10 iPhone Tips

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are ten iPhone tips you probably don't know.

Now I'm using iOS 26 to demonstrate some of these. So if you're on an older version of iOS things may be a little different. Only the last tip requires Apple Intelligence. All the rest will work even if you have an older iPhone. 

So my first tip for you involves setting timers. When you go to the Clock App and then you go to Timers you can set a timer for a number of minutes, say 15 minutes. You can also ask Siri to do it for you. But what you probably didn't know is you can set a timer that goes to a certain time. So, for instance, I can set a timer to go until 10:00. You have to use Siri to do that. I'm going to press and hold the side button, activate Siri and do it. "Set a timer for 10:00". So now you can see how the timer started counting down at 19 minutes and a few seconds. So, it is a countdown clock. Yes, you could calculate the number yourself and you can set an alarm for that time as well. But this gives you a timer that tells you exactly how much time is left until the timer is done. 

Now let's go to the Phone App. To make a call on the phone app you would normally pick somebody from your Contacts. But if you have a lot of contacts it could take a little while to find the right number. Instead go to the keypad. Now I'm not suggesting you type the entire number. You can use the letters at the bottom of each number there and start typing out the person's name. So, for instance, I'll start typing out John, like that, and you can see how it suggests a contact that starts with those letters. This is called T9 dialing. It probably doesn't save you any time the first time you try to do it. But once you start using it you get used to the fact that, say, 564 will bring up John as a first suggestion and then you can just press the Call Button to dial. 

Now using Undo is always a little troublesome on the iPhone. A lot of people prefer to Shake the iPhone. But that's not always the most elegant way. When you make a mistake, like I just deleted that paragraph by accident, you can Undo by taking three fingers and just doing a tap in the middle of the screen. This brings up Controls at the top that include an Undo button and a Redo button and you also have Cut, Copy, & Paste at the top. Since you're using 3 fingers you can also swipe with 3 fingers to the left to Undo and 3 fingers to the right to Redo. 

Now if you like to use your iPhone at night when it is dark you may find that using the Brightness Settings and even going all the way down doesn't make it quite dark enough. You can go even darker. The trick is to go into Settings and then go into Accessibility. Then go to Display & Text Size. Now what you're going to look for is Reduce White Point. Be careful when turning this On. If your screen is already pretty dark and you turn this on you may find you can't see it at all. So when you tap it you can always just tap it again to turn it Off, even if you can't see it. You've got a percentage here and you can turn it all the way to the right. That will make it as dark as possible. To the left will make this effect as minimal as possible. So you might find putting it somewhere in the middle helps your brightness get to the dark range that you want. 

Now maybe you know about the first part of this next tip already. If you go in Safari and take a screenshot, I'm going to use the volume Up button and the Side button at the same time, and take a screenshot. There's an option at the top to go to Full Page. So this will take the entire Safari page and make that the screenshot. You can scroll through it here on the right and you can Save it. You can do all the normal stuff like Share It. You can mark it up. You can even Crop it and just get a portion of that entire page if you like. 

Now you can also do this in two other apps. It works a little differently in each one of those. If you go to Notes and you take a screenshot here, of course you're just going to get what's visible on the screen. But you've got Full Page here at the top as well. But instead of it being just a long scrolling view, like it is in Safari, it's actually going to convert it to an actual page. Something more like the note might look like on your Mac. It would be as long as needed for the entire note to fit. 

Another app this works in is Maps. So in Maps you've got this whole interface here. Even if you do your best to minimize it to take a screenshot you're still going to get pieces of the interface in the way. But if you go to Full Page you get the same Map section but all the interface elements are gone. Now you can continue to Crop it a little bit if you want.

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Now when you've taken the screenshot, or perhaps you're in the Preview App or you are in Photos you have the ability to Markup something. You've got the Markup Tools and I'll use this last example here. I'll select the Pen down here. I've got the color set to red. If I were to draw  something, like a circle, you could see how my circle is far from perfect. But if I hold at the end, just hold for one second before releasing, then the imperfect circle becomes perfect, like that. It works with other shapes as well. Watch, I'll draw an arrow. Like this. I'll hold and it becomes a perfectly straight arrow. 

So here's the same thing in the Preview App. I've got a PDF open here. I can turn On the Markup Tools. I've got the Pen selected here. I can draw a circle, hold at the end, you can see it changs to an oval because I kind of made it an oval shape there. You can draw a Star, like this. Hold at the end and you can see it changes to a star.

Here I am in the Photos App. I can tap the Adjustment Tools here and then tap the Markup Tools at the top and I can draw, say, a rectangle. Watch as my imperfect rectangle changes to a perfect one just by holding a bit at the end. 

Now it is pretty easy to launch any app on your iPhone. Just tap the Icon and it launches. But if you want to make it a little harder, maybe because sometimes you hand your phone to another family member and you don't want them to, say, purchase apps in The App Store. You can tap and hold an app like this and one of the things you can do here is you can set it to require Face ID or Touch ID. So now when you turn that On the app now will require that extra step. You can see it worked very easily for me because of Face ID. But for somebody else it wouldn't have worked at all. It is easy to turn it Off too. Just tap and hold like you did before and then select Don't Require Face ID or Touch ID.

Now even if you don't have Apple Intelligence on your iPhone a bunch of things you can do with Siri that make hard task pretty easy. For instance, let's go back into the Clock App. A lot of use have a list of alarms that looks like this. A ton of alarms. Every time we've created one for a different time, they add to the list. If you want to clear that out you're going to have to swipe and delete each one of those. But Siri can do it for you in one go. You just ask Siri. ""Siri delete all my alarms." There you go!

Another thing Siri can make much easier to do is Restarting your iPhone. I mean Restarting, not shutting down. So, if you go into Settings and you go into General you can go to the Bottom here and Shutdown. That will shutdown your iPhone. It won't start it up again. You kind of have to wait till it's all shutdown and then hold the side button until it starts. Likewise if you drag down from the top right and hold the Power button there you can shutdown but you can't restart. But Siri can. "Restart" and then you confirm there. 

Now here's something that does require Apple Intelligence. If your iPhone is new enough to have it and you've turned it On then you can type to Siri instead of talk to it by simply double tapping at the very bottom of the screen. Right where the white bar usually appears or if you're on your HomeScreen you won't see a white bar there but this still works. Just a quick double tap at the very bottom and it brings up the Keyboard and then a little Ask Siri prompt. The some suggestions. Now you can use some of these Siri commands that I just talked about. For instance, I can ask to restart and it will do it and I never had to use my voice. The suggestions make it even easier to type. Like if I start typing Delete here, see how Delete All My Alarms comes up as the first suggestion. I can just tap that and it will put it in and do it. 

Hope you found these tips useful. Thanks for watching.