Every once in a while I meet someone who has absolutely no idea the iPhone can do some very simple things such as moving icons around or even deleting applications. To most of you this will sound like basic iPhone features, however there are some really tech-challenged people out there. This article is for them!
If you’re brand new to the iPhone, then read on because you’re going to learn some simple and effective tricks… Read More
Every once in a while I get asked about how to do something dead simple on the iPhone, such as moving icons around. To most of us, this is very basic stuff, but not everyone knows everything about the iPhone, which is why I decided to write a post with 10 tips and tricks.
Shake to Undo
When you are writing an email or a note, you can shake your iPhone to undo what you just wrote. If you just deleted some text from the note or the email, you can also shake to undo and it will bring back the text you accidentally deleted. Note that this feature works for every application that allows you to input text (ie SMS, Tweetie, etc…)
Quickly Silence or Send Incoming Call to Voicemail
If you are receiving a phone call you don’t want to answer, you can press the power button or any volume buttons once to mute the ringing. Now if you want to send the person calling you directly to voicemail, simply press the power button twice.
Zooming on Images in Safari
To quickly zoom on an image in the Safari web browser, simply double tap on the image.
Zooming on Text in Safari
Just like you can zoom on images, you can zoom on text in Safari by double tapping it. If you are on a website with multiple columns (such as the New York Times website), it will zoom in the column, making it easy for you to read what’s in it.
Save or Copy an Image
You can easily save images from virtually any application (ie Safari, Mail, Twitter app, etc…) by holding your finger on the image and selecting “Save Image” or “Copy”. If you select to save the image, it will be saved in your camera roll.
Quickly Go Back to the Top of A Page
In any application, if you are scrolling down (ie scrolling down a web page in Safari) and you quickly want to go back to the top of the page, you don’t have to scoll up. Simply tap the status bar (this is where the time is displayed) and it will take you all the way up the page.
Preview Links
When browsing a web page for example, you may see a link to another page. If you are curious to see where this links may take you without having to open it, simply put and hold your finger on it. It will show you the destination of the link, also giving you the opportunity to open it, open it in a new page or even copy the link.
Save Time Typing Domain Names
When you are in Safari and you want to go to another web page, you don’t have to type the full URL. For example, if you want to go to http://www.idownloadblog.com from Safari, just type iphonedownloadblog and the “www.” and “.com” will be added automatically.
Take a Screenshot
You can take a screenshot of any screen on your iPhone by simply holding the Power and Home button together. You will see your screen flashing and making the camera noise. The photo will be saved in your camera roll.
Add Your Favorite Websites to Your Springboard
If you have favorite sites that you visit all the time, it might be a good idea to add them to your springboard (the main screen where all the apps are). To do this, simply go to the webpage you want to add to your springboard, tap “+” at the bottom, and choose “Add to Home Screen”. This will create an icon on your home screen and you’ll be able to access this page quickly, without having to open Safari first.
Do you have more tips? Please share them in the comments.
There are 2 ways to share your iPhone pictures via email or MMS but one is better than the other because it does not compress the images and keep them in their original size and resolution.
Method 1: The first way is to simply go to the photo application and type “share”. This will ask you if you want to share via email or MMS. Whatever you decide, it will compress the picture to 800×600, reducing the quality of the image.
Method 2: The better way to do it if you want to preserve the quality of your images is to “copy” (not “share”) the image, then manually launch the mail or MMS app, and paste the image into it. This way, your images will not be automatically resized and should be 1600×1200.
By using the second method, your MMS or email will take longer to be sent out, but at least it will be a full quality image.
If you have other simple tips like this, feel free to let me know.
You may have heard of the new AT&T add-on called A-List that gives you unlimited calls to and from 5 numbers of your choice. Thanks to a little bit of thinking outside the box, and mostly thanks to Google Voice, you can actually get unlimited calling to any numbers in the US.
For those of you who don’t know how Google Voice works, let me explain briefly. Google Voice gives you a free phone number that entitles you to free calls in the US (and very cheap calls overseas). If you try to make a call from the Google Voice app on your iPhone (or the web-based version), Google Voice will call you at your number and connect you to the number you dialed. I’m not sure if that makes sense but basically, when you use Google Voice for calls, you don’t get free calls, minutes are taken off your plan, which kinda defeats the whole purpose.
Here is how the loophole works. Simply add your Google Voice number to your A-List. Now every time Google Voice calls you to connect the call with the dialed number, it will be free of charge and you’ll be able to call anyone in the US for free (really free).
I’m not sure this is very clear but Google Voice users will surely understand and see the benefits of this little trick. Let’s just hope AT&T doesn’t figure this one out and puts an end to it.
Do you use Google Voice? If so, you should definitely look into it…
Thanks kper for sending us this tip.
My fiance Tina is a mental therapist and she regularly has appointments with clients. She usually uses her old Samsung phone as a calendar but needless to say it is not very practical. I recently “forced” her to get an iPod Touch and one of my sales argument was that she could use it as a calendar and that she would be able to sync it with Google calendar over the air. Note that these were just arguments I pulled out of my butt so she agrees to get an iTouch (yes, the iTouch is more for me than for her)…
We finally bought a 32GB iPod Touch and I started looking into ways to sync an iPhone calendar with Google calendar. I found many options but all involved some third party apps and that’s clearly not what I was looking for. I was very surprised that Apple hadn’t included this feature in the iPhone/iPod Touch until I actually found an article on JAIB saying that the new OS 3.0 supports CalDAV with SSL so your are technically able to sync Google calendar with your iPhone or iPod Touch, as long as you have internet access.
Here is how to set up your iPhone or iPod Touch to sync calendars with Google over the air:
1. On your iPhone, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account > Other > Add CalDAV Account
2. For the CalDAV settings, enter the following information. Note that your username should be the email address you use to access your Google calendar as well as the password.
3. Then tap “Next” and it should verify your information.
4. If you can’t get your account verified, tap “Advanced settings” and make sure that “Use SSL” is On, that the port is 443, and that your Account URL includes the sign “@” in your email address.
That’s it!
Now every time you add an event to your iPhone calendar, it will also show up on your Google calendar, and vice versa. You obviously need to have internet access from your iPod or iPhone for the data to sync. Note that the sync is not immediate. It sometimes takes a few seconds but besides this, it works very well.
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I know that most people have figured this one out, but to be complete, and for Newbies, I thought it would be good to add this. When you press on a key and you hit the wrong letter, simply slide your finger to the right letter (without lifting it) and lift up to correct your mistake.
Instead of switching between letter and punctuation modes, slide your finger to the @123 button, but don’t release it until after sliding and releasing over the period key. The keyboard will switch back to letter input automatically. This makes a big difference. Be sure to measure the improvement of the slide method on your typing speed. This is also known as the McCallum method via Pogue. An otherwise, well documented shortcut, but addresses a very common complaint about the iPhone keyboard.
You can intentionally spell it’s incorrectly as “itsp” or “itsa” and “it’s” will be suggested. The A and P keys are ideally positioned for this kind of a shortcut. To get popular contractions filled in automatically just add a third repetitive letter to get Safari to suggest the contraction word. Examples include “helll” -> “he’ll” , “welll” -> “we’ll”, “weree” -> “we’re” etc.
Press the space bar from the .123 keyboard to return to the alpha keyboard. This can be good when you just need a number or a period. If you have the iPhone 1.1.1 update you can simply double-tap the space key to get a period.
On the keyboard press and hold the .com key to see other tld extensions based on your selected languages. For example in the U.S. you will see .net, .edu .org, with German you will see .edu .org .de, and with Spanish you will see .edu .org and .es in a pop up list.
Just like a real browser, it appears that the iPhone will allow you to type in most .com URLs without having to type the actual .com or pressing the button. Simply press Go after typing the site name and iPhone’s Safari browser should automatically insert the .com for you.
When typing in an email message, URL, web page text box, or any other item that requires the keyboard, you may make a spelling error. To fix any errors that aren’t at the tail end of the string you just typed, hold your finger over the text until a small magnifying glass appears. You will now be able to position the cursor at the proper location in order to make your change.
If you want to send the URL of a Web page you’re viewing to a friend, tap the Address Bar, then tap Share. A new e-mail message, containing the URL, will open in Mail; just choose a recipient(s), add any comments you want to include, and tap Send.
When not using a zoomed-in display, double-tap towards the bottom of the screen. The page will re-center around your tap. Make sure not to tap a link!
Double-tap the very top of the screen, just below the time display to pop back to the top of the page. (Thanks John C)
Double-tapping images in Safari zooms them to fit your iPhone display. If the picture is linked to a URL, this can prove a little tricky but it works great for non-linked images. Double-tap again to return to the unzoomed display. Using 2 fingers to double tap, and zoom a section of a web page will avoid the accidental clicking of links.
You can zoom text columns as well as pictures. Double-tap on the column to fit it to the display. Double-tap again to return out of the zoom. Not only does Safari zoom block-quoted text independently of regular text but if you move your finger after the first double-tap-to-fit, it interprets the next double-tap as a re-center page command rather than a return-to-previous-zoom. Smart.
After flicking a page to get it to scroll, you can tap the page at any time to stop that movement. Don’t forget, you can also manually drag the screen display to reset the part you’re viewing.
This is probably one of the most-advertised Safari features (along with the flip-the-phone-on-its-side-trick) but it’s worth mentioning again. To zoom into a Safari page, put your thumb and forefinger on the screen and move them apart. To zoom out, pinch the fingers together after starting with them apart.
To peek at a link’s destination, touch and hold the link for a few seconds. You can also do this with images to see if they are linked. If a link appears and you don’t want to activate it, just slide your finger away until the destination text disappears.
The iPhone ‘locks’ your scroll to either vertical or horizontal only if the initial finger-slide is straight up/down or right/left enough. This can be very useful if you’ve got a skinny column of text with room on either side to get derailed. If not your initial scroll, using 2 fingers side by side will force vertical scrolling. Likewise 2 fingers stacked is horizontal.
Save images in Safari by tapping and holding on the image and you will see a “Save Image” button. Great feature if you want to use images you find online as your wallpaper.
Hold a letter for a popup of various versions of the character (i.e. to type España with the “ñ” simply hold “n” and simply slide/release to the appropriate character).
In Safari, hold a link to see the URL and site name.
When you have selected the number keypad (@123) while typing text in the Safari Address bar, pressing the Shift Key, changes the symbols you can select. In other keyboards (for example the Google search text box, the Shift key is replaced with a second symbol option key (#+=) but this doesn’t appear in the address bar. To access these symbols, just press Shift key and pick the character.
By default, Safari uses the Google search engine when you enter search text. However, you can change it to Yahoo but selecting the Safari Option in the Settings application. Pick this option and select the Search Engine option to change it to Yahoo.
I wanted to start a Tips and Tricks thread. I am compiling a bunch I have found on the net, and adding a few of my own, but please help us and add any ones that I didn’t list. If this works out, we can add it to our FAQ.
Navigate to the site in Safari. Click the + symbol to add a bookmark. Select the Add to Home Screen button to save the bookmark in your current app panel. Now use the normal methods to move it (press and hold until icons start to wiggle) to the desired spot.
This one’s a little more confusing. In the previous tip, I explained how to create an Icon for a bookmark, but following those steps, the image in the icon, however, is a screenshot of the page you were on. So if you want the icon to look a specific way, zoom in on a particular item on the page. Whether you want the website’s logo, or some picture on the page, simply zoom in on that part of the page before you press “Add to Home Screen”.
Note: This doesn’t work with all websites. Popular sites like Google have special icons for the iPhone’s home screen.
Moving icons from one panel to another can be a pain because the feedback lets you only move one panel at a time. If you are moving icons across multiple panels, use this trick. Once in wiggle mode, momentarily drag one of the icons in the bottom tool bar to the screen. Now replace it with the icon you want to move. Scroll to the target panel, and drag the icon out of the tool bar to its new location.
If you have a jailbroken iPhone or iTouch, install Categories. This tool lets you define folders (and associate icons to them) where you can use to contain your icons. Works pretty good.
