iTunes Radio now lets you create stations full of the artists and songs you like, just like Pandora. You can also add artists to the list that you don’t want playing in the station.
When you create a new iTunes Radio station, though, it’s typically named after the first song or artist that you create the station with. That’s not always what you want.
You can rename any station you like with a couple of easy taps.
If you’re one of the millions of people who went out and got themselves an iPhone 5s recently, you might notice that sometimes Touch ID doesn’t work on the first try. While most people haven’t had an issue with the new biometric fingerprint scanner, some have.
Luckily, there’s a pretty straightforward way to make it much more reliable.
Sure, you use the Messages app to send along SMS and iMessages all day long. You know how to use Emoji’s, too, with a tap on the international keyboard button on your iPhone.
I bet you even use regular text emoticons, like semi-colon and parenthesis to create a wink, or colon and parenthesis to create a smile.
But have you ever tried to have your iPhone turn your text-based emoticon into an Emoji? I bet you haven’t.
I’ve grown up with this last name, so I’m fairly used to people butchering it. I’m surprised at the amazing number of pronunciations given to my last name over the past several decades, with people adding all sorts of weird consonants that just aren’t there.
Siri isn’t much different, though she does manage to say my name phonetically, but my family doesn’t say “Luh-Feb- Vree.” We say, “Luh-Fay” with an accent on the second syllable.
Turns out, it’s easier than you’d think to teach Siri how to say names correctly.
iOS 7 came with a new look and feel, including the font used across the system. It’s a little thinner than earlier versions of iOS, so it might be a bit tricky to read, especially on the small iPhone screen.
You can always increase the size of text dynamically, but if you just need a little boost to the readability, try enabling Bold Text.
You can hit Command-F to find anything on your Mac, or you can hit Command-Space to invoke Spotlight, which took over for Sherlock as the built-in searching system many moons ago. In Windows 8, you can use the Search “charm.”
On the iPhone and iPad, however, some might be a little confused. There’s no keyboard commands in iOS, and Apple has even moved the Search functionality in iOS 7 from the furthermost left icon page.
What’s an iPhone owner to do when she wants to search for that specific app that she’s buried in a folder somewhere on her device, or needs the phone number of her best friend, because she’s always just used Siri to call her and has no idea what her number actually is?
I hate voicemail, I truly do. It’s like a fax machine: outdated and unnecessarily complicated. The introduction of visual voicemail in iOS was a good step toward updating the technology, but I’d still much rather get an email or text message than sit through someone’s verbal ramblings just to hear them say, “call me back.”
Unfortunately, there are still plenty of people who insist on leaving auditory messages for me on my iPhone. Apple has also given us quite a few ways to delete them, and then to clear out the deleted messages (yes, even deleted voicemails stick around). They must hate voicemail as much as I do.
Ahh, iOS 7, you are so beautiful. Yet you are also confusing, especially to old-timers like myself who wonder where certain features have moved to.
I recently created two new albums in my Photos app, one for each of my kids. When I created each album, I was able to add as many photos as I wanted to, and then save the album.
Later, I wanted to go back and add more pictures of each child to each new album. But I realized I had no idea how to do so. I tried tapping the Share button, but found no “Add to Album” option. I was super sad.
Luckily, Apple has provided a way to add photos to existing albums, and, while it’s not as intuitive as I’d like, it’s not too difficult.
When you browse the web with mobile Safari, you’ll come across sites that ask you to create a login, and that usually requires a password.
You can save your passwords in mobile Safari automatically, but there are some sites that request passwords not be saved. There’s a workaround, though, if you feel like you should be able to save whatever passwords you darn well please, and it’s buried in the Settings app.
The web is full of all kinds of links, both clearly labeled ones as well as links with varying degrees of treacherousness (Rick Roll, we’re looking at you). While finding yourself sent to a video of Rick Astley may be fairly innocuous, there are times when you’re on the web and you come across a link that could possibly do something more serious.
That’s where the mobile web browsers in iOS 7 come in. I’ve tried this trick in both Safari and Chrome, but there may be other, less popular browsers that do the same thing: your mileage may vary.
On the Mac, you can close all the tabs in Safari (or any browser of your choice, really) with the keyboard combo of Option-Command-W. Hit that, and all the tabs in all the windows open will close at once. It mirrors the Finder command, which will close all Finder windows.
You can swipe away the tabs one at a time when you’re browsing on your iPad or iPhone, but there’s no keyboard command equivalent to close them all at once. How can you close all the tabs you have open in one fell swoop?
There you are, in an important meeting. You’ve silenced your iPhone with the button on the left-hand side of the device like a good employee. You set your iPhone on the table to show your boss you’re not afraid of the ringtone.
Suddenly, your buddy texts you. Like, four texts in a row about some foolishness that you’d love to read, but you can’t, because you’re in a meeting. But your iPhone betrays you, buzzing like a mad bee, over and over. Your face turns red, you grab the device off the resonating wood conference table and mutter, “I put it on silent…um…sorry.” And then you jam it into your pocket, your plan to impress the chief gone in an instant.
You could have avoided this embarrassing scenario fairly easily, though.
Sure, you can use something like iPhoto to really dig in and edit your iPhone photos, but if you just want a simple, no frills simple edit or two–plus some nifty filters if you have an iPhone 5 and up–the built-in Photos app in iOS 7 is a pretty great choice. It’s easy to use, and you already own it.
We showed you how to apply the new iOS 7 filters in yesterday’s tip post, so let’s look at the other four options available to you: rotate, auto-enhance, red eye, and cropping.
Apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic have trained us all to find photos with various filters applied attractive and cool. Apple realized this, obviously, when it updated its own built-in Camera app for iOS 7. These are only available on the iPhone 5 and up, though, so don’t worry if your iPhone 4S doesn’t show any filters here.
While filtering your photo is pretty darn easy, it might not be super intuitive for everyone. Plus, removing the filter is straight up non-intuitive. Launch your camera app and take a photo to walk through the steps involved.
Want to capture a square image from the get-go, rather than cropping in Instagram later? How about Taking a panoramic photo or a video? If you have an iPhone 5s, you can take a slow motion video, as well.
It’s pretty easy to get these options, though it may not be as intuitive to find. Here’s how.
There isn’t a built-in way to add extensions to mobile Safari or Chrome on your iOS device, so it’s not possible to add the amazing (and free) Evernote web clip extension like you can on the Mac.
There are third-party apps that will add anything in your clipboard to Evernote, but the best one (Everclip) cost money, and you need to copy the web URL to your clipboard, and then launch the app.
If you want a quick way to add webpage clips to your Evernote file system from within your mobile browser, all you need to do is use Javascript. This works really well on the iPad, but the iPhone 5 I tested it with had some sizing and formatting issues, so your mileage may vary.
Activation Lock is a new feature in iOS 7 that allows you to remotely wipe all the data on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch in case it gets lost or stolen. It’s such a great idea that 78 percent of iPhone users have it enabled.
After Activation Lock is enabled remotely, your iPhone will display a message for you with details on how to return it to you. This is a great feature.
When you get the device back, all you need to do is enter your Apple ID (and password!), and your iPhone or iPad will reactivate, give you a fully functional iOS device again without letting anyone else use it in the meantime.
But where the hell do you enable this feature?
Chances are you are looking at apps for your kids during this holiday season, or you will be shortly. You don’t want to do this willy-nilly, as not all apps are made for kids, and searching for any apps from the big list is just too much.
Whether you need to find an appropriate gaming app for your child to keep them busy while you’re carting them around your local department store, or you want to fill their iPod up with great new apps for the holiday, Apple has got you covered with its own dedicated Kids section.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve found the included Flashlight–along with the ease of access within the Control Center–to be a fantastic addition to my life. I always have my iPhone with me, which means I always have a quick flashlight with me. I use it to see in my over-crowded closet, behind the sound board at gigs, and into my shed during the dark hours of the winter up here in Alaska. It’s handy.
One thing, though, that’s kind of a pain is turning the thing off. Yeah, you can slide the Control Center up, then tap the flashlight icon to turn it off. But I’m usually trying to manage my phone along with whatever thing I needed from the shed or the closet and those couple of steps can seem like too much.
Some users have reported problems with sending text messages to their friends and family after the upgrade to iOS 7.
Typically, when iMessage is unavailable, your iPhone should send messages as SMS ones instead, denoted by the green chat bubble as opposed to the regular blue.
If, however, your iPhone won’t send texts automatically, here’s a possible fix.
If This, Then That (IFTTT) is a system by which you can create amazing workflow recipes. There’s also an app in the App Store that lets you use the incredibly powerful recipes right on your iPhone. Send all your Instagram photos to Dropbox, for example, or email all your Photos to a specific address. There are tons of recipes you can browse and steal use, plus making your own custom recipes is a snap.
Since emails can often contain things you have to make reminders for follow-up, let’s take a look at turning our emails into reminders using the IFTTT app right on your iPhone.
iTunes Radio competes with other non-on-demand internet radio services, like Pandora. It allows you to pick a seed artist or set of artists and then let its magical algorithms decide what other songs and artists best fit your seed. It then feeds you a stream of music that you can like or dislike along the way, theoretically building a “station” of your favorite music, based on your own tastes.
To access iTunes Radio, all you need to do is launch your Music app with a tap, and then tap on the Radio icon in the lower left. Once there, you can create stations on your own, edit stations you’ve already created, or even listen to iTunes featured stations.
It’s also trivially easy to share your own stations with other folks.
The clock app in iOS 7 is pretty straightforward. There’s an alarm, stopwatch, timer, and a world clock. The latter allows you to add any number of cities to your list and your iOS device will tell you the time in each city. You can rearrange them into any order you like with a quick tap on the Edit button in the upper left. To add new cities, simply tap the plus button in the upper right.
The world clock defaults to an analog representation of the time to the right of each city. We can fix that.
The native calendar app on your iPhone or iPad is pretty great, and since it’s built right into iOS and the info is on your iPhone, not the internet, you have access to all your calendar events even when you’re offline or can’t find a network signal.
Now, many of us use Google Calendar to schedule our stuff. Personally, I like that I can sync my calendars across the web and my iOS devices, and share events with other Google Calendar users. But I’ve always wanted to have my events on my iPhone’s Calendar app, too, for the whole “can’t find a network” reason above.
It’s pretty easy, really, to get it all to sync together.
iOS 7 has brought some great new gestural support, like being able to swipe from the left side of the screen to go back a page in apps like Settings, Mail, and Safari.
Did you know, though, that you can use the same gesture to peek at your list of email or iMessages from within those specific apps? I didn’t either, so figured I’d pass it along to you.
