As I’m making this video, I reckon we’re about two months, maybe a bit less,
from Apple releasing iOS17 fully, to the public. And while that’s exciting and all,
there are still so many amazing things that your iPhone can do,
that I reckon most people don’t know about. So while we wait for iOS17, here are 10 ‘How did
I not know that’ iPhone tips, all available on iOS16. Stick with me to the end of this video,
if you’re someone who likes to find every last tip and trick within your iPhone.
OK, let’s get into it.
1 - SpaceBar to select blocks of text You probably already know the tip where
you can use the spacebar on your iPhone’s keyboard as a trackpad,
I’ve covered it many times here on the channel, but in case you’re unfamiliar with it,
you would basically tap and hold on the space bar with your thumb or your finger,
and then move it around the screen, and you can see the cursor moving around with it,
allowing you to drop the cursor wherever you need to with pretty remarkable accuracy.
But watch this. If you tap and hold for a moment, and then use another finger to tap the space bar,
notice that the cursor changes to a text selection tool. You can then use the finger or thumb that
you’ve still got pressed down on the space bar, to gently swipe up to select a passage of text.
You would then tap into the selected passage, to get the usual cut, copy, paste options.
Now, I’ve found that the best way to use this is to begin at the end of a passage that you’d
like to select, because this works best if you’re swiping up, essentially you run out
of screen if you start from the top and try to swipe down. It takes some getting used to,
but it’s a proper lightbulb moment if you find selecting text difficult on your iPhone.
2 - Change Pano Direction It’s really easy to create
panoramic photos on your iPhone, you simply open your camera app, and choose the Pano option,
then hold your phone as steady as you can while you move your camera from left to
right. But what if you want to move from right to left instead? Simply tap in the arrow section
of your phone’s display to change the direction of the arrow. The process is exactly the same,
just in the opposite direction, and the end result will be just as good.
3 - Remove entire Home Screens from your phone OK so, here’s the homescreen of this particular
iPhone, and you can see that I’ve got a couple of widgets, and then a bunch
of apps. And you already know I’m sure, that if you swipe, you’ll move to the next page of apps,
and then if I swipe again, in this case, I get to the App Library. The App Library is really useful,
and a great way of quickly finding a specific app, if you’ve got quite a few on your iPhone.
So with that in mind, you might decide that the apps on this second screen of your iPhone are apps
that you want to keep, but you don’t need to see this particular page of apps, maybe they’re ones
that you don’t use very often. You can hide them, in literally just a couple of seconds.
Tap and hold on the Home Screen to enter jiggle mode, and when that happens,
tap here, in what looks like an ellipsis menu. It’s not actually an ellipsis,
it represents the Home Screen pages you’ve got on your phone.
Notice our two pages of apps, with a checkbox underneath them. If I uncheck one of these,
it will hide that page of apps. You’ve then got the option to fully remove the page if you like,
I tend to think that hiding them is probably better as you can always change your mind later
on if you like, but remember, you’re only getting rid of the page, you’re not deleting the apps.
Choose Done when you’re ready, and you can see that the page of apps is hidden. To get it back,
repeat the process, but tick the box to add it back in.
PDF Shoutout By the way,
there is an accompanying PDF for this video, with full step by step guide including screenshots,
and you can access it, along with all PDFs moving forward, and the growing library of old ones,
for just $5 a month. Click the link in the description of this video that says ‘get the PDF’.
4 - Record your screen with a voice over I’m sure you’re already aware that if you go
into Settings, then Control Centre, you can ensure that you’ve got the screen recording function
enabled and included within your Control Centre. Screen Recording lets you record video of what’s
happening on your iPhone’s screen, as you can imagine I use it all the time. But let’s say that
you’re using it because you’ve got something weird happening on your screen, and you want to send
a video of it to someone to see if they can help you, wouldn’t it be good if you could include your
voice, annotating the issue while you’re recording the screen, instead of just silent video?
Do this. When you open the Control Centre, instead of tapping the Screen Record button,
tap and hold it. Select your microphone. You can then press Start Recording,
and your screen recording will begin as normal, but your mic will be enabled, so whatever you
record will also pick up your microphone, allowing you to provide your own voice over.
FYI, your phone will remember that setting, so if you only
want to have your mic enabled the one time, remember to go back in and switch this off,
otherwise you might catch yourself out next time you’re recording your screen.
5 - Take perfectly level photos OK so, you’re at a restaurant, your food
gets brought to your table, what’s the first thing that you do? You take a picture of it for your
socials right? No, me neither, but a lot of people do, and if you do, you might find this tip useful.
Your iPhone has a built-in function to help you get a perfectly horizontal shot. Because often,
when you think that your phone is facing straight down, it’s actually still at a bit of a wonky
angle, well this can help you solve that issue. Open Settings, then scroll down to Camera and tap
into there. Under the Composition setting, ensure that Grid is toggled on. Then open your camera.
You can see that to begin with, your phone now displays a grid when you’re taking pictures,
which is helpful for composing good photos anyway. But notice what happens when you
hold your iPhone flat. You get a yellow and white crosshair appear in the centre
of the screen. The yellow is where you want to be, the white is where you are currently,
and you simply have to move your phone to bring those two together. When that happens,
and your crosshairs are entirely yellow, you’ve got a perfectly level shot.
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6 - Have your iPhone listen out for a sound Your iPhone has a function within the
accessibility menu called Sound Recognition. With this enabled, your iPhone can listen out
for a number of sounds for you, and notify you if it hears that particular sound. Clearly,
this isn’t designed to replace your ability to listen out for things,
but if you’re hard of hearing, or in a situation where you might need a little help,
it can be a really good feature to have your phone listen out for things where you might struggle.
It’s got a bunch of default sounds already included, things like breaking glass,
babies crying, dogs barking, a doorbell ringing, and I’m sure it’s pretty obvious why you might use
those specific sounds. But what if you want something a bit more customised to you? For
example, our LG washing machine makes a really specific sound when it’s finished it’s cycle,
and this one doesn’t have any phone connectivity, so the only way you can know when it’s finished
is to either set a timer when you start the wash, and let’s be honest the timers
on washing machines always lie, or listen out for it. Or rather, have your phone listen out for it.
Head into Settings, then Accessibility, then Sound Recognition. Toggle the function on,
and if your phone needs to download some files for this, allow it to,
it’s around 25MB so nothing too big. Then tap into Sounds, and scroll
down to Household, and tap on Custom Appliance or Doorbell.
Give your custom sound a name, and choose Continue.
On this next screen, you’re going to need to record the sound that you’d like your phone to
listen out for, and you’ll need to do it 5 times in a row. How you get that sound is of course up
to you, I’m probably going to suggest that you record it on another device, running your washer
5 times is going to be a bit laborious, or you might be able to do like I did, and go on YouTube
and find a video with the sound, and you can just grab it from there. Hold your phone so it
can hear the sound, and hit Start Listening. Your phone should automatically realise when
the sound is finished, and then you’d simply repeat the process 5 times.
Once that’s done, and you’ve got your 5 green ticks, give your phone a moment
and it should let you know that your custom sound is ready to go.
Now, whenever your phone hears this specific sound, it will alert you to it.
7 - Swipe to select multiple items There is a hack that I reckon most people
don’t know about on your iPhone for selecting lots of things at the same time. So here for example,
in the Messages app, let’s say that I want to select lots of these auto text messages that
you get sent with verification codes, and I want to delete them. You could tap the ellipsis menu,
then choose Select Messages, then tap each one with your finger to select them.
Or, you could take two fingers, and swipe down the page. So much quicker.
This doesn’t work in Photos, but what does work is the Grid Select method of selecting lots of photos
all at once. So for example, here I can press Select, and then with one finger, I can swipe from
left to right to select a whole row of photos. But if you keep your finger pressed down while
you do this, you can not only select a row, but an entire grid of photos all at once by swiping down.
8 - Swipe left for Burst photos How often have you seen people quickly
tapping the shutter button on their camera app, desperately trying to capture the perfect photo,
maybe because something’s happening really quick like your kid’s sports day or your dog running on
the beach. It makes sense, take loads of pictures, pick the one you like the best
later. But it’s so much easier than what you’re doing, and more effective, if you do this instead.
In the camera app, when you press the shutter button, swipe it to the left
and hold it there for a second instead. Your camera will take a burst photo.
Then, when you go into the Photo library,
your phone does try to show you that it’s a burst pic, although it’s a kind of subtle effect.
But when you tap into the image, it says Burst in the upper left of the screen, and there’s this
new Select option at the bottom. Tap on that, then scroll or swipe through the pictures. Tap
to select the ones that you’d like to keep only. Choose Done, and you can either keep everything,
or just the ones that you’ve selected, which is what I would choose personally.
9 - The Magnifier App Your iPhone has a magnifier app
built into it, and you would access it by going to the App Library and searching for Magnifier.
At it’s most basic level, it’s a camera app with a powerful digital zoom built into it,
allowing you to zoom in on things. I can imagine that if you’ve got some kind of special visual
requirement, the ability to zoom in on small text for example is always going to be really useful.
The problem, for me at least, is that the Magnifier app isn’t all that intuitive,
but let me show you how you can use it. So here for example, let’s say I want to see some of the
text on the back of this smart thermostat, I can open the Magnifier, and I’m going to tap on the
cog in the lower left of the screen, then choose Default, to set everything back to it’s default.
Then I’m going to tap on the Contrast button to use the slider scale to change the contrast.
If you can’t see that by the way, tap into the cog, and add it to your view from in there. The
slider scale above with the magnifying glass is your magnification slider.
You then have to tap on the Contract icon to get you back to the previous menu,
and from here you can choose other options. This filter option is quite useful,
as you can do things like invert the black and white, make the image red on black,
anything that you might find useful for your eyes. And then at any time, you can tap the Freeze
Frame button to capture a picture. With that image captured, you can still make
changes to the filters here, or you can share this image with someone if you wish.
10 - Draw PERFECT Shapes So here’s a photo, and you
may already know that you can mark a photo on your iPhone, you would hit the Edit button,
and then the pen button, and that would bring up the markup menu. From here,
you would select a pen or a pencil or whatever you like, and you can draw shapes on the screen.
So for example, here if I draw a circle, you can see that I’m able to freehand a
pretty awful looking circle. But watch what happens if,
when I finish drawing the circle, I hold my finger on the screen for just a moment.
My iPhone recognises that I’m trying to draw a circle, and creates a perfect one for me.
You can do this for other shapes as well, so for example I can freehand a square, which isn’t
especially good either, but then I can do exactly the same thing, and get a perfectly drawn square.
Also, once you’ve drawn it, tap this button,
and then draw around the shape. This selects it, and you can now move it around the screen,
so it’s helpful if you’ve maybe drawn this in the wrong place.
I’ve been able to get this to work with rectangles, with triangles, and with stars,
so give it a go, and see what shapes you can now perfectly draw on your iPhone.
End So there you go,
10 tips for the iPhone that I reckon the majority of people still aren’t aware of. What about you,
what would you have included in this list? Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.