| Cult of Mac

How to customize Mail swipe gestures on iPhone

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A mail box
Mail used to be such a pain to use.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Apple’s Mail app has gotten pretty good. And one of its best features is mail swipe gestures: being able to swipe an email in your message list and quickly delete, archive, move, or flag that message, and lots more besides.

With gestures, you can speed through your inbox, deleting the cruft, archiving boss mails, and filing messages, all with single swipes. It makes dealing with mail easy, if not actually fun.

The default swipes gestures are fine, but you can customize them to do exactly what you want. Let’s see how.

These are the touch gestures you can use with HomePod

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homepod
HomePod likes to be touched.
Photo: Apple/Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

The HomePod’s fancy gimmick is that you can use Siri to control it. Even when the music is loud enough to get your neighbors banging on the walls, Siri can hear you thanks to the six microphones’ ability to ignore the sound from the speakers. But touch is always faster than talk, so a quick tap on the top of the HomePod will often be better than trying to get Siri to understand you.

Activate iPhone X Reachability with a flick of the thumb

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gestures iPhone x
Your thumb will get a workout now that the home button is no longer around to do all the work.
Photo: Apple

Here’s a great Reachability tip for iPhone X users. It’s so neat that even if you find Reachability pointless, you’ll love it. Or at least, you’ll love how absurd the gestures are to activate it.

What am I talking about? Let’s just say that if you’re a close-up conjurer who specializes in card tricks, then you will have no problem with this iPhone X tip. If you’re a normal human, it might take a bit of practice.

Master your iPhone X with these tips, tricks and how-tos

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iPhone x unboxing
Fresh out of the box.
Photo: Killian Bell/Cult of Mac

The iPhone X is Apple’s most exciting iPhone in years. It packs an incredible portrait camera, ditches the home button so it can squeeze and iPhone Plus-sized screen into a regular-sized body, and adds Face ID.

If you want to read all about your new iPhone X, or to see what the fuss is before you purchase one, check out this roundup of all Cult of Mac’s iPhone X coverage.

Learn all the new gestures for iPhone X

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gestures iPhone x
Your thumb will get a workout now that the home button is no longer around to do all the work.
Photo: Apple

The iPhone X has no home button. We already know that, but what does it mean when you’re actually using the phone? The home button is the most important button on the iPhone. It wakes it up, gets you to the home screen, activates Apple Pay, invokes Siri, takes a screenshot, and helps you force the phone to reset if everything goes wrong. And that’s just the beginning. The iPhone X replaces the home button with a combination of gestures, and by using other buttons. Some of them you may already use. Others take existing gestures and move them. Let’s take a look at all the new gestures on the iPhone X.

5 ways to quickly switch apps on iPad with iOS 11

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iOS 11 iPad Pro
The iPad is insanely flexible in iOS 11.
Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac

In iOS 11, there are four ways to switch apps on the iPad. Five, if you count the old-school way: hitting the home button to return to the home screen, and tapping an icon to launch a different app. Some of these methods have been around a while, and have changed drastically in iOS 11. Others are brand new, and exclusive to the iPad. Today, we’re going to look at them all.

How to use one-handed Maps mode in iOS 11

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one-handed-maps
This is all happening with one finger.
Photo: Cult of Mac

Using one-handed maps is currently suboptimal, because you need two fingers to zoom the map. But in iOS 11, the familiar pinch-to-zoom gesture is joined by a new tap-to-zoom, which lets you navigate the entire interface with a single thumb. This means that you can easily check the map while walking, or even — if you are an irresponsible psychopath — while riding a bike.

Windows 10 is going to steal OS X’s trackpad gestures

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Photo: Apple
Photo: Apple

One of the many, many things that Apple does right is trackpads. Not only is the trackpad hardware that Apple uses in the MacBook lineup the best in the world (seriously, I’ve never used a non-Apple trackpad that even came close), but the software backing it up is world-class.

A lot of that has to do with the library of consistent trackpad gestures Apple has built into OS X over the years. Compared to OS X, Windows feels downright schizophrenic when you’re using gestures. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. But it now appears that Microsoft is putting an end to the trackpad schizophrenia by borrowing Apple’s approach to gestures.

New Macbook? Here Are Some Non-Obvious Trackpad Gestures You May Not Know About [OS X Tips]

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These are just the obvious ones.
These are just the obvious ones.

I’ve let friends borrow my Macbook when they come over to my place from time to time, and I’m still surprised by the way they don’t “get” the trackpad. Some of them look for the button to click, some want to know how to right click, and still others move the mouse cursor way over to the scroll bar area on the web browser, looking to move the page up or down.

So, I figured it might be time for a quick tip with some easy yet non-obvious Trackpad gestures that you can use if you’re new to the Macbook trackpad system, or if you just want to send to friends that continue to be baffled by the trackpad when they borrow your laptop.