4 Ways Waze is the Best Navigation App

When it comes to driving with GPS navigation, there's just nothing better than Waze mobile app. In terms of features, it blows Google Maps out of the water. That's probably why Google paid over $1 billion for to acquire Waze in 2013. 

Here are four Waze features that set it apart from other geo-navigation apps like Google Maps:

1. Detailed Real-Time Updates

The community-based nature of Waze makes it unmatchable for real-time updates about what's actually happening on the road. The app uses a crowdsourcing method to keep maps up-to-date, allowing drivers to edit maps and report roadside sightings - even cops! Drivers can report exactly where they see police officers so that drivers that come after them will be warned. When other drivers approach that spot, a pop-up notification and sound warn them up what's ahead. In fact, the app has been working so well to warn drivers of cops that some police officers in Miami, Florida started submitting tons of false Waze reports of police sightings to throw them off the trail!

2. Location-Based Amber Alerts

Last week, a location-based Amber Alerts feature was added to the Waze app. Drivers will receive alerts about missing children when they enter certain geographic areas where the child was abducted or may be found.  For safety reasons, the alerts will only be available when drivers have been stopped for more than 10 seconds.

3. Phone Crash Route Recovery

One great feature of the Waze app is its ability to recover from a phone or app crash. If either occur, Waze can restart and automatically generate a new route for you. 

4. Ability To Share Your ETA

If you're sick of getting calls every hour to check in on your whereabouts or estimated time of arrival, Waze is for you. Using the social features included in the app's functionality, you an actually share your location with friends and let them keep track of your progress and view an estimate of your arrival time. You can also use their "Pick Up" feature to request GPS coordinates of a friend who needs a ride (if they also have Waze) and when they accept that request, you will see directions to their location and they will be able to track your arrival in real time. 

Waze has a fun, community-based, and game-like feel that allows it to stand apart from any GPS-nagigation apps that came before it, but more than anything it provides some powerful and useful features that make it easier to be a smarter, safer driver. 

6 Steps to Start A Facebook Ad Campaign from your Phone

In my last post, I talked about how the new Facebook Ad Manager app and how it compliments desktop browser tools as an added convenience for ad managers. Now, I'm going to show you how easy it is to create a new ad campaign within the app. 

After downloading the Facebook Ad Manager app (only iOS for now - sorry, Android users!), open it on your phone and follow these steps: 

Step 1: Create Campaign

From the default "Campaigns" landing screen, press the plus sign icon at the bottom (second from the right) to begin creating a new campaign. 

Step 2: Select Associated Facebook Page and Advertising Objectives

Select the Facebook Business Page you want to associate with the ad. You must be an administrator of the page to do this. Facebook will select one of your pages by default, so just use the "Change Page" button toward the middle of the screen to change it.

Select your advertising objective from 3 options:

Boost a Post -  If you trying to generate exposure for your page, you might choose to boost a post generated by that page. If You may choose to boost a post that the page has generated. 

Reach People Near Your Business - This is a good option for locally-focused businesses that only want to target their geographic area. 

Send People to Website - Choose this option if you want to drive traffic to your website rather than engage with users on Facebook.

Step 3: Select Your Image

You can choose an image from the Facebook page albums or from your phone. As companies move away from the use of stock images and toward more natural shots (especially on social media channels), this provides the opportunity to take photos from wherever you are and instantly turn them into ads. 

Step 4: Create Ad Content

Write an ad headline, body text and web address. 

You can also easily preview your ad from this screen.

Step 4: Select Audience

Choose who you want to see your ad. You can choose from people who like your page, or expand to also target their friends. You may also choose a custom saved audience if you use those in the desktop Facebook Ad Manager. 

Step 5: Decide What To Spend

Set your budget by day or for the lifetime of the campaign. At the bottom of the screen, you will see an estimate of potential reach, or how many people will see your ad. 

Step 6: Review and Place 

Simply review your campaign details and if everything looks correct, press the "Place Order" button. 

That's it! To track the success of your new campaign, just return to the app home screen and click your campaign to see details on performance and spend. 

Facebook Gives Its 2 Million Advertisers A Useful New App

Facebook recently released the Facebook Ad Manager app to give Facebook advertisers a way to manage and monitor ads on the go. With the app, you can create new ads, edit and manage existing ads, and keep up with important performance data. It makes sense that Facebook is beginning to offer mobile versions of these tools, since mobile ads account for over half of their earnings in the fourth quarter of 2014. There also should be high demand for an on-the-go Facebook ad service since it seems like just about everyone is advertising on this social media giant these days. In fact, Facebook has about 2 million advertisers. According to Facebook, small businesses account for 1 million of them. The mobile app will probably come in handy for the small business employees who are charged with managing social efforts like Facebook ads in addition to their regular daily responsibilities (which often don't involve sitting in front of a desktop computer all day).

In addition to the basic functions of app creation, editing and tracking, the Facebook Ad Manager app can provide push notifications to give you important updates about your ad in real time.

When you enter the app, you land on a home screen that displays all of your ad campaigns by name. These may include ads or promoted page posts. Each campaign listing shows a thumbnail image, status of the campaign (active or inactive) and a top-line metric (usually clicks for ad campaigns and engagements - things like "Likes" and comments for promoted posts).

At the top of the screen, you can easily change the view to show ad sets or individual ads rather than the default campaigns listing. A simple drop down menu from the right-hand corner also allows you to filter each of these categories as shown below.

You can then select a campaign, ad set, or ad to take a closer look at performance metrics and budget/spend information. 

Facebook did a nice job with this app, all-in-all. However, I would recommend sticking to desktop for initial setup of campaigns and for any in-depth reporting. The app serves as a nice compliment to desktop tools for post-setup management and maintenance. First-time Facebook advertisers should also begin in a desktop browser until they are comfortable with the basic functionality and structure of Facebook ads and how campaigns, ad sets, and ads relate to each other. Otherwise, navigating through the app could be confusing.

As someone who has used the desktop Facebook advertising tools in the past, I find this to be a very usable and simple app with all of the necessary features I would expect. I highly recommend that any Facebook advertiser give it a try with your next campaign!

A Review of the "Clips" Clipboard Manager App

About Clips

Clips is a new clipboard management app for the iPhone that allows you to easily "clip" bits of content from the internet and organizes those clips (along with links to source contents) within the app interface.

You can also share the clips via email, message, or social media, add them to the Apple Reading list, or add them to other productivity apps like Evernote.

Getting Started

After you download the app from the App Store, there are a few steps you need to take before you can begin clipping. First, access your Control Center by swiping down from the top of your iPhone home screen. Make sure "Today" is selected at the top of the screen, and scroll to the bottom to find the "Edit" button. Select "Edit" and add Clips.

Next you need to add the Clips keyboard. Go to the iPhone Settings app, then General > Keyboard > Keyboards, and you should see an option to add the Clips keyboard. Then you're ready to go!

Clipping Content

Once you have everything set up, simply find some content on the internet (text, image, or both) and select and copy it.

Once you have done that, open the clips app and you will see your content listed on the main screen with a link to the content. At first it will be highlighted in red with a blinking white dashed line around it. You will need to select the plus icon to save the clip.

Once you have saved the clip, you can select the right-arrow icon to see the entire clipping.

From there, you can copy or open the URL or select "more" for additional sharing options.

Conclusion

This app a quick and easy way to archive interesting content or save it for later use/reference. It could be especially helpful in quickly sharing key content from online articles with team members in school or professional settings. I am a big user of Evernote, and if I were compiling web sources for a project, I could clip key points from sources and send them to Evernote to access later, maybe even in a shared Evernote document that could be seen by other team members.

If you save or share a lot of web content, I highly recommend giving this new clipboard manager a try!

2 Free and Simply Awesome Game Apps

These two apps show that you don't always need complicated game structures or a lot of fancy graphics and effects to make a good game app that's hard to put down. Sometimes the simplest game apps reign supreme. 

1. Pancake - The Game 

Warning: May cause pancake cravings.

In this simple game, all you do a flip a pancake. But don't be fooled, you might just get addicted. Flipping the pancake isn't as easy as it seems, either. I failed miserably the first few times, but I just couldn't resist tapping to try one more time. Then started to develop some strategies. I realized I could  tilt the pan to have more control of the catch, and that higher flips are riskier but don't get you any more points. This is a good game for players who are "problem solvers" by nature, because there are no guides to help you figure out how to successfully flip the pancake. It's all trial and error. The way the game is set up, you are always trying to beat your own high score (number of consecutive pancake flips). So far, I'm at 10, which isn't very good judging by comparisons with friends in the Game Center!

The app is also clean and well designed. The only visual you see is an arm holding a pan against a stark white background. They show your current high score in a clever way, too. It is tattooed on the side of the arm. When you get a new high score, a tattoo gun comes in and revises it with the new number. The only part of the game that bothers me visually is that each new pancake is cracked from an egg shell and dropped in the pan. I've never seen a pancake come straight from an eggshell before!

Here's a look at the game play in action:

Pancake - The Game is FREE in the App Store - Download Pancake

2. aa 

This super simple game will test your reflexes, but once you pick it up, it's hard to put down. When you begin playing, you have a big wheel with a bunch of spokes that is spinning. Below the wheel there are numbered circles. Your job is to tap the screen when you think there is room for another spoke, and one of the circles will move up to become a new spoke. But, you can't hit any of the other spokes, or you're game is over.

It seems, too simple at first, but as you progress, the wheel changes directions and speeds to make it more challenging. Also, the number of circles you have to add to the wheel increases, making it more difficult to find space for them all without bumping into other spokes.

aa is FREE in the App Store - Download aa

Apps That Make Weather More Fun

The east coast has been buzzing about weather this week as temperatures dropped and many of us saw the first snow we've seen this year. It inspired me to check out the current selection of weather apps available in the Apple App Store, and here are a few of my top finds:

Storm by Weather Underground, LLC

This is a new app by internet weather service, Weather Underground. It features a full screen, interactive, high resolution radar map. Users can also view customizable data layers over the map like tropical data and severe weather. When a storm is approaching, users can see it's speed and direction, find out which cities will be affected by it and how much time those cities have to prepare.

Swackett by AGLogic, LLC

It's called the "Different Kind of Weather App" and it definitely is. Swackett makes the weather a little more fun by letting users select characters called "peeps" that appear on the home screen with current weather info that is accurate but not overwhelmingly detailed. It also includes fashion advice on the home screen -- a list of suggested clothing items for the day's conditions. There is a grid navigation that accesses other extra features like "This Day in Weather History" and lifestyle and health advice, including what kinds of activities are best for the day's weather conditions. I found that navigation to be confusing, but otherwise thought this was a cool twist on the everyday weather app.

Weather Puppy by Weather Creative, Inc.

Everything's better with puppies! Nothing too fancy about this app. You just get to look at a cute puppy each time you open it to check the weather. You can choose the puppy on your home screen from the app's 18 themes of puppies Example themes include Glamour, Outdoorsy, Holiday Pups, and Puppy Love. Many are free, but a few are themed for dog-related non-profits and require a small donation to use. Purchase of a paid theme also removes all ads in the app. For $1.99, you can also upload pictures of your own dog.

Effing Weather by Kevin Blakeley 

Of the weather apps I tried, this was my favorite. It's simple but entertaining and offers some options for customization.

The app opens to an uncluttered home screen with a plain blue background. The only content items are current temperature, city and day of week, funny "effing" phrase about the weather, and a list of temperatures for weekdays at the bottom. There are also 2 small icons - a share icon to share current conditions and the "effing" phrase on social networks, and a camera icon, which can be used to customize your background on the home screen with a photo.



Today the phrases i got were:

You can use a toggle in the settings area to turn explicit language on and off - basically changes all the effings to the real deal.

In the "Effing Store" you can buy themed phrase packs.

They also invite users to submit their own phrase ideas and claim to add their favorites to the default message pack.

Organizing iPhone Apps

According to Nielson data, the average American accesses 26.8 apps each month. As we put more and more apps on our mobile devices, app overload inevitably ensues. Finding a way to organize all those apps on your phone can help you use them more efficiently and ensure you don't forget about important apps or get lost in distracting ones.

Yesterday, I was snowed in at home and decided it was the perfect time to finally get a functional organization system in place for my apps. Below is a look at my process, which will hopefully inspire you to examine how your own apps are organized.

I considered a few strategies based on this helpful article from Mashable, including:

Verb-Based Folders
Categorizing apps info folders and labeling the folders according to the action you take when you use them, such as "Read" for news or book apps, and "Listen" for music or podcasting apps.

Color Coding
Grouping apps in rows by color. This can help if you are a visual person, but it would require that you can recall the color of the app you're looking for in order to find it quickly.

Alphabetical
Sorting apps outside of folders in an alphabetical sequence by name.

Themed Rows
Grouping apps on rows based on theme, such as social media apps on one row and photography apps on the next. This could pose problems if you have lots of variety in app themes or if you have OCD tendencies that are put on edge when all the apps for a theme don't fit nicely on 1-2 rows, or when apps fit in more than one theme.

My Process

In the end, I employed elements of a few of the strategies mentioned above.

First, I identified apps I use multiple times every day and would want to have quick access to from my home screen.

Next, I categorized the remaining apps into folders based on the use/functionality of the app. As part of this step, I created a folder called "Unused" containing all of the apps that i don't use but that Apple won't let you delete.

I then segmented the app folders into 1st and 2nd screen folders. I wanted the first screen to contain folders of apps I would access at least daily. It also doesn't include folders of apps that could be distracting during the day, like games. The second screen contains all other folders.

On the home screen, I used the dock for the 4 apps I use most often and ones that I typically want to access quickly as soon as I unlock my phone. I then arranged the remaining apps and app folders in 3 rows. I like having only three rows because it doesn't give you visual overload on the phone home screen. I also alternated a row of app icons, a row of app folders, and another row of app icons, to add more visual contrast and make things easier to find quickly.

On the first page, it seemed most appropriate to use the verb naming strategy for my folders. On the second page, it was more logical to use noun descriptors. I also used some color grouping on the first page, within the 3rd row (Asana, Twitter and Facebook together, with Blogger isolated on the right).

Here's my final setup!

First Screen

Second Screen

Third Screen