25 Things To Try On Your iPhone With iOS 14

The new iOS 14 for iPhone is packed with new features. Take a look at some of these features, big and small, to see that you can use.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are 25 things to try with your iPhone after installing iOS 14. 
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So iOS 14 brings a ton of new features to your iPhone. Here are 25 to try out right now. First let's look at the Home screen. One of the things you can do with the Home screen is you can add Widgets to it. To do that tap and hold in a blank spot until everything wiggles like that. Then tap the Plus button at the top. Now select Smart Stack. Smart Stack is a group of stacks and you can swipe up and down and choose which one you want. You can tap on it to select the widgets that are shown in there. You can swipe to the left say to delete one. You can rearrange them. You can turn On or Off Smart Rotate which will automatically show the one that makes the most sense for that time of day. When you tap Done you've got the widget there. You can swipe up or down to change the widget that is there.
Now if you continue to swipe all the way to the left you'll eventually come to the App Library. Here you can see all of your apps by category. You can tap at the top and see an alphabetical list of apps. People have been asking for this for years so they can find apps alphabetically rather than having to search through all their app icons. 
In fact you can have apps that aren't on the Home screen at all. Just tap and hold an app and then select Remove and you have the option to Delete it or to just simply Move to App Library. So it won't be on a Home screen but it will still be installed on your iPhone and you can get to it in the App Library.
In Settings you can go to Home screen and you can choose that when you download a new app it only appears in the App Library. So it's not on the Home screen unless you specifically drag it from the App Library onto a Home screen.
In fact you can Hide entire screens of your Home screen. So for instance if I only wanted the first Home screen to be shown and none of these others I can Hide them by tapping and holding in any blank spot. Then tap where the dots are at the bottom of the screen. Now you can see these check boxes. I can turn off everything except the very first screen of the Home page. So now I just have one screen of icons and go right to the App Library where I can find all of my apps.
A new app that you get with iOS 14 is called Translate. This is an app from Apple and it allows you to easily translate from one language to another. It also shows the text on the screen and you can have your iPhone speak it. So it's really handy when you're trying to communicate with somebody and neither of you speak the same language. You can use your iPhone as a go-between. Instead of typing you can speak and it will translate your speech to text and then to the other language. (Which way to the train station). You can choose from a variety of different languages and you can even add more.
There's also a new translation function in Safari. So this is built into the browser. You could be at a page like this in another language. Tap the Reader View icon there at the top left and you could see one of the options here is to Translate the Page. 
Now you probably already know that you can send an audio message using the Messages app. So I can type here or I can tap the button to the right of the message field and speak. Then the audio will be sent instead of the text. Now you can have Siri do that for you too. (Send an audio message to MacMost. This is a test). 
Now there's been a lot of talk about new privacy features. One in particular is the ability to give an app your location but not a precise location. This is handy for an app, say like weather app, where it doesn't need to know exactly where you are just your general location. To enable this go into Settings and then go to Privacy. Then from there go to Location Services. Now tap any app that you want and turn off Precise Location. Now that app only has a general idea of where you are, like the neighborhood, but not your exact location.
Another feature that people really are excited about is the ability to have default apps different than Safari or Mail. So you can go into Settings and then look for an app that is a valid alternative. So, for instance, I can go down here into the apps and look for Chrome. If I select Chrome you can see it says Default Browser App. I can tap here and you can see I have the choice between Safari and Chrome. Now an app developer has to enable this in the app. So if your favorite app isn't listed then that's because the developer hasn't updated their app yet. Right now you can do this for Chrome. You can do this for Firefox. You can do this for Microsoft Edge. In Mail you could do it for apps like Gmail and some other mail apps.
The Weather app has a few new features. One I like is to be able to see minute to minute precipitation. Now it has to be raining to do this so you don't see it here but here you could see there's this line there and it shows you the precipitation over the next hour or so minute by minute.
Here's another improvement to the Messages app. You can now do an inline response. In other words if I want to respond to not the previous message sent but the one before it I could tap and hold and you can see I can select Reply and now I can reply to that particular item. Now you can see there's one reply to that particular thing instead of just piling that at the end there.
You can also Pin conversations to the top of the list here. Swiping to the left select Pin and that gets stuck there at the top so it doesn't get lost in your list of conversations.
Also a really cool new feature in FaceTime is Picture-In-Picture. So I can be on a FaceTime conversation here and I can go back to the Home screen and go into another app and I still can have the FaceTime conversation there in a Picture-In-Picture that I can move around on the screen.
Now of course when you're typing sometimes you want to type an emoji. So anywhere you're typing you can use the emoji key on the keyboard and go into that. But now there's a search field at the top. So I can search for an emoji just like I can on the Mac.
An interesting feature is in Settings you can go to Accessibility and then in there you can go to Sound Recognition and turn that On and you can have it automatically recognize sounds. So you could have it enabled for those sounds and you'll get a Notification. I guess the idea is you would get a vibration as well if one of those sounds is heard. I tried it out and it works, not perfectly, but it did detect some of the sounds.
Another Accessibility feature and one that we could all use is under Touch if you go to the bottom you'll see Back Tap. You can have a double tap or a triple tap on the back of the iPhone. So it's like tapping the finger on the back of the device like that and you can set it to do a variety of different things. Even run Shortcuts. This is one of those features that is only going to work on newer iPhones. So if you don't see that option there your iPhone is too old to support it.
These next two features also need a newer iPhone. So on my iPhone 11 here I could tap and hold in the middle and do an auto exposure, auto focus lock. But I could also drag up from the bottom here and there's that new button that allows me to now adjust the exposure without having to mess with that little yellow sun at the right side of the yellow box there.
Another new feature for newer phones is you could go into the Camera settings and you have the ability to mirror the front camera and reverse how it looks when you're taking a selfie. If you go to the FaceTime settings here there's an option to have Eye Contact turned On or Off. This is a feature that moves your eyes slightly in the image to make it look like you're staring at the camera rather than the image below it. So you're making direct eye contact with the person that you're talking with.
A new feature in the Photos app that is really long overdue is the ability to add Captions. So while you're viewing a photo like this you can swipe up and you can see Add A Caption and type something there. This does sync in iCloud Photo Library and appears as the description for a photo in your Library there.
Now when you are using the camera you will notice a dot at the top of the screen. There's a green dot there saying the camera is currently being used by an app. That green dot will be there for any app using the camera. Now if an app is just using the microphone and not the camera it will be an orange dot.
In the Voice Memos app you have the ability now to enhance an audio recording. This is basically noise reduction. So if you recorded your voice in a noisy environment and you want to clean it up you can go in and Edit the recording and you'll see this little magic wand tool that you can turn on and that enables noise reduction in this recording.
Now if you use the Magnifier there's a whole new set of controls for it. I've got it set so the magnifier comes on when I triple press the side button but you may have it when you use Control Center, for instance. You could see all the new controls at the bottom including the ability to save multiple images. So you tap this button here at the bottom right and now I could take multiple shots and you could see it gives you a number there of multiple shots. I could tap that and go through the different shots. So, for instance, if you're looking at a booklet that is several pages of instructions you can take a shot of each one and then zoom in and out on those instructions without having to keep pointing your iPhone at them.
Finally, there's a big new feature in the Maps app for those of us that bike. It's Biking Directions. So here I've got standard directions for driving but I could switch to Bike Directions. Unfortunately I found out that this isn't available everywhere yet. It's not available in my city. But hopefully it will rollout in other places very quickly.
So this is just a handful of features to explore in iOS 14. This version of iOS definitely is very rich in the number of new features like this. Play around with these to start and then keep exploring.

Comments: 9 Responses to “25 Things To Try On Your iPhone With iOS 14”

Gene

3 years ago

Another fine video! Two questions: does one have to have wifi in order for "Translate" to work? You referred to having your "side button" triple press and do something. Where can I find out how to program the side button(s)?

Gary Rosenzweig

Gene: Yes, of course. How would you load the web page in the first place? Even if you did, how would that page be reloaded in a translated form? The "Accessibility Shortcut" has been around for a while. I did a video on it a while back: https://macmost.com/how-to-customize-the-triple-click-iphone-accessibility-shortcut.html

Marcy katz

Hi Gary, i installed it in my ipad. These features for ios iphone dont seem to be active on the ipad. How come?
Thanks for your response. I hesitated to install on my iphone because it seems that ios 14 on my ipad has screwed up accessing my contacts. Can i un install ios 14 on my ipad?

Marcy: Some features are, some are not. Many of these features try to help out iPhone users and their smaller screens. Uninstalling iPadOS 14 is not the answer to fixing problems. Instead, try to figure out what is going on with your contacts. In what way are they not accessible? Call Apple for support or stop by the Genius Bar if you need to.

Dan Bails

Thanks Gary, After I watched this video I checked my phone and it hadn't updated yet. The software screen said it was updated but then I clicked check for new updates and it found 14.0.1!

Do you remember all that you have taught all of us over the years?

Dana Schwartz

What happens to all the icons displaced when you put one of those giant (ugly) blocks (widgets?) on your home page? Do they get shoved to the next page and icons on every subsequent page get partially shifted too? Not good. One poster on TidBits suggested they all got deleted, and had to be re-extracted from the library. Also not good. What’s your experience?

Dana: If you think they are ugly, you don't need to use them. Icons are moved to a new page yet (not deleted!) and all other pages are intact.

Norm

I’m up to date on downloads. My default browser is “DuckDuckGo”. I don’t see “Default Browser” OK., Safari set as icon on iPhone. When I click I get my favorites no bookmarks, side bar reading lists? Is all that only for iPad iOS

Norm: Reading list in a sidebar is Mac and iPad. There's no room on an iPhone screen.

Comments Closed.

25 Things To Try On Your iPhone With iOS 14

Comments: 9 Responses to “25 Things To Try On Your iPhone With iOS 14”

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