Dorchester — May 14th 2019

Michael ran through some of the IOS apps that he finds really useful and a couple of addictive games. Apple’s very informative Health app keeps him up to the mark on exercise helped by owning a dog. Battery Hd provides five screens of detail about battery health, usage and much more. BBC News gives very accessible, comprehensive and unbiased news. City Mapper provides highly detailed maps, transport details for many major cities around the World. Enter a destination and you get public transport detailed times and costs, walking direction and times etc. Find My Friends is another Apple App. You can allow friends to know your location for a timed period and they likewise. Google offer a similar but cross platform app Google Trusted Contacts.

The first game Michael recommended is Hocus; what looks very simple where you swipe or tap to move a red cube along a grey lattice. But as you move up level the simple lattice lattice steadily more complex and challenging. Perhaps also more in the fun category is the flight monitoring App Flight Radar 2 which shows details of every airborne plane and all commercial flights showing departure and arrival times, plane model etc. Useful to monitor a plane you are meeting. At £32.50/Annum Mac Format’s App gives you all the content of the print addition which can be downloaded and retained with full back number access. The Met Office App gives masses of weather related information including. UV, Pollen Count and Maps showing the movement of clouds and weather over time.

Michael’s second and highly addictive game is Monument Valley, a beautifully designed app in which you to guide a princess through mysterious monuments with optical allusions and more besides. My Tides App, providing local tide information is very useful as it National Trust’s App which provides all the information found in their printed hand book and uses Location Services to highlight properties in a given radius. Wikipanion provides instant and convenient access to Wikipedia. The final App Michael finds useful is Wot Wine based on wines available at supermarkets, you just scan the bar code on a bottle to get review, price comparisons.

Mick talked about scam and started by showing how easy it is to buy credit card details and all related information about the holder as shown on an ITV documentary. Telegram Messenger seems to be the preferred app on which to negotiate purchases but Mick couldn’t tell us an actual address! Currently, when you make a bank transfer only the sort code and account number are used but the recipients name is not checked against those. Mick recommends that if you are making a big payment by bank transfer, make a small test payment and confirm it has been received before making the main payment. Social media is full of investment offers with Celebrity Endorsement but don’t believe them. Martin Lewis had to threaten court action against Facebook to remove adverts fraudulently using his name for endorsement.

One of the ways crooks get your credit card details is by compromising commercial websites. Mick had received a letter from a small supplier of bird feed he uses apologising that their website had been hacked and customer credit card details obtained. Keeping a close eye on his accounts he knew no fraudulent use had been made of his card but had it cancelled and and new card issued. People selling on eBay or similar should always use tracking and sign for as a popular scam is a buyer saying they never got the good and getting their money back.

Mick’s talk on scams, particularly those relating to credit cards were a precursor to David explaining the benefits of using Apple Pay. David gave a brief description of how to use and set up Apple Pay on IOS devices, Mac and Apple Watch and explained how the only time the details of a card is ever included in a transaction is at the initial setting up. For more detail see How Apple Pay Works Under The Hood.

After the break, David talked about the IOS Files App demonstrating how to move files and documents, well, move within iCloud Drive but only copy to third party Cloud Drives or even the internal memory on the IOS device. This differs to the Mac where moving a file from iCloud Drive to another folder on the Mac simply alerts that the file will be removed from all other devices. When saving a web page on the Mac by exporting as a pdf, you can change the title and create a new folder. You cannot on IOS devices where you use the share feature to create a pdf which can the be copied to an existing folder and cannot be renamed. Too get around this, David showed how to create a new folder in Files, save the pdf. reverting once again to Files to rename the file. As Tom pointed out, in the share option rather than create a pdf you can save as pdf in Books.

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