Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how you can use a personal automation
shortcut to get settings in your iPhone to change but only when you're in one app.
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Now suppose there's an app on your iPhone that you have trouble using unless you adjust some
settings. Like maybe making the contrast greater or changing the font size. But you don't want to
change this for your entire iPhone. You just want this one app to behave differently. Well,
you can use a shortcuts app to create a personal automation that will change a
setting on your iPhone whenever you launch an app and change it back when you leave the app.
So as an example let's look at the Calendar app. If you go into the Calendar app you may think
the fonts are too small on your iPhone and you would like to make them bigger. You could do this
by going to the Settings app and in there go to Accessibility and then
under Vision go to Display & Text Size. Here you can turn on Larger Text and you could see
it's increased here in the Settings app. Then when you go to the Calendar app you could see
everything looks a lot bigger. But now all the fonts and all sorts of different apps are bigger.
Let's say you just want to do it for the Calendar app. So let's switch it back to the normal size.
Let's go into the Shortcuts app. Here I'm going to click on Automations at the bottom. I'm going to
create a personal automation. Now I'm going to set this personal automation to be triggered whenever
an app is opened. So let's choose the app. I can choose from all the apps I have installed.
In this case we'll choose Calendar. We're going to set it to Is Opened. Then next
we're going to choose the Actions. So I'm going to Add an Action here and now I can search for
different actions. So let's search for the Text Size change there in Settings. You can see here
if I look through when I search for Text with the Settings icon next to it
Set Text Size. I'll select that. It's set to Set Text Size to extra small. That's not what
we want. We want to go and make it Extra Extra Extra Large. So that's the top setting there.
Now we're going to do Next and you could see here it's set to When, Calendar is opened. Do, Set Text
Size. Ask Before Running - No. We don't want it to ask. We just want it to do it automatically.
So let's test this out. I'll tap Done there.
Let's go Home. Now you could see the text is normal size. But when I go into the Calendar app
it changes it. It's automatically to the larger size. The problem is when I go back Home
it's still set to the larger size. So let's go in and add another shortcut. So in the Shortcuts app
here I'll add another personal automation and I'm going to set this also for App.
Choose the app and I'm going to choose Calendar again. But this time When, Is Closed
and turn off is opened. Here I'll add an action. I'll search for that same thing. So that way Set,
text and you could see it appears right there, and I can go in and have it go to Default.
So now when the Calendar is closed it will set the text size back to default. I can turn
off Ask before running. Done. So now I have two things here. When Calendar is closed it's going
to set the text size to default. When Calendar is opened it sets it to that extra extra extra Large.
So let's go back into Calendar now. Everything is still large text size from
when we had it set before. So I go into Calendar but this time when I leave Calendar
it's going to set everything back. You could see it jump there at the last second. So now
every time we go into the Calendar app everything gets big and every time we go back everything gets
small again. That's not all we can do. We can do a lot more. If we go into the Shortcuts app here
I can go back in to When Calendar is opened here and I can add more things here to do.
So I can use Plus here and, for instance, I can search for Contrast and you could see
Set Increased Contrast. So some apps look better with increased contrast. You can have
that automatically happen. I could also invert the colors if I want. I could go and Search for
Colors and instead of Classic Invert I'm going to do Set Smart Invert. So it won't invert photos
and things. So this is going to set the text size to really big and turn on Smart Invert.
Now I'll go back here, Done. I'll change the When Closed to Add the same thing except turning off
Smart Invert. So I'll switch the to Off.
So now you could see When, Calendar is Closed text size and set at smart invert and the same
thing when it's opened. Now let's test this out. If I go into the Calendar app
there it goes. Text set large and it inverts. When I exit the Calendar app
everything goes back to normal.
Plus you don't have to do this for each individual app. If you like these settings and you want to
have it for several apps you could go in here and notice under When, when calendar is opened, I can
go back in here. Under app I can tap there and I can add another app. Let's say we'll also have
that happen in the Contacts app. I'll add it to the Contacts app there and now it says Any of Two
Apps. I'll do the same thing for When, Is Opened I'll change from Calendar to also add Contacts.
Now the same thing will happen when we launch the Contacts app. You could see
text gets bigger. It inverts. But when I go back Home you can see everything sets back.
So you can continue to go in here and add new apps to this list,
add new Actions to be performed under Do, or add a new pair of Actions and have it
do different things. Like maybe increase the contrast but when other apps are run.
I tried this out on a couple different iPhones and one of the things I did notice
was that it works much better on newer iPhones. On my iPhone 11 ProMax for instance it kind of
happens instantly. Whereas an iPhone a couple of years older than that you can
see how it took a second for it to make all those adjustments. So try this out. Play around with it.
The shortcut is basically exactly the same as you going into settings manually and changing these
settings. There's no magic to it. So it's easy to play around with it. If you make a mistake
it's easy to go into Settings and change those things back to be exactly as you want them.