Maps: Let Your Fingers Do the (COVID) Traveling
By Jennifer Kerr
With all real, interesting traveling precluded by the pandemic, you can have some fun and get ready for a return to great trips with the Maps app on your phone (it’s also on iPad). Play around, explore and practice and you’ll be adept for our normal future.
First, open Maps in Settings. You want to have Location turned on, either While Using the App or While Using the App or Widgets. You also want to have Precise Location turned on so you get good directions. When you are not on WiFi, you want to have Cellular Data turned on. You can keep cellular data on all the time if you have an unlimited plan. If your plan is limited you can keep it off but perhaps turn it on when you really need it someplace.
Open Maps. Your current location will be in the center of the map, a blue pulsing circle. If it’s not (or to return at any time to your location), click on the pointed arrow at the top right.
At the bottom right is the temperature and the Air Quality Index.
Tap the i with a circle around it at the top right. You can choose map settings: Map, Transit or Satellite. Traffic or not. With traffic on, when you look at the map, especially when planning a trip or route, on highways and streets you will see slowdowns in red, accidents, road construction and lane closures.
The top of the map is North by default. If you move around your map so it is not, a round compass will appear under the arrow. Tap on the compass to get North back on the top.
Use your two fingers to move around and drag the map. To zoom in or out, pinch in or out. It will show the scale in the upper left as you zoom. You can zoom really far out and see the entire country or even the whole world.
Turn on Satellite and you will see 3D by the arrow. Tap on that. Rotate and move with your fingers to get closeup 3D looks. Tap 2D to go back.
For directions, tap in the search bar, usually at the bottom, and type the city or place where you want to go. The map will show it and offer you directions for your choice of car, walk, transit or ride-share. It tells you how many miles it is and gives estimated travel times (these vary with the traffic; to test this try one route in the middle of the night and the same route at rush hour!). It often will give you several route choices, its preferred one in bright blue. Just tap on a light blue route if you want to consider that. You can also choose to have a route that avoids tolls and/or highways.
Be sure your home address is in your Contacts and is labeled as your home. Then when you want directions from some place to your home, the map immediately knows where to go!
There are lots of things you can have fun searching for: landmarks, parks, beaches, places you might want to visit, addresses or towns where you lived a long time ago, old addresses of your parents or even grandparents.
Look for places where it says Look Inside, such as a shopping mall like Arden Fair or an airport. It will show you all the shops and where they are in the building. You can get details on the various stores, and restaurants, including hours, phone number, website and which ones take Apple Pay and often photos. Maps Look Inside notation - OSX Daily reference
In bigger cities like San Francisco, you can get lots of pictures when you see Look Around. In some cities or places you will see a binocular symbol. Tap on that to get 360-degree views of a street or attraction. Note that license plates and faces are blurred for privacy.
You can use Siri to search for something, like the Golden Gate Bridge. Or type it in. You can search by specific address, by intersection, by area, by landmark, by Zip code, for kinds of businesses or categories like gas station or coffee shops or hardware stores.
You can mark places with pins to help you find those places later. Press down. And you can look at the bottom of search cards (under your searches) to add places to your Favorites.
New in iOS 14:
There are guides from what Apple calls trusted brands and partners in this country and around the world. Just type Guides in the search bar at home or when you’re somewhere else or have open a different place where you want to go on a trip. You’ll get some choices of various attractions in that area. You can save them. Tap on a pick, then tap on Save Guide. You can also share these guides.
You can now set up electric vehicle routing in Maps. You need to download your vehicle’s app that includes EV routing. You need a compatible vehicle (not sure if there are many yet).
When you’re using Maps in your car for routing, it will show alerts for speed and red-light cameras.
There are supposed to be bike directions for selected cities, but Sacramento is not one of them yet.
For more Maps tips, check out the iPhone User Guide, iOS14, available for free download in the Books app on your phone.
The Maps app has evolved over time and keeps getting better and adding features. Read how our seminar has covered this topic before.
Tom talked about privacy and security. Here are links to learn more.
February 26, 2021 Forum on Computer Crimes with Sheriff Detective Matt Deaux is on YouTube.
Bad guys just want to get hold of your money … your personal information … they try to get your info by coercion - getting you to give up information. Email is their tool.
Email - Unsubscribe from mailing list could be at the top of a message or at the bottom of a message. Some messages include an option at the top of the screen to Unsubscribe for the mailing list. if you know the company sending the emails then use this option. If you do not know the source of the email - then unsubscribing is a way to tell nerfarious people that your email is a current active email list.
Move messages to Junk … when viewing the content of an email message look for the back arrow icon to see all the options for a message.
Apple apps do not sell information about you to other companies to market products with ads.
Download new apps from App Store, aka 3rd Party Developers, once developers have updated for iOS 14 include information on App Privacy with Data Linked to You …
Settings > Privacy >> where you control downloaded apps information on you
> Location Services > by app to set While Using or Ask or Never or Ask Next Time
Often ads pop up when surfing the web because our information has been collected by an app and passed (“sold”) to digital marketing companies.
S > Privacy > Location Services > Share My Location > Find My iPhone > ON
Email - some messages pretend to be a reputable company. Touch the From to see the full address of the sender. Beware of clicking links in emails that you do not expect
Settings > Privacy > Motion & Fitness >
Settings > Privacy > Google Photos > …
Open the Settings app - get comfortable with exploring this app. There is a Search field to help get deep inside for additional controls.