iOS tips - page 21

Use Instagram much? If you do, you’ll know that the best part about it is the community of users that’s over there. It’s as vibrant and rocking a community as Twitter or Facebook, all wrapped around photos you take, filter, and share. It’s what Flickr wishes it had become. Poor Flickr.

Anyway, you can have followers on Instagram, just like Twitter. And, also just like Twitter, people can unfollow you when you post something obnoxious, post too much, or just post something they don’t agree with. It’s all very democratic.

If you’ve ever wondered who was following you or who was un-following you, Followers+ might be the app for you.

So, Facetime over cellular data networks has been available to some AT&T unlimited data customers since late November.

What about you? Is your iPhone able to use this much-anticipated feature? How do you know? Well, read on, and we’ll show you.

If you’ve spent some time with last week’s app tip, Glympse, you’ll know it’s pretty handy to send your location info along to friends, family, or co-workers. One feature that is missing from Glympse, however, is an automatic message about when you’ll be there.

Twist, another iOS app that helps you keep folks you’re meeting up with aware of where you are, has just that — an automatic ETA message.

If you’re one of the many folks that own and still use an older iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you might notice a slowdown when using the more recent web apps out there. Many of these rely on Javascript, which can slow down older devices when browsing those sites.

Luckily, it’s fairly easy to disable Javascript on mobile Safari. Here’s how.

Sure, you could use the calculator, or any one of a dozen-odd apps that allow you to tap the screen and calculate the tip in a restaurant, but why even bother? iOS and Siri can meet your needs just by talking to your iPhone–or iPad, but won’t that get meatloaf gravy all over it?

Regardless, here’s how to ask Siri the right way to calculate the tip for the super-helpful server or bartender in your life.

Ever wanted to remove all those recently contacted emails from the drop down list in your Mail app on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad? The lists gets kind of long, and maybe you just want to narrow it down to the folks in your list of contacts, rather than all the folks you’ve contacted recently.

You can do this fairly easily on your iOS device, provided you don’t mind removing one address at a time. The address also has to not be in your Contacts on the device, either.

There are quite a few apps out there that share your location data and allow you to check in at a place, like Foursquare, Facebook, etc. They’re pretty fantastic, and they let your friends see where you are at, and then come meet you.

But what if you want to share where you are going to be in a little while? What about letting your friends know that you’re on your way, and letting them track where you are, how far away you are, and when you’ll arrive at a certain location? Glympse has got your back for that very thing, and some other great stuff.

Wow, I could have used this tip last week when I was getting constant iMessage errors, having to tap the “please try again” icon again and again to send some messages along to my friends. There have been a few iMessage service outages lately, and when that happens, there’s the potential for some upset.

Luckily, there is a way to easily turn that frown upside down as well as turning that iMessage into a regular SMS text message. Here’s how to do just that.

Podcasts can be great fun, but they tend to have long segments of audio that you may or may not want to listen to. Which is fine, if you could sip through it easily. And, let’s face it, you might not be fully paying attention to them when they’re on, so you might miss things. Things you want to back up to hear, for example.

Well, guess what? You can do both with iOS 6, in the Podcast app.

Twitter has rapidly become a great way to stay informed, keep in touch with friends, and generally faff about on the internet. Sometimes, however, that very same sense of humor that has brought you hundreds of Twitter followers can be the cause of folks un-following you. Whether they don’t get the joke or you actually said somethign offensive isn’t hte point here. Tracking who leaves your Twitter-sphere is.

Enter Sayonara, a new app by Nacho Soto that will alert you every time your Twitter stream loses a follower.

The iPhone is a paragon of simple design. It packs a ton of complexity in a simple, easy to understand package. One example is the iconic Home button. One click of the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad touch will wake your device, a click and hold will bring up Siri, and a triple click can enable a host of accessibility features.

Did you know, however, that you can set the speed at which the Home button will recognize your clicks? Added in iOS 6, this feature will be a boon to anyone with motor issue or even just those of us who want to slow down the speed at which we double or triple click that Home button.

One of the cool unsung new features of iOS 6 is the way it doesn’t ask you for a password every single time you go to make an app purchase. Remember those days? Ugh.

The downside of this convenience is that anyone who uses your iOS device within about 15 minutes of you having entered the password–like to buy that free game app for your kid, you know, the one with the in-app purchases–they will be able to purchase other apps or (gasp!) complete in-app purchases without entering the password. No, Apple, I really don’t want $100 worth of Smurf Berries.

Short of turning off in-app purchases–which, really, you should if you have children using your iOS device often–there’s another way to protect yourself from this kind of snafu.

I have a book I’m reading that I received from a book publisher. It’s an ePub file, which works well with iBooks. Since I love the interface in iBooks, I loaded the file on my iPad 3 and my iPad mini, so I would have it at home on the larger iPad and on the go on the smaller one. Sounds great, right?

I’d hoped to be able to sync my bookmarks, though, so I could bookmark the novel on one device and then pull up the bookmark on the next device I was reading it on. I couldn’t. I spent some time messing about on the internet, trying to figure out how to fix this issue. Apple has the answer, and it’s a lot simpler than I thought.

We all have too many apps, I’m guessing. As an app aficionado, I have hundreds of apps across several pages, many of them buried within folders. iOS is organized for visual memory; I’m usually flipping through pages and looking for the app I need based on where it is on the page, how the icon looks, and what other apps it’s near.

Once past the first page or two, however, and especially in folders filled with a bunch of apps, that visual strategy starts to break down. Typically, I’ll swipe right from the Home screen and type in the name of the app, then tap on it to launch it. This works fine, but eventually takes more time than just knowing what folder the app resides in. Here’s how to find out.

So, you think the panorama feature on your new iPhone is pretty sweet, right? It allows you to take panoramic photos without any special post-shot software, and you can shoot left to right or right to left.

But what if you want to take a picture of a super tall Sequoia tree, for example? Or a skyscraper, for that matter? Turns out you can shoot really tall things, too, using this vertical panorama picture tip.

It sure would be nice to change the order of the many calendars on the iPhone. Sadly, iOS 6 only lets you show or hide specific calendars with a tap on the calendar in question from within the Calendar app on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

You can, however, reorder the different calendars on your iPhone, just in a different way. Here’s how.

Did you know you could use Siri, Apple’s personal voice assistant, without unlocking your iPhone? Well, you can. Hold the Home button for the few seconds it takes for Siri’s purple microphone icon to show up, and you can ask it to do anything you like, like making a phone call, composing a Tweet, or sending an iMessage. This is a great feature for the person who owns the iPhone, but what about someone who finds your iPhone, or that one friend who can’t keep from messing with your stuff?

Luckily, you can turn this “feature” off, thereby preventing this from happening. Here’s how.

Now, I love me some Siri, but even I have to admit that the personal voice assistant isn’t always super fast or super accurate. Last night, when I asked it when the new iMac would ship, it said, “I don’t know that that means. If you like, I can search the web for ‘When does the new iMac ship’.” Today, it directs me to “Apple’s rather fabulous website.”

When I asked Google search the same question? I got a ton of responses, including a link to an Amazon.com question And Answer: When will the new imacs ship…”

Google search also seems a LOT faster in recognizing and interpreting what I mean when I speak to it, and it works on non-Siri capable iOS devices. Apple’s got some competition here.

Geeze, I use an iPad every day and still I’m learning new things to show you in these tips. Today, I found out about Multitasking Gestures–a feature that’s been around since iOS 5, but really hasn’t been well-publicized, in my opinion. Multitasking Gestures allow you to manage your new iPad mini (or other flavor of choice, from the iPad 2 to the iPad 4) without resorting to the Home button to manage multitasking.

Here’s how to enable, and to use, Multitasking Gestures on your iPad.

I don’t take a lot of video with my iPhone, so I didn’t know about this tip until today. When looking to upload video to YouTube, I figured you’d have to transfer the video to your Mac, open up a web browser like Safari or Chrome, and use the YouTube website to upload it.

Not so, apparently, as there’s an easy Share to YouTube button in the Photos app that lets you send it directly from your iOS device. Here’s how to use it.

Wondering whether that iPhone you plan on buying off of craigslist is truly unlocked like it says in the ad? Want to make sure that your iPhone is able to switch carriers after a legitimate unlock from your current carrier? Grab your iPhone and open a new web browser window; we’re going to show you how to find out.

Now, this is fun. You may have heard that Apple ditched Google maps and navigation data to create their very own new Maps app using Tom Tom data. While some of the pros and cons of such a move are beyond this little iOS tip today, a little hidden feature of the new Maps App is not.

So, if you have an iOS device that will support it, try this fun little trick out, and let us know what you think in the comments below.

There are so many great iOS games out there, for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, that it’s hard to choose which to play.

For Halloween, however, the playing field is narrowed a bit. Lots of games are going on sale, and quite a few have Halloween-flavored updates for this most scary of nights.

Organ Trail: The Director’s Cut, though, has both.

Using the real web on an iPhone is a wonderful thing. Apple has made their iOS browser, Safari, into a solid powerhouse of web-browsing goodness, ready to use out of the box, accessible in many ways to many kinds of people. It’s a great app.

And yet, the size of the iPhone screen, iPhone 5 included, can be a bit cramped. Add in the top address bar and the bottom button bar, and you have even less screen real estate to use for actual browsing. That’s why Apple included a new feature in iOS: full screen browsing.

No time to type out a status update on Facebook or send a genius Tweet? Sometimes, inspiration for an amazing update to one of the ubiquitous social networks supported in the latest iOS 6 on Apple’s portable devices happens on the fly. Even while driving! What’s a safe-driving-no-texting individual to do?

Why, have Siri post to Twitter or Facebook, of course!