Mailbox for iPhone lets you send each email to a list, set it to snooze for a certain number of hours or days, or even just archive the email if you want.
In addition, you can mark emails as read or unread, and star them, just like in Gmail itself. THis gives you yet another way to sort and classify emails on the go, which also transfers easily to the web version of Gmail, as well.
Mailbox for iPhone is revolutionary, sure, and it lets you “snooze” your emails to a point later in the day, week, or month. But what if you don’t like the way it does that?
By default, Mailbox defines the start of your day as 6 am, the start of your weekend as 10 am, and the end of your workday as 6 pm. It defines Later Today as +4 hours, and Someday as +3 months.
If that doesn’t fit your individual schedule or tastes, here’s how to change it.
One of the central conceits of new iOS mail client, Mailbox, is getting to Inbox Zero, a zen state of pure joy, in which you feel much better having dealt with all your email. The way the app does this is with swipes. Swipe partway across an email to the right and you archive it with a pleasant green checkmark. Swipe completely from left to right and you send the offending email to the trash. It’s lovely, and easy, and oh so nice.
But what happens when you make a mistake and long swipe to Trash when you really meant to short swipe to Archive?
If you’re one of the lucky ones to have signed up for Mailbox, Orchestra’s amazing new email client for the iPhone, you know how great it is. It allows you to re-think how you deal with email on a daily basis. Mail messages can be archived, set to remind you at a later time or day, or placed in lists you create yourself all with a swipe of your thumb or finger. Mailbox turns email into much less of a chore while on the go.
Did you know, however, that instead of swiping each email one at a time, there’s a way to take care of all of them at once? Here’s how.
You probably already knew about how to tap and hold on the .com button in your iOS version of Safari to bring up the top level domains that come with the basic web keyboard, right? Tap into the URL bar at the top of Safari, and the web keyboard will show up. Tap and hold on the .com button and you’ll see all the top level domain suffixes for .com, .edu., .org, .net, and the like (if you’re in the US).
But what if you want to be able to quick access domains not in your main country, like Australia (.au), Canada (.ca), or the UK (.co.uk)? With a quick trip into the Settings app, you can add these and others, super easily.
You know how when you use the iOS Calendar app, you can tap on the little arrows to the right or left of the Day or the Month? This will move you one unit per tap, so when you’re in Month view, you’ll move forward one month if you tap on the right arrow, and one month back if you tap on the left arrow. Same thing with the Day view: tap on the left arrow to move back one day, the right arrow to move forward one day. Simple, right?
Turns out that you can move through the calendar even faster in either Day or Month view.
Last year, I told you about Picture Safe, a great app that lets separate, group, organize and password protect any iOS device photos you want. It’s an app that I’ve used since then to keep photos that I want to keep privately archived on my iPhone.
Just a couple weeks back, though, when I launched the app, I got a notification to upgrade to Video Safe 2, an app by the same developer that does the same thing as Photo Safe, but allows you to keep video behind the password as well. Even better, it had a migration tool that let me move all my folders and photos from Photo Safe over to Video Safe, using my Mac and the USB Lightning cable that came with my iPhone 5.
If you’ve ever handed your phone over to someone to let them use it as a (gasp) telephone, you’ve felt that moment of frisson where you wonder, “oh, man, what if they see that certain app? What will they think of me?” I’m not going to judge you; we all have apps we’d rather not have people see.
Luckily for all of us, then, that there’s a couple of neat ways to hide those apps on our devices, using Apple’s built in Restrictions system. Here’s how.
Ever been driving along when inspiration strikes? When the perfect line for that song you’ve been writing appears in your head and you just have to write it down? How about when you’re listening to the radio and you want to remind yourself to look up a book you’re hearing about on NPR?
You could pull over and rummage around your glove box for a pen that works and some paper, or pull out the Moliskine notebook you carry around everywhere (you hipster). Or, you can just have Siri create a Note about it on your iPhone. You can even have Siri add stuff to Notes you’ve already made. That way, you can just make a note of it, using your voice and the power of Apple’s personal assistant, and it will sync to iCloud (if you have it enabled), ready for action when you get home, or back to your Mac.
The iPhone and iPad are magical devices because of one thing: the well-designed hardware and software works in conjunction to make everything just work. The iOS operating system is a thing of beauty, not least of which because there is so much to explore and learn about.
As a touch-based platform, iOS uses gestures like swipes and taps to let you control things with intuitive ease. However, there are bound to be less well-known gestural commands in such a complex set of software. Here are five of the better ones.
iPhoto for iPad is a fantastic photo editing app with a ton of multitouch gesture support. When editing and looking through your photos within the app on your iPad, all it takes is a bit of learning to get these gestures down and make your time with iPhoto just that much more productive and fun.
Safari is a great browser on iOS, as well as the default one. Chrome is also a fantastic browser, and I find myself using it more and more as it integrates well with its Mac version, with bookmarks and such synching nicely due to a unified Google sign in.
Tabbed browsing is great on both the iPad and the iPhone, and Chrome implements it a bit differently per device. The iPad has tabs similar to that of the desktop app, while the iPhone displays tabs only when you hit the little tab button in the top right corner of the screen.
You can also navigate between tabs in either version of Chrome using naught but a swipe gesture.
Here’s a tip that never fails to amaze my friends and relatives when I show it to them. It may seem a little “meh” when you read about it, but try it and you’ll be sharing this quick “get to home” trick on your iPad, your parents’ iPad, and maybe even the iPad of strangers in the coffee shop.
Just being able to keep your tapping fingers near the screen, without having to drop down to the Home button, is a time and brain saver that should make your workflow on the iPad just that much better in your day to day interaction.
It’s probably true that you’ve learned some great iOS gestures with two or three fingers, like pinching in or out to zoom and the like. But did you know that you can use some multitasking features with just the addition of another finger or two?
Use the claw technique to activate the following swipes on your iPad and you’ll be one step closer to gestural iOS nirvana. Or is that nerd-vana. Either way, I suppose.
Notifications on the iPhone can be annoying. Right? They drop at inappropriate times, and I always end up accidentally activating them. Of course, my iPhone is more than happy to hop over to the application that sent the Notification in the first place. There are, however, a couple of cool ways of dismissing them without activating them, short of waiting for them to go away, which is what I’ve done since they appeared in iOS 5. Today’s tip shows you how.
iMessages have taken the iOS world by storm, offering multi-device messaging services that go across the internet, rather than the SMS systems of your cell phone provider. For those who pay per SMS message, this is great news, and for the rest of us it’s still, well, great news.
Here are five ways to get the most out of Messages and iMessage on your iPhone, as well as other iOS and Mac devices.
One of the wacky things you may notice if you’ve just gotten a new iPhone is the default double alert whenever you get a text message, whether iMessage or SMS. Why Apple has this as the default, I’m not sure, but it kept freaking me out before I figured out how to turn it off.
However, I’m willing to see that you might want the double alert, or more (shudder), and there’s a simple way to make that happen, as well.
Here’s how.
Not too long ago, there were a couple of iMessage service outages. When that happened, I (and many other folks, I bet) wasn’t able to send out my iMessages. The little red exclamation point would show up, mockingly, and I waited for the service to go back online to send them again.
Luckily, there is a way to easily turn that iMessage into a regular SMS text message, thereby avoiding any service outages from Apple. Here’s how to do just that.
Has this happened to you? You’re out and about with friends, and a text message (or iMessage) hits your iPhone. Being a serious iPhone user and Tweeter, of course, you’ve left your iPhone out on the tabletop. Unfortunately, the text message that shows up on your screen isn’t very flattering to the friend sitting immediately to your left. She sees it, gets upset, and storms off. Nobody wins.
With a quick trip to Settings, however, you can prevent this tale of tears and keep your iMessages for your eyes only. Here’s how.
Here’s another one of those tips that should be blindingly obvious, but isn’t. At least, it wasn’t to me, at first.
If you try to send a photo via iMessage (or text message), you’re limited to one photo at a time. Go ahead and give it a shot. I’ll wait. No, really–give it a shot.
See? From the Messages app on your iPhone, you only have the option to take a photo or choose an existing one. What if you want to send more than one photo at a time, though?
Let’s be honest, the fact that you can conduct iMessage conversations across your iPhone, iPad, and Mac is pretty freakin’ cool.
Let’s also be clear, sometimes this very same feature is a pain in the butt. Getting iMessages on all three of my Apple devices in the same room can be a bit daunting, especially when I’m trying to concentrate on, say, writing an iOS Tip for the next day.
What’s a busy, popular, connected person to do? Manage those devices and their iMessage settings a bit better, that’s what. Here’s how.
The one part of your iPhone or iPad you use the most is the on screen keyboard, a fantastically complex little app in its own right that must meet your needs all the time, across a ton of different situations. Whether you’re typing an iMessage, a Note or Reminder, or an email to your family, you’re using the iOS Keyboard. Why not take the time to get to know it even better?
Here’s a list of five great tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your time with this ubiquitous bit of software at the center of your iOS experience.
Auto-correct is one of the most loved and hated features of the modern iPhone era, with tons of websites featuring the hilarious, and usually racy, mistakes that auto-correct seems to gleefully include in any hastily typed conversation with your mom.
There are other features that you can toggle off and on as well, but seriously, this is important. Right, mom?
This is actually my favorite tip ever, and it’s usually the one I share with any new iOS owners I come across.
When you’re tapping away on the keyboard on your iPhone, there are bound to be times when you miss the right key. It happens, right? So, the options are to tap the delete button, and deal with all the auto-correct stuff, or just do this one little thing and make it all better.
So, there you are, typing a long note on your iPhone or iPad, when you suddenly realize that you need–gasp–a special symbol or accented character. Perhaps you want to use the £ (British pound) symbol, or the é symbol when sending an email to a business associate or family member.
No, you don’t have to use the Emoji keyboard (unless you want a copyright (©) symbol), but there is a bit of a trick to it. Here’s how.
