iOS tips - page 13

While other web browsers exist and thrive on iOS, Safari is the one Apple includes with it’s iOS system software, and it’s probably the one most of us use often, no small thanks to the fact that it’s integrated at the system level. Every click through, unless third-party apps (like Mailbox) allow something different, takes us to Safari as our main browser.

Therefore, if you’re looking for ways to protect more of your privacy, you’ll want to enable the Do Not Track feature in mobile Safari, as well as possibly block cookies, which are bits of code that store your preferences on website servers for return visits.

We’re big fans of Apple’s Pages app on iOS here, as it allows us to create and edit good-looking documents easily and on the go. Pages’ stunning array of templates, combined with the ease of use associated with an app built by Apple itself for its flagship touchscreen device, make it a must-have app on anyone’s iPad.

Color us excited, then, when we heard about a hidden feature in Pages that lets us delete backgrounds from photos right from within the app itself. Instant Alpha is a super helpful feature when we need to get rid of a large solid color background without dropping the image into an editing program first.

With the new iOS 7, you’re able to search your iPhone from any icon-bearing home screen. Simply drag downward on the iPhone screen on any page, and you’ll see the Search field. Type in whatever you’re searching for–Contacts, Apps, Music, Messages–and your iPhone will display all of those things in a nice list for you. All you need to do from there is tap the result you want to check out, and iOS 7 will take you to that specific bit of data.

However, maybe you don’t want to search everything on your iOS device. Maybe you don’t keep Music on there, or you don’t want to see a list of Podcasts or Mail when you search your iPad for a specific app.

Lucky you; it’s pretty easy to customize. It might even help you save a bit of battery, too.

One of the newer features of iOS 7 is in the App Store. No, I’m not talking about the Wish List feature, which is pretty slick, but the “near me” function of the App Store. It’s a pretty cool thing to play with when you’re traveling, if nothing else.

You can get a neat little list of the hot apps of other people in your general area with this cool little feature, and I did so on my current trip to Hawaii, just to see what people were downloading here in the beautiful city of Honolulu.

You can see my results above, and then try it on your own.

It’s fantastic to be able to swipe up from the bottom of the screen in any app or the home screen to turn Wi-Fi on or off, enable or disable Bluetooth, and the like. Control Center in iOS 7 has really solved some of my biggest issues with iOS in general.

However, there are times when I’m playing a game or using a certain app that I don’t really want the Control Center to pop up when i use the bottom of the screen.

Thankfully, Apple’s given us a way to disable it.

Siri continues to become more integrated into the operating system with iOS 7. We’ve already shown you how you can navigate to any of the specific settings screens on your iOS device using the clever digital assistant.

Let’s it one step further, though, and get Siri to actually DO some of the controlling of our oft-toggled settings, instead of just taking us to the specific page. Sure, you can also do this with the new iOS Control Center, but if you can’t touch your iPhone, Siri can cover it for you.

It used to be fairly simple to add e-books (of the epub format) to your iPad or iPhone via your Mac, using iTunes file sharing. You’d simply drag and drop the book into iTunes, connect your iOS device, and sync the non-iBook file via the file sharing system in iTunes, just like any other file supported by apps on your iPad

With the advent of iBooks on the Mac with OS X Mavericks, there is no longer a way to sync epub books in this way. You might be stymied on attempting to get epubs from your Mac to your iPad, but thanks to an intrepid Cult of Mac reader, we all get to learn how to do just that.

Deleting emails has long been a fairly simple task in iOS. All you’ve ever needed to do to delete one is swipe to the left to pull up the delete button, or tap on Edit to delete multiple messages. Deleting email is such fun, of course, but there are other things you might want to do with your emails.

In iOS 7, luckily, there’s more…quite literally.

It’s a fact that we use more and more data these days, what with our iPads and iPhones having the ever-present connection to the cellular and Wi-Fi networks all around us.

Unfortunately, less of us have unlimited cell data plans these days, so it’s paramount that we keep track of which apps are sucking up the cell bandwidth, so to speak.

Luckily, iOS 7 lets you control which apps will use cellular, and which apps will only connect to and use the network juice via a stable Wi-Fi connection.

Want to know where you frequent the most? Your iPhone is set up in iOS 7 to track your location, and it also aggregates this information deep in the Settings app.

To find out where you are most often–or at least where your iPhone has been most frequently–you only need to look at the Frequent Locations tab.

One of the better ways to compose better pictures when taking them with your iPhone is to turn on the grid lines built into the iOS camera.

Back in iOS 6, you could tap on the options button at the top, and toggle the grid lines on or off. Simple, right? That ease of use is no longer in iOS 7.

Where did the grid lines go?

One of the things I’ve always wanted to do in my car (as I drive to and fro taking my kids to and from school, music lessons, and soccer practice) is to read my emails and text messages. But taking your eyes off the road is bad, mmmkay?

You can always turn on VoiceOver before you get in the car to read your screen to you, but it involves a whole lot of tapping and different gestures, so it’s kind of impractical to use on a non-regular basis.

Luckily, in iOS 7, you can now get Siri to read your email and your iMessages to you with a simple spoken command.

One of the better ways to see what’s coming up in any calendar is the list view. It’s a handy way to see, at a quick glance, the major events of the next few days.

Unfortunately, Apple has taken this view from its new iOS 7 Calendar app and hidden it away.

Here’s how to get it back.

I like some notifications. I try to keep it down to a dull roar, of course, but I enjoy knowing when I get a phone call, text message, and email from specific clients or friends.

It’s just that when I see all these notifications in my lockscreen, I mentally dismiss them, only to have them appear again the next time I check my iPhone for the time.

I messed around with it a bit yesterday, and came up with this solution, thanks to iOS 7.

When you searched for apps in the App Store in iOS 6, you got a bunch of cards that you could swipe through to find the specific app you were looking for. To get back to the beginning, you’d need to swipe back as many of the apps as you’d swiped through, and that could take some time.

There’s a new little trick in iOS 7 that makes it a lot easier to pop back to the beginning of the cards.

One of the much touted features of iOS 7 is the new organization feature of the Photos app. When I opened it for the first time, back in the beta, I was dismayed to see the Year view.

The photos? They’re tiny! How the heck am I supposed to find the photo I want? I’m old and need glasses. Sheesh.

Ahem.

It turns out to be much simpler than you’d think to scan through the photos in this view.

One of the great things about Messages, for me, is the “read receipt.” I know if my child has seen my messages to them, of if they’ve just been “delivered” but not read. I like it.

Some folks, though, might want to turn off this feature so they don’t give off the signal that they’ve actually seen a message. it goes a long way towards plausible deniability when things go wrong.

If you’re one of those folks, though, you might have noticed that when you upgraded to iOS 7 that–even if you have the preference for receipts toggled to OFF, you might still be sending out read receipts.

Luckily, there’s an easy fix.

There you are, listening to your favorite song, when you just want to get to the good part. So you look at the Music app that’s playing that favorite song, and you wonder, “How on earth am I going to scrub through the song to move to where I want to?”

In iOS 7, the visual upgrade gives us a red line in the track being played. You can definitely tap, hold and drag that red line along the track for some high-speed scrubbing, but what if you want to move along the track more slowly, or have a more fine-grained approach?

Here’s how to do just that.

Whether this feature has been in iOS since the beginning or not, this is the first I’ve heard of it, so I’m guessing there are a few of you out there that haven’t found the sleep timer in iOS, either.

If you want to listen to music or audiobooks before you go to sleep, it’s generally a good idea to have a way to turn the music off after you’ve fallen asleep, right?

Well, it turns out that there’s a sleep timer right in iOS itself, but it might not be where you’d expect it to be.

The new mobile Safari app built in to iOS 7 has a whole new multi-windowed interface, which allows for a near limitless number of windows that you can open at once. Simply hit the icon in the far right-hand bottom corner to bring up the “tabs” interface, and then tap the big central Plus button to add a new page to the list.

But what about closing those windows? They’ve got an X icon in the upper left of each tab/window, but the X is super tiny, and not always easy to tap. Sometimes I end up activating a window instead of closing it. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

iOS 7 brings a ton of visual and interface changes to our favorite smart phone, not all of them easily intuited from general use.

One of these is the new fullscreen mobile Safari. The web browser’s address bar and toolbar (at the bottom) disappears when you’re browsing, and you might have figured out how to bring it back by accident, but not in a systematic way.

Nothing sucks the joy out of using a smartphone than not really being sure how to do something, so here are three ways to re-appear that sucker on your iPhone.

Ok, I’ll admit it; I occasionally use Siri in the car. It’s not a perfectly hands-free system, but it is great to be able to send a quick text to let someone know I’m running late without touching the phone too much.

The other day, though, I was sitting in the car at my son’s school, waiting for the final bell to go in and get him from class. I had my iPhone set up in the car, and was sending a text to a friend. I realized that somehow, in the transition to iOS 7, I no longer had access to the Emoji keyboard.

As the iPhone was propped in it’s in-car holder (a Breffo spiderpodium), I just activated Siri, out of habit.

In addition to using Yahoo! Weather data, the new Weather app in iOS 7 also borrows some of its look from the stellar Yahoo! weather app that came out prior to the release of Apple’s latest mobile operating system.

One new feature that the built-in Weather app from Apple brings to the table is a way to see all the locations you check the weather for into one screen. Here’s how to access it.

Do you miss the dedicated .com button from the iOS 6 and earlier software keyboard? Many of us do, remembering that you could tap and hold it for other oft-used URL finishers, like .net, .org, and the like.

If you want to find the .com button again, you’re out of luck, but if you want to get that same functionality in iOS 7, here’s how.

iOS 7 has changed the look and feel of so much on the iPhone and iPad, that some of you may be looking for familiar bits, but find yourselves unable to locate them.

A case in point, here, is the Safari “Reader” button that used to be in the upper right hand side of any Safari window when it was showing a page that was Reader-able. I love Reader, especially on my iPhone, so I went searching for it the minute I upgraded to iOS 7 today.

Here’s where I found it.