iPhone users can now find a parking space with Apple Maps. Starting Monday, the navigation application has SpotHero built in, giving parking options for more than 8,000 locations across North America.
The feature is free, though the spaces are not. Here’s how to use it.
If you live near a big city, or travel to metro areas frequently, you know what a pain in the butt parking can be. Parking lots and garages use confusing signage to trick you into spending more money, and some less expensive spots are often poorly labeled or hidden entirely. With ParkWhiz, you can get the most bang for your buck, and know exactly what you’re getting. Best of all, you’ll save time so you can enjoy your trip without adding stress.
Apple Pay’s latest promotion can save you 20 percent off SpotHero parking in major U.S. cities. The discount is valid against a single reservation valued up to $5 through January 25.
If your car has a Bluetooth stereo, then you can set your iPhone to remember exactly where you parked, and mark the spot in your iPhone’s Maps app. Once enabled, you’ll never lose your car again. The process is automatic: Whenever you leave your car, the marker is placed. Let’s see how it works.
Despite the improvements Apple has made to its own Maps platform, Google Maps is still the number one choice for millions of iPhone users. And it keeps getting better.
Its latest update adds a handy feature that will remind you exactly where you parked your car.
“Dude, where’s my car?” is about to become a question of the past thanks to a new feature in iOS 10.
The underrated new feature went unmentioned during Apple’s two-hour keynote yesterday, but it might solve one of the biggest problems with going to any mall, festival, airport, hotel or hospital: remembering where you parked.
If you have trouble finding your car in a busy garage, or always find yourself coming back to a lapsed parking meter and a ticket stuck under your windshield wiper, you’re in luck. A new Bluetooth sensor, in combination with an iPhone app, can make losing your car and racking up fines a thing of the past.
SAN FRANCISCO — It’s every entrepreneur’s worst nightmare: The app you’ve spent hours developing gets shut down before it even really launches.
It’s been a rocky road for four young French entrepreneurs who hoped to make their mark with a parking app called Sweetch. Their idea was to alert prospective parkers that spots on the street were freeing up, exchanging a nominal fee between drivers that could be donated to local charities. But instead of paving the road to fame by clearing the city’s congested streets, they ended up pulling their app from the Apple store under threat of litigation from San Francisco’s City Attorney.
“We helped five or 10 people a day, we brought value to them, but the city didn’t even try to understand that,” co-founder Hamza Ouazzani Chahdi says, speaking to Cult of Mac in the sunny, immaculate and modern apartment the guys call both home and office in the city’s Mission District. “We were lumped in with the other apps that definitely had a predatory model and it was toxic for us.”
He says that despite a meeting with San Francisco officials, the entrepreneurs weren’t really give a chance: “It was just, ‘Here’s your deadline.’”
SAN FRANCISCO — A parking app that reliably helps find open spots in this congested city was coded on a turn-of-the-century tugboat in Sausalito.
The Terrapin served David LaBua as a coding den for VoicePark, a free app that uses sensors to monitor parking spots. It’s the only one we’ve tested to date that guided us to viable public spots on the busy streets of San Francisco.
“Parking is probably San Francisco’s biggest stressor, and writing about it has been very therapeutic for me,” says LaBua, who holds a master of science in psychology. “I had no intention of getting into the app game, but there was a real need for it.”
SAN FRANCISCO — You can buy and sell a lot of things in this boom town, just not public parking spaces. All three parking apps called out by the city attorney for auctioning or selling public spaces have backed off.
City Attorney Dennis Herrera slapped MonkeyParking with a cease-and-desist on June 23 and mentioned that similar apps Sweetch and ParkModo were next in line. Each took a different tack — defiant, conciliatory, quiet — but in the end, all three are on hiatus.
