The Newsroom

Years ago, I migrated my entire personal email life to Gmail. That includes a couple of different Google accounts plus my primary email account that is set up on a domain that I own. It all comes to one unified inbox and it works, and I'm very happy with it. I can send and receive as my own custom domain, and can switch to the other accounts if I need to. But all the email comes to one inbox. Terrific. It would be logical, then, that I would also use Gmail on my iPhone to maintain a high level of continuity. But the honest truth is that Gmail's iPhone app is merely fine and not great. And the best Gmail app on the iPhone actually Microsoft Outlook. Yes, that's a little weird. I switched back to the Gmail iOS app last week for an entire wweek to give it another try. And it mainly just frustrated me. It lacks features that virtually every other email app has (such as swipe one way on an email to archive, other way to delete). It has no calendar integration, even thou...

I confess when I bought my iPhone 7, I took the included earbud adapter and threw it into my electronics drawer without really looking at it. The bundled lightning earbuds - obviously - work with the iPhone 7's lightning port. So I had no reason to go exploring that little 3-inch adapter thingy. Flying to the west coast a few weekends ago, I figured I should dig out the iPhone 7 earbud adapter because there would be a good chance I'd want to plug into the plane's audio-video system, which, of course, uses the standard 3.5 mm headphone jack. To my rather large surprise, the adapter was exactly the opposite of what I thought it would be. I assumed that the adapter would let me take my iPhone 7 earbuds and give me a traditional 3.5 mm headphone jack connector at the end. Instead, it's designed to take OLD earbuds with the 3.5 mm headphone connector and turn them into lightning earbuds for the iPhone 7. Which strikes me as a far more arrogant stance on Apple's...

I somehow managed to score an iPhone 7 on launch day, which is classified as a near miracle in my books. Some early first impressions: This is the perfect size of an iPhone, IMO. The Plus size doesn't fit comfortably in one hand, and the 5S was just that little bit too small. The 6/6S/7 is basically exactly what I want in iPhone size. I have yet to try the lightning earbuds, so don't ask. I have a bigger desire to try the lightning earbuds in my iPad Mini 2 to see how they work in that gadget. Upgrading from a 5S, I've never been able to use the 3D Touch before yesterday. HEY, IT'S REALLY COOL! Battery life seems pretty impressive so far. I did resist the urge to buy the Apple battery case for this because I figured it wouldn't fit in my car bracket gizmo thingy. I have strongly mixed feelings on the new Home "Button" that's not really a button but some kind of haptic response mechanism that shakes whenever I press it but makes me feel like...

Whenever I check the stats on this blog, this post always leads the traffic count. Unfortunately, while that trick was terrific for its time, the SoundCloud app no longer has the ability to record files, so the trick no longer works. HOWEVER! Necessity is the mother of invention and recently I was in a situation where I had to find a way to get a Voice Memo off an iPhone and sent to someone else without using iTunes. I tried email, but even though Apple appears to have lifted the restrictions on the size of a Voice Memo file through email, not all mail servers are willing to deal with such large attachments and so that potential solution reached a dead end. After playing around a little further, I realized that I can use iOS 9's share menus to save the file to Dropbox. So step 1, obviously, is to ensure you have Dropbox installed on your iPhone and you're logged into your account. Click on the Voice Memo you want to save to Dropbox and bring up the Share menu. Cli...

I'm hardly classify myself as even an amateur photographer. I just like to take pictures and I learned a few things during my newspaper days from my shooter friends about photo composition. And every once in a while, I take a picture I really love. And this is one of them.

The tail end of an iMessage conversation between my wife and I, during which time I was exercising with my iPhone zipped into my jacket as I listened to music, getting Siri to read my messages to me and responding using, well.....

Twitter's iOS app now has the ability to include up to 4 photos per tweet, and tag people in those photos. Here's what a tweet looks like with 4 pictures included. Bottom example includes tags. Twitter for iOS gets the ability to post up to 4 pictures at a time. The pics don't have to be of cats. pic.twitter.com/jBYFzPdoue — Mike Jenkinson (@MikeJenkinson) March 27, 2014 Gotta admit ... I love this multiple photo uploading/tagging feature. pic.twitter.com/6GqTNsdxBN — Mike Jenkinson (@MikeJenkinson) March 28, 2014

Post by Mike Jenkinson .

The good people at Readdle were kind enough to hook me up with an advance copy of their iOS new calendar app, Calendars 5, which releases today in iTunes. You will be able to find lots of reviews that will talk about the features and such of the app, and Readdle wrote a blog detailing its features . I wanted to write about my experience because, as I've noted in the past, I find too many tech bloggers tend to merely rewrite the press release without playing with the app and putting it in some context. I used Readdle's now-discontinued app, Calendars+ for a few weeks after getting it on a promotional deal for free (it was a $6.99 app). For the most part, I enjoyed it. It was my first venture in using anything other than the default Calendar iPhone app (which I had synced to my Google Calendar so I could access it on my browser). But that experience with Calendars+ got me investigating other calendar apps for my iPhone. I used Tempo's Smart Calendar for a while,...

Post by Mike Jenkinson .

The folks at If This Then That ( IFTTT ) have released an iOS app that can put some serious automation power behind routine tasks on your iPhone. The concept behind If This Then That is pretty simple, and IFTTT has now made it even more simple with essentially push-button operations: An action triggers another action, all on its own. For instance, one of the "recipes" (as they're known) that I've set up is to automatically upload any photo on my iPhone camera roll that gets put into the "Flickr" album to, naturally, Flickr. This was one I found on the IFTTT website and I activated it using my own Flickr account info. Painless. It was basically something I was doing on my own manually every couple of days, but now it's all automated to work in the background. All I have to do is move the new photos into the Flickr album in my camera roll and IFTTT does the rest. Another one that I created myself takes pictures uploaded to Instagram and tweet...

When it comes to technology, I'm largely of the "whatever works best for me" school of thought, and anyone who follows my random tech thoughts around here knows that I'm loyal to apps and computer programs (no matter how popular or obscure they are) only until something better comes along. (Heck, I used OS/2 Warp at one point in my life,) Although I have an iPhone, I use the GMail iOS app as my primary email app on my device ... not necessarily because GMail is better than the built-in Apple Mail app, but because it works best for me, given how I manage my email across all my devices and computers. Similarly, I was a long-time Firefox user before moving to Google Chrome because Chrome just ended up being better for what I wanted out of a browser.  So, naturally, when Chrome came out with an iOS app, I gave it a try. One of the features that I absolutely love in Chrome iOS is its built-in sharing menu: Hit the menu, hit "Sharing..." and yo...