and that they will be rejected in the future. A deadline has finally come on UDID apps, as Apple just announced they will reject any apps that use UDIDs starting on May 1st.
Another stipulation on Apple’s deadline, is that all apps must support the iPhone 5’s 4-inch display too. Here are the full notes on the deadline:
ActoTracker is a free Mac app that automatically tracks all of the activity on your Mac. You might show up at the office on Wednesday having completely forgotten what you were working on Monday. You might wonder what specific website you went to while researching that lit paper, and not have a record of the history stored in your browser. With ActoTracker, you can pull up this kind of information, and much more.
Apple has been historically fickle about how it lets marketers and developers track iOS users through apps downloaded from the App Store. After all of the privacy concerns were raised about the UDID device identifier back in 2011, a better solution never presented itself.
Apple eventually introduced its own Advertising Identifier for iOS device tracking purposes, but marketers still favored the unique, permanent nature of the UDID. The UDID worked so well because it was a device-specific identifier that could never be changed. Athough developers were technically banned from using the UDID to track iOS devices more than a year ago, many, many apps still use the deprecated method today.
Apple is reportedly starting to reject apps that use web cookies to track user activity in iOS. Could this mean a reinvigorated push towards the Advertising Identifier again?
A mobile phone in the hands of your kid can be a liability. But it can also be guardian angel — it all depends on how it’s used. MobileKids is a free iPhone and Android app that enhances a phone’s guardian angel-like qualities while putting the liabilities on lockdown.
If you lose a smartphone and you use a service that can track its location via GPS, ignore it when it tells you that your handset is a Wayne Dobson’s house. For the past two years, this 59-year-old retiree has had cellphone owners showing up at his Las Vegas home demanding their devices back. They turn up at all hours of the day, yelling and threatening to call the police.
But Dobson is no thief, and he doesn’t have their phones. It’s a strange glitch that appears to be affecting devices on Sprint, and its making this man’s life a misery.
Stick-n-Find is a clever – and very small – object tracking device that talks to an app on your iDevice via Bluetooth, over a range of about 100 feet. After a hugely successful fundraising program on Indiegogo that raised six times more than required, the makers will be showing off the gadget at CES.
Sometimes, discovering a free app is like finding gold; other times, it’s more like finding a rock covered in gold paint. Case in point: While we really dig the free version of HoursTracker HD for iPad, the freebie of the iPhone version is severely hobbled — and not nearly as useful.
But just for today, the superb full version of the HoursTracker iPhone app is free.
If you preordered an iPad mini directly from Apple.com, you have probably noticed that you have yet to receive a shipping confirmation from Apple… and it’s getting close to the wire.
Considering the fact that Apple is guaranteeing a Friday, November 2nd delivery for initial preorders, and that Apple usually ships out new products directly from the factories in China, that might have you concerned.
There’s no reason to panic. Your iPad mini has, in all likelihood, already shipped, and is right now sitting in a delivery center in the United States, just waiting for Apple to give the okay to have it delivered to your door.
Here’s how to check on your iPad mini, even if Apple hasn’t sent you a shipping reference yet.
With iOS 6, Apple has officially deprecated the UDID as a valid means for advertisers to track app users. The UDID functioned sort of like a Social Security Number for your iPhone, allowing advertisers and third parties to track your behavior across multiple apps… a troubling privacy concern for many. But UDID tracking also had many beneficial advantages, like allowing developers to troubleshoot crashing apps and the like, which inspired some third-parties when their many companies started releasing their own alternatives to UDID.
Apple wasn’t going to leave advertisers and developers without an alternative to use in their apps, though. New in iOS 6 is two new IDs: IDFA and IDFV. Yes, both IDs still track you, and the IDFA is specifically used by advertisers to collect data on you. But the good news is that this tracking can easily be turned off, and it’s much less invasive than the UDID.
The first thing the vast majority of us would do in the event that our precious iPhone is stolen is load up the Find My iPhone feature within iCloud and then call the Police and tell them where the shameless thug is located, in the hope that they’ll find the time to go and recover our device. Some of us may even take matters into our own hands and try to recover it ourselves (but that’s not really recommended.)
But when Michael Meehan’s son had his iPhone stolen, he took advantage of his position as Chief of Police in Berkeley, California, and ordered ten of his officers to track it down. All off the books.
There has recently been a lot of concern into the way in which our iOS apps access our personal data, and then what they do with it once it has been collected. Since the whole Path debacle in particular, users seem to be more concerned by the issue than ever before.
BitDefender is one security firm looking to capitalize upon that concern with a new app called Clueful, which promises reveal what each of your apps is doing with your data and identify the “misdemeanant apps on your iPhone.”
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – Last night the Cult of Mac staff was given a sneak peek at the latest and greatest products at the CES Unveiled event. Here is a small sample of what was shown.
If you’re the type of person who spends a few hours a week searching for your car keys, wallet, dog, or other precious belongings, then the BiKN Smart Case and tags for iPhone could save you a whole lot of time.
Equipped with radios that talk to the accompanying tracking tags, the BiKN (pronounced “beacon”) case will ensure that that you’re always connected to the things most important to you — even when they’re down the side of the sofa.
A handy way to link up with friends? You bet. Evil? Quite possibly. Lame? That’s what a friend of mine thought. Find My Friends, Apple’s newest app, is a new location tool that can be used to great effect — or become one huge, scary headache.
Here’s an FAQ with all you need to know about navigating safely through the app.
Just seven days after Steve Jobs promised to fix the location tracking bugs in iOS, an update is available now for download through iTunes.
A free download, iOS 4.3.3 fixes three bugs related to location tracking:
The data isn’t encrypted, but Apple says that will be fixed in the next major update, likely iOS 5, which is expected at WWDC in early June.
The 4.3.3 update applies to the iPhone (4 and 3GS, but not the iPhone 3G); iPad (1 and 2); and iPod touch (3rd and 4th gen, but not 1st or 2nd gen).
There’s a separate 4.2.8 update for the Verizon iPhone 4 (the CDMA phone is still on a different fork of iOS).
Update or no, Apple is still expected to testify at a May 10 Congressional hearing about mobile tracking.
No matter how harmless this whole iPhone tracking feature may be, some people still aren’t happy about it. While many of us have brushed it off and chosen to ignore what seems like something blown way out of proportion, others have decided to take things a little more seriously.
Now dubbed ‘Locationgate’, the issue has been the subject of class-action lawsuits and government investigations. But surely if users are really concerned about their iPhone tracking their every move, they can just turn location services off, right? Wrong.
The Wall Street Journal has revealed that even with location services disabled on the iPhone, the device continues to collect and store users’ location data with the help of cell towers and Wi-Fi hotspots. This isn’t a dirty little secret, however; this is well within the rights of every cell phone maker. But what’s interesting, is that Apple seems to lie about it.
The iPhone tracking issue that’s causing a big privacy stink isn’t new and isn’t really tracking users, says an iOS forensics researcher.
It’s actually a data file that is used internally by the iPhone to do things like geo-tag photos, and it’s been in iOS for a long time (in a different form).
What’s new is a nifty extraction tool called iPhoneTracker that pulls the data off your hard drive and makes a striking map out of it. iPhoneTracker was released this week at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference, causing a huge outcry about privacy and prompting U.S. Senator Al Franken to write to Steve Jobs.
In addition, the file has become more accessible than it used to be because it’s now used by third-party apps that require location data.
“It is not secret, malicious, or hidden,” writes Alex Levinson, an iOS forensics researcher.
