iPhone

Stay up-to-date on the latest iPhone news and learn new tips and tricks with our comprehensive tutorials. From software updates to new features, we’ve got you covered.

How to block strangers from messaging you on Vine

Some of our past tutorials have provided step-by-step instructions for saving Vine videos, hiding other people's revines in your feed, deleting Vine accounts and blocking users. This how-to mini-series continues with the topic of preventing people you don't follow from messaging you on the service.

Since Vine's 2.0 update, the app has gained the ability to send instant messages to other Vine members. This has quickly generated an influx of unwanted messages that in many cases is classed as pure spam.

This tutorial will teach you about a toggle you can switch to tell Vine to block strangers from messaging you on the service.

How to make a profile video in Facebook’s iOS app

Facebook recently began allowing users to set a short video as their profile picture on the service. Users can now take or upload a video of up to seven seconds to use as their profile video. These profile videos appear at the top of your profile, just like static profile pictures, but you can currently add a profile video only from the iPhone.

If you feel your Facebook profile is too static, here's how to spice it up with a profile video in Facebook's iOS app.

Eleven 3D Touch shortcuts in Messages for iPhone

There's no question that 3D Touch really does make the iPhone's Multi-Touch user interface multidimensional. By varying the degree of pressure applied to the screen of your iPhone, you can preview emails, websites, locations, messages and a variety of other items in Apple's stock apps.

We have already covered new 3D Touch shortcuts in iBooks and today we're taking a closer look at arguably the most-oft used iPhone app—Messages. In Messages, you can Peek and Pop most of the file types to your heart's content without needing to jump between multiple apps, which can save a lot of time.

In this tutorial, we're going to lay out 3D Touch basics in Messages before moving on to all of the items you can preview in your conversations.

How to purge iPhone memory without rebooting

As you use apps on your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, iOS dynamically manages system memory (don't confuse RAM with storage), allocating chunks of RAM to foreground and background tasks and suspending memory usage for apps that are not actively running in the background.

For the most part, iOS manages RAM efficiently to ensure that your frequently-used applications are ready for action as soon as you switch to them. But as so-called garbage collection is not available in iOS, a poorly written application might keep large portions of memory to itself and refuse to release it at iOS's request, resulting in slower performance.

You can get around this by rebooting your device, but there's a more elegant way to purge the memory taken up by apps without rebooting, as explained in this tutorial.

Six 3D Touch shortcuts in iBooks for iPhone

Owners of the iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus can now use Peek and Pop gestures in iBooks to speed up common tasks such as checking out their notes and bookmarks, previewing pages in search results and more.

This tutorial takes you on a quick tour of 3D Touch gestures in iBooks, including six ways applying pressure helps you interact with your fav reads.