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iCloud 101: Find My Friends app gets iOS 6 update

Geoffrey Goetz — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 19:00:48 +0000

There have been several sensational stories about how people have been able to recover lost or stolen devices using the iCloud-based “Find My iPhone” service on their Apple devices. This same iCloud service using an app with a slightly different name, “Find My Friends,” can also be used to keep track of where your family and friends are located. In reality, you are just tracking the Apple device they are carrying with them. Apple recently recently released iOS 6; here is a look at how those updates have improved the Find My Friends app.

Invite friends

The first thing you need to do is to set up each device’s Find My iPhone/iPad/Mac service via an iCloud account on the device. If you’re not sure how to do that, we have outlined the steps in a previous post. After you follow those steps, it is simply a matter of sending and accepting invitations from your friends:

Download Apple’s Find My Friends app (Universal Free) from the App Store.
Launch the app and log into your iCloud account.
From the Requests tab, tap on the Add Friends button to invite your iCloud friends.

Once your friends accept the invitations, they will have a chance to reciprocate the invitation and ask if they can in turn follow you. When you finally have your list of friends established, each time you launch the app, it will retrieve their latest location from iCloud and pinpoint their location on the map.

Track friends temporarily

Sometimes you may want to know where someone is located, but you do not want to follow them all of the time — and you certainly do not what them to follow you all of the time. In such cases, you can set up a temporary arrangement. The steps are similar to setting up a permanent follower:

Launch the app and log into your iCloud account.
From the Temporary tab, tap on the Invite Friends button to invite your iCloud friends.
Set the date and time that you want this temporary arrangement to end.

This will allow you to keep track of your friends when you plan a particular event together, or when you need to pick them up from the airport, as an example. They will be located along side your list of permanent friends. If your followed friends list gets to be too long, you can edit the list and set up your favorites, which will always display at the top of the list.

Geofence friends

As great as this service is, constantly checking the app to see how close one of your friends is to a particular location can become a tedious and repetitive task. With the iOS 6 update, you can now be notified when your friend arrives at or leaves a particular location. To set up this notification, do the following:

Launch the app and log into your iCloud account.
From the Friends tab, tap on the friend for whom you want to set up a notification.
In the top right corner of the screen, tap on the Notify Me button.
Choose either leaving or arriving, and set the address of the location.

Hide from your friends

You may notice that you cannot locate your friends all of the time with the app. This is because they don’t have an internet connection, they could not establish a location, or they have turned off the service and decided to “hide” from all of their friends. You too can turn off this ability and hide from your friends and prevent them from tracking you by performing the following steps:

Launch the app and log into your iCloud account.
From the Me tab, switch on/off the “Hide from Followers” setting.

You don’t have to think of this as a covert setting. It may be that you keep track of your business partners during the day on a company-owned device, and in the off hours you don’t need to know where they are located for privacy reasons. You can also use the account settings located on the Me tab to establish which of your iOS devices is currently publishing your location information to your friends. You may set up your iPad to publish your location information during the day when you are at work, and your iPhone to do the same at night when you are home. One of the other convenient features that Apple has added with the iOS 6 update is the ability to forgo the iCloud password when you have a passcode established on your device. This allows for much faster access to your friends’ location information. Overall, the enhanced features offered with the iOS 6 upgrade has turned what was once a novelty feature on the iPhone into a useful tool across a wide range of Apple devices.

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Obama’s reelection team sought advice from Steve Jobs, plus 4 other Apple stories to read today

Erica Ogg — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 15:57:00 +0000

With so many people writing about Apple, finding the best stories and reports isn’t easy. Here’s our daily pick of stories about the company from around the Web that you shouldn’t miss:

For a somewhat social media-shy company, Apple doesn’t seem like the place you get your social networking advice, but apparently that’s what President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign did. As part of a larger feature, Bloomberg Businessweek reports that Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, took advice from Steve Jobs last year on how to market Obama on mobile and social platforms.
What kind of app discovery and promotion plans does Apple have? The day after the introduction of iOS 6 at WWDC, the company registered two domains: freeonappstore.com and freeonibookstore.com, MacRumors found.
In the aftermath of the Path and LinkedIN privacy debacles, this makes sense: Apple is now requiring much more specific user permissions when it comes to what apps can access on your iOS device, CNET writes.
Macworld delves into a new feature coming with iOS 6 not mentioned in Monday’s keynote that’s “one part creepy, two parts useful” — Find My Friends adds geofencing.
Another feature Apple didn’t sell during Monday’s keynote? The ability to turn on AMBER Alerts and other government-issued emergency alerts right in iOS 6, as Cult of Mac discovered.

Image courtesy of Flickr user acaben

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Apple puts family first with iOS 5 and iCloud

Darrell Etherington — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:39:09 +0000

A common theme of questions I’m seeing about iOS 5 relates to how well the update plays with shared family devices and Apple ID accounts. While it can be a bit confusing to negotiate, the questions only serve to underline that people often use Apple’s mobile products in shared family situations. And iOS 5 and iCloud seek to acknowledge and capitalize on that aspect of their appeal.

iMessage keeps everyone in the loop

With Apple’s new group messaging/SMS and MMS replacement iMessage, family members can stay in close contact quickly and easily. The beauty of the system is that even if children are too young to necessarily have a smartphone, they can still join in the family conversation, since iPads and iPod touches connected to Wi-Fi can communicate through iMessage, independent of any cellular network.

For families where some members spend a lot of time travelling, or where different members live in different households, this is a great way to keep up communication between people who might not otherwise be able to talk as often. Plus, thanks to group messaging features, you can use iMessage as a virtual family message board, or target just the kids or just the adults separately from everyone else.

Find My Friends can reassure, help coordinate

I’m not entirely sure that knowing where your kids are all the time is necessarily a great idea, but Find My Friends can help make letting them go out on that first date a little easier. Also, when the family’s on vacation, Find My Friends can help everyone feel a little more secure when venturing out on their own for day trips or independent excursions.

Finally, Find My Friends could help family members coordinate, too. You could use it to see if you’re nearby to one another if you’re in an unfamiliar neighborhood and want to meet up for lunch, or if someone calls for a ride and aren’t sure how to get there or what the exact address is.

Reminders creates shared task lists

If you set up a shared iCloud account for your family, you can sync Reminders lists between devices, resulting in a shared to-do list. This could be for grocery shopping, errands to run on the way home, projects for the weekend, or whatever else you need to get done working in concert with other family members.

Since you can add notes to Reminders, you can even add greater specificity to tasks, and thanks to ge0-fencing, one partner could easily set a task to pick up milk that notifies the other to complete it when they leave work for the day. Sharing one iCloud account between family members may not work for everyone, but for a small family or a couple without much need for independent calendars or contacts, it could be perfect.

Past purchases and iTunes Match help share and share alike

It isn’t yet live for the general public, but when iTunes Match arrives, it’ll be possible to share one music library between multiple iOS devices in the cloud. If you share an iTunes store account, all members of the family will be able to download music from your iTunes library selectively to their own devices. That means you can have a general pool of all your music, and people can pick and choose what they like, by song, album, artist or playlist.

Even before iTunes Match arrives, past purchases in the iTunes, App and iBooks Stores will make it easier for family members to pool their resources and share media buying duties for their iOS devices. You can easily do this by sharing one iTunes Store account, and keeping iCloud, iMessage and FaceTime associated with separate credentials if you don’t want those things to work across all devices. Gone are the days when Junior buys Pages even though Father already has it.

The family that computes together buys together

Apple is very smart to make iOS, iCloud and its devices more appealing to families; it extends the concept of platform lock-in beyond the individual and applies it to a whole group. If iOS-only services make life easier for a family in terms of communication, the daily grind and keeping everyone entertained, then users will probably be even less likely to switch to other platforms down the road.

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Find My Friends, AirPort Utility now live ahead of iOS 5

Darrell Etherington — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 13:35:28 +0000

Apple’s iOS 5 and iCloud are set to arrive for the general public later Wednesday, but Find My Friends and AirPort Utility, two new apps for iOS 5, have arrived a little early. Find My Friends is now available through the App Store, but you can’t get it by searching there directly. Instead, you have to log in with iCloud credentials at iCloud.com on your device, where you’ll be prompted to install the app or visit the link above. You also have to be running iOS 5 to use it.

Some non-developer users have already been able to get access to iCloud.com, but don’t worry if you can’t yet. Once iOS 5 is available, you can sign up directly from your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad running the new software. If you do have access, you can peek at the Find My Friends app a little early.

So far, there’s not much to do on the app, besides make your location available for others to view. If you have friends using iCloud already, you can request to see their location via email using an in-app tool. Once the iOS 5 update gets rolling, Find My Friends should get a little more populated.

AirPort Utility also isn’t yet listed directly on the App Store. Instead, if you’re running iOS 5 and you go to Settings > Wi-FI, you’ll see a new button that lets you “Manage This Network” (if you’re using an AirPort network) and that button will take you to the download in the App Store.

We’ll have hands-on looks at both these new apps (which are universal, so they’re designed for both iPhone and iPad) from Apple when iOS 5 goes live for all, which should happen sometime around 10 a.m. PDT.

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Apple’s new and updated apps offer small but significant gains

Mark Crump — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 21:21:44 +0000

Apple highlighted three of its own apps that will arrive Oct. 12: an updated Camera app, Cards, and Find My Friends. We had heard about some of the updates to Camera during this summer’s Worldwide Developers Conference, but Cards and Find My Friends are new, somewhat curious additions with lots of potential.

Camera. The best part of the new Camera app is you can access it right from the lock screen. A close second is the ability to use the top volume button as a shutter. These should help you take quicker and better pictures. Not having to unlock your phone and tap the Camera could be the difference to taking a funny picture of your kid, or taking a picture of where your kid used to be. Using the volume button should reduce camera shake from haphazardly stabbing the on-screen button to capture an image.

You can also show a grid while taking your photo to help you take a straight image, and lock in the exposure and focus. I’m really looking forward to the exposure lock to take photos like this on my iPhone. My iPhone isn’t my best camera, but it’s the camera I always have with me, and I’m looking forward to these improvements.

Cards. I found Cards to be a curious lead-off for the iOS portion, as well as a head-scratcher for its inclusion at all. Cards is a free download, has 21 different designs for letterpress cards, and it will cost you $2.99 to have them mailed in the U.S. or $4.99 anywhere else. While I’m cynical about this service’s chances at success, I think it’s a great way to easily send travel postcards with a custom note right from your iPhone, especially when paired with the new Camera app.

Find my Friends. My first reaction to Find My Friends was a sarcastic, “So, now you can tell if your husband really is where he says he is.” The reality is, I could have used this feature a couple of weeks ago. A contractor was having trouble finding my house and I couldn’t help him based on his description of his surroundings. If we both had iPhones and Find My Friends, it would have really helped out. Apple has given Disneyland as place where it could come in handy, and that’s a good example. Apple also seems to have kept privacy in mind by allowing you to go off the grid and decide whom you will share your location with using simple touch-based controls.

All three of these apps will be available Oct. 12 when iOS 5 and iCloud launch.

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