It just so happens that the building where I work has no street address, as it is part of a university campus. When I asked Siri where I was, it gave me an address, which I put as my work address in my contact card. However, whenever I asked Siri to give me directions to work, it would lead me astray - about a mile down the road. Yet when I double-checked by asking Siri where I was, it aid I was at the address previously reported. I also discovered that if I manually touch the address in my contact card and touch Directions to here I would get directed to the correct spot! I played around with Siri today and figured out a work-around so that I could ask Siri for directions to work and get there properly.
I believe this is all due to some sort of Apple Maps bug. Manually touching to get directions versus asking Siri for directions to the same address should give you directions to the same place. I suspected that Siri was using different address mappings than Maps was using, so I tried methodically asking Siri to give me directions to slightly different addresses on the same road to see if I could pinpoint the address that Siri thought my building was located at. This turned out to be an incorrect assumption. I discovered that if I ask Siri these 2 questions, I get two different destinations:
Give me directions to xxx Road.
Give me directions to xxx Road, City.
The first gave me directions to the correct destination and the second gave me directions to a place on the same road about a mile away. My Contact card had the full address: city, state, zip and country included. I first tried removing all but the street address, but that gave me wildly inaccurate results.
In order for me to be able to ask Siri for directions to work and get the correct result I had to delete only the city from the work address in my Contact card.
This problem is probably location specific; an issue with the map data itself, or possibly with the Maps app, so most people probably won't have this problem. I have submitted this issue to Apple via their feedback form and via the report a problem link in the Apple Maps app.
[crarko adds: Definitely sounds buggy to me, although I have noticed similar behavior in Google Maps and MapQuest before too. Anyway for future reference (if you don't have these) to report a bug in OS X go here and for iOS go here. If you're in the Developer program, you have access to other tools, of course.]
In iOS 7, suppose you trigger the flashlight via Notification Center.
After using the flashlight, you don't have to swipe up the Control Center and tap the flashlight icon again to turn it off—no, no. There's a simpler way.
Trigger the lock screen, and then simply touch the camera icon in the bottom right corner: The flashlight goes off.
When you flip the ring/silent switch on your iPhone, it goes quiet while it's locked/asleep—mostly. But unless Do Not Disturb is turned on, your iPhone will still buzz the hum of its internal vibration motor when alerts that would otherwise ring out arrive.
But there's a fix. You can make your silenced iPhone be truly silent with a single flick of a virtual switch. Head over to Settings, and tap on Sounds. Switch Vibrate on Silent to off, and your phone will be both sound and vibration free when you slide the ring/silent switch to the quieter position.
You can identify unwanted calls. I still have a land line, but I am forwarding all calls to my iPhone. To identify unwanted calls (new windows, green energy, political adds...), I created a Contact named Don't Answer.
When I answer the phone and it is one of those annoying calls, if the number shows up, I can just use the 'add to existing contact' feature. Of course, this doesn't work if the number is blocked. But, in two weeks, I have a long list of calls that show up as Don't Answer and I can just not answer or choose Decline—there's no guesswork involved.
Lex adds: I do something similar for another reason. I use Google's two-factor authentication, and Google uses a variety of phone numbers to text me my passcode when I log in. So I created a Google entry in my contacts, and add each different number the company texts me from to that contact. That way, instead of ending up with lots of old entries from Google in Messages, there's just one that all their texts get grouped in.
iOS 7, of course, will provide a way to block specific unwanted callers, too. But this hint makes a nice stopgap!
I have an Android phone and wanted to automatically save photos that I take in iPhoto, similar to the Photo Stream feature that iPhones have. Dropbox has a feature that automatically uploads photos that you take into a folder called "Camera Uploads,” which is synced across all of my devices, so was a perfect candidate for creating a cross-platform Photo Stream.
First, I needed to import the existing "Camera Uploads" photos into iPhoto, as the folder action only triggers when a new file appears in the folder. Once this has been done, the folder action can be created.
Open Automator and create a new Folder Action. Select the folder "Camera Uploads" (in the Dropbox folder).
Next, drag "Import files into iPhoto" from the list of actions to the main window. Select the album to import into, and choose whether to delete the photos after import or not (I chose not to).
Save and give the folder action a name.
Quit Automator and iPhoto.
To test it, I took a picture with my phone, and allowed Dropbox to upload it. As soon as my MacBook downloaded the file, iPhoto opened, and the new picture was imported. iPhoto then quit automatically.
[kirkmc adds: I don’t have an Android phone, and cannot test this, but it seems pretty straightforward.]
Until 10.6, all Nokia devices were directly supported by iSync. iSync still runs under 10.7, but has to be installed manually from a backup because it's no longer supported (you'll have to find a 10.6 installation to get a copy).
However, the introduction of iCloud finally broke iSync, too. You will not be able to sync a Nokia phone with iSync if you have iCloud activated.
The solution is:
Create a new user (called for example NokiaSync)
Select all Address Book entries. Drag the list of entries to your desktop. This creates a .vcf file.
Copy this file to the Desktop of your new user NokiaSync (via the NokiaSync user's Public folder, or some other means).
Drag the .vcf file into this user's Address Book.
Launch iSync for user NokiaSync and sync NokiaSync's address book with your Nokia phone.
The key is that while every other user on your computer can use iCloud, the new user NokiaSync will not use iCloud and will be used only for syncing with your Nokia phone. You can repeat above steps 2 to 5 regularly, whenever you've made updates to your Address Book.
If you add new entries on your Nokia's address book, you can do the opposite process and Mac OS X will reliably detect which new entries were added and will copy these to your regular user's Address Book.
[kirkmc adds: I don't have a Nokia phone to test this, but it makes sense. It seems like a lot of work to update a contact list.]
I wanted to sync my Address Book on my MacBook Pro running Mac OS X to an Android device. The problem is that I use iCloud for syncing between my Mac and my iDevices (iPhone, iPad) via the iCloud service.
I found a solution for syncing between Mac OS X and Android with some tweaking. Download SyncMate and install it on the Mac. The free version handles Address Books. Then download SyncMate from Android Market on your Android device and install it.
Start the SyncMate.app on your Mac and select 'Add Connection.'
Select 'Android Device.'
Select Wifi, assuming you use Wifi on the Android device.
Enter the IP address of the Android device.
Start the sync.
Open Address Book on the Mac.
Select Groups under the View menu.
Click on 'All iCloud' and then select all the addresses you want to copy to the Android device.
Drag the addresses to Contacts group.
Starts the sync again in SyncMate.
Now all the addresses in Contacts groups are copied to the Android device. When you add new addresses on the Mac you have to copy them manually to the Contacts group and resync.
[crarko adds: It looks like the free version may also handle calendars. If anyone out there with an Android tries this out, please post your results.]
The following hint was submitted a while ago in the comments section of another hint about the 9300. In 10.6, I couldn't get the original hint to work, but the method from this comment worked fine. For others struggling with this in 10.6, here's the method from that comment:
Control-click on iSync.app (version 2.3) and choose Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. Navigate into Contents » PlugIns » ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice » Contents » PlugIns. Duplicate the folder Nokia-9300i.phoneplugin, and rename it as Nokia-9300.phoneplugin.
Open the new folder Nokia-9300.phoneplugin, then open the Contents folder within it. Open file info.plist with TextEdit, find ALL 9300i references and replace them with 9300, then save. Next, open the Resources folder, and rename com.nokia.9300i.tiff to com.nokia.9300.tiff.
Open MetaClasses.plist with TextEdit, find all9300i references and replace them with 9300, then save. Close all open files and you're done! Happy Synchronizing!
I just used it under 10.6 on a new MBP and it worked great.
[robg adds: I reformatted the comment, but (hopefully) didn't change any of the actual steps. Check the original comment if you have any issues.]
Since the AT&T rates are so high for data, I have the smallest/cheapest plan available for texts and minutes, so I often get close to my limit at the end of the month. I therefore like to send my SMSs via the unlimited data email (###@vtext.com), and only make/answer calls to those that are in network when I'm running out of minutes.
Instead of going through each Address Book entry and adding emails to them manually after looking up their carrier through a service (such as this one at whitepages.com), I adopted ViViDBoarder's excellent script to add the SMS emails, updating the code to work better with the current version of whitepages.com, and adding a little suffix representing the carrier to the mobile phone label so it says mobile att.
I wanted something I could see easily on the phone when it rings, so I shortened the carrier names. This works on the iPhone, and should work on other phones you might sync with your Address Book if they show you the phone number label when a call comes in. An alternative is to have it set the actual person's name or suffix to the carrier label instead. You just have to make sure the person's name isn't so long that the suffix falls off the end of the screen.
Here's one way to move contact from a Verizon phone to an iPhone. First back up your Verizon contacts using Backup Assistant (a small app you download using GetItNow). After running the app to back up, log onto your Verizon account, click the My Services tab, then click the My Contacts link.
This will show you all your contacts. Click the Print Address Book. This exports them into a single window ready for printing. But rather than print (or after printing as a backup), choose Save As and save the file as text. Open this in a text editor (it wouldn't open in Pages, so I opened first in TextEdit, then copied and pasted).
From there, you can do some replacing and deleting until you have a tab-delimited list which, voila, can be imported into Address Book and synced with your iPhone.
