Pro Tips

A hidden gesture on the iPhone and iPad lets you quickly select a bunch of items in a list — kind of like Command-A (⌘A) for Select All on a Mac. I use it all the time to select a bunch of emails to archive, a bunch of reminders to rearrange, a batch of files to sort, etc. 

Once you learn this two-finger swipe gesture, you’ll use it everywhere. It’s great for getting work done on the go with your phone. Watch our quick video or keep reading.

Accidentally texting the wrong person can bring disastrous consequences, and yet it’s incredibly simple to mix up threads. Luckily, iOS 26 offers a great way to keep things straight: You can add specific backgrounds to various Messages conversations on your iPhone so you can easily tell them apart.

For instance, if you set a shimmery blue background for your group chat with co-workers, you’ll never confuse that conversation for a sensitive one-on-one text with your closest colleague. You’ll never accidentally send a message to your boss meant for your partner if the chats look obviously different.

Setting up an iPhone Messages background is super-easy — here’s how it works.

You can set up persistent notifications from specific apps so they stick to the top of your iPhone screen. With persistent notifications in iOS, when your phone is unlocked and an important alert comes in, the notification will stay visible at the top of the screen until you act upon it.

It’s an easy way to make sure you don’t miss (or forget about) critical notifications on your iPhone.

This proves super-handy for things like medication reminders. It also works wonders if you’re the sort of person who ignores notifications once they disappear from your iPhone screen. I’ll show you how to make your notifications sticky.

Mac Hot Corners are shortcuts for your mouse. Enable the Hot Corners feature, and you can throw your mouse cursor to the corner of the screen (the easiest place to hit) to perform quick actions. You can instantly lock the screen, start a screensaver, show the desktop, show all windows and more.

If you use your Mac with a standard two-button PC mouse instead of Apple’s Magic Trackpad or Magic Mouse, Hot Corners can replace the multitouch gestures that you miss out on. The Mac’s built-in Hot Corners feature provides a quick and easy way to navigate your computer, and I recommend that you turn them on and use them.

Set your Apple Watch time a few minutes ahead of the actual time and you might trick yourself out of running late every day. This is an officially supported feature, not a hack that will produce cascading, annoying side effects. And it doesn’t require you to set your smartwatch out of sync with internet time.

What will you gain? By running your Apple Watch a few minutes fast, you might nudge yourself to rush out the door a little earlier. And that might be enough to get you somewhere on time rather than late. If tardiness is a frequent problem for you, this little change could save your skin.

A hidden setting will speed up Haptic Touch, the fantastic feature that lets you preview links and bring up menus on your iPhone. If you use Haptic Touch all the time, like I do, changing this setting will make your iPhone feel turbocharged. With the settings tweak, your iPhone will bring up handy shortcuts — hidden actions, content previews and contextual menus — in a flash. And that saves you precious time as you tap around your screen. Alternatively, if you find Haptic Touch annoying and trigger it accidentally all the time, you can slow down the time needed to activate the gesture. That way, a tap won’t be mistaken for a tap-and-hold.

Although the Mac offers fantastic support for opening and editing PDFs in the built-in Preview app, the simple act of copying and pasting text from a PDF can still be a nightmare. For instance, selecting text on a two- or three-column document often selects across the whole width of the page, which is totally useless.

Luckily, there’s a better way to copy text from a PDF on a Mac using Apple’s Live Text feature.

Taking a quick screenshot and using Live Text often yields better results when you need to copy text from a PDF or an image. (It also works with photos and old document scans.) Here’s how to do it.

Say you’re in the kitchen and you hear an alarm going off on the iPad in your living room. Rather than walking across the house to deactivate it, you can use Siri on your iPhone or HomePod to shut off the alarm. This method also works with timers (and a variety of devices, too).

Here’s how to do a handy trick that everyone should know.

The best way to send someone a great article you just read online is to share a link with highlighted text. It will quote whatever you found interesting in the post and encourage them to click the link.

While you could copy the quote and paste it in alongside the link, there’s a hidden way to do it in Safari. It’ll properly format the rich link with the quoted text highlighted above.

If you want to quote a specific line from an article or a how-to (like this one), sending it with a pull quote is easier and looks nicer than copying the text you want and putting it in quotation marks as a separate text.

And it takes just a second! Here’s how to share a link with highlighted text.

You can use the Apple logo as an emoji … if you know how. Expressing your love for all things Apple looks a lot better if know how to type the .

It’s easy to do on a Mac, and I can show you how to add  to texts on iPhone and iPad, too.

Traveling is a lot easier if you can keep track of your stuff with AirTags in your luggage. It’s been in the news lately: Airlines have lost flyers’ bags and people have recovered them because they had the foresight to put an AirTag in the luggage. You can make sure it’s with you all the way along your journey and quickly find it among the baggage claim at your final destination.

Read on for my tips on traveling with AirTags.

Say you want to send someone a YouTube link with a timestamp, to show them a specific part halfway through. Doing this is really easy from both the YouTube website or the app.

Let me show you how to share a YouTube video that starts at a specific time.

So, you’ve been using Safari’s Private Browsing mode on your iPhone or iPad, for whatever reason, but you forget to close out of the tab. The next time you open Safari, you’ll be thrown into whatever unscrupulous web page you had open last time — and the result can range from unfortunate to embarrassing, depending upon what you were looking at and where you are when you unexpectedly resume the Private Browsing session.

Luckily, iOS offers a foolproof way to avoid reopening a Private Browsing mode session. Let me show you how.

If your Apple Watch feels like it’s not responding to your taps, it could be in Water Lock mode. It’s easy to forget to turn off Water Lock Mode after you go for a swim or a shower.

There’s also a bit of confusion about how Apple Watch’s Water Lock feature works. Read on to see how to (and how not to) use it.

You’re at a party and your friend takes a great picture. You ask them to AirDrop you a copy and the two iPhones won’t connect. So frustrating … what the %^#* is wrong? Why can’t you share iPhone photos the way you used to? You probably just need to tweak a setting to turn on AirDrop’s capability to work with any iPhone.

You see, Apple changed the way AirDrop works in iOS 16. If you haven’t updated your AirDrop settings, it might not work the way you want. Here’s how to set the easy wireless file-transfer system so you can get that picture from your friend.

The Reply button in the iPhone version of Apple Mail does a whole lot more than let you reply to messages. For some reason, Apple packed it with unrelated options.

Here’s everything lying hidden behind that simple button.

You can fit two shortcuts into one small widget in iOS 17, a significant change for power users of Apple’s time-saving Shortcuts app. A lot of shortcuts I make are in pairs — and now, you can put two shortcuts of a kind in one small space on your Home Screen.

Shortcuts, if you’re not aware, let you automate the things you do most often on your iPhone, Mac, iPad or Apple Watch. For instance, you can create a shortcut that sets a Focus mode when you get to work, one that suggests easy-to-remember passwords, one for converting units — the possibilities are endless. (Read Apple’s helpful Shortcuts guide if you want to familiarize yourself with the powerful app.)

Home Screen widgets are a great way to launch the shortcuts you use every day. On the iPhone, where space is limited, fitting twice as many shortcuts without losing any icons could be a game changer for your Home Screen. Let me show you how to set it up.

The Apple Watch borrows a lot from the iPhone, but the biggest difference between them is down to the extra buttons. They each do different things whether you click, double-click or hold them down. What do the Apple Watch buttons do?

This guide was written before watchOS 10 changed and moved a lot of these features. See our updated guide if you’re confused why your Watch suddenly works differently.

If your iPhone or iPad locks up, iOS 16/iPadOS 16 will let get out of the jam by rebooting the device with a simple Siri command. It’s the easiest method I’ve found to get the handset or tablet going again when there’s a problem with the touchscreen, or the device is just misbehaving.

Here’s all you have to do.

Your iPhone battery has run out, you absolutely must make a call or text, and there’s no wall socket anywhere. If you have an iPad, the solution is easy: Connect the iPhone to the tablet.

Using your iPad to give your handset an emergency charge is a trick you might not have thought of. But maybe it’ll get you out of a jam sometime.

Don’t you just hate having to give visitors your long and complicated Wi-Fi password? Instead, make connecting to your network quick and easy by turning your password into a QR code that can be scanned in an instant. But if you prefer a built-in iOS method, you should also know how to share WiFi on iPhone, which allows quick and secure sharing without the need for QR codes. Learn more here.

We’ll show you how.

iPad has gotten better and better at working with external keyboards in recent years. You’ll now find great support for keyboard shortcuts in most of the apps you use regularly. But how do you quickly find out which keyboard shortcuts are available to you?

There’s an easy way in iPadOS — and it works inside any app.

We want to help you master Control Center, one of the most powerful and underutilized features on Apple devices. Cult of Mac’s Control Center Pro Tips series will show you how to make the most of this useful toolbox on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac.

Make your favorite Control Center tools and shortcuts easier to find by reorganizing and cleaning up your Control Center window. It’s easy on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch — and we’ll show you how.

We want to help you master Control Center, one of the most powerful and underutilized features on Apple devices. Cult of Mac’s Control Center Pro Tips series will show you how to make the most of this useful toolbox on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac.

Can’t remember where you left your iPhone? Use Control Center on your Apple Watch to “ping” it so that you can quickly track it down. You can even have your iPhone light up so that it’s easier to find in the dark.

We’ll show you how.

We want to help you master Control Center, one of the most powerful and underutilized features on Apple devices. Cult of Mac’s Control Center Pro Tips series will show you how to make the most of this useful toolbox on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac.

Switching between different AirPods audio modes is simple with Control Center on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. You can activate or deactivate Transparency and active noise cancellation in just a couple of taps.

We’ll show you how.