How to Make Your Apple Watch Vibrate More Prominently | Dramel Notes

Your Apple Watch taps you on your wrist to alert you when you get a notification. This is called haptic feedback. If you have trouble feeling the taps, you can increase the intensity of the haptic alerts.

First, we’ll show you how to adjust the haptic feedback directly on your watch. Press the digital crown to access the Home screen. Tap the “Settings” app icon.

On the “Settings” screen, tap “Sounds & Haptics”.

You’ll see the volume settings on the “Sounds & Haptics” screen. Swipe up to scroll down to the haptic settings.

The first thing you can do to increase the intensity of the haptic alerts is to tap the button to the right of the “Haptic Strength” indicator. Secondly, you can add an additional haptic alert by turning on the “Prominent Haptics” slider button. This plays a prominent haptic to pre-announce some common alerts.

Now, the haptic feedback is at full strength and you will receive a prominent haptic alerts as well.

NOTE: You will feel the watch give you a sample of the adjusted haptics as you change the settings.

These options can also be changed on your iPhone. Tap the “Watch” app icon on the Home screen.

Make sure the “My Watch” screen is active. If not, tap the “My Watch” icon at the bottom of the screen.

Tap “Sounds & Haptics” on the “My Watch” screen.

On the “Sounds & Haptics” screen, tap and drag the “Haptic Strength” slider all the way to the right. Then, tap the “Prominent Haptic” slider button to turn that feature on.

To reduce the strength of the vibration on your watch, simply drag the “Haptic Strength” slider to the middle and turn off “Prominent Haptic”. This will also save a little bit of battery life on your watch.

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Travelling A Lot? You Need These Free iPhone Apps | Dramel Notes

As you step into the airport ready to jet off to exotic locations — maybe with your Apple Watch on your wrist — your iPhone should be a handy travel tool, rather than an incredibly efficient way of racking up expensive roaming charges.

There are some awesome apps for travellers out there. They can do everything from completely manage your trip to book you a castle (yes, a castle) for the night. Here’s a few of them.

TripIt

If you travel a lot TripIt (which we looked at a few years ago) is a life saver. You forward your booking confirmations to TripIt — or if you’re brave, directly connect your Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook email account — and they scrape all the important details: flight numbers, check in times, hotel names, and everything else. They then gather all this information into one master itinerary.

That on its own is pretty handy, but if you subscribe to TripIt Pro, they also keeps you updated if anything changes. It’s amazing to get a push notification in the airport if your gate changes or your flight is delayed by half an hour. You don’t have to walk miles in the wrong direction or leave the bar so soon!

Most features of TripIt are entirely free, so you don’t even have to travel that much for it to be useful to you. Having all of your important travel information in one single place makes things like filling in customs forms a lot easier. If you set up TripIt to automatically scan your email, everything happens like magic.

Kayak or Skyscanner

The more you travel, the more you end up spending on flights. If you save even $20 or $30 dollars every time, it can add up to be quite a lot of extra cash to spend when you get to where you’re going. There are quite a few apps that allow you to compare flights between airlines, but the two I’ve found to be the most reliable are Kayak and Skyscanner

Both apps give you a good idea of the prices that different airlines charge on the routes you want to go. If there’s no direct flights, the apps will create multi-leg trips — even if you want to fly to a really obscure destination, you can find out how to get there.

Kayak has one amazing feature I really love: buying recommendations. When you search for a flight, the app compares the price data against all the historic data available (and there’s a lot of it). They then give you a recommendation on whether to buy the flight or wait based on whether similar flights in the past have gotten more or less expensive over time.

I’ve found this to be really accurate. Once I failed to heed Kayak’s recommendation to buy and the price had doubled by the time I checked back a week or so later. I haven’t made that mistake again. Both Kayak and Skyscanner, despite their names, also compare hotel and car rental prices. They aren’t, however, quite as good at this.

LoungeBuddy

In his awesome guide on how to learn to love flying, Matt raves about airport lounges and the app that tells him all he needs to know about them: LoungeBuddy.

LoungeBuddy has a database of thousands of airport lounges in all the major airports. They tell you how much they cost, what requirements (like memberships) that they have for entry, and, most importantly, what amenities are available. It’s not worth paying $50 to get into a glorified box with leather couches and a grumpy waiter, but $40 for access to free food and showers might have you thinking differently.

Relaxing at the Cathay Pacific First and Business Class Lounge at SFO thanks to @LoungeBuddy https://t.co/Iziv6ZbnPO

— James Miller (@JamesADMiller) December 4, 2015

If you’re travelling a lot, you’re invariably going to find yourself stuck in an airport at some point. It could be for any reason from just a long layover to a missed connection or delayed flight. When it happens, check out LoungeBuddy and see if you can find something better to do than trying to sleep on your luggage in the corner.

Google Maps

Apple Maps has come along way — it’s now my go to maps app when I’m back home in Dublin — but it’s always good to have a back up. While Apple Maps is great if you know the street name of where you’re going, in my experience it struggles to find businesses by their names. Instead of directing me to the nearest Starbucks, it picks one a few hundred miles away!

If you ask Google Maps for walking directions from The Shire to Mordor, it tells you that "One does not simply walk into Mordor."

— Interesting Facts (@neverknownfacts) December 3, 2015

With Google Maps you know you’re getting an (uglier) app that has (mostly) accurate business listings. You might not know your hotel’s address, but Google probably does. When you land you can use it to easily find out where you’re going. The public transit directions are also great in most major cities; they can save you a fortune on taxi fares.

Uber and Hailo

If you want to avoid public transport and all the headaches that go with it, then you need to have Uber, Hailo and whatever local app is popular on your iPhone.

Uber gets a lot of press, much of it negative, but the service they offer is solid. Trying to actually call or hail a taxi is almost impossible in some cities. There can often be the language barrier, weird regulations, and a lack of cabs to contend with. Uber ignore all of these problems with their iPhone app.

Hailo is similar to Uber (although they use taxis instead of other people’s cars) and a genuine competitor in some major European cities. If you try to use Uber in Dublin you’ll be waiting for hours while there’ll be a Hailo cab nearby in moments.

Do a little bit of research before you go, and learn which transport apps are popular with the locals — for example, Ola Cabs or Meru Cabs in India. Uber has the biggest name but it isn’t available everywhere. Don’t get tied into using it out of habit.

Airbnb, Hostelworld, and Booking.com

Once you get to your destination you actually need somewhere to stay. Depending on why you’re travelling there are different apps that will fit your needs best.

If there’s a few of you going or you want a more authentic experience, Airbnb is the app to use. Like Uber, Airbnb gets a lot of negative attention but the service it offers is still great. With Airbnb you can rent out anything from a room in someone’s home to a castle.

If you’re on a budget then youth hostels are the best places to stay. Most major cities have some pretty great hostels with comfy bunks, bars, and good locations. They’re my preferred place to crash when I’m in a new city. Finding the best (or cheapest) hostel doesn’t have to be hard; I just use the Hostelworld app. It’s well designed and does everything you need it to do.

Finally, if you’re travelling for business or have any other reason to book a real hotel room with things like room service and mini bottles of shampoo, Booking.com is the best app I’ve found. It has a huge list of hotels which you can reserve with a few taps.

What Apps Do You Use When You Travel?

There are thousands of other apps out there for travellers. The ones I’ve listed above are just the ones that I’ve found to be great. It’s far from a complete list.

Got a favorite app that never leaves your iPhone when you travel? Let me know in the comments.

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How to Resume Your Last Activity on Wrist Raise on Apple Watch | Dramel Notes

By default, your Apple Watch screen turns on when you raise your wrist. Also, by default, when the screen turns on due to a wrist raise, the watch face displays, even if you were performing a different activity on your watch when the screen went off.

The “Resume To” setting on the watch allows you to specify whether you want the watch face to display every time you raise your wrist, or whether the previous activity is resumed. This setting can also be set on the phone. To change the setting on your watch, press the digital crown to access the Home screen and tap the “Settings” icon.

NOTE: The setting on the phone has a different name than the setting on the watch. It’s called “On Wrist Raise” on the phone but it’s the same setting, and we will show you how to change the phone setting later in this article.

On the “Settings” screen, tap “General”.

Tap “Wake Screen” on the “General” screen.

If “Watch Face” is checked, then the watch face displays when you raise your wrist no matter what you were doing on the watch before the screen went off.

If you want to have the watch resume to whatever activity you were performing before the screen went off, tap “Previous Activity” under “Resume To” on the “Wake Screen” screen. Press the digital crown to return to the Home screen and then again to return to the watch face.

To change the same setting using your phone, tap the “Watch” icon on the phone’s Home screen.

Make sure the “My Watch” screen is active. If not, tap the “My Watch” icon at the bottom of the screen.

On the “My Watch” screen, tap “General”.

Scroll down and tap “Wake Screen” on the “General” screen.

Under “On Wrist Raise”, on the “Wake Screen” screen, tap “Resume Last Activity”.

NOTE: Changing this setting on the watch, also changes it on the phone, and vice versa.

You can also turn off the “Wake Screen on Wrist Raise” setting on the same screen if, for example, you need your watch to go into “theater mode” and not display the watch face when you raise your wrist.

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How to Adjust the Volume On Your Apple Watch | Dramel Notes

While we love how the Apple Watch parks useful notifications right on our wrist, it can be a noisy little cricket. Thankfully it’s easy, if you know where to look, to quiet the Apple Watch.

Adjusting the Volume from Your Watch

There are two ways to deal with a noisy Apple Watch directly from the watch itself. The first way is to blanket silence it, which is the technique we highlighted in our previous Apple Watch tutorial, How to Silence, Manage, and Conceal Notifications on Your Apple Watch.

If you need to quiet your Apple Watch in a hurry or you just want to temporarily silence it while you’re in a meeting, it’s very convenient to do so via the Glances menu system.

From the watch face just swipe up to access the Glances menu and over to select the Status glance. There you can tap the bell icon to immediately silence your watch, as seen below. You cannot, however, adjust the actual volume levels here.

 

The second way is more granular and involves a trip into the Settings menu of the Apple Watch. To get there click the digital crown on the side of the Apple Watch to access the application menu, select the Settings (the gear shaped icon), and then scroll down to the menu entry for “Sound & Haptics”.

There in the Sound & Haptics menu, seen above, you can not only mute the watch just as you did with the Glances shortcut but you can also adjust the volume to a comfortable level.

Adjusting the Volume from Your Phone

If you wish to make the adjustment from your phone you do so easily from the My Watch application. To do so open up the My Watch application on the paired iPhone and then scroll down and select, just like on the Apple Watch, the entry for “Sound & Haptics”.

Within the Sound & Haptics menu you can adjust the volume just as you can on the Apple Watch. The big difference here is that, thanks to the screen sizes, the slider bar on the iPhone is radically bigger and offers a little more of a fine-touch when it comes to selecting exactly the sound level you want.

You can also put the watch in “Silent Mode” from the phone application, perfect for those times where your watch is, say, buried in your luggage and chiming away.

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Have a pressing question about your Apple Watch or other gear? Shoot us an email at ask@howtogeek.com and we’ll do our best to answer it.

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How to Make the Apple Watch Screen Stay On Longer | Dramel Notes

The watch face on your Apple Watch displays when you raise your wrist and hides again when you lower your wrist. You can also wake the screen by tapping on it, which displays the watch face for 15 seconds by default, but this can be extended to 70 seconds.

If you’re using your watch as a simple flashlight or if you need to refer to something on your watch for longer than 15 seconds, this new wake screen time can be useful. You can change this setting on either the watch or iPhone.

To change the setting on the watch, press the digital crown to access the Home screen.

On the Home screen, tap on the “Settings” icon.

On the “Settings” screen, tap “General”.

Then, tap “Wake Screen” on the “General” screen.

The “Wake Screen” screen displays.

NOTE: This screen also allows you to turn off the “Wake Screen on Wrist Raise” setting, which is helpful if you want to put your watch in “theater mode”.

Scroll down to the bottom of the “Wake Screen” screen. Under “On Tap” tap the “Wake for 70 Seconds” option. You can back out of the “Settings” screens by tapping the title at the top of each screen to return to the previous screen until you reach the main “Settings” screen. Whether you back out of the “Settings” screens or not, press the digital crown once to return to the home screen and again to return to the watch face.

NOTE: When you use the digital crown to exit “Settings” without backing out of the screens, the next time you open “Settings” the last screen you accessed opens automatically.

To change this setting on your iPhone, tap the “Watch” app icon on the home screen.

Tap “General” on the “Settings” screen.

On the “General” screen, tap “Wake Screen”.

Under “On Tap”, tap the “Wake for 70 Seconds” option.

NOTE: The “Wake for 70 Seconds” option only works when you tap the screen to view the watch face, not on a wrist raise. If you want the watch face to turn off sooner, you can cover the watch face with your palm to turn it off.

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