Jim Karpen

Author Details

Jim Karpen's picture

Author Details

Jim Karpen

Jim Karpen holds a Ph.D. in literature and writing, and has a love of gizmos. His doctoral dissertation focused on the revolutionary consequences of digital technologies and anticipated some of the developments taking place in the industry today. Jim has been writing about the Internet and technology since 1994 and has been using Apple's visionary products for decades.

Fortunately I'm not addicted to an iPhone—but only because I don't have one. I do, however, tend to go through withdrawal if I don't have my iPad with me. It turns out, these gadgets have become so much an extension of ourselves that scientists have found that we suffer cognitive and physiological impairment if we're separated from them. A new study by University of Missouri researchers put iPhone users in a situation where they were separated from their phones while taking a cognitive test. Not only did they do worse on the test compared to their performance when they had their phones with them, they also had a significant increase in anxiety, heart rate, and blood pressure. 

Spotlight has long been a great feature of iOS, and is especially useful at helping you find apps that are buried away in a folder on your device. Since iOS 7 you invoke this handy search tool by simply swiping down on any home screen. (But keep in mind that if you swipe down from the very top of the display you'll get Notification Center instead.) In iOS 8, introduced last fall, Apple greatly expanded what Spotlight can do. In addition to finding apps and text strings in apps such as Mail and Notes, it also now searches the web, searches Wikipedia, finds related apps in the App Store, finds related movies, and even brings up results in Maps if you search on a location.

If you own stocks or have an interest in how the market is doing, you can use Siri to check current stock prices. In addition, you can compare performance, ask more general questions about how the market is doing, ask about the performance of specific indices such as the Nikkei, and more. Note that this functionality is available on the iPad as well, even though iOS on the iPad doesn't include Apple's Stocks app.

I'm continually amazed at how useful Siri is to control the various functions of my iPad. I often use it to set an alarm or a timer. Doing so is so much faster than interacting with the Clock app itself. You can also use Siri to tell you the time and date, as well as the time at a specific location around the world. And you can ask Siri to tell you the date for a particular day of the week.

Everyone likes movies. And no one likes wasting time on the lousy ones. So no doubt you check out the reviews to see what people are saying about it. Siri can help. Siri will not only let you find out what's playing at local theaters and play the trailer, but will also tell you how a movie is rated.

If you're wanting to get into the spirit of the holidays, you now have a wide selection of Christmas-themed music in iTunes Radio. Early this month Apple added a number of curated stations for a total of 10 options: The Sounds of Christmas, Holiday Hits, Latin Holiday, Children's Christmas, Rockin' Holiday, Country Holiday, Souful Holiday, Holiday Classics, Classical Holiday, and Swingin' Holiday. Only a couple of these appear in the Featured Stations listing, so you'll want to add them to your list of My Stations.

One of the nice features of the iPhone and iPad is the ability to see a photo of your contacts, such as when a call is coming in. You can manually add a photo to a contact by tapping Edit and then tapping Add Photo. Doing so lets you either select a photo you already have on your device or take a photo of the person on the spot. However, there's a much faster way. With just a couple taps you can add photos from all your Facebook friends to your contacts.

Time-lapse videos can be fun, whether of moving clouds, a sunset, a busy street corner, a tennis player — basically any situation where there's movement or change. Time-lapse videos simply take still photos at specific intervals, such that a slow-moving snail can appear to be speeding along. One of the neat features of iOS 8 is the new Time-lapse mode in the Camera app. As usual, Apple has made it simple.

One of the great features of recent versions of iOS is how deeply embedded sharing is. You can quickly share items such as photos and videos with friends, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Flickr, and more. In fact, you have so many options now that the screen that pops up when you tap the button for sharing can start to get cluttered. Fortunately, you can customize it.

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