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OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
Ever since I updated 1Password to the latest version, it never asks for TouchID unless I just had the app open and unlocked, and just switched away from it for a second. If I open the app cold, it always asks for my master password. It didn't do this when iOS8 first came out, it changed to this behavior with the last big update.

Is this how it's supposed to be, or is my install broken or something wrong with my settings?

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OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
Is Dark Sky worth 4 bucks? Is it as hyper accurate as it purports to be?

EDIT: Everything I've read says that Dark Sky gets its information from forecast.io

What does the app give me that I can't get from the forecast.io webapp? Does the paid app give me more info?

OldSenileGuy fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Oct 22, 2014

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
What's everyone's recommendations for a good BluRay/DVD cataloging app? On OSX, Delicious Library looks head and shoulders above the rest. But puzzlingly they don't have a complementary iOS app.

I look in the App Store, and everything I saw ranged from "that looks like total poo poo" to "that looks like it might be ok, but is probably total poo poo."

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001

Bummey posted:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/delicious-scanner/id637919291?mt=8

You use the app to scan items into your computer's library but, yeah, there's nothing for managing all of that on your phone.

Yeah, I saw that, but unless I can browse my library on the go, Delicious Library is pretty useless to me. If I'm at home, I can just look on my shelf.

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
I thought of a good idea for an app today and figured I'd check to see if it already exists:

I have three different credit cards, and each card has two or three different tiers of % cash back for different kinds of businesses, AND the top tier of 5% cash back rotates every three months or so on each card.

I'd like an app where you can make an account and enter in the specific credit cards you have, and then you tell it what store you're shopping it, and the app tells you what card to use. Ideally, the service would keep track of the rotating rewards categories for every available credit card, AND be smart enough to know all the loopholes and exclusions and account for them.

For example I get 4% cash back on gas using my Costco Visa, but not if I'm at a competing warehouse gas station. So if I just type in "gas station" it tells me to use my Costco Visa, but if I type in "Sam's Club gas station" then it knows about the fine print and tells me to use my Amex that gives me 3% cash back at any gas station.

So, does something like this exist already?

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
I remember hearing a few years back that Gmail was going to stop mining people’s email for data? Did that ever happen? Or is it just a “yeah, suuuuuuuure you are :rolleyes: “ type thing?

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001

Mr. Apollo posted:

Any suggestions for a parcel tracking app? I purchased Deliveries but they switched to a subscription based service last year and didn't grandfather anyone who previously purchased it. I don't mind paying for one, I just don't want a subscription based one.

I'd like to be able to track Amazon deliveries and eBay deliveries through their Pitney-Bowes shipping service.

There's an app called Parcel that's worked great for me. It's free to track only 3 deliveries at a time, or you can pay something trivial like 1.99 or something to track more.

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
Ever since I got my first iPhone, I've always used the stock mail app and it's always been fine for me. I never understood why people used/liked third-party mail apps.

Now I just started a new job that uses Exchange email, and I'm seeing the problems with the iOS stock mail app. For some reason, emails I get from certain people put the entire mail thread in every email, with no option to auto-hide or auto-collapse. And emails from certain other people come in with tiny tiny text that needs to be pinched way in on and scrolled to read.

I checked the OP, but it only has suggestions for the best iOS8 apps. :lol:

What are the best Mail apps that will be compatible with an Exchange server, a Gmail account, and a Yahoo mail account? I've done some searching and heard about Spark, Edison, and (ugh)Outlook. I'm open to paying for an app if it's good, but I don't really want a subscription service. I actually already downloaded Outlook and it's surprisingly not bad for a Microsoft app, but I'm wondering if something better is out there, or a goon-consensus "best mail app."

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
Thanks for the recommendations. I guess I'll try Outlook for a week or so and see how it goes.

I just....I hate the app icon so much. And to give such a hated icon a spot in my dock....it annoys me more than it should. I hate it so much that I might still give Spark Mail a try.

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001

Arcsech posted:

Just make a shortcut with the "Open app" action to open Outlook. Add that to your dock instead.

That's....a great idea. Only two issues.

1) That means I won't get badges on the app icon, right? This actually isn't the end of the world, since I compulsively check emails just to get rid of that badge, so hopefully this leads to me checking my email less frequently.

2) Every time I launch the shortcut, there's a little slide down notification from the top of the screen with a check mark to tell me that the shortcut has run. Again, this is a small thing but irrationally annoying. Any way to turn that off?

OldSenileGuy fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Mar 26, 2021

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
Random question: Why the hell hasn't Google Maps (or Apple Maps, but this is something I'd expect from Google first) integrated a toll-estimator into it's driving directions? It will happily tell you "This route requires tolls", but doesn't tell you which roads have the tolls or how much they'll be. Is there a reason for this?

EDIT: Actually, Google Maps in the browser will tell you which roads are the toll roads if you drill down to turn-by-turn, but still doesn't estimate how much they'll be.

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
Those are both valid issues but....doesn't seem beyond Google's power? Certainly they seem more do-able than having a car drive down every street in the world taking a picture every 5 seconds?

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
Google Maps and Apple Maps both STILL do the most annoying thing:

If I’m zoomed in on a location far away, and I do a search for something, like let’s say “pharmacy”, it feels like maybe 25% of the time it does what I want, which is show me pharmacies in my current map area.

The other 75% of the time it whips me back to my current location to show me pharmacies around me. I NEVER NEVER WANT THAT YOU STUPID APPS I ALWAYS WANT YOU TO SEARCH THE AREA IM CURRENTLY LOOKING AT

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
Has anyone used the Pass2U app to create cards for Apple Wallet that otherwise aren't compatible with Wallet?

It seems to work well, though I don't like that it apparently has to upload the information to it's servers to create the card? On the one hand, that seems like a privacy no-no. On the other hand, do I really care that this company might have my Wegman's Price Saver card and my Shop Rite price plus card?

Is there any good alternative to this app that keeps that information more private? Otherwise I'll probably just use this one lol

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
Stocard looks nice, but after the first card, it won't let me add any others to Apple Wallet?

And Pass4Wallet is ok too, but I hate that the Apple Wallet automatically stacks all of the card from Pass4Wallet into a single stack that you have to swipe through horizontally.

Why do you make this so hard, Apple :mad:

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
Does anyone have a Spam Call Blocker app that they recommend? I'm tired of getting multiple spam calls a day, but I'm wary of simply turning on "Silence Unknown Callers" on my phone because I don't want to miss the odd call that's NOT spam but also NOT in my contacts list. (For example, I got a call the other day from my building's management company that I would not have wanted to miss - I only picked up because the number was local and didn't appear to be a spam number.)

Edit: I guess I could just turn on “Silence Unknown Callers” and assume that any ‘real’ callers that aren’t in my contact list will leave a voicemail. But if there’s a spam blocker app that works seamlessly, that’d probably be nicer.

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
Does anyone know if you're able to login to Apple Music on your iPhone using a different account than your main Apple account?

I'd like to ditch Spotify for Apple Music, but my wife and I share a Spotify account. The only limitation is that we both can't be using it at the same time, which almost never is an issue (especially during covid times.) But if we can't both share the same Apple Music account and are forced to get the $14.99/mo family plan, that's probably gonna be a no-go.

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001

Endless Mike posted:

It might be worth seeing if the $20 Apple One plan is something you'd make use of tbh.

The $20 Apple One plan would be like $2 more than I'm paying combined right now, but I don't see myself ever making much use of Apple Arcade. I wish they'd let you mix and match services - if I could swap in Apple News+ instead of Apple Arcade I'd probably do it.

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
I just switched from Spotify to Apple Music and, after a brief adjustment period and wrapping my head around the different way it works, I'm really enjoying it. I don't know if it's a placebo effect or not but I swear the upgrade in audio quality is noticeable.

However, this puzzles me:



Why would they lump WiFi and 5G together like that? The main reason for having a separate toggle for LTE and Wifi in the first place is so that people can be mindful of their data usage while on mobile, so why wouldn't they group 5G with LTE?

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001

Buff Hardback posted:

It only does that if you enable “allow more data” in Settings > Cellular

The assumption there is “turn it on, this person doesn’t give a poo poo about data usage, yolo”

Huh, interesting and good to know. I do have unlimited (well, really 50GB before they start throttling me and I've never come close to hitting 50), so I'll leave it on and see how it goes.

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
Did anyone ever release an app that does LiveNotifications for NHL games? I would have figured Apple would support this natively by now, but alas…

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
Not strictly iOS focused but - are there any guides out there that give an in-depth look at transferring everything from Google Photos to iCloud Photos? I googled for it, and every "guide" doesn't really go any deeper than "download everything from google and upload it to icloud!"

Specifically -
  • Downloading everything from Google gave me a .json file for every picture and video. It looks like these files contain metadata. Should I just delete these? Or can iCloud make use of them?
  • It looks like Google did save my iPhone photos as HEIC, however it looks like in order to implement Live Photos, it saved a short .mp4 for every Live Photo. I assume iCloud will not turn these back into Live Photos? Should I just dump the whole folder into iCloud, or will that leave me with a ton of 2-second long mp4 files that I don't necessarily want?
  • How does it deal with duplicates? I'm pretty sure there's a ton of these that already exist in my iCloud, but I really don't want to sort through all this myself. And I also don't want to be taking up twice as much space in my iCloud as I need to.

I'm probably gonna dump the whole folder onto iCloud and let it run overnight and see what happens, but I'm not sure if I will like the results.

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001

Thwomp posted:

So I recently did this with my own photos and I'm trying again with my spouse's and I'll just say its a huge pain.

First thing is to get all the photos down in as much of a go as possible via Google Takeout. If you don't, you risk them not having all the needed metadata to correctly file themselves by date and time. Extract them all to one central location.

Next, import them by a year at a time. It can take days and days to sync a large library import to iCloud so its best to do it in smaller bits. If something doesn't sync right (and there will be some that don't), then you can mass edit them into the correct year at least before you move on to the next year. Much easier than trying to sort your whole library after the fact.

The json files do contain the needed metadata and I cannot honestly remember how exactly I managed them because I did do it for my photos. My own searching led to an exiftool that I'm kinda weary on.


Duplicates will get sorted both before and after. It'll ask to Import New Photos to exclude any obvious duplicates. If it finds further duplicates afterwards, they'll show up in their own item in the Photos app on the Mac (are you doing this on a mac? I probably should've asked earlier).


No idea on the HEIC/mp4 bit. I think that stems from the short time after Apple announced for format shift and before Google Photos natively supported Live Photos.

Good luck and also let us know how it goes!

Edit: Now that I found this link, it looks real familiar and I believed I used this on my photos to bring in the metadata from the json files first before importing into the Photos app on my Mac.

Definitely agree on it being a huge pain.

As you noted, Google leaves the metadata in the pictures alone, and any metadata changes you made are included in the .json files that are downloaded in the Google Takeout batch. But Apple doesn't know what to do with those, so there are several different options of how to merge that data back into the photos. I ended up using https://metadatafixer.com, which is a paid option that cost like 20 bucks, but also all I had to do was point it to the 29 zip files that Google gave me and it processed them all overnight and left me with nicely organized and tagged folders in the morning.

Also, to my surprise, it seems like Apple Photos DOES have the capabilities to merge the .HEIC's and associated .mp4's back into a single Live Photo. Although now that I'm typing it out, I'm realizing that all my tests have been on recent photos, so it's possible that some older ones might not be as seamless.

The biggest problem now that I'm dealing with is on Apple Photos. When I first started using Google Photos like 4 years ago, I THOUGHT I switched off Apple Photos backup, but apparently I did not. So like 75% of the photos I downloaded from Google will already be in Apple. And when I did a test of importing the 2023 photos into Apple, it only correctly found and identified like 80% of the duplicates. I'm not sure why it didn't correctly identify some of the duplicates - the photo content, file name, and metadata is exactly the same. The only difference is the file size, because the Google Photo versions are much smaller. This shouldn't even need any "advanced machine learning ai algorithm" detection to detect these, it should be a slam dunk.

Also, there doesn't seem to be a way to actually trigger Apple Photos to do a "scan library for duplicates" check. It looks like it's just something that happens when your computer is idle, which kinda sucks.

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
There's no way in Apple Music to share playlists that have iTunes Match uploaded songs in them, is there? I thought maybe they would share across users in my family plan, but they don't. Then I thought maybe if I uploaded the same tracks to iTunes Match for both users, then it would work, but it appears to still not work.

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001

Weedle posted:

nope, if the status is "matched" or "uploaded" those tracks are only visible to you. it has to be an apple music track specifically to appear in the shared playlist for them

Huh, that's strange. It totally makes sense that "uploaded" songs would only be visible to me.

But doesn't "matched" essentially mean "you've added this file to your library, but we've replaced it ('matched it') with the version that's on Apple Music"

Seems like those SHOULD be visible to others?

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
Parcel is free if you only track three packages at a time. It's so good that I'd gladly pay for it if I needed more than that, but it hasn't really been an issue yet.

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
With Apple Music, is there a way to transfer a "listening session" from my laptop to my phone?

I've been listening to my "Discovery" station on my laptop and it's been pretty good today, and I just want to keep the station going on my phone while I run out. I know I can just start the station on my phone, but a song just started that I like and if I start the station on my phone, it procedurally generates a new playlist. I know I can just search for the song and add it to "play next" on my phone, but it would be really nice if there was a way to handoff the currently playing song/station from MacBook to iPhone.

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001

Agghhhhh this is so maddening because this is exactly what I want except for iPhone <> MacBook. I already tried AirPlaying from the MacBook to the HomePod and then handing off from the HomePod to the iPhone and it didn't work.

It DOES work if I control the HomePod from iTunes Music.app on my MacBook (as opposed to AirPlaying to it), but I got a new set of Edifier speakers that I'm now listening to music on via Bluetooth, so it seems pointless to go back to AirPlaying to HomePod.

drat why this gotta be so complicated

OldSenileGuy fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Oct 17, 2023

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
In general I find the thumbs up/thumbs down system too restricting, not just in Apple Music but also on Spotify or any music streaming app.

This would be a UI nightmare, but ideally I'd have separate options for:

- Thumbs Down (I like this song but it doesn't fit on this radio station / procedurally generated playlist*)
- Thumbs Down (I don't like this song but I do like this band - take this song out of the suggestion list)
- Thumbs Down (I don't like this band but I do like this genre - take this band out of the suggestion list)
- Thumbs Down (I don't like this kind of music - don't recommend it)

Thumbs Up is more forgiving, but I need more granularity in my Thumbs Downs!


*today I started a Nirvana station, and after 3 songs it started playing mid-00's Radiohead and The Killers. I love both Radiohead and the Killers so I can see why it would play them, but they don't fit on a Nirvana station! I guess just skipping the songs SHOULD help the algorithm determine what to play on the station, but I'm not sure if it actually does.

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
But do those influence the algorithm at all? I don't really care about rating songs if it's just gonna be me that ever looks at it.

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
What country did you use? I’ve heard Argentina is the best one to use but of course Mullvad doesn’t have servers there

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
Is Paprika the go-to app for recipe organization? It's 5 bucks but if it's good and doesn't have a subscription i'm happy to pay it.

Here's a dumb question - these days I'm getting most of my recipes from Instagram reels because I'm a basic bitch. Is there any app or shortcut that will: 1) Save the video to either an app like Paprika or to a note in the notes app AND 2) save the caption from the video along with the video?

I found this site https://instavideosave.net that will let me save the videos, but it doesn't have the caption which doesn't help me.

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
Is there a weather app that shows historical weather data? I’d like to put in a zip code and a calendar week with a specific year and see what the weather was. Bonus points if you can get an average of what the weather was that week for a 10-year period or so.

I know this information is available elsewhere, but I’m wondering if there’s any app that includes an easy interface for viewing this data

OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
If we're talking Calendars, iOS's calendar infuriates me that is has no "always show events in local time" option.

I'm taking a trip to Vegas next month, and I've added a bunch of events to the calendar, and even though if you dig down you can see when the events start and stop in their local time (PDT), at a glance it only shows what they are in my home time zone (EDT).

So when I want to remind myself "when is my flight back from Vegas?", i can't just glance at the calendar, because it will show me 2pm when it's actually at 11am.

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OldSenileGuy
Mar 13, 2001
It's been like a week now since 17.4 released - does the EU have any alternative browsers yet, like a true version of Chrome or Firefox that's not just a reskinned Safari? And has anyone done any performance comparisons?

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