iOS 11 tips

Read Cult of Mac’s latest posts on iOS 11 tips:

How to set up and use Messages in iCloud in iOS 11.4

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clouds
Clouds, unlike those where your iMessages will now be stored.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

The iOS 11.4 update finally brings Messages in iCloud, which means you can treat your iMessages like you treat your photos.

Your messages will sync across all iOS devices and should work soon on Mac. (Update: It works on Mac now, once you update to macOS 10.13.5). You can even delete them from an iPhone or iPad that’s short on space. But they will remain accessible from the cloud. Here’s how to switch on iCloud support for Messages.

How to quickly zoom text on your iPhone and iPad

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zoom text
A magnifying glass is the OG zoom for paper
Photo: theilr/Flickr CC

It’s not just old folks or people with bad eyesight that like big text on their iPhones and iPads. Maybe it’s late and you’re getting sleepy. Or perhaps you have your iPad propped up on the desk during the day and would appreciate larger text because it’s quite a bit farther away than when you hand-hold it. Or maybe you’ll try this tip and realise that zooming text is as useful as zooming photos.

iOS has long allowed you to zoom text, but it was buried deep in the Accessibility section of Settings, making it hard to adjust on the fly. Ever since iOS 11, though, you’ve been able to zoom text as easily as adjusting the screen brightness. Let’s take a look.

iOS Mail filters quickly tame overflowing mailboxes

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mailbox filters
A mailbox, aka a postbox, or even 'pillar box."
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

The iOS Mail app gets overlooked by power users, but it’s still the default for most people, unless they’re using Gmail in the browser. And that’s not a bad thing, because Apple’s Mail app has gotten pretty great in recent years, from smart mailboxes, to swipe gestures, to iOS 11’s drag-and-drop. Today we’re going to take a look at a feature so hidden you may never have seen it before. It’s a filter than can be applied to any folder, letting you see just mail with attachments, mail addressed directly to you, VIP mails, and more.

Essential iPhone X tips you need to know [Video]

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Watch our latest video to see all the crucial iPhone X tips and tricks.
Watch our latest video to see all the crucial iPhone X tips and tricks.
Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac

iPhone X is radically different from every iPhone that came before it. As you strive to get accustomed to life without a Home button, these iPhone X tips and tricks will come in handy.

Check out the video below to see nine iPhone X tips you need to master immediately.

How to add quick keyboard shortcuts for emojis on Mac and iOS

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emoji text replacements
Adding shortcuts for your favorite Emoji is easy.
Photo: Cult of Mac

If you use emojis, the iOS keyboard is fantastic. It suggests emojis for you as you type words, and you can insert them into your messages with a tap. But what about the Mac? How can you add emojis with the keyboard on the desktop? And how can you force iOS to remember shortcuts for your favorite emoji on the iPhone and iPad? The answer to both is Text Replacement, which is built into both macOS and iOS.

Dropbox is now baked into the iOS 11 Files App

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dropbox files
Dropbox is now just another folder on your iPad or iPhone.
Photo: Cult of Mac

Dropbox now shows up as a regular old folder in the new iOS 11 Files app. The latest update to the Dropbox iOS aa brings full integration with Files, making it work much more like it does on the Mac and PC. For instance, now you can drag a file from a Dropbox folder into an iCloud Drive folder, and it just works.

How to record your iPhone screen in iOS 11

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control center iOS 11
You can now record iPhone screen easily using the Control Center toggle.
Photo: Apple

Recording your iPhone screen used to be a hassle. If you wanted to capture iOS gameplay, or make a funny or informative GIF of on-screen action, you needed to download a third-party app or connect your device to a computer.

Those days are over: With iOS 11, Apple baked in sweet functionality that lets you record your iPhone screen effortlessly. Here’s how to do it.

iOS 11 Notes app finally lets you search notes when you save

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search notes iOS 11
iOS 11 lets you narrow down your target notes by search whenever you save a new snippet.
Photo: Cult of Mac

Apple’s Notes app got a few headline updates in the iOS 11 section of the 2017 WWDC Keynote — in-line sketches and handwriting recognition for example — but there’s another tiny tweak that might be an even bigger deal than those two. Now, when you use the Share arrow to send a URL, snippet of text, or anything else, to the Notes app, you can search your existing notes, and choose which one you want to add it to.

This is huge, and takes Notes from being a higgledy-piggledy junk drawer to being a real replacement for things like Evernote and Microsoft’s One Note. Now you can keep a note for, say, planning an upcoming vacation, and easily add new places and plans to it as you find them, or quickly add links to a book reading list.

How to get your iPhone and iPad ready for iOS 11

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iOS 11's one-handed keyboard
Get your iPhone or iPad ready for the new iOS 11 update.
Photo: Cult of Mac

iOS 11 is available on Tuesday September 19th, and if your device is compatible, you can go ahead and update, by just tapping the button in Settings>General>Software Update. If all goes well (and it should), then you will wait for a while as the update downloads and installs, then your iPhone or iPad will restart into the new version of iOS, with all the cool goodies it brings.

But things sometimes can go wrong, so it pays to take a few precautions. You might also like to take the opportunity to clean up your device a little. Here’s how to prepare your iDevice for iOS 11.

How to switch off Auto Brightness in iOS 11

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Auto Brightness iOS 11
Auto Brightness has been hidden in iOS 11, but it can still be found.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

You’ve all been there. You’re sitting near a window or a lamp, reading an excellent article on your iPad — perhaps a well-written How-To from Cult of Mac — and your iPad’s screen Auto Brightness is going haywire. You slide open Control Center, and set it back where you want it, and continue reading. Then, you turn the iPad a little too far towards the light, and the screen brightness creeps up again.

In iOS 10 and prior, you’d just open the Settings app, tap Display & Brightness, and hit the switch for Auto Brightness. In iOS 11, that option has disappeared. The good news is that it hasn’t gone — the Auto Brightness switch has just moved.

How to defeat Google AMP with 3D Touch on iPhone

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google amp iphone
Google AMP is bad for the web, and Apple is fixing it so you don't have to.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Google’s web-hostile AMP scheme makes copies of web pages, shrinks them, and serves them instead of the original when you click on a Google search result. It renders your content in non-standard HTML, and removes the original link to the article’s source. Whenever you share the page you’re reading, it forces you to share a the Google AMP URL instead of the original.

Unless you’re using an iPhone, that is. In iOS 11, Mobile Safari strips AMP from any links you share. And iPhones running iOS 10 will load the non-AMP version (i.e. the original version) of a page if you press a link with 3D Touch.

How to see which apps are wasting your iPhone battery

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iPhone battery
Which apps are running riot on your iPhone's battery?
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Sometimes an app gets out of control and eats up your battery, even while it doesn’t seem to be active. Once, I had an iPad drained almost completely by a runaway instance of Skype. Or you may have an app that is supposed to run in the background — a synthesizer, or another music app, for example — and you forget you left it running, draining your iPhone battery.

Or perhaps you just want to see how much battery your various apps use. In any of these cases, you can open up a Settings screen that will report which apps have used how much battery, and for how long, over the past day or week. It’s a very handy screen indeed.

Apple how-to videos help you make the most of iOS 11 on iPad

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how-to videos
Apple's new how-to videos showcase the best new iPad features in iOS 11.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Six new how-to videos from Apple show how to do things with your iPad running iOS 11. The minute-long episodes are engaging, informational and make iOS 11 look super-exciting, which it totally is.

If you want to get an idea of the neatest new features in iOS 11, these videos make a great place to start. Even better, you might want to send them to somebody else to show them what they will be able to do with their own iPad when Apple releases the final version of iOS 11 in a few weeks time.

How to find your purchased apps in iOS 11

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Purchased apps in ios 11
Your purchased apps haven’t gone in iOS 11 — they’ve just been hidden.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

The Purchased tab in the iOS App Store may seem to have disappeared in iOS 11, but don’t worry — it has only moved. And got a little less useful. Whereas in iOS 10 and prior, your previously purchased apps were found in their own dedicated App Store tab (iPad) or above the list of app updates (iPhone), now they’re accessed by tapping the little silhouette of a head in a circle, which indicates your user account.

How to pin notes and use stationery in iOS 11 Notes app

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The iOS  Notes app is now even more powerful than the Mac version.
The iOS Notes app is now even more powerful than the Mac version.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

iOS 11’s Notes app is fantastic, and can probably replace apps like OneNote or Evernote for many people. In iOS 11, it mostly catches up with the Mac version — and adds a bunch more neat features only possible on the iPad, like sketching with the Apple Pencil.

Today, we’re going to see how to pin notes to the top of the list; how to swipe to delete, password-protect or move a note to a folder; and how to pick a stationery background for a new note.

How to share your iCloud storage plan with family members

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iCloud storage family plans
Sharing a big storage plan can save money, and make things simpler.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

In iOS 11, you can share your iCloud storage with family members. This is a big deal, thanks to the new supersize iCloud plans, which make it a lot cheaper to buy a single 2TB plan and share it among all your family members.

With all that storage available, you can keep a huge iCloud Photo Library, and take full advantage of the new Files app in iOS 11. Never again will you run out of storage on your iPhone, iPad or the MacBook you foolishly specced at just 128GB of storage space. Here’s how to share iCloud storage with your family members.

How to scan and mark up paper with Notes app in iOS 11

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scan notes
Scanning paper documents is easy in the iOS 11 Notes app.
Photo: Cult of Mac

In iOS 11, the Notes app really wants to become the go-to place for you to dump all your ideas, all your snippets, and all your, uh, PDF scans. New in iOS 11 is the ability to scan a sheet of paper right there in the Notes app, then scrawl on it using the new PDF markup features built into Apple’s new mobile OS>

Potentially, the Notes app in iOS 11 will be able to replace apps like Evernote (aka “Everbloat”), as well as purpose-built scanning apps like Scanner Pro. Let’s see how to make a scan, and if the Notes app does enough to be your sole go-to notes destination.

Enable the hidden dark mode in iOS 11 and save your eyes

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iOS 11's Smart Invert feature brings a stunning dark mode
iOS 11's Smart Invert feature brings a stunning dark mode
Photo: Cult of Mac

Some users have been longing for an iOS “dark mode” for quite a while. With iOS 11, Apple is introducing a new Smart Invert feature that replicates the dark mode functionality, though it’s not quite there yet. It builds upon iOS’ classic Invert Colors mode but excludes some images, media and apps that use dark color styles.

Here’s how you can try out the hidden dark mode in iOS 11 right now.

Siri tweak lets you type your queries in iOS 11

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Type to Siri on iOS 11
Tired of talking to Siri? In iOS 11, you can tap out your requests silently.
Photo: Cult of Mac

Using Siri in public places can be a drag. Either it’s too noisy for Apple’s AI assistant to understand your query, or it’s too quiet and it’s embarrassing (or even risky) to ask Siri for help.

Luckily, iOS 11 brings a Siri upgrade that changes all that: The new Type to Siri feature lets you silently send all your questions and commands. This feature comes disabled by default, but enabling it shouldn’t take more than a few seconds.

iOS 11 makes it far easier to organize Home screen app icons

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iOS 11 brings plenty of powerful new features.
iOS 11 brings plenty of powerful new features.
Photo: Apple

Rather than completely overhauling the Home screen in iOS 11, Apple settled for a few neat tweaks that will make using your iPhone easier. One of the coolest new features makes the previously clunky process of organizing your Home screen a lot less annoying.

Rather than painstakingly dragging individual app icons across the pages of your Home screen, iOS 11 lets you move multiple icons simultaneously with this hidden trick.