I often catch myself accidentally tapping play for music or videos via my iPhone even when I don’t have my AirPods in my ears and ready to go.
This is typically accidental, as I usually prefer to keep my media consumption to myself with personal headphones of some kind, but there are rare occasions when I’m by myself that I’ll use my iPhone’s built-in speakers to listen to a YouTube video here and there.
One thing that I’ve always liked about having a jailbroken iPhone is that I can get to important things more quickly than I could on a stock handset. This is all because of the different types of shortcuts and extensions that you can have on a device that’s no longer being subjected to Apple’s native software restrictions.
While there’s certainly no shortage of jailbreak tweaks that permit handy shortcuts and functionality from almost anywhere in iOS, those who consider themselves to be power users may have something to gain from the likes of a newly released jailbreak tweak called AppEditor by iOS developer @CrazyMind90.
If there’s anything that jailbreaking my iPhone has taught me over the past several years, it’s that I should always come to expect more from iOS than Apple provides for it out of the box.
The aforementioned rule of thumb holds true in so many different respects, but one particular element of iOS that I find to be lacking features and intuitive integration is the App Switcher. It’s just… boring.
Of the multitude of different things I use on my iPhone on a daily basis, the Calculator and Phone apps are definitely high on that list.
But sometimes life catches us in a pinch, and that’s why having the ability to access these tools without unlocking our iPhones and finding and launching the Calculator or Phone apps can come in handy.
Shortcuts that help you do things with less effort can be a godsend, especially when it comes to being productive on a small and often cramped device like an iPhone.
That’s one of the reasons why I enjoy taking full advantage of iOS’ Text Replacement feature whenever I can. The only problem with it is that you’ll find yourself inconveniently navigating to Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement to manage (add or remove) your text shortcuts.
All iPhones incorporate a magnifier interface that can enlarge things for the hard at seeing. It tends to be useful for getting a closer look at fine text on a sheet of paper such as a book or shopping receipt.
In iOS 14 and earlier, the Magnifier interface can be summoned via accessibility using Control Center or a manually planted Home Screen icon. However starting with iOS 15, the Magnifier interface debuts as a standalone app on the Home Screen right out of the box.
One of the things I’ve long wished to be able to do is schedule messages to be sent at a future date. Fast-forward many years later, and this still isn’t a native feature on the iPhone – not even for Apple’s feature-rich iMessage platform.
Most iOS 14 users are familiar with the App Library by now. For those who aren’t, it’s the additional page all the way to the right of the Home Screen that sorts your installed apps by their categories.
I sternly hold the opinion that Apple offers one of the best touch screen-based keyboards in the smartphone industry today, but that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about ways that Apple could make it better. Perhaps my biggest gripe has to do with the amount of wasted space on notched devices — especially at the bottom of the keyboard interface.
Key+ is a newly released jailbreak tweak by iOS developer XCXiao that makes much more productive use of said wasted space on the keyboard interface by filling it with useful commands and shortcuts. These include but aren’t limited to text editing shortcuts for cutting, copying, and pasting text, a way to customize the output of key swipes, a way to rapidly enter pasteboard items, and a quick entry Emoji bar.
Anyone that does any capacity of text editing on their iPhone, whether it’s writing a document in Microsoft Word, modifying something drafted out in the Messages app’s text field, or some other form of the matter, may have noticed that the magnifying glass no longer appears when moving the cursor somewhere specific in the body of text.
Apple made this change because you can now pan the cursor across your body of text by tapping and dragging on the keyboard. But that hasn’t stopped a growing number of nostalgic iPhone users from wishing that the classic magnifying glass was still a thing. Said nostalgia is only amplified by the fact that the magnifying glass still exists on the iPad in the latest versions of iPadOS 14.
Apple began integrating sleep-related health feature into the iPhone in iOS 13 with Bedtime, but it wasn’t until iOS 14 that more meaningful sleep-based features such as Sleep Mode came to fruition.
When Sleep Mode is active, your iPhone mutes incoming notifications with Do Not Disturb to keep you asleep and dissuades you from using your iPhone when you should be sleeping by way of a more convoluted Lock Screen that adds an additional button to tap before you can swipe up to unlock.
We’ve shown you many ways to use VoiceOver on your Mac. From the basics of turning VoiceOver off and on to in-depth uses like navigating your desktop, Dock, and Mission Control with it. But there is one thing that VoiceOver users may want to know right from the start and that’s how to use it on the login screen.
You can manually turn VoiceOver on from your login screen. But you can also have it ready to go every time you sign in on your Mac.
