Sometimes, you need a Genius from an Apple Store or just a light bulb moment. Or both.

So let’s quickly recap and makes some sense of the above statement. The iPhone 6S Plus was available to hold in your hands on the 25th September. The first 2 – 3 weeks for mew were taken up with an unpleasant experiment of using iCloud Photos and iTunes Match and the need to spend evenings trying to fix the mess. In the end I am not using either of those options from Apple.

iCloud Photos is flawed. It wants to sync your entire library on each device. You can have a save space option or full resolution. What you can’t do it select which albums to sync, which for large photo libraries would make sense. Also, if you go out and snap 300 photos, even if you delete 270 and delete them in the iPhone’s recently deleted folder, it appears it still uploads 300 photos taking up time and unnecessary bandwidth. iTunes Match offered me a lower quality bit rate recording then my original song. So whilst not a massive drop in bitrate it was enough. In addition, iTunes Match first sync was causing issues that I have already documented in previous posts.

So I am using iCloud though for everything else including iCloud Photostream. I have resorted to backing up to Google Photos in high resolution too.

Now that left me with one nagging issue. Notifications on the iPhone 6S Plus and Apple Watch. The default behaviour works as follows. Place the Apple Watch on your wrist and no notifications will sound on your iPhone. Your Apple Watch can vibrate (tap) or make a ping. It only has one sound for notifications whereas on your iPhone different apps can make different sounds. This became annoying as it I was working at my desk, it was potentially easier to decide whether to react to a notification purely based on its sound. Even if you don’t agree that makes sense, it would have had been great to have a toggle in the settings somewhere to give you that option.

This option seemed non existent. Nobody knew the answer, not even Apple support, but then during another conversation there was a eureka moment. Whilst wearing the Apple Watch, if you want to stop notifications on the watch, but hear them on your iPhone, go into the Apple Watch iPhone app, go to DO NOT DISTURB, switch mirror iPhone to OFF. Then on your Apple Watch, in settings or using the Glance Screen settings, tap DO NOT DISTURB. Remember to reverse this if you want your watch to notify you again. Mirroring DO NOT DISTURB on your iPhone is a good thing especially as it means both devices at the preset time will switch to this option.

A solution is a solution even if its a bit long winded.