Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I’m excited because whenever I dive into the nether reaches of my iPhone or of iOS,
I always find new and unexpected and sometimes very pleasurable ways of doing things and
it’s best when I get to share that with friends.
So today, unexpected pleasures in iOS on DottoTech.
All right, we have seven things to go through today so we’ve got lots of little tips to
teach you about.
These are all things that perhaps you know about but perhaps you don’t, but I think
they’re all useful ways to get more out of our mobile device, in this case our iPhone.
The first one it really was a joy to discover.
It’s in the Notifications area.
Now notifications happen when you swipe from the very top of the screen down and that basically,
regardless of what you’re doing in the iPhone, brings up all of your notifications that are
being delivered to you.
These are typically text messages or emails that are coming into your system and we see
them all listed here.
But the cool thing, and it’s good to just be able to see what notifications are coming
into your system, but here is where it gets better.
If you swipe from the right side of your screen to the left on any one of these messages,
if it’s a Gmail or an email, you can reply or archive it directly from the notifications
screen.
So you can do a certain amount of email triage if you just want to archive messages so that
they aren’t in your inbox next time you can it and you’ve noticed them.
You can do it.
Or if there is something urgent, you can go reply to it right now as well.
That launches your email client and allows you to reply immediately to the message.
Very cool, I think you will agree.
But it goes beyond just emails.
Actually, you can just test every message type.
Lots of message types like my message from Agora Pulse—it’s just a message here—but
look here, I’ve got a message that came in as a text message.
If I swipe to the left there, I can actually go in and reply to that.
So again, I don’t have to exit the notification screen, launch messages in order to reply
to a text message.
No, no, no.
I can just reply directly from here.
Very cool, I think you will agree.
Next up, we’re going to talk about batteries.
Our battery life on our smart devices frankly sucks for most of us.
But we can improve things.
Now if we go into the Settings in the iPhone, they’ve got a battery setting there where
you can go into your battery setting and the interesting thing to look at is the battery
usage.
If you take a look there, it will tell you what apps are using what percentage of your
battery consumption over what period of time.
You can see here over the last seven days and over the last 24 hours, I’ve had a different
variety of apps that use up my time.
If we tap on any of them, it brings up the exact amount of time that it actually is used
both in the foreground and in the background.
So this is a great little bit of sleuthing work that you can do to see exactly what’s
running in the background which is the real insidious battery drain.
You know pretty much what you’re on and what you’re using and how much battery it’s
draining just because you’re using the app.
So the ones that are on the screen at the time, that’s fairly self-evident.
It’s what it does in the background that kind of gives you an idea of how you can better
manage your apps.
So this is a great way for you to look at things.
Next up, I want to show you some features in our messages screen.
Now when we go into any thread in messages, if we look at the very top of that message
thread—these are basically texts that we’ve been sending back and forth—we have detail
screen.
If we go into the details, we’ve got a variety of different really valuable information available
to us.
Now this is where we go to do things like change the contact information in our contact
list.
But also here is a roster of all the different attachments that we’ve sent to that person.
What are attachments?
Things like photos and videos that we might have sent.
Even the instant ones that we do right within the messaging app are here and available to
us.
So if you need to find a photo that you sent to a friend by text and you can’t quickly
find it in the camera roll, a quicker way is to go into the detail screen and you’ll
find it there as basically a catalogue of all of the images or all of the videos that
you’ve shared with that individual.
Very cool, I think you will agree but even more cool are the location services.
Now these work in two ways.
Under Location, we can send my current location and this is what you’d use if say you’re
at a coffee shop, a friend says, “Hey Steve, where are you?”
I say well, I’m right here.
I tap on Send my current location and it sends a text to that individual with a map pin including
the current location so they can navigate to you immediately and effortlessly.
The other option here is Share my location which does the same sort of thing but it does
it on a continuous and ongoing basis so you can track where a person is or where their
phone is at any time.
This is incredibly valuable.
Let’s say a family is on vacation.
A few of you want to grab a bite, a few of you want to go shopping and you’ve agreed
to meet at a third location afterwards.
If you turn on Share my location with each other, you can track where each of the groups
are in real time.
It’s very convenient but it also adds a great level of security to your family unit
as you’re doing this.
So these two location services, awesome.
Now to be fair, share my location is a bit of a battery hog but what’s a little bit
of battery juice compared to knowing where your loved ones are at all times?
Now before we leave the messages area, I want to talk about video and audio messages which
is something that I’ve not used a lot.
Perhaps you have.
But if we look on the left-hand side when we go into type a text message, we see we
have the camera icon there which will allow us to grab our camera and share an image or
take a picture and share it with whoever we’re texting to.
But did you know that if you just press and hold down on that, up will come the ability
for you to take photo automatically or go up and actually record a video.
And as long as my thumb is over top of this, I’m recording a video which I can then take
and automatically share with the person I’m texting.
How freaking cool is that?
Stop.
Now I could send Sienna—I’m sure she won’t appreciate it—this video of me just ranting
about how cool this is.
She wouldn’t, of course, know exactly what I’ talking about so I won’t do that.
But that same functionality is available on the audio side of it.
We just tap on the other side, the microphone icon, it starts recording and now we’re
recording a voice-over which we can then send to whoever it happens to be, a little voice
message.
So we have the ability to record both audio and video messages.
Now one cool aspect of this is you can actually set these messages to expire, sort of like
the early days of SnapChat.
So you can send it to somebody and say that it’ll only last for two hours before it
expires.
Go back into Settings.
We go down till we find Messages and in Messages, we scroll down to Audio Messages and Video
Messages.
Do you see there?
We can tell them to expire after a period of time so that we then have the ability not
to be clogging things up but to be able to send those instant messages that are time
sensitive as well.
So that is a very cool aspect that we have for video and audio messages in our messaging
area.
The very last thing I am going to show you in this cornucopia of interesting iPhone and
iOS tricks is a Siri trick, Siri, of course, the voice recognition tool built in.
We know that if we hold our Home button down for a moment that it will invoke Siri and
then we can ask Siri something.
But there’s also a voice recognition or a voice activation feature built in that you
have to turn on that allows you to use Siri in a completely hands-free mode.
So watch what happens.
What happens is you say the word.
“Hi Siri.
Hey Siri” and then Siri will wake up and ask you.
So watch and be amazed.
“Hey, Siri.
What’s the weather going to be like today in Ladner?”
“Today, the temperature will range from 8 degrees to 15.”
“Thank you.”
“Hey Siri, when is my next vet appointment?”
“Your next appointment is at 2:30 PM Tuesday.”
I’ve got an English Siri.
It sounds so much more sophisticated as an assistant, don’t you think?
I have to show you how to find that.
I got all excited about showing you Siri and then I didn’t show you how to find that.
So you go back into Settings and within Settings you go into General.
Within General, you find Siri and you have a little toggle switch right there that allows
you to use Hey, Siri.
The odd time Siri is woken up unbidden, such as I think when I say the word “history”
or something like that, Siri will then wake up at that particular point.
But for the most part, it’s tremendously useful if you want to have full hands-free
access to Siri occasionally.
And with that, our 7 very cool iOS features that you probably didn’t know about is now
complete.
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Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!