iPhone Clock

Bedtime is a beautifully designed new feature of the Clock app meant to help you keep and monitor your sleep schedule. The best aspect of it, besides its simplicity, is that it has an independent volume setting and an array of wakeup sounds with soothing melodies that gradually get louder, easing you out of sleep rather than shocking your system with a harsh alarm. When you use it for the first time you simply tell it when you get up and how many hours you like to sleep, then you can select which days of the week you want it applied to.

Your iPhone's clock by default automatically syncs with your carrier's network time, which is probably what you want ninety-nine percent of the time. If you need to know the time elsewhere in the world you can simply check the Clock app's World Clock feature with a few taps. There may be times, however, when you want your iPhone's main clock to show a time other than local - maybe while you are travelling you want to know the time at home at a glance. Perhaps you are somewhere without service and your phone can't sync, or the network time is wrong for some reason.

If you are like one of many people that need a little more than the sounds of crickets or the city streets to put you to sleep at night, then you probably try to drift off to some of your favorite music or maybe even the audio of a video.

It’s a great idea that can get complicated by the fact that not every audio and video player has a sleep timer built into it. What's the point then of drifting off to a little entertainment if you’re going to have to make the effort to turn off the sound yourself?

Practically everyone with an iPhone or iPad knows how to set an alarm to get themselves out of bed in the morning. But how many of these iOS users know that a music sleep timer is also available? Setting the iPhone to automatically stop playing music after a set time interval can help one fall asleep without draining the battery into the night.

While the music sleep timer works with the built-in Music app and some others such as Pandora, the feature is hidden in the Clock. To set up your music to fade out quickly and stop playing when the timer ends, first open the Clock app and navigate to Timer.

If you've been having problems with the widely reported Do Not Disturb bug, rest assured it will self-fix on Monday January 7, 2013. Apple recommended a simple solution to temporarily fix the problem that has been keeping Do Not Disturb (DND) engaged past a scheduled time. iOS 6 users will have to manually toggle DND mode and disable Settings -> Notifications -> Do Not Disturb -> Scheduled until Monday.

So what caused this week of DND turmoil on iOS devices and prompted an Apple support document on the issue? Turns out that DND uses the ISO week date format, which wanted to compute the first day of the year as January 7. According to Ars Technica Apple even warns third-party developers of the problem, and steers them toward the Gregorian calendar instead.