iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

Tired of scrolling through Messages threads looking for photos and links friends and family have sent you? Find them the easy way; here's how!

In iOS 8 you can now quickly access your contacts via the App Switcher by double clicking the Home Button. If you don't want to look at a list of your favorite and most recent contacts every time you use the App Switcher, or if you don't want anyone else to easily see who you call or text most often, you can disable the feature in settings.

There are many new features available to you in iOS 8 in the Photos and Camera apps. When you're viewing an individual photo, one nice new feature is the ability to designate it as a favorite. Then those photos that you've identified as favorites are automatically collected into an album titled Favorites.

If you find it more convenient to listen to some text on your iPhone or iPad rather than read it, you can easily enable that capability. You might, for example, want your device to read a web page, ebook, or another document to you while you perform household chores. Here’s how to use text-to-speech on iPhone or iPad.

It's that time of year again. Right after a new iPhone comes out there is the inevitable deluge of great cases to protect your new investment. This happens with every iPhone release, but perhaps never more markedly than with the introduction of the completely new form factors of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. If ever an iPhone called for a protective case it is these large and larger models, with their increased real estate, slick, rounded edges and extra heft. Rather than clump an assortment of different cases together, I'll be focusing on one great case each week over the course of the coming months. In a break from the norm, this week we are featuring two different waterproof cases: the LUNATIK TAKTIK 360 ($119.95) and the LUNATIK AQUATIK ($89.95).

Thanks to iOS 8, Apple lovers finally have access to widgets on their iPhones. But users will find some widgets more useful than others. Maximize their utility by deleting widgets you don't need to see in the Today view in Notifications and arranging the rest in the most convenient order.

Protocols are a powerful, advanced tool that help make your apps easier to design and extend. They define standard behavior in classes that are not necessarily related. Protocols used together with delegates allow you to create classes with a well-balanced load of responsibilities.