15 New Things To Try On Your iPhone With iOS 15

iOS 15 has a lot of new features. Here are 15 you can try out right away to make your iPhone even better. Learn how to use Live Text, Visual Lookup, Focus, Weather maps, Hide My Email, Notes tags and much more.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here is some new things to try on your iPhone once you've installed iOS 15.
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There are a lot of cool new features in iOS 15. Here are some to checkout right away. So before iOS 15 we had Do Not Disturb. Simply two modes. Either Do Not Disturb On and Off. Right now with Focus you can set all sorts of different modes and customize them. So go into Settings and then go to Focus. You'll see all of these Focus settings already there. You can go in and customize one and have exactly the kind of things you want. So you can add people that are allowed to notify you while driving. You can have whether your status is Shared or not. You can have some Auto Replies set. Things like that. Even have this mode turned to Automatically say while driving or certain times of the day. That kind of thing. You can customize all of these and even add your own creating your own custom one with a name, icon color, and everything. You can set which apps are allowed to notify you while you're in that mode. 
Then to switch modes just bring up Control Center and you'll see Focus here. Tap that and you can pick one of those modes to switch in to. Let's head over to the Photos App. One of the coolest new features is Live Text. You can use it in the Photos App and elsewhere as well. So here to see a normal image, nothing special, it's the same as before except you can actually select the text. So it's converting text that it finds in Photos to actual text. I could Copy that and Paste that into a document. Another cool thing Photos does is called Visual Lookup. So you can click on the i button here at the bottom or you can simply swipe up inside the photo when you're viewing one. Then it will give you information about the photo, location, camera information, that kind of thing. In here is says Lookup and it will tell you what it finds in the photo and here you could see it identifies this as a plant. Big deal, right. Well, watch this. Tap on that and it will go and tell you what type of plant it is. Here's another example. If I swipe up here it says, oh this is a landmark. Really? What landmark?  There you go. You can tap here and get more information. 
Now let's head into Safari. Safari moves the Tab Bar to the bottom of the screen. That's the page I'm currently at and I could swipe. This makes it much easier to hold your iPhone and swipe through your tabs. But there are more tab features as well. Go into the Tab Overview here and you'll see your Tab like before but now you go here and you've got Tab Groups. So I've got four tabs here. I can create a new group with those four tabs, a new empty tab group. So instead of having twenty different tabs open I could have several tab groups and have the pages in groups that make sense. Here's the third thing that's new in Safari. Here's your Start Page. So you've got a Start Page that's very much like on macOS. If you scroll down to the bottom there's an Edit button and you could edit your Start Page like on the Mac as well. So you can determine exactly what you want to have on your Start Page. Pick a background image and everything. Then it will even sync it so you can see the same Start Page on your Mac, your iPad, your iPhone.
Now let's go into the Maps App. It looks better than ever but, of course, starting with major cities. So, for instance, here I am in New York. Let's go to 3d view and let's pinch in here. You could see how detailed we get here with lane information like turning lanes and things like that. Pedestrian crosswalks. It just looks amazing. It gives you tons of good information so you could figure things out before your travel. 
So if you're paying for any iCloud Storage you have something now called iCloud + which means you get some extra features. In Settings, if you look under your iCloud Settings, you'll see ones for Private Relay and Hide My Email. So Private Relay is like a simple VPN. It will mask your IP Address and encrypt your internet traffic. I have my email as a feature where you can create these email addresses and use them. They forward to your regular iCloud email and whoever your provide them to doesn't know your real email address. So you go in here and you can see your existing ones. You can create a new one. You can't specify what the email address is, that's randomly generated. But you can create as many as you like. 
A new feature of the Notes App and Reminders is the ability to add Tags. So all you need to do in a Note to add a tag is simply use the hash symbol and then call it whatever you want. That automatically becomes a tag. Then at the top level you can view all of your tags and actually go to a list of all of the notes that include that tag.
Apple has added a bunch of accessories to the Memoji builder. So now you can go and Edit your Memoji or create a new one and the last option is Clothing. Go in there and you could choose from all sorts of different clothing, usually with two or three colors that you can customize. Another cool feature is System-wide Translation which is available for any text that you select. So you can use it in Safari but you could also use it in Mail or somewhere else. So just select some text and then use Translate and it brings up this Translator here. You can have it speak the translation to you. You could change the language and copy the translation. 
So one of my favorite features is really simple. Just Maps in the Weather App. Before if I wanted to see a weather map I had to go to another app or to the web. But now I can do it inside the Weather App. Just tap here and I get a map. I can choose the layers. It pretty much means I could find everything I need now in the Weather App. 
Text selection now looks a little different. When you tap and hold to select text you get a little magnified oval right above the text so you could see exactly where it is you're placing the cursor. 
Finally, here's something that I think will make Voice Memos a lot more useful. You can now go to a voice memo, select settings there, not only change the playback speed but have it skip a silence. So now periods of silence, even just one second, will simply be skipped over. So you can turn on Voice Memos say while you're driving and over the course of several minutes talk a little here and there about some ideas you have and then when you play it back it may only take you thirty seconds to listen to the five minute recording because it cuts out all the silence. 
So this only scratches the surface of some of the new features that you now have on your iPhone thanks to iOS 15. I'm going to be covering some more features in future videos as well as going more in-depth into things like Focus which is also coming to macOS in the future. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 9 Responses to “15 New Things To Try On Your iPhone With iOS 15”

Razvan Mihai

3 years ago

Gary, thanks for scratching the surface in such an entertaining way! On a related note, I tried Quick Notes on my iPad with iPad OS 15 and loved it.

It's so disappointing that we don't get that on iOS 15. Perhaps in your upcoming tutorials on Shortcuts, you might consider a video on how to make a shortcut that emulates some of the features of Quick Notes, i.e., coping a mail deep-link to the clipboard or copying a safari URL to the clipboard, and pasting it in Notes.

Fred

I have been using TextSniper to copy text from images, PDF's that are images (not OCR), and websites. It's fantastic! Very cheap as well. While I see the tags feature in iOS, why did they not include it in the Mac version? It's very odd to have a function one one and not the other. Tags were really needed in Notes and makes it much more useful for sure. I tested this a bit. Made a tag on Mac, but iOS didn't see it. Kind of odd deployment.

Gary Rosenzweig

Fred: Do you mean tags in Notes and Reminders? That is on macOS too. But macOS Monterey isn't out yet, so unless you have the beta you'll have to wait a few weeks.

Eric

Excellent stuff! I'm off to try some of those features. In particular, I hadn't realised that the iCloud+ features required an iCloud upgrade.

Kathy

Hi Gary, what Siri settings are required to be on for Visual Lookup to work in Photos? I haven't thus far used Siri and even though I turned 'her' on in iCloud on my phone, the Visual Lookup still isn't working for my test photo of a dog or a tree. Maybe it would be for only newly taken photos after turning 'her' on...but I'm just not sure. Thanks for all your help and excellent videos and tips.

Kathy: Siri and Visual Lookup are separate features. Doesn't have to be a new photo either. Do you maybe have an older iPhone or are outside of the US?

Hi Gary, Phone is XS and yes outside US in Canada.

Jason

Hi Gary: I am a new member of your group and I'm really enjoying your content. Question: what do you use to show where you are touching the screen on an iPad or iPhone? Looks like a red dot. Asking because I'd like to show some of my sales reps some tips on how to use their devices during remote Zoom or Teams but they have trouble seeing where I am touching the screen.
Thanks in advance.
JB

Jason: Thanks for your support! I'm simply using a mouse, which places that dot on the screen so you know where the pointer is located. Handy for tutorials. See https://macmost.com/how-to-use-a-mouse-with-your-ipad.html

Comments Closed.

15 New Things To Try On Your iPhone With iOS 15

Comments: 9 Responses to “15 New Things To Try On Your iPhone With iOS 15”

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