The December meeting was held on Friday the 9th. DaveK explained how to deal with Calendar SPAM and then talked about the iPhone Health App and how it interacts with other health and fitness apps. As this was our last meeting before Christmas, members brought food to share and we held our now traditional quiz, this time titled “Tips and Trivia”.
Calendar Spam
DaveK explained the recent phenomenon of Calendar SPAM where scammers send e-mails which cause a SPAM event invitation to be automatically added to Calendar on the Mac and iOS devices. He explained the appointments can be safely ignored, however if you want to remove them that should be done using a specific method to avoid notifying the spammer you have seen the appointment.
It’s also possible to change a setting in iCloud that stops the invitation being automatically added.
Tidbits has an article explaining how to deal with these SPAM invitations and change the iCloud setting.
Update 16/12/2016: Apple have added a Report Junk option to Calendar in iCloud providing a simpler method of removing spam invitations and reporting them to Apple.
Health App
DaveK went on to talk about the Health app which is included on iPhones. The app acts as a secure repository for health information which is kept on the phone and not synced to iCloud. While it is possible to enter data directly into the app, Dave explained that the intention is for data to be collected by specialised third party apps (and Apple products such as Apple Watch) which then add it to the Health App database. The Health app can even recommend apps to help you collect different types of health data. Within Health you can decide which (if any) data is shared with apps or medical professionals.
The app has some other features such as Emergency Medical ID (which can be set to be available without unlocking the phone for first responders) and secure storage of health records.
Apple have a page on the Health app with more details.
Quiz
We rounded off the meeting with a quiz. This year the quiz, compiled by Robert and DaveK, was titled “Tips and Trivia”, with many of the questions including useful tips covering both Mac and iOS. There was also a picture recognition round and a sound round challenging members to identify the person providing the voice-over in Apple adverts.
The voice-over round was based on Round 3 from NSHipster quiz 8, they have more ads there if you’d like to test your recognition skills!
Congratulations to Ben for winning the quiz!