macOS Catalina adds a new Find My feature, which combines Find My iPhone and Find My Friends.
Finding a lost or stolen Mac works even when the machine is sleeping …
Apple is working on a new app that’s going to replace the Find My Friends and Find My iPhone apps. With codename “GreenTorch”, the app is currently being tested by engineers at the company.
People familiar with its development shared exclusive details about the project with 9to5Mac, but asked to remain anonymous discussing the company’s plans. The new app will have the same features of the two existing apps, but combined into a single app, which will be available on both iOS and on macOS, as a Marzipan app.
Apple’s Find My Friends app can be a really useful way to share your location with your partner, family and friends, but it relies on everyone having an iOS device. Google has just solved that problem by bringing its Trusted Contacts app to iPhone. The app first launched on Android last year.
In addition to working across platforms, it also offers an additional level of control …
Update 2 9:45PM ET: Users this evening again reported issues centered around iCloud. The outage affected all store services, according to Apple’s status page. It appears to have been resolved, however, with the exception of Game Center.
Update: After about an hour of downtime and still with no admission from Apple of anything ever having gone wrong, iCloud services seem to be coming back online now.
Despite being listed as fully functional on Apple’s status page, it seems iCloud is once again down for many users. Reports across Twitter and in our own experience here at 9to5Mac have verified that iCloud and the App Store (and possibly other Apple services) are currently down.
Before Family Sharing, there was Home Sharing, which allowed you to share apps and media with your family by having an Apple ID that contained the purchases to be used on up to five computers and an unlimited number of iOS devices. For your family to make purchases with that Apple ID, they either know the password to that Apple ID (which also means they can access your passwords, credit card information, documents), or they have to go to the account holder every time they want to purchase an app or music.
Now with iOS 8 there is Family Sharing and it does not require sharing an Apple ID. Instead your family of five (six including yourself) each have their own Apple ID with the same credit card and can download apps and iTunes. Your family does have to have their Apple ID based in the same country. Also, parents can approve their kids’ purchases right from their device. Besides managing the App Store and iTunes purchases, Family Sharing can help you track where your children are using Find My Friends and can help find their lost devices using Find my iPhone.
Family Sharing also allows you to easily create a shared family calendar and shared family reminder list that anyone in the family can view and edit. It also creates a shared family photo album. In this how to, I will discuss how to set up Family Sharing and how to use it.
Apple has finally updated one of the last of its apps holding out for iOS 7: Find My Friends.
The social app stood out the most on iOS 7 with its leather stitching and real life paper map theme, but rest assured Apple has redesigned it with iOS 7 in mind.
The new update features transparency, lots of white space, and feels much lighter (which is refreshing if that’s your style). It also abandons the tab bar UI for a single view with sub menus.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Update: Apple confirmed on its iCloud status page that Find my iPhone is back to normal:
The Find my iPhone iOS app has been updated with a new iOS 7-style icon while the rest of the UI remains the same. This icon is the same as the one found on the updated beta.icloud.com website:
However, many are noting that you cannot log in to the new Find my iPhone app without having a developer account:
Expand
Expanding
Close