1/ Block numbers from texting or calling you in iOS — If you’re running iOS 7 or later, you can stop those telemarketers and chronic wrong-number dialers with this quick and easy trick. To block someone already on your contacts list, open the Phone app, select a contact card, scroll down toward the bottom, and tap Block this Caller. If you’re blocking someone in your Recents list of the Phone app, tap the ‘i’ to get their contact card. Aside from that, the process is the same.
2/ Take screenshots — Sometimes there’s no better way of showing what’s on your iPhone than with a screenshot. Press both the sleep/wake button (on the top of iPhones up to 5, and at top-right of iPhones 6 and up) and the Home button simultaneously. It might take a little practice to get the hang of it, but once your iOS device recognizes the screenshot command, the screen will briefly flash white, as if a camera flash went off.
All screenshots get saved to your device’s Camera Roll. To view your screenshot, open the Photos app and look through your Camera Roll. iOS 9 and later makes finding your screen captures easier than ever by automatically placing them in a Screenshots album. From there, you can share and edit screenshots just as you would any other image file: crop them, share them with your friends, whatever.
3/ iPhone battery is draining faster than usual is a typical holiday concern — iOS reports the percentage of power use by app in Settings>Battery. This feature is a nifty way to see if anything has run amok. You can toggle between Last 24 Hours and Last 7 Days, which helps see if any particular app’s usage has spiked. Tapping the clock icon toggles between showing the way an app uses the battery other than in the foreground (Audio and Background Activity), and a display of the amount of time the app was in use on screen in the foreground and handling activities in the background.
4/ Make iOS 9’s default apps disappear — While Apple is still working on an official method of dealing with unwanted default apps in iOS, a glitch in iOS 9 through 9.2 will let people temporarily push them out of sight.
As seen in this video, users have to move the unwanted apps into a folder, then drag them as far to the right as possible, beyond any and all of the folder’s tabs. With an app still suspended ‘mid-air’, hitting the Home button simultaneously will cause it to vanish.
Apps hidden this way aren’t permanently deleted — instead, they return only once an iOS device is rebooted. Simply putting a device to sleep leaves them invisible.
5/ Camera: use a hardware shutter — You can use the physical volume buttons on the side of your iPhone to take the shot rather than the big onscreen button, which is handy if you’re holding the phone horizontally and at an awkward angle – but you can also use the Apple headphones with the remote controls on them (and third-party ones) that have inline volume controls on the cable.
6/ Use self-timer — There’s a self-timer on the iPhone as well: a two-second one and a 10-second one which is great for those press-the-shutter-run-back-into-shot-then-hold-a-grimace-way-past-the-point-you-think-it-should-have-triggered shots. Tap the little timer icon at the top in Camera mode to choose the one you want. You might be able to prop your iPhone up against something for these, but consider a tripod for more control and better results if the shot is important.
7/ Reduce camera shake — push the side of your body against a vertical surface to steady it, resting your elbows on a low wall, or even simply bracing your iPhone by holding it in both hands and tucking your elbows into your body. But also consider the two-second self-timer, since you’re not actually pressing a shutter when you’re taking a shot, camera shake is reduced: enable the timer, press the shutter, then in the two seconds before the camera actually takes the shot, brace yourself and hold the iPhone firmly.
8/ Burst mode — One reason pros are able to get such great portrait shots is because they can take many dozens or hundreds of shots and just pick the one that captures a fleeting expression or a moment of delight or seriousness. You can do the same with your iPhone, and it’s great for getting the perfect shot of your kid grinning or your dog’s guilty look when you discover him tearing up a cushion. Just hold the shutter down (whichever shutter you use – the virtual one on the camera screen or the volume control as above) and let the camera just keep shooting.
This uses up loads of space on your device, but once you get a quiet moment go to that burst of shots in your Camera Roll and tap Select. Now scrub through all the shots, tap the ones you like then tap Done; you’ll be given the choice of saving everything or just the ones you selected, and in the latter case all the other, rubbish shots get deleted.
9/ Specific shooting mode with 3D Touch — If you have an iPhone 6s or 6s Plus (only), press hard on the icon for the Camera app on your Home screen and you get the option of jumping straight to slo-mo, video, selfie, or regular photo mode. (It’s worth reinstating the Camera app back to your first screen of apps if you’d previously banished it because of the Control Center button for launching it, partly for this direct-mode-launch feature but also because Touch ID is so fast on the 6s-generation devices that you never get the chance to see Control Center from the Lock screen!)
10/ Go nuts with filters — You might think that the filters you can apply when you’re taking photos—look for the three-overlapping-circles icon at the bottom right—mean that the effect is permanently “baked into” your shot, but that’s no so. Even though the filter looks like it’s applied when you view your photo in your Camera Roll, actually what your iPhone has done is save the unfiltered photo along with an invisible tag that says “put the filter in front of this image when displaying it.”
Tap Edit and you can change the filter or remove it completely. This goes for the Light, Color, and B&W controls you can tweak too.
Mac NZ 