Posts tagged: Maps

iPhone Tip Of The Day

This one’s for the walkers out there, you good honest souls you! When using maps in iOS 7, you have the option to choose walking directions as a dafault in settings, and to have Siri read you the directions turn- by- turn. Snazzy.

 

To set walking directions as your default, go to Settings>Maps. Scroll down to the Preferred Directions section and choose between walking and driving.

 

To ask Siri to give you prompted map directions whilst walking, tap the Directions button in the top left hand corner, select the walking icon at the top of the screen, enter your destination and then tap Route.

 

Interesting, (and some might say challenging), fact for you – Given that the world is about 25,000 miles in circumference and that the average walking rate is 3 miles per hour, it would take a person walking nonstop approximately 347 days to walk around the world.

 

Go to it!

 

 

 

 

What do people think about your city? (Map Infographic)

Well, what do people think about your city? We were a bit surprised when we checked out some of the results. (Fargo is good? Bozeman, Montana is expensive?!)

 

So just to be clear, we went through and used Google to search up each city, and we used the phrase “Why is (City Name) So …”

 

This prompted Google’s Autocomplete engine (you know, the one that pops up the sometimes-silly recommendations for you when you are searching). When the autocomplete recommendations came up, we wrote them down, and the result is here!

 

The Most Common Google Searches for Each City

The Most Common Google Searches for Each City

 

 

After taking in all the data, well, it looks a little sad for most places.  That being said, there was some interesting data:

 

Four cities were “Great”:

New York City, Denver, Boston, and Nashville

 

Four cities were “Boring”:

Charlotte, Louisville, Dallas-Forth Worth, and San Jose

 

And a few others had some pretty interesting ones:

Seattle is Loud

Portland is Weird

Chicago is Windy (Duh..)

and Atlanta is Gay

 

Sorry if we offended your city, but well, Google said so..

 

Hopefully you don’t live in one of the “Bad” cities:

Cleveland, Baltimore, Jacksonville, or Memphis

 

But then again, who trusts Google anyways?

 
 
 
*Black Rock City entry may include artistic liberties.

 
 

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Who Breaks iPhones the Most? (Broken iPhone Infographic)

Well, the results are in.  Since we are an iPhone buyback company (in case you were interested in getting an offer for your iPhone click here), we have decided to compile our latest purchases to make a map of where the majority of broken iPhone trade-ins come from.

 

We tallied up all of our transactions, and created a heat map that shows where the majority of our customers have had broken iPhones.  The red areas on the map show a high amount of broken iPhone trade-ins for the area, while the green areas show a high amount of used iPhone trade-ins (meaning they did not break their iPhones).

 

Heat Map of Broken iPhone Sales

 

Hopefully your city wasn’t one of the bright red ones (sorry LA and New York).  The data tends to show that our customers that are in larger cities (San Francisco, Chicago, New York, etc.) tend to break their iPhones more often.

 

So if you really care about your iPhone, well, move out of the city.  Or maybe just get a good case.  Or heck, just go ahead and break it, but make sure to sell it to an iPhone buyback company like ours if you do!

 

 

 

 

 

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OS X Mavericks

 

 

We would have suggested OS Liger ( rawr!), but Apple went ahead without consulting us and decided with this system update to start over with the naming process, leaving the big cat names behind.

 

Coinciding with their new ‘Designed by Apple in California’ ads, and the announcement that the Mac Pro will be built solely in America, Apple have started a new naming scheme for their operating system based on locations in California.

 

To start it off, announced yesterday at WWDC, we have OS X Mavericks. Mavericks is a surfing location particularly well known for its dangerous big wave riding in Northern California, just north of the town of Half Moon Bay.

 

 

Now, it’s also the new Apple operating system. Is it as cool as beach with big wave breaks? Well, kinda? We may have trapped ourselves in that comparison- it might not be that cool, but it is very cool.

 

Here’s the double rainbow of coolness for you guys;

 

 

New Finder Tabs.

 

 

Just like in your Internet browser, you can now have independently controlled tabs in your finder windows. You can merge these finder windows and take the finder full screen.

 

 

 

Tagging.

 

 

Filed under ‘I wouldn’t have though of this, but now that you did, it looks really freakin useful’ is tagging.

 

With Mavericks you will be able to ‘tag’ documents and media – save it, tag it as sports, home, to do, etc. and it catalogues these under their tags in the side bar of the finder.

 

You can tag documents with multiple tags, create new tags on the go, and the best part? Searching using tags. For instance, searching for ‘iphone stuff’ and ‘the best’ will naturally take you directly to your saved iPhone Antidote Wallpaper.

 

 

 

Multiple Displays

 

 

Users will now be able to access the menu bar and dock separately on each screen with multiple display support. You will also be able to load separate and independent applications on each screen, and drag them from screen to screen.

Apple TV is not forgotten here either, as it can now be a fully powered OS X display, with access to menu bar dock and independent applications also.

 

 

 

Extended Battery Life

There is a heap of new processing elements included in Mavericks to extend your battery life and reduce CPU utilization by up to 72%.

 

We particularly like a new feature called app nap, which figures out what applications and web pages are in use, and which are not. The system will then simply stop giving power to the web pages and applications that you’re not currently looking at.

 

Compressed memory pretty much does what it says, compressing inactive memory to provide spare memory to running applications when needed.

 

Timer Coalescing groups low end operations together , creating tiny periods of time when your computer can enter into an idle, low power state, which in turn saves your battery.

 

 

 

 

Safari

 

Safari is updated with Mavericks, starting with an all-new homepage with top sites and a sidebar with your bookmarks and access to your reading list. This will also include shared links from people you follow on Linkdin and Twitter.

 

Safari uses less energy in this update and includes accelerated, smoother scrolling and one click bookmarking.  In your readin list, you will be able to scroll continuously through all of your articles, one after the other.

 

 

 

iCloud keychain

 

Cross device safe keeping of all your passwords and credit card information starts with iCloud Keychain.

 

This new feature will store all your passwords, across all your devices, so you don’t have to think about them ever again. Sounds pretty good right? The keychain will even suggest new passwords for you, and then will go ahead and put it in the cloud, encrypted.

 

With your credit card information, when shopping online, the keychain will offer the last four digits of all the cards you have stored, and you can pick one when paying and be done with it.

 

Although this sends little tiny shivers of scariness up the security part of our spine, it also sounds super useful and convenient.

 

 

 

 

Notifications

 

You can now get all your notifications, from all your devices, on your computer.

 

What’s also pretty great about this is you will have a number of new options for action within the notification when it appears on your screen.

 

You can respond directly to most notifications, (by replying to email, declining Skype calls etc.), within the notification banner when it appears.

 

Once you have actioned a notification, you won’t see it again on any of your other devices, and they will all be updated with your response to the original notification.

 

When the computer is awoken from sleep, all the alerts you may have gotten when it (and you!) were asleep will be listed.

 

 

 

Calendar

 

The calendar app has been updated in a really cool way- where now if you have appointments scheduled, the app will give you a ton of information you might need for them.

 

The calendar will now provide you with weather in the spot where your appointment is scheduled, as well as suggestions for restaurants etc if you require them.

 

We particularly like that the calendar will work out and tell you the travel time to and from your appointment, and will even add it to the calendar so you cant double book the time when you’re supposed to be on your way!

 

You will also get notifications of when you need to leave on your phone and/or computer.

 

 

 

Maps

 

Maps hits the computer with Mavericks! You can now access street maps, 3D flyover data and info cards. You can also push turn-by-turn directions to our iOS device straight from your computer.

 

 

 

iBooks

 

 

 

iBooks will be on your computer by Fall with this system update. Now you can access all the books in the iTunes store as well as your stored books and bookmarks, and read them full screen on your computer screen.

 

But what is really cool is for the educators and the learners amongst us.

 

iBooks for Mavericks will come with interactive textbooks, which feature videos and other media embedded within the normal text. You will also have the ability to highlight and make notes, and learn using study cards made from the material.

 


Sounds pretty awesome huh?

 

OS X Mavericks will be available to the public in the Fall.

 

 

All images courtesy of Apple. 

Apple Maps for iOS 6 review

 

So, Apple Maps. Garnering a lot of press and a lot of anti-apple ammo, maps was the rather large hiccup of the iPhone 5 release. The premise made sense- take the advantage of owning one of the biggest and most useful apps away from one of their biggest competitors- Google. If they had the brainpower, they could build their own version. And they did, built using Dutch navigation equipment and Tom Tom’s Data.

 

And it works. Just not… perfectly. Yet. Soon after the release the internet was flooded with screenshots showing the inaccuracy of the application, from wrong destination information to odd looking buildings, roadways etc. Stating that your destination was in the ocean 10 miles out is not very good for a maps application. Unfortunatley the more humerous the inaccuracy, the worse it was for Apple- and anyone relying on the app to get them somewhere…

 

So. The app itself is not quite fully formed. It does, however, work very well for a lot of people. Here at iPhone Antidote we have used it extensively- across two countries, in the city and in the middle of nowhere, and have only come across one inaccuracy. Don’t get us wrong- there are  apparently lots out there, we just haven’t happened across a lot of them.

 

Disregarding the flaws for a moment-  the features of Maps are great- turn by turn directions, voice intergration, flyover and vector based maps. The 3D looks brilliant, vibrant and lifelike, and it’s really fun to play with- the pivoting action of being able to rotate the point of view and zoom out so you can play with the whole globe is stupidly fun. A lot of people find the interface a lot simpler to use and more pleasing to the eye.

 

It’s definitely something that holds promise, which, yeah, is not really what you want with a cornerstone feature of a new operating system. You want that shit dialed in.
So, Good Guy Apple organizes a press release where they tell their own customers that they made a mistake in releasing their maps too early, that they were sorry, and advised them to go to their competitors- please. They showed remarkable customer service by admitting their mistake and doing the right thing for their customers.

 

Apple have told their customers that they are improving maps and that the problems like buildings or roadways looking a bit funny will be fixed by user feedback, so an increasingly perfected system. Until that point is reached, we suggest using Apple maps until you run into a problem, then using Google maps as a backup. To do this- go to google maps in safari, and you will be prompted to ‘save as an app for your mobile’ by touching the arrow on the bottom and choosing the option to add to homescreen.

 

Happy travelling.