With iOS 11, your iPhone gets smart enough to realize when a Wi-Fi connection is flaky, and gives up trying to join it. This might be most useful if you’re one of those people who keeps your Ask Join Networks setting activated, but it should help anyone who uses their iPhone in multiple places — i.e. everyone ever.
It used to be that when you got back from vacation, you’d drop your film off at the lab and cross your fingers. You hoped you’d get some half-decent photos back a week later, while memories of that cool restaurant you liked faded with your tan.
Now we share our photos with friends and family while we’re still on the beach, then forget about them. But we can, and probably should, make a little effort to preserve our vacation memories. And — you guessed it — there are apps for that.
Your mobile data plan takes a hammering when you travel. All the stuff you usually do while sitting in bed using your home Wi-Fi — like reading Cult of Mac and viewing cute capybara GIFs — will eat through your monthly allowance. And that’s before you get to the extra use of maps and Google to find your way around.
Today on Tech Travel Tips, we’ll look at ways to stop your iPhone and iPad from using up all your data in the first few days of your vacation.
At home, you can pretty much trust your own Wi-Fi network, and you kind of have to trust your cellular provider. But as soon as you fetch up at a hotel, airport, Airbnb rental or coffee shop, you risk everything.
Short of leaving your MacBook or iPhone out on the table while you visit the bathroom at a hacker conference, using public Wi-Fi is just about the worst thing you can do with your devices when you travel. Fortunately, there are ways to protect yourself — and they’re cheap and easy.
The rumors say that SoundCloud is on its way out. The company is laying off staff, while burning through streaming bandwidth with no real way to make any money. If you’re a musician, this is a big deal, because SoundCloud is where you share music, and where you go to hear other musicians’ music. It’s a mixtape and an audition reel combined.
The smart move is to take your music to YouTube, because a) it’s not going away, b) it’s free, and c) it’s where everyone goes for free music anyway. The problem? You need to make a video. You could always just put a still image up there, but then the kids will get bored and move onto something else. But as a musician, you’d probably rather spend your time making music instead of making movie.
Luckily — surprise surprise — there’s an app for that. It’s called Wizibel, ands it comes from master iOS music-app-maker Klevgränd.
If you find yourself on a mailing list that you either never signed up for, or just got sick of, then iOS Mail has you covered. The app has a built-in feature that detects emails from mailing lists, and offers to unsubscribe from them right there, without you having to visit the sender’s site and hunt for the unsubscribe option yourself, like some kind of spam-lackey.
If you’re using iOS 10 in an iPhone with 3D Touch, you can press on the timer widget in Control Center and pick from one of the preset timer shortcuts. In iOS 11, on the other hand, you get a full-featured, interactive timer widget that you can adjust, pause, and resume, all without ever launching the actual clock app. Let’s see it in action.
You have a big 27-inch iMac sitting on the desk in the corner of your living room office, and yet you’re over there on the couch watching a movies on your iPhone or iPad. Wouldn’t it be great if you could beam one to the other, like sending video from an iPhone to an Apple TV? The good news is that you totally can, just by installing an app on your Mac. There are several available, but today we’ll use my favorite, Reflector.
Pick a photo on your iPhone. Any photo. Can you tell me where and when you took it? Of course — that’s easy. But can you tell me the shutter speed of that photo? What about your elevation when you took it? Could you show me a histogram of the photo’s exposure? If you have Icon Factory’s Exify installed, then the answer is “Yes.” You can get to all that info, and a whole lot more, with a couple of taps.
In iOS 10 and earlier, if you don’t like the order of your photos in an album, then tough luck. In iOS 11, though, you can rearrange photos as easily as dragging them into a new spot. It’s just like rearranging pictures in a real photo album, only without all that futzing with sticky cellophane corners.
