So you’ve got an iPhone, and you know all about tapping on the screen,
swiping up and down, pinching and pushing to zoom in and out - but do you know all
of the different gestures that you can do on your iPhone? I reckon most people don’t,
that’s why I’m going to share 20 amazing iPhone gestures with you in this video.
OK, let’s get into it.
I'm sure you already know that you can pinch and pull to zoom in and
out of the Maps app. Did you know that if you double-tap on the Map screen,
then keep your finger or thumb pressed down, you can move it up and down to zoom in and
out? This is really handy if you're trying to use the Maps app one-handed.
If you're in the settings part of your iPhone, you already know that you can use the menu in
the top left of the screen to go back to the previous page. But you can also swipe from
left to right. To do this, make sure that you're swiping all the way from the left of the screen;
otherwise, this might not work. The action is more of a flick than a swipe if I’m honest,
so you may have to practice this a little bit. But once you get it,
it's an incredibly quick way to navigate through the pages of settings.
When you're working with passages of text, you probably already know that you can tap anywhere
in the text to drop your cursor. Did you know that you can double and triple tap to select a preset
amount of text? Double tapping will select the word that you're currently tapping on,
while triple tapping will select the entire passage that you're currently tapping on.
If you're typing and you suddenly make a mistake, you can shake your iPhone as if you're shaking
a cocktail, and your iPhone will recognize this motion as you wanting to undo whatever you just
did. You would then tap the undo button on the screen to undo the text that you just wrote. The
nice thing about this is that it also works with things like moving apps or deleting apps from
your homepage. The downside is that it looks a bit silly. So, if you're working with text,
there is another option for undoing something that you just did, and that's to use three fingers and
swipe from right to left on the screen. Each time you do this, you will undo a piece of the
text that you just wrote. Swipe from left to right with 3 fingers, to redo whatever you just undid.
If you’re using an iPhone without a home button, you can swipe up from the bottom of the screen in
any app to exit the app and return to the home screen. Note that this doesn't close the app;
the app remains open in the background. This action simply takes you back to the home screen.
If you swipe and hold for a second, you will be taken to the app carousel. From there, you can
swipe left and right to navigate through all the apps that are currently open on your phone. Here,
you can swipe up on an app to force close it. However, it is important not to make a habit
of doing this too frequently. Your iPhone is designed to work most efficiently when
it has apps open and can manage them on its own. Closing apps that are functioning perfectly well
can actually slow down your iPhone and drain the battery faster. Nevertheless,
there may be times when you need to force close an app, and that is how you do it.
Let's say that I have this photo and I would like to email it to someone. I could tap the
share button at the bottom of the screen and then use the share sheet to open Mail,
compose a new email and do it that way. There is an alternative way of doing this though,
and that's to drag and drop. To do this, tap and hold on the image for a moment
and move your finger to start dragging the image around the screen. This takes a bit of practice,
but once you've done this a couple of times, you'll be really good at it. Keep your finger
on the screen, and with your other hand or another finger, swipe up from the bottom
of the screen to exit the Photos app. In the case of an email, you could then just drag the
image onto the Mail app. This will open a new email with your image preloaded, ready for you
to edit and then send. This works on all kinds of apps, including Messages, so give it a try.
If you're in Safari and you suddenly realize that you want to go back a few pages,
rather than tapping the back button multiple times, just tap and hold on the back button
and then choose the page you would like to go to from the list that appears.
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Be honest, how many times have you wanted to move an app from one page of your home screen to
another, and you do that thing where you drag the app to the edge of your iPhone's display and then
wait patiently for your iPhone to move you across to the next page? Sometimes this works, sometimes
it doesn't. A much easier way of doing this is to tap and hold to move the app around your screen,
then with another finger or with your other hand, swipe to the next page while still holding the app
down. Your iPhone will move to the next page, and you simply let go of the app where you want it.
If you find pressing buttons at the top of your iPhone's screen difficult when holding it with
one hand, you're not alone. iPhones are getting bigger all the time, and using them one-handed
can be difficult. There is a feature that you can enable in Accessibility called Reachability.
Open Settings, choose Accessibility, then choose Touch and ensure that Reachability is toggled
on. With this enabled, you can flick down from the bottom section of your iPhone, and you will
notice that the screen will scroll down with you. This does take a little bit of practice,
both getting used to the flick motion that you'll need to do and figuring out exactly where you need
to do this, but once you get the hang of it, it's very easy and you'll be able to do this
with either a finger or a thumb. With the screen swiped down, you simply tap to do whatever you
need to do at the top of the screen, and it will automatically return back to normal afterwards.
If you go to the Control Centre, you'll see that there are swipe controls for both the brightness
of your display and the volume of your phone. However, if you tend to use the buttons on the
left side of your iPhone to change the volume, you know that you just have the option to tap
up and down. You can technically use both methods if you like. Tap the volume up or
down button to display the volume bar on the screen, then swipe on the volume bar to access
swipe options for adjusting it. You need to be quick to make this work as the volume bar
disappears very quickly. Once you've mastered this technique, it becomes really easy to use.
Here I've got a note, and in that note I've got some bullet points. You're no doubt aware
that you can use indentation to have sub bullet points underneath your existing bullet points,
and there is a swipe gesture to help you do this. Simply swipe from left to right on a bullet to
increase its indentation. Swipe from right to left on a bullet to decrease its indentation.
If you tap and hold on a message in the Messages app, you have a number of options
to choose from, including things like copy, translate, and speak. But for most people,
you probably just want to either react to a message or reply to it. Because of this,
Apple has made these two options available by simply double-tapping on a message. As you can
see, I just tapped on one of the messages, and I can choose to either reply or react.
I'm not sure how useful this one actually is, so if you're someone who finds this useful,
do drop me a comment and let me know why you find it useful. But when you're typing,
you can use three fingers to pinch and push,
kind of like you do when you're zooming in and out, to copy and paste. With some text selected,
use three fingers to create a pinch motion on the screen. You can see that this copies
the text to the clipboard. Then use your three fingers to push outwards on the screen, and this
functions as a paste. This one definitely takes some practice to get good at, but it does work.
So here, I have a lot of emails, and I want to quickly select all of them. I could tap
the "Edit" button at the top of the screen and then make my way down the screen, tapping the
select buttons next to each of the emails. Alternatively, once I've pressed the "Edit"
button, I could use my finger to swipe down the select buttons to select multiple items at once.
Without even pressing the "Edit" button, I could use two fingers to swipe down the screen,
which will select multiple items all at the same time.
There's a similar trick that you can use in the Photos app. Tap the select button
in the top right corner of the screen, and then swipe your finger across images to
select multiple images. You can swipe from left to right to select a line of images,
or you can swipe diagonally downwards to select multiple rows of images.
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If you want to work with multiple images or files on your iPhone, you can create stacks. To do this,
tap and hold on the first image or file that you would like to work with and move
it around to start dragging it on the screen. While keeping that image or file selected,
use your other hand or a different finger to tap on the other images or files that you would
like to add to your stack. You'll see a count on the screen, which represents the number of
items that you're adding to your stack. With the stack still selected, you can then open
another app like the Files app, Mail app, or Messages app and drop the stack directly in.
This is kind of an old one now, but I still find people who don't know about this,
and it's an absolute game changer if you're learning about this for the first time. When
you're dealing with text on your iPhone, tap and hold on your spacebar. You can then move
your finger around the screen, and this will move the cursor around in relation
to your finger movement. This allows you to place the cursor exactly where you want in
the text that you're working on, giving you precise control over what you're writing.
When you're in Safari and you have lots of tabs open and you want to move from one to another,
I think what most people do is they tap on the tabs button in the bottom right-hand corner and
then tap on the tab that they would like to open instead. There is another way that you
can do this, and that's to swipe down at the bottom of the screen where the address bar is.
You can swipe left and right here, and that will move you from one open tab to the next.
If you go into Settings, then Accessibility, then Touch and scroll all the way to the bottom of this
menu, there is an option called Back Tap. Tap into here, and you can choose to enable either a double
tap or triple tap of the back of the iPhone. What this does is it allows you to assign a shortcut to
either a double tap or a triple tap of the rear of your phone. For the sake of this illustration, we
will do this for a double tap, but understand that it is exactly the same whether you do this for a
double tap or a triple tap. The only difference is what you will have to input to make this work.
When you tap into Double Tap, you can see that you can choose from a number of different functions to
enable when you perform the double tap. You might want this to open the camera,
in which case you would choose Camera. You might want this to enable Reachability,
in which case you would choose Reachability. I know a lot of
people use this for taking screenshots as they find it easier than the traditional method.
Choose your option for this example. I'm going to choose Screenshot. With that done,
you would then simply double or triple tap the back of your phone accordingly.
You may want to experiment between double tap and triple tap to see what
works for you. Some people find that having double tap enabled makes their
phone a bit trigger-happy with this, while others find the exact opposite.
All across your iPhone, there are potentially hidden functions if you don't know about them,
and that's the ability to tap and hold something to gain further options. So,
for example, on an app on the home screen, if you tap and hold for a moment, you may find that there
are quick options that you can access without having to open the app entirely. For example,
tapping and holding on the mail icon will give you quick options for accessing your
inboxes or composing a new mail. Doing this on the camera will give you the option to jump
straight into a portrait selfie, a video, or a regular selfie. This functionality
also exists within apps. For instance, in the camera app, if I tap and hold on the
format at the top of the screen, I can then change it to different options available.
Another useful feature is the keyboard. You can tap and hold on individual letters to get
different accents of that letter. For example, you can tap and hold on the zero key to get the degree
symbol. You can tap and hold on the emoji button to access the left and right-handed keyboard.
There are too many of these features across the iPhone ecosystem to show you all of them,
but a good rule of thumb is that if you haven't tried tapping and holding on something on the
iPhone yet, give it a go, as you may find it unlocks additional options for you.
If you're navigating your way through an especially long safari article,
the way that most of us do this is by swiping our way down on the screen. The problem is,
this is a bit like using the trackwheel on a mouse; you can end up going way too fast
or way too slowly. Instead, tap and hold on the scrollbar on the right side of the screen, and
you can then drag up or down as you wish, working your way through the article much more accurately.
So there you go, 20 gestures that I reckon every iPhone owner should know. Any in here that you
didn’t know about? Or any that I should have included? 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.