Fruity Tips #1 - Automatically Detect Your Current Timezone

Here's the first of the Apple Harvest Fruity Tips. It's been a while coming but it has saved my bacon this week so I had to share it with the world as soon as possible!

I've had problems travelling overseas with some of my iDevices for the past six months because the Timezone setting won't update automatically. This never used to be an issue, but I'm guessing that in iOS7 or iOS8 a preference has changed which does now cause the problem.

And what a problem it was this week. I returned to Prague and forgot to change the time on my iPad 3 (the new iPhone 6 and new iPad Mini 2 were both OK) and as a result got up an hour later than I intended on Monday morning.

The problem appeared when I went to the Settings->General->Date & Time preference with the Set Automatically option switched on. The Time Zone setting wouldn't load properly - I just got the spinning fan icon. It turns out that the fix is very simple and it's all to do with the Location Services in the Privacy settings.

In order to get the Time Zone to update automatically, you need to turn on the Privacy->Location Services->System Services->Setting Time Zone. Once you make this tweak the Time Zone will change automatically in the future. Of course you also need to make sure that Location Services are switched on!

Make sure Setting Time Zone is Turned On!

Luckily in my case there was only an hour difference between where I was and where I'd been and there were no critical appointments in the diary. It could have been a very costly error though if I'd had a flight to catch or an interview to attend!