10 Quick and Useful iPhone Tips

Here are 10 simple iPhone tips. Learn how to Print As PDF on your iPhone, never miss a message, set custom vibration patterns, offload apps to save space and much more.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are ten tips for getting the most from your iPhone. 
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You know how on a Mac you can save anything as a PDF as long as you can print it. You could just go to Print and then Save as PDF. You could do the same thing on the iPhone. So for instance say you're looking at a webpage. You could go to the Actions button here and then go to Print. Then what you want to do is pinch apart with two fingers and it will turn it into a PDF. You could now Share it and send it as an email, a message, or Save to your files. Now every time we open up a new link in Safari we get a new Safari tab. So if you look at your Tabs usually you have a lot of them. You can, one by one, click the little x here to close each one. But a quicker way to do it is simply to tap and hold the Tabs button here. Then you'll get a selection including Close All Tabs. But if you would rather not have all those tabs in the first place you could go to Settings and then down to Safari and then go to Close Tabs and then select Manually, which is the default, or Close the Tab after one day, a week, or a month. Just setting it to a week may actually make a big difference in the number of tabs you have open.
Ever wish you could go to sleep listening to music and then have the music automatically turn off after a period of time. Well you could do that but you won't find that in the Music app. Instead go to the Clock app and from there go to Timer and then set the Timer for the number of minutes. Then change when Timer ends from a sound to the last selection which is Stop Playing. Now music in the Music app will stop playing when the timer is finished. So ever see one of those boxy QR codes somewhere like now we see them all the time in restaurants to be able to view the menu on your iPhone. Well you don't need any special app to use one of those. They just link to a URL and you could do it in the Camera app of your iPhone. So just activate the Camera, point it at one of these QR codes and you'll get a little notification at the top. You tap that and it will take you right to the URL. Note that there is a Setting for this in Settings, under Camera. There's scan QR code. So make sure you have that turned on.
So if you ever need a level like while you're building something or maybe just hanging a picture you could do it on your iPhone using the Compass app. Notice in the middle there is a circle and a crosshair. If you line that up with the larger crosshair you know you've got your iPhone perfectly level. Even if you turn your iPhone on the side you could see the crosshair there and you could line it up perfectly with that line and get a perfect level from your iPhone. Now you can use it while you're actually taking a photo as well. So go into Settings and under Camera again turn on Grid. Now when you have the Grid on if you go to take a photo and you want to take it straight down, you want to make sure your camera is perfectly flat, you can look for the little crosshair in the middle and there's a second crosshair as well. When you line those up perfectly then you know you've got your camera perfectly level above  the surface. 
Now if you're like me you actually don't use a ringtone. I always have my iPhone on silent and I have it vibrate if I get a phone call. Well, you can customize those vibrations and create your own pattern to identify different people that are calling. So go into Sounds & Haptics in the Settings app. Then go to Ringtone. Then under Vibration you've got some standard vibrations here but you could also create a new one. Then you tap and hold to create the vibrations. Then hit Stop and then Save. Call it what you want and Save it. Now you can see it here in the Custom List. To assign it to a contact go into your Contacts app, select a contact, tap Edit, and then go to Ringtone and set the vibration to that custom vibration.
Now if you have too many apps on your iPhone and you want to free up some space you can delete an app. But then it also deletes the data associated with that app, how you're logged in and everything. Instead you can offload an app so that it gets rid of the bulky app itself but keeps all of its data. Then to reload it all you need to do is tap it, just like you're going to launch it. To do this go into Settings and then under General go to iPhone Storage. Then tap the app that you want to clear out. You can see here this app takes up a lot of space for the app itself and not as much for the documents and data. If I use Offload App here it will get rid of the app, free up all of that app space while keeping the documents and data. You can see I can easily reinstall the app here or I can just launch the app as normal and it will download it right there and then and then I can use it again.
Now when you want to move apps around on your Home screen you can tap and hold and wait. Then you can drag it around. But you could do it with more than one app. So, for instance, if I wanted to a bunch of apps from this screen to another screen while I'm dragging around with one finger I could take another finger and I could tap on other apps, group them together and move this bunch to another screen or anywhere I want. 
Now do you ever miss a notification for a message and only find out later when you look at the Messages app that you've got this notification from something from hours ago. Well you could avoid that by having it repeat the notification. Go into Settings and then look for Notifications and then scroll down to Messages. Under here you can set Repeat Alerts to repeat twice, three times, five times, or ten times. If you have it set to ten times it's going to be hard to miss a notification. 
So I hope you found these tips useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 9 Responses to “10 Quick and Useful iPhone Tips”

Ruth

4 years ago

Gary, I just got the new iPhone 12 Pro (upgraded from the 6S Plus that I had for five years!) and I can't find the Compass. I put it on the search function and all that comes up is a Compass Navigation App that I installed previously but not the original iPhone Compass app. I looked in the Maps app but it's not there? What am I missing? Thank you for your help.

Gary Rosenzweig

Ruth: It should be there. If not, have you looked in the App Store for it?

Anthony

Is it in a "utilities" folder (maybe second screen)? Or have you scrolled to the last window and checked the AppLibrary?

Carol

If I am about to (finally) replace my 6s, does it make sense to offload apps now, or will I have to do it again when I sync everything to my new iPhone?

Carol: Makes sense to do it now if you need space. Just takes a few seconds.

Lali Raj

Gary where is the option button while looking at a webpage on an iPhone 6 Plus on safari?

Lali: Option button? Which button are you looking for, specifically?

bets

The first tip looked interesting but I couldn't get it to work - where's the "action button"? found the actions, including print, but couldn't get it to a pdf. ...Just a suggestion but saying go "here" is really not helpful, especially speaking rapidly. After trying the first for about 5 minutes I didn't even try for the rest. Obviously, I really need tips and help! :)

bets: Look at the video and you can see where I'm touching -- a little red circle.

Comments Closed.

10 Quick and Useful iPhone Tips

Comments: 9 Responses to “10 Quick and Useful iPhone Tips”

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