ADAM ENGST 19 March 2025
Every time I travel, I vow to figure out exactly how time zone support works in calendar apps, and every time, I get caught up in whatever I’m doing and forget. Now it’s time to buckle down and see if I can wrap my head around the topic.
I’ll admit to some trepidation about this topic, as I’m uncertain I can even test all the possible scenarios. I’m sure frequent travelers and distributed workgroups have encountered issues that my testing won’t uncover. So, please, if anything I say below doesn’t align with your experience, let me know, and we’ll see if we can figure out why.
The most common issue I encounter when traveling arises when I schedule a 1 PM lunch while I’m at home in Ithaca (Eastern Time), only for the alert to go off at 10 AM when I’m in San Francisco (Pacific Time). I’ve missed meetings at Macworld Expo because the alerts went off three hours earlier than I needed them.
Another issue I’ve encountered, though less frequently, is that when people in different time zones are invited to an event or share a calendar, it’s important to enter events so that they appear at the correct time in each person’s time zone. This usually works well, but if I’m significantly more technical than the other person, I worry that something I’ve done might confuse them.
Adding to the confusion is the fact that Apple’s Calendar app on the Mac includes a checkbox labeled “Turn on time zone support” that lets you pick a time zone for display, while the Calendar app on the iPhone features a Time Zone Override option that allows you to specify a particular time zone. Additionally, calendar apps like BusyCal and Fantastical manage time zone support in slightly different ways. How do these options influence what I see, and do they impact what others will see?
To better understand all of this, I set one of my Macs to Pacific Time (San Francisco), another to Greenwich Mean Time (London), and kept my iPhone on Eastern Time (Ithaca, New York). I created events on each device with their local times included in the title, experimented with toggling time zone support on and off, and switched the Macs between time zones to simulate traveling. Here’s what I concluded.
The key point to understand is that every event has a time zone. All events automatically default to the local time zone, regardless of whether time zone support is enabled. However, if time zone support is turned on, you can manually set an event’s time zone.
Every timed reminder you create in Reminders is assigned to the local time zone, which can lead to confusion while traveling if you depend heavily on reminder alerts. I can’t find options to adjust time zones for reminders in Calendar, Reminders, BusyCal, or Fantastical.
Events may have associated time zones, but how they are displayed depends on two factors:
When an event’s time zone differs from the device’s native or manually specified time zone, something will always indicate the difference. For instance, this event was created for 2 PM Eastern Time but is being viewed in Pacific Time; therefore, Calendar displays it at the adjusted time of 11 AM but notes the creation time in parentheses.
Reminders are less obvious. I created a reminder for 4 PM on a device set to Pacific Time. When I view that reminder on a device set to Eastern Time, it shows up at 7 PM in Calendar (left) and Reminders (right), but neither app indicates its original time zone. (The title does, but I did that solely for clarity during testing.)
While traveling to San Francisco for Macworld Expo, I often encountered the need to juggle multiple meetings each day. I didn’t want to schedule them based on my Eastern time zone because then they’d be at the wrong time once I arrived in San Francisco. At the same time, enabling time zone support and setting them to Pacific Time was tricky since they appeared three hours later on my calendar at home before I left. If I scheduled a lunch meeting for noon on Tuesday, and it showed up at 3 PM, it was all too easy to agree to another lunch that day since noon would seem available.
The answer is the “floating time zone,” which isn’t tied to any specific time zone. Instead, events using the floating time zone appear at the same time regardless of which time zone is currently being observed. The floating time zone first appeared in 1998 in RFC 2445, the specification for the proposed iCalendar standard. Apple seems to be the only major player that has adopted it in a significant way.
The floating time zone is helpful for individuals who are managing their own calendars across multiple time zones and sync between devices using iCloud. If you schedule lunch for noon on Tuesday, it will appear at noon on Tuesday, regardless of where in the world you are.
Unfortunately, the floating time zone isn’t a panacea:
I’m sure this isn’t an exhaustive list, but some common scenarios that require thinking about time zones include:
If you know of any other scheduling situations involving tricksy time zones, please share them in the comments, and I’ll consider adding them.
The four pre-set categories in Mail starting with iOS 18.2.
As of iOS 18.2, Apple's Mail app features categories to help users sort through their mail. Here's what it does, how to fine-tune it, and how to turn it off if you prefer.
After updating to iOS 18.2 or later, the Mail app now categorizes incoming email into four broad categories. These are Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions.
The idea to automatically categorize incoming emails has been kicking around Apple for years. The feature was originally intended to debut in iOS 13, but awaited further development of Apple's machine learning and Apple Intelligence features in order to ensure the work was all done on-device.
In our experience, the Primary category works very well. Email from people in our contacts, time-sensitive notifications, and email from other individuals rather than companies tend to be seen here.
Traditionally, Mail also shows the first line or two of a received email. If your iPhone supports Apple Intelligence, time-sensitive emails will be at the top, and some emails in the Primary category will now show short summaries of the content.
As before, you can tap on a given email to open it, or do a half-swipe to the left to choose options including deleting, flagging, or additional tools like forwarding and replying. You can also half-swipe to the right to set a reminder for a given email, or mark it unread.
In addition to Primary, the other categories are Transactions, Updates, and Promotions. In our experience, these categories need a bit of user training in order to reach their peak usefulness.
If your iPhone model supports Apple Intelligence, those other categories — apart from Primary — will group all email from a given sender by default. When you tap on a given email summary, the most recent message is shown.
You can also view all messages from a particular sender, if their emails are in any but the Primarycategory. Tap on the top or newest one and you get a digest page with the sender's details at the top.
That top section also includes an ellipses icon, which provides tools including Delete All.
This is once place where you can re-categorize an email, but you can also do that directly from the inbox. Do a half-swipe to the left on an email, tap the three buttons icon, and tap Categorize Sender.
Once you've moved an email to a specific category done this, all messages from that particular sender will be put into the new category instead.
Showing off the new categorization features of Apple Mail in iOS 18.2.
The Updates category is intended for messages from companies you've allowed to email you with their news updates, or from social sites like FaceBook, Bluesky, and X. At first, you may find yourself moving some messages that arrive here to other categories, but once that's done it works well.
The Promotions category is where mass emails go. Depending on how much of this type of mail you get, you may need to spend a few minutes marking mass emails from your community groups and clubs to go to other categories, but again Mail remembers your choices and files future emails correctly.
Though it can be very useful — after a bit of training — some users will prefer to not have the categorization feature on at all, preferring to weed through their incoming email themselves.
Apple has made it very simple to turn off the categorization feature. At the top of the iOS Mail app, there is a three-dots menu on the right. Tap it, and change from Categories to List View" and you're back to the way Mail worked previously.
In that menu, you can also opt to turn off Show Priority if your iPhone supports Apple Intelligence. When this is unchecked, urgent or time-sensitive emails will not rise to the top unless they happen to be the most recent messages.
Alternatively, you can quickly switch to the all mail category. Either tap on the currently-selected category, or swipe across the categories. This is best used when you want to keep the categorization, but temporarily need to see all your mail in the list view.
If you choose to leave the new Mail categorization feature on, you can fine-tune how it works via a section in Mail's preferences. To get there, openSettings, scroll down to Apps, tap on Mail, tap on Apple Intelligence & Siri, and turn on or off any options there.
You can also choose to turn off Apple Intelligence altogether if you want, assuming your iPhone model supports it. Apple Intelligence features only show up on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, or the iPhone 16 models or later.
To do so, open the Settings app, scroll down until you see an Apple Intelligence & Siri category, tap it, and turn off Apple Intelligence. You won't see this category at all if your iPhone does not support Apple Intelligence features.
Surveys taken early on in the Apple Intelligence rollout found that many users don't yet consider the suite of features to be that important to them. This is likely to change as further updates — including a much-improved Siri — roll out across 2025.
ADAM ENGST 12 March 2025
Earlier this year, 404 Media published another article about the location-tracking industry that surreptitiously gathers and resells our location data (for earlier coverage, see “Exposé Reveals Ongoing Smartphone Location Tracking Threats,” 23 October 2024). This piece highlighted another reason why allowing private companies to collect such information is concerning—one of the major players in the field was hacked. Gravy Analytics, the parent company of Venntel, which sold smartphone location data to the US government, reportedly lost “a massive amount of data, including customer lists, information on the broader industry, and even location data harvested from smartphones which show peoples’ precise movements.”
Despite the FTC later prohibiting both companies from collecting, using, and selling sensitive location data of Americans, all that data is reportedly now available for purchase. Among those compromised files was a list of over 12,000 iOS and Android apps that may have been—and may still be—exploited by data brokers to collect users’ location data. These apps do not contain malicious code; instead, they are part of the real-time bidding advertising ecosystem. When advertisers bid to place ads within apps, all firms participating in the bidding—including data brokers—are granted access to information about your device, including data that can be used to infer location.
Even browsing through a list of over 12,000 apps, many of which are for Android, feels overwhelming, let alone manually comparing all the apps on your iPhone to the master list. Fortunately, there is an automated way to determine which apps on our iPhones were involved, knowingly or not, in this location data collection scheme.
Given that I hadn’t launched any of those apps in years, I don’t think I was particularly vulnerable to having my location data sucked up as part of the real-time bidding process. Nevertheless, this experience will make me even more cautious about downloading apps that display ads.
If you go through this process, please share the apps it identifies. Some people have come up with alternative approaches that include Apple apps, which Configurator does not, and then match those apps against what I believe are Android apps in the full list. There’s no reason to worry about Apple apps in this regard.
Charles Martin | Oct 17, 2024
All the Apple Notes tools are also available in an Instant Note.
The Instant Note feature on iPad allows users to create a note in the Apple Notes app incredibly quickly. An Instant Note allows access to all the features of the program — including new features added in iPadOS 18.
You must be running at least iPadOS 15 in order to use the Instant Note feature. Whether you've arrived late to class and the lecture has already started, someone is imparting important information to you over a phone call, or you've just had a brilliant idea, you can get it down right away.
To start an Instant Note, you'll need to turn on the iPad — but you don't have to authenticate using Face ID or Touch ID. Simply tap your Apple Pencil on the screen, and a new blank note will appear.
You can then start writing with the Pencil, the on-screen keyboard, or any attached or Bluetooth keyboard if you prefer. iOS 18 has added a fairly short "timeout" between the time a note is started and writing must begin on it, so don't pull up an Instant Note if you're not quite ready to write.
When you're done, just swipe up to dismiss the note: it will be saved automatically. The title will use the words you type in the first line of the note.
Now that iPadOS 18 is out, you can use the "Math Notes" feature in an Instant Note. Just write out an equation, put an equal sign at the end, and the solution will appear.
Math Notes is a feature that lets users solve equations using Apple Pencil.
Other features in iPadOS 18 that will be available in Apple Notes includes the ability to record audio, along with audio transcriptions. The Smart Script feature can optionally — and lightly — "clean up" your Apple Pencil handwriting.
Some of these new features require recent hardware, such as the live transcription. If you're using the feature on an iPhone, it will need to be an iPhone 12 or later, or an iPhone SE (third generation).
For the iPad, all models of iPad Pro can be used. The requirements for other iPads are the 4th-gen iPad Air or later, the 8th-gen iPad or later, or the 6th-gen iPad mini or later.
For Macs, the MacBook 2017 or later is needed, or the MacBook Air 2018 or later, or the MacBook Pro 2017 or later. The 2017 iMac, the iMac Pro, the 2018 Mac mini, or the 2019 Mac Pro are required.
There's also be the ability to collapse or expand subsections of an outline if you are creating one, and the option to highlight sections of your text using new marker-like colors. The Notes app overall will also inherit further Apple Intelligence features as they roll out, including the option to create summaries of long notes, or suggest tone revisions.
The new features available this year and those coming in early 2025 in iPadOS 18 should help Apple's Notes app rival more sophisticated note-taking apps, like Microsoft's OneNote. Apart from the more-private Journal app, Notes will become the best — and definitely the fastest — way to quickly capture information on the go.
If your iPad is already unlocked and you are using a Magic Keyboard to work on an Instant Note, you can press hold the "globe" key and tap the "Q" key to minimize the existing note, but keep it available. If there is no note currently on screen, that keyboard combo will bring up your most recent note.
It should be noted that you can also opt to turn off the Instant Notes feature on your iPad, if you want. Just visit the Settings app, scroll down and tap on the settings for Notes, and turn off "Access Notes from Lock Screen."
GLENN FLEISHMAN 7 March 2025
In an era marked by competing desires for online child safety, parental control, and the need to abide by evolving government regulation, Apple hopes that changes it plans to roll out over the rest of 2025 will thread the needle on issues related to personal data disclosure for children. In a new white paper, “Helping Protect Kids Online,” the company has outlined its plans for how children’s ages will be indicated by parents and passed to developers to provide access to age-appropriate apps and features.
Apple’s approach tries to balance three different impinging needs: more invasive age-verification requirements being imposed by some US states and countries, parents’ interest in protecting their children’s personal data and blocking access to materials they deem inappropriate, and the company’s goal of releasing to developers the least amount of information necessary to comply with privacy-impacting regulations. It’s a hard row to hoe.
While the white paper focuses on parents’ oversight of children’s access to apps and the content within them, Apple isn’t shy about criticizing requests for government-issued IDs—whether instigated by developers or required by legislation—when nothing within an app should require such disclosure.
Apple outlines four areas of change:
A full-page sidebar also explains Apple’s stance on limiting age disclosure from information Apple or its users possess to developers. (The company categorizes this under the new term Age Assurance.) This explanation is targeted at the many rules imposed by various governments, most recently across the United States, that require age verification to access social media or adult media content. There’s quite a lot of subtext on this page, such as:
Some apps may find it appropriate or even legally required to use age verification, which confirms user age with a high level of certainty—often through collecting a user’s sensitive personal information (like a government-issued ID)—to keep kids away from inappropriate content. But most apps don’t.
Apple states its position clearly without calling out any particular state, political party, or nation:
Requiring users to overshare their sensitive personal data would also undermine the vibrant online ecosystem that benefits developers and users.
As a result, Apple says it won’t allow apps to request IDs or other proof of age arbitrarily. Instead, the company will rely on age ranges for people under 18. Regardless of age, Apple implies that a developer will have to justify the need to collect explicit proof of age during app review.
The new global age ratings Apple plans to roll out are:
Apple says most of these features are “coming later this year,” “this year,” or “by the end of the year.” Some changes will be straightforward and entirely within Apple’s control, such as streamlining Child Account sign-up or enabling migration from a regular Apple Account. Others will require Apple to deploy new APIs and developers to upgrade their apps and disclose new age-range requirements in the Privacy Nutrition Labels in their App Store listings.
