iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

Previously, we covered creating keyboard shortcuts to help you quickly type commonly used phrases. Did you know you can also create shortcuts for emoji characters (those cute emoticons that go way beyond your average smiley face)? This is handy if you use a lot of emoji characters and don't want to switch back and forth between keyboards all the time.

If you own an Apple Watch, you already know that the built-in speaker it comes with is not designed to deliver high-quality audio, at any appreciable volume. Yet with a respectable onboard storage capacity for your music, the Apple Watch has the potential to store and deliver great sounding audio wherever you go, if you have a quality Bluetooth speaker that is. A good Bluetooth speaker can also work wonders when it comes to phone calls and FaceTime chats, as most Bluetooth speakers these days also house a built-in microphone for such purposes. Here are three of our favorite Bluetooth speakers that serve as perfect complements to the Apple Watch.

Do you always measure ingredients exactly when following a recipe? Do you say things like, "According to my pedometer app, I've walked 3.8 miles today."? Do you use decimals when filling out your weight on medical forms?

If you do, you'll be happy to know you can also quantify exactly how much battery power your iPhone has left.

How to Manually Add Data in the Health App on iPhone

Apple's Health app helps iPhone users keep track of a variety of data concerning their health all in one place, such as tracking how many steps they take in a day, body measurements, heart rate, and more. In addition to information collected by the iPhone or imported from a healthcare provider, your Health app can also accept data that you enter manually. Let's get started learning how to manually enter data into the Health app on your iPhone.

With all of our information in "the cloud," it feels like we have everything at our fingertips. Emails, dates, calendar appointments, and phone numbers easily pop up on whatever device we're using and sometimes we take for granted how it all syncs up. Syncing your Google and Yahoo contacts with your phone is a super simple process and I'm going to walk you through it now. 

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure, and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 20 of the series. If you are just getting started now, check out the beginning of the series here (This post has been updated to Swift 1.2, Xcode 6.3 and iOS 8).

So far in this series, you have learned just enough about table views to get through some basic exercises. In this post, I'll cover some of the basics by way of review, and then we will take a deep dive into the world of managing lists of data with table views.

We've shown you before how to customize the Today view in your Notification Center by removing unwanted widgets and reordering the widgets you do want. But you may have noticed there's no option to remove the Apple Weather widget, which is frustrating if you've also got a widget from your preferred third-party weather app and want to remove any redundant widgets.

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