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Yesterday, my wife and I drove from Phoenix, Arizona, to our home in San Francisco.
It’s an exhausting 12-hour journey that nonetheless was fairly pleasant except for one thing — constant, maddening alerts from the Waze map app.
We use Waze because it handles police speed-trap alerts way better than any other mapping app I’ve used.
Not that we were Cannonball Running it, but I may have occasionally exceeded the speed limit, and my wife would have been very upset with me if I’d gotten a big fat speeding ticket. (She prefers not to speed; I prefer not to get home in the middle of the night.)
Luckily, Waze makes it easy to customize what alerts you get, so you can be notified if the bizzies (Google it!) are lurking, but not when there’s a vehicle on the shoulder (the most irritating alert we got, which seemed to pop up every few minutes).
I tweaked the settings to my liking on my iPhone long ago, but unfortunately, yesterday we were using my wife’s phone for navigation. While it’s pretty easy to change the settings in Waze, it’s way too dangerous to do it while driving. So the Waze notifications were nonstop.
I face a somewhat similar situation with other iPhone notifications, which are super-important to me, but have steadily become a bit unwieldy.
I very much appreciate notifications about new emails and Slack messages, but not so much crime alerts from Ring or friend suggestions from Facebook.
Trouble is, customizing it all seems like such a chore. I just can’t be bothered! On the other hand, notifications are one of the primary ways I interact with my iPhone.
Thing is, it’s actually quite easy and painless to fix notifications universally, or on a per-app basis, and there are some clever tweaks you can make to ensure they are informative rather than infuriating.
Also in today’s newsletter:
Seeing as Apple has long hidden Mac power buttons (to stop them from being clicked inadvertently), I was nonplussed by the controversy surrounding the infamous Mac mini power button. And I’m also wondering if this “fix” really is a fix.
Even if you’re not a videographer and have never heard of Color.io (like me!), this looks like encouraging news for all Mac users.
I think I might be in the market for one of these new gadgets from Twelve South.
🔥 DEAL OF THE DAY: And talking of Twelve South, this looks like a good alternative to the company’s wonderful AirFly Bluetooth transmitter/receiver — and it’s quite a bit cheaper, too. #affiliate
I’ve got several bicycle lights and a clever Find My bike tracker from Knog, which makes very high-quality gear. And the Aussie company’s new Find My luggage tracker packs a unique feature that looks positively essential. Here’s our hands-on review.
— Leander Kahney, EIC.
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A message from the Cult of Mac Deals team
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Tweets of the day
Wallpaper of the day
One more thing ...
From: Steve Jobs
Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2005 9:36 AM
To: Bruce Chizen
Subject: Recruiting
Bruce,
Adobe is recruiting from Apple. They have hired one person already and are calling lots more. I have a standing policy with our recruiters that we don't recruit from Adobe.
It seems you have a different policy. One of us must change our policy. Please let me know who.
Steve.
Today’s poll
How's your notifications situation?
Results from yesterday’s poll:
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