iPhone ideas, and does anyone know if this is available now or not?

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. when your phone auto-locks after 30 seconds or five minutes depending on which setting you have it on...if you are like me you have it on 30 seconds so in case it is lost or stolen they cant get into it, but 98% of the time you are at home, especially now, and this is not an issue...so how awesome would it be to have a setting that allows you to change it to 5 minutes for instance but then it automatically goes BACK to the 30 second setting 30 minutes later or an hour later...

2. to make the red 1 go away from a TEXT message you have to open the text message, most of the time I dont need to open it to see what I want to see but I always want that red 1 to go away...I dont suppose there is a way to do that? To be clear, anytime you get a text you can see it in preview or whatever but to make the notification go away you have to click on it and go into messages to see it then go back out...

[Pinback]

1. Interesting. I wonder if IFTTT would work for the conditional auto-lock settings.

IFTTT (If This, Then That) -- as you may already know -- is a service (or platform, or app depending on your point of view) that enables automating all kinds of things. It seems you could create an IFTTT applet that changes your phone's timeout setting based on whether you're at home or not. This could be based either on location or on connection to your home wi-fi network.

I've played around with IFTTT a bit just to see how it works, but I've never really found it all that useful in my life. I don't use a smart speaker, I don't have any "smart home" lighting or devices, and I just don't have all that many other things that I feel the need to automate. (A daily weather forecast is one exception.)

On the text message question, those little red numbers are called badges, in case you didn't know. Here's a good overview of Alerts, Badges, and Banners (from 2014, but I think it's still relevant): https://heresthethingblog.com/2014/01/22/ios-7-tip-whats-difference-alert/

You could just turn off Badges for Messages altogether, which would mean you'd never see any of the red numbers.

[Eliot Rosewater]

2. Thanks...Yeah I could turn off the "badge" but that would mean I would miss out in a timely

manner of messages.

Badges, I dont got to show you no stinking badges, and how did I not know that is what they are called?

[Pinback]

3. LOL

Apple should call one of their software releases “Sierra Madre.”

[Eliot Rosewater]

4. Good one! I am in a apple/community/support conversation now about

battery issues after 14.4.1.

After every update some folks say the update caused their device to get bad battery use. Usually it is a coincidence and an app is to blame.

But not always, so hard to tell.

I know that Apple purposely made the battery section difficult to figure out how much battery you have used over a given period of time, even though it seems to do that it doesn't the way it used to.

It is nice to have these problems, I guess. If you know what I mean.