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iView: iPhone in Nature

By Hal Goldstein

iView: iPhone in Nature

My wife and I are most fortunate to own and share 33 acres of rural Iowa forest with birds, trees, plants, grasses, insects, fish, reptiles, small mammals, and deer. Admittedly, staring at my iPhone when walking in our woods is not a good look. Yet, worlds have opened thanks to apps that let me name trees, identify birds, diagnose plant health, and plot our newly created paths.

Before there was Apple Music, there was Spotify—a $10 per month streaming service that continues to be quite popular, with over 30 million paid subscribers worldwide and millions of songs available. A free, ad-supported version offers favorite artists and albums, but to get ad-free music and features such as offline listening and on-demand songs, as well as higher quality streaming, you’ll need to go with the premium version. I couldn't immediately find a way to upgrade to premium from within the app, but it's long been cheaper to sign up via your desktop computer anyway ($10 as opposed to $13 from within the app). In this post we’ll give you 15 tips for getting the most out of Spotify.

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference will take place at the Bill Graham Civic Center in San Francisco, California. Developers from all over will attend, and Apple recently gave out scholarships for the event. However, on the first day, there’s a keynote that Apple users will want to tune-in for to see the latest operating systems and new laptops.

Some people are wondering, "Can you share iBooks?" While you can share purchased e-books with other members of your Family Sharing group, if you want to know how to share iBooks, now just called Books, with a friend outside of Family Sharing, this tip will show you how to give them an e-book. Sending the gift of a good book is a real pleasure, and being able to do so instantly with just a few clicks is even better! As long as you've set up an Apple ID and you have the email address for the friend you want to send a book to, you'll be able to complete your purchase quickly. So let's dive in with how to send an Apple book as a gift.

A lot of gadgets connect via the iPhone’s built-in Bluetooth these days. But what if you’re listening to music on your Bluetooth speaker when your phone rings and you don’t want the whole room to hear your conversation once you pick up the phone? Luckily, it’s easy to quickly switch the audio from a Bluetooth speaker to your iPhone’s internal speaker or to your AirPods or other Bluetooth headset. Here’s how to bypass a Bluetooth device when taking or making a call.

There is no end to amount of accounts you need to create when using various apps and websites. And each one of those accounts has it’s own password. Since you have to remember those passwords, having extremely unique ones made of random numbers, letters, and characters isn’t easy to keep up with. Password manager apps were made to solve that problem. When you download a password keeper app, there’s only one password you need.

Apple Music offers lots of radio options by genre or curator. But you can also create your own radio stations by starting with a song you enjoy. Apple Music will then offer songs it feels matches the mood, tempo, and genre of what you chose to play. If you really like the radio station you create, you can take it step further and share it with your friends. Here’s how to share a station you created in Apple Music.

It’s that time of year again when young people everywhere leave the safety of education for the wild west..I mean job market. Congratulate them on getting that higher education and the very important piece of paper that comes along with it. Regardless the grad or chosen career path, there’s a tech gift out there for every individual. Here’s some of our favorites from across the web.

For the past couple weeks, Apple Music users have been reporting a major problem with iTunes. When you sync your own music to iTunes and Apple Music, the service is going to look for a match on their servers. That’s the file Apple Music will then use. But the problem is that multiple users have discovered that iTunes is deleting the original files of their music (thus they would lose their own music when unsubscribing from the service.) As someone who has been collecting a personal library of music for years, I can understand why people are thoroughly pissed off. But Apple assures us a fix is coming.

Yesterday, Instagram introduced a new icon and app design meant to focus on content. My first thought was, “dear god why?” While the new logo is full of pretty rainbow gradient, it barely looks like a camera at this point and completely abandons the nostalgic polaroid look of the original. Alas, all good things must come to an end, but we can complain about it anyway.

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