Hot Corners On the iPhone and iPad

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use Hot Corners on your iPhone or iPad.

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Now a lot of Mac users know and love Hot Corners. By moving the pointer to one of the corners of the screen you can trigger an action. It's a great way to have a shortcut that doesn't involve the keyboard. You can do the same thing on the iPhone or iPad but there are a lot of catches. 

First of all you have to be using a mouse or trackpad on the iPhone or iPad. It doesn't work with your finger. You can't just tap the corner of the screen. So you have to have a pointer on the screen. That means you must connect some sort of pointing device. Now a lot of people already are using a pointing device, especially with the iPad. So if you are it makes sense to also configure Hot Corners.

But Hot Corners are not just a feature by themselves. They are in Accessibility, part of Assistive Touch, and part of Dwell controls. The way Dwell controls work is they assume that you can't actually tap or click anything. But you can move a pointer. So the idea is you move the pointer to something and you stop. When you stop after say two seconds then a tap occurs. If you don't want a tap you keep moving. If you do want a tap you pause and let the tap happen. Now the good news is just for Hot Corners you can actually turn most of Dwell controlling off. I'll show you how to do that. 

Okay, so here I'm going to demonstrate on an iPhone although it is probably more likely you'll be doing this on an iPad. I works the same on both. So I'm going to go into Settings and from Settings I'm going to go down to Accessibility. Then from there I'm going to go under Physical & Motion to Touch. There I need to turn on Assistive Touch, just to get the pointer on the screen which I already have because I'm using a mouse to show you where I'm pointing instead of my finger and you would't see anything on the screen. So I have Assistive Touch turned On already. Now I need to go down to Dwell Controls which are further down here. I need to turn Dwell Control On. Let's talk about that for a minute. 

Once you turn Dwell Control On  you can notice that the pointer gets a little bit bigger. As long as I keep moving it it behaves the same. But if I stop notice how the circle fills in and then it Taps. So all I need to do is move a little bit again and it fills in and Taps. The Tap was two seconds which is this time right here. So you can make it faster or slower by changing the two seconds. If I want to Tap something all I need to do is pause over it and it will Tap. So you can see how it turned Dwell Control Off. I'll go over here and actually click the mouse to turn it back On again. Now you can see how that is not going to work very well if you just want to use Hot Corners because you're going to have to keep the pointer moving all the time or you'll end up tapping something. You could always move it over a spot where there is nothing to Tap and then let it tap and don't move it again. That's fine. But what you want to do is pause Dwell Control. If you Pause it then most of the features of Dwell Control pause. One of the features that doesn't though is Hot Corners. So that's good news. 

So if we look for the Assistive Touch Menu, it's this little button here that you can drag around, and if I actually go into that and then into Dwell there is a way to Pause Dwell. Now once I do that I could stop moving and it won't tap. So I've basically turned Off Dwell except it still works in some places. One of those places is over that little control. So I can go back into the Menu there and back into Dwell and let's, say, turn it On. Resume Dwell. Another way to Pause Dwell is to go Fallback Action. Fallback Action is what happens basically after the main action. Does it go back to tapping or after one action does it Pause. So I've got Dwell going so if I stop right here you could see it is going to Tap but now after that tap it is paused. So there are two ways to pause Dwell. One is using that Fallback Action and making sure the first tap is kind of harmless. The other way is to just go into that Menu here and Pause it manually. Once you've got it Paused Hot Corners will still work. So let's finally get to the Hot Corners themselves.

If I tap here I can go into Hot Corners and you can see I've got four corners as you would expect. I can set them to do things. Let's set the top left corner to go Home. Now let's just go back here to this screen and let's try to use it. Notice that Dwell is still Paused. It is not going to do anything even if I stop moving the pointer. But if I move the pointer to the top left it kind of snaps into place like that. It gets bigger. Then you see it fills in but only the quarter of the circle that you see there. Then it performs the action. That happened even if Dwell is paused. 

Let's go into Calculator here and say we want to get back to the Home screen using Dwell. I'll go back to the top left and there you go. It activates. 

So back in Settings you see I can set Hot Corners to a variety of things. Let's go to bottom left here and you can see some of the things I could do. I can have it jump to the App Switcher. I can have it open up the Camera. I can have it go to Control Center. I can have it Lock the Screen. Lots of good things that you can do. But there is even more than that because if you go all the way down to the bottom notice you can have Shortcuts here. So, for instance, I could go into the Shortcuts App here. I could add a new shortcut. I could simply add the action Open App. I can choose from the list of apps and let's say let's have it go to the Calculator App. It could be something a little more interesting. I can Tap Done and you can see it says Open App Here. Let's go in and change the name to that and Done. So I've got this Shortcut. All it does is open Calculator. But now I can go back into Hot Corners here and if I scroll down I should see Open Calculator in the list, and I could assign that. So now I go back to the Home screen and when I go to the bottom left and let the Hot Corner activate it's going to launch the Calculator App. 

So since, of course, there are a ton of possibilities with just Shortcuts alone there is a lot you can do here with Hot Corners. So it may be worthwhile giving this a try. Seeing if you think the Assistive Touch Menu Button or having to Pause Dwell kind of gets in the way of it all. It is definitely a problem with using this. It is not a straight forward as it is on the Mac. But if you can get past that then setting the four corners to perform some sort of action or shortcut could be a productivity boost. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.