When you back up your iPhone before upgrading to iOS 9, you have a couple of choices. You can use iCloud or iTunes.
For your best, most comprehensive backup, connect your iPhone (or iPad) to iTunes. Seriously, iTunes backs up almost everything — and it’s your best bet for downloading iOS 9 when the upgrade becomes available today.
Here’s how to do it.
Whether you’re getting a new iPhone 6s or not, you’re going to want to upgrade to iOS 9 to take advantage of everything Apple’s new mobile operating system has to offer.
iOS 9 is ready to revolutionize your mobile life, but there are a few things you should do before making the leap. Here’s how to get your iPhone (or iPad) ready for its iOS 9 upgrade — the right way.
Sometime in the last few weeks, I’ve had a big problem with Apple Music.
Whenever I’d start an album or playlist, I’d only hear the first song I chose, over and over and over.
I’d hit the Up Next list button and see the same song, endlessly repeated.
The fix is an easy one, but man did it frustrate me for weeks. Here’s how you can make sure you’re not stuck on repeat.
Imagine working on a sketch with a reference photo right next to it, or writing a paper while copying citations from an iBook. Or, heck, running YouTube in Safari while writing a post about Split View on the iPad (hypothetically).
iOS 9 brings this multitasking joy to your iPad, provided you have the latest and greatest iPad Air 2, since it’s the only device that can currently manage the power needed to run such a double screen.
So the next time you need to FaceTime with your boss in San Francisco but still take Notes on your iPad, you can easily make it happen.
Here’s how.
We’ve all been using a passcode to secure our iPhones and iPads since forever, right? You’ve had the option to use an alphanumeric passcode since iOS 7, but if you chose to use a simple numeric code, you were limited to four digits.
Not anymore! Apple added the ability to use a six-digit passcode in iOS 9, and this quick settings tweak will make your iPhone or iPad far more secure.
Finally! Apple has added a small yet incredibly useful feature to the way iOS 9 handles Bluetooth devices.
In the past, you’d have to drop into the Bluetooth settings, tap on an offending Bluetooth device, and tell your iPhone or iPad to Forget the device, just to re-pair it or use the built in speakers. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent doing that, especially when I get a call while connected to a speakerphone-capable audio device; I have a lot of Bluetooth speakers.
Now however, Apple’s added a little extra so you can disconnect from a Bluetooth device instead of Forget it entirely, making it much easier to, say, stop using a specific speaker and return to your iPhone’s built-in speaker.
Here’s how.
iOS has so many settings in one app, it’s kind of ridiculous.
Whether you want to change preferences for an app or the operating system itself, a trip to the crowded Settings app can often be a frustrating experience.
iOS 9 — still in beta — has a solution for that information overload though: Search.
Here’s how to access it.
iOS 8 introduced the idea of showing your most-contacted contacts in the multitasking screen. You’d simply double click on the Home button to see the list of the most recent apps as well as a row of the folks you contacted the most across the top.
If you’re looking for that feature in iOS 9, you might have noticed that the contacts are no longer in the multitasking screen. Never fear, though, they’ve just moved.
In previous versions of iOS, finding your photos was a bit tricky, especially as you started to amass them in the thousands, what with having a high-quality camera in your pocket at all times.
In iOS 9, currently in public beta, the Photos app has gotten a new way to find the photo you’re looking for amidst the haystack of your Photo Roll. Here’s how to use this new feature.
iOS 8.4.1 might have fine-tuned Apple Music, but some users are complaining about about battery issues after updating to Apple’s latest mobile operating system.
If you’re afflicted, the good news is that iOS 9 is right around the corner. The bad news? That doesn’t help you now, and iOS 9 will likely have its own host of bugs that Apple needs to address. Here are some tips to help you eke out as much battery life in iOS 8.4.1 as possible.
Closed captioning is useful to those with a hearing impairment to make the audio of videos accessible. Subtitles help those who speak a different language understand what’s going on in a film not in their original language.
You can enable these features on your Apple TV, but it’s not super-intuitive — there’s no single button to make it happen.
However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t easy. Here’s how to turn on Apple TV subtitles, even if you just want to watch a scary movie at night and have the sound turned down.
WhatsApp is a pretty popular messaging app that went from 200 million daily active users in April of 2013 to 800 million of them as of April 2015.
Unlike competitor SnapChat, however, WhatsApp will save every photo and video file sent to you to your Camera Roll. This could make for some embarrassing moments when you’re swiping through your photos to show mom your latest cat pictures.
It could also start to clog up your iPhone, really, with all that racy video your friends keep sending you.
To avoid these situations, you can disable the “feature.” Here’s how.
If you travel a lot, iOS 9 and El Capitan have a hidden feature just for you.
Apple’s latest operating systems (both of which are currently in beta) offer a way to keep tabs on airline flights. Here’s how to access this hidden new feature.
I wanted to find photos from my vacation a couple of weeks ago, so I figured I’d try out Siri’s new iOS 9 functionality.
“Siri,” I said, “show me photos from Hawaii.”
Dutifully, Apple’s updated digital assistant pulled up photos from my trip to Oahu a couple of years ago. They’re lovely, but I wanted more recent pictures.
“Siri, show me photos from Hawaii last week,” I said, reasonably.
As soon as I finished speaking, there they were. Siri had launched my Photos app on my iPhone and brought up the photos I’d taken while in Kona. Great stuff.
Here are some other ways you can get Siri to find the photos you want in the huge pile you have sitting on your iPhone.
Apple’s new Wallet app replaces Passbook in iOS 9, currently in public beta. Just like Passbook, when you wave your iPhone at an Apple Pay kiosk, it will only let you choose your default credit card and pay for the goods or services you bought.
In iOS 9 beta, you’ll also be able to choose any of your other provisioned credit cards from your Apple Pay account without even unlocking your iPhone or accessing the Wallet app.
Here’s how.
iOS 9 brings a bunch of battery-boosting features, most of which work right out of the box. But there’s one battery-saving feature you’ll have to enable yourself.
Called Low Power Mode, this new feature should prove super-useful when you need to eke out just a bit more time with your device — provided you’re not doing anything intense.
iCloud Drive is a Dropbox and Google Drive-type service from Apple that lets you store documents in the cloud, making it super easy to synchronize them between your iOS and OS X devices.
You can access it on your Mac with an icon that shows all the documents you’ve stored in iCloud in a folder-like structure.
Prior to iOS 9, in order to access these documents on your iPhone or iPad, you’d need to open an app that supported iCloud Drive on your device.
Not anymore. iOS 9 comes with its own iCloud Drive app, and here’s how to enable it.
If you’ve been itching to get your hands on Apple’s latest public beta for iOS 9, you’re in luck. With new proactive features for Siri, public transit directions in Maps, and a supercharged notes app, not to mention new multitasking and keyboard features for newer iPads, iOS 9 is looking pretty great.
Plus, now that we’re getting closer to the actual Fall release, the iOS 9 beta (release 5) is probably more stable than it was when it first released to the public in July. Of course, all beta software can mess up your iPhone, so don’t apply it unless you’re willing to put up with possible glitches and maybe even a bricked iPhone.
If you’re good with that, though, here’s how to get the iOS 9 beta onto your iPhone (or iPad) right now.
If you’ve been using iCloud to back up your iOS devices for a while like I have, chances are you’ve got a few older backup files crufting up your iCloud storage space.
If you want to maximize the space on your iCloud account, you might want to delete some of these older iCloud backups to make room for more.
Here’s how to do that.
When you sign in to Apple Music, you have access to Apple’s new music-centric sharing and socializing system, Connect.
While Ping may have come to an an ignominious end, Connect has the advantage of being integrated into the new, exciting Apple Music to the very core, and will let everyone signed into an Apple ID account (not just Apple Music members) use the system to follow their favorite artist.
When you comment on a Connect post, though, you’ll be known by a user name, which uses the @ symbol just like Twitter.
If you want to have something unique, though, you’ll need to act quickly and enter it now, before the service gets clogged up with all the other people that might want your specific user name. Here’s how to do just that.
Siri is a handy virtual assistant. It’ll fetch information for you, send texts, and even tell you a joke if you ask it repeatedly (Siri is a little shy at first). But did you know that it can also narrate e-books?
If you can’t get enough of that lovely robot voice, here’s how to make your favorite literature come to synthetic life.
The worst part about vacationing is coming back home and getting hit in the face with cold, hard reality. Excessive food consumption, relaxing atmospheres and sugary alcoholic beverages are out of your life and work is back in. But what if you take the travel part (not to mention the cost) completely out of equation? You get Flyover in Apple Maps.
Why vacation in this costly, unforgiving world when you can live vicariously through your iPhone, iPad or Mac?
Flyover, the immersive 3-D view in Apple Maps, now supports hundreds of cities around the world and Apple adds more all the time. In fact, seven more were added to the list just today so we thought it would be fun to take a look at the hottest vacationing spots of 2015, without even leaving the couch.
Get your summer vacay on at these hot Flyover spots:
Your iPhone is set up as a still camera first and foremost, so it tends to automatically focus and expose your images. This is fantastic when you need a quick snapshot, but when you’re taking video, the constant re-focusing and exposure adjustment just makes everything look blurry and amateur.
You can tap the screen in either video or photo modes to get a quick adjustment, but the minute you or or subject moves, all bets are off. Your best chance, then, at keeping your iPhone videos blur-free is to lock the focus and exposure.
Here’s how.
I took the plunge and downloaded a password manager today, and when I was researching how to use it on my iPhone, one help page said I needed to put some bookmarklets onto my Mac and then move them over to the iPhone.
Problem was, I wasn’t sure how to make that happen; I figured it was just automatic.
It might be magically enabled for you, but if you’re like me and don’t know how to get your Safari bookmarks from one device to the other, here’s how to get it to work.
Chances are you’ve heard about the iOS bug that lets users send a string of text to another iPhone owner that causes their Messages app to crash and their iPhone to reboot.
Although Apple has yet to fix the Messages bug with a software update, it has published an official support document containing a temporary workaround for solving the problem.
