Kibbles & Bytes Blog

We are pretty much ready for our annual migration, like the snowbirds we are. I winterized the camper, put gas stabilizer in all the gas engines, put my little Austin Healey Sprite away and just have to button up the motorcycle.

It seems every year that our schedules get compacted just before we leave. We have goodbye dinners with friends and family, we have last-minute medical appointments and lots of moving of personal gear to make room for our winter tenants.

Hey, did I mention that it would be a really good idea if you voted this year?

Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

Don & Emily

This past weekend I started using the Walkie-Talkie feature on Apple Watch and WatchOS 5. And, I must say, this is a not only a cool feature but a functional one as well. The Walkie-Talkie feature on the Apple Watch may be an overlooked feature in the latest OS, perhaps because its immediate benefits aren’t recognized. We are all used to just picking up our phones and sending a quick text to someone when we need to communicate, most of us probably do this more often than actually making a call to that someone. The messages are instantly sent, why would you need to Walkie-Talkie them?

The big difference between Walkie-Talkie and texting, in my experience, is the instant communication no matter what you might be doing. If I am out in my barn my phone isn’t always right with me, same when Luke is in the basement working on a project. Being able to just raise our wrists and send an instant voice message is more convenient than sending and waiting for a text. Walkie-Talkie works everywhere! You can be several thousand feet away and need to send a message or you can be miles and miles apart. We have used the Walkie-Talkie feature for silly things like asking each other what our lunch plans are to working fixing a broken water line and making sure we aren’t flooding the other end of the building. Best of all, setting up Walkie-Talkie is quick and simple!

All you need to talk with some else is to make sure they are running WatchOS5. You simply tap on Walkie-Talkie within Apple Watch. Once you have the app open, it’s as simple as hitting the + sign and adding contacts you wish to join you with Walkie-Talkie. Anyone you send an invite to will get a message on their watch asking them to confirm they want to connect with you. To talk to anyone you are connected to in Walkie-Talkie, all you need to do is select their name and then press Talk. That is all there is to it, handy!

If you are worried about a sudden message coming through your watch when you are in a meeting or maybe sitting in the dentist chair, do not worry. You can silence alerts and make yourself unavailable as needed. There are two ways to ensure messages don’t come through when it’s inconvenient, simply go into Walkie-Talkie and toggle the available switch to off. You can also simply turn on Theater Mode or Do Not Disturb, these options ensure all communications to your watch are silent. According to Apple, just putting the watch in Silent Mode will not prevent voice communication through Walkie-Talkie. Take Walkie-Talkie for a spin.

I love the Do Not Disturb feature in iOS—it’s really handy for keeping notifications from waking me up at night or causing embarrassing light and noise in a dark movie theater. This has been a problem because when Do Not Disturb is turned on manually for a movie or doctor’s appointment, one had to remember to turn it off manually when ready, or risk missing important notifications. No more!

In iOS 12, Apple enhanced Do Not Disturb in two ways: enabling it to disable itself automatically after a certain amount of time or when your location changes and adding a Bedtime mode that holds all notifications until you wake up.

An Automatic End to Do Not Disturb Sessions

In previous versions of iOS, you invoked Do Not Disturb manually by tapping its button in Control Center. However, if you forgot to turn it off after your meeting, say, it would stay on forever unless you had a Do Not Disturb schedule set, and, even then, not until the end of that schedule. So if you forgot to turn Do Not Disturb off after a 10 AM meeting, it could stay on until the next morning or until you realized you weren’t getting any calls or messages.

If you start Do Not Disturb sessions in the same way in iOS 12, they’ll act the same way. But if you force-touch or press and hold the Do Not Disturb button in Control Center, that brings up the Do Not Disturb card with five options:

1. For 1 hour: This first choice tells Do Not Disturb to hold all your calls for an hour, after which it will turn off automatically.
2. Until this evening/Until tomorrow morning: If you invoke this option during the day, it will silence calls and notifications until 7 PM. Select it at night, however, and it will quiet your iPhone until 7 AM.
3. Until I leave this location: Use this choice when you’re invoking Do Not Disturb in conjunction with being in a particular spot that you’ll leave as soon as you’re done.
4. Until the end of the next event: When you enable Do Not Disturb during an event on your calendar, this choice appears, giving you the option of turning off Do Not Disturb at the end of the event.
5. Schedule: Tap this button to open Settings > Do Not Disturb.

While Do Not Disturb is on, iOS 12 puts a notification on the Lock screen telling you when it will turn itself off. At any time before then, you can tap the Lock screen notification to allow calls and notifications again.

Do Not Disturb During Bedtime

In Settings > Do Not Disturb, you’ll find a new Bedtime switch. When enabled during the times for which you’ve scheduled Do Not Disturb, it dims and blacks out the Lock screen, silences calls, and sends all notifications to Notification Center instead of showing them on the Lock screen.

The idea behind the Bedtime switch is that it reduces the chances that glancing at your iPhone in the middle of the night to see what time it is it will not shock your eyes or engage your brain. Sleep is good! But if you get up early and want to allow notifications through again, tap the Do Not Disturb notification on the Lock screen to turn it off.

That’s not all you can do with Do Not Disturb During Bedtime. You might know that there’s a bedtime screen in the Clock app that’s designed to help you go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. If you use it to set your desired sleep schedule and enable the Do Not Disturb During Bedtime switch in Clock > Bedtime > Options, you get another Do Not Disturb schedule.

That could be extremely welcome if, for instance, you want Do Not Disturb on automatically both at night when you’re sleeping and also during a regularly scheduled class or meeting.

Give these new Do Not Disturb options a try! They go a long way toward ensuring that our iPhones fit into our lives better, rather than forcing us to pay attention to every last alert or message.

Dear Friends,

Wild weather here and even wilder down south with the huge damage from Hurricane Michael. I know the president says this is all a hoax and he’ll have to figure out who wrote the UN climate report that says we have only 12 years before irreversible damage is done to our planet, but seriously folks, climate change is real – just look at the evidence. Oh, I forgot science is not science…

It was 82 on Wednesday and I took the Indian to drive to work and just had to leave at lunch for a joy ride. Now I hear it is supposed to be only a high of around 40 on Saturday. Hapy texted me a screenshot from his iPhone last night of the weather app and asked me what that symbol was next to next Tuesday — yup, it was a snowflake and that makes my preparations to head south even more urgent.

We are only 25 days from the election and, yes, it is the most important election in my lifetime, and probably yours, too. Please get out and vote. In many states, you can vote early, too! I sort of like going to the voting booth so I will be voting around the corner from my house. This year we are opening our stores and offices late on Election Day so that our employees have the ability to get to their local polling place conveniently. If you send a picture of yourself by your polling place or of you and your mail-in ballot to sales@smalldog.com we will send you a coupon for $10 off your next order!

This week’s Kibbles & Bytes Exclusive is the 21.5 inch iMac featuring the 2.3 GHz i5 processor, 8GB of ram and a 1TB drive. We are bundling this iMac with AppleCare and giving you $50 off. This week only this bundle is $1218.99!