iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

The Notes app is your handy iPad and iPhone notepad and sketchpad. If you're looking for a drawing app for the iPad, look no further than the built in Notes. You can simply draw right on the note as though it were the paper. Here’s how to add inline drawings to Notes on iPhone.

Augmented Reality (AR) is supposedly "the next big thing" in videogames, and Apple has embraced that possibility by outfitting iOS game developers with ARKit to help standardize and accelerate AR on iOS. During the recent iPhone 8 and 8 Plus and iPhone X launch event, Apple had a developer from Directive Games take to the stage and demonstrate the company's ARKit-powered new game, The Machines. After upgrading to iOS 11, the first AR-enabled game I played was The Machines ($4.99). Does it live up to the hype? Read on to find out.

Online shopping is more popular than ever. Not only is it super easy to click and have a product show up on your doorstep, but also shipping prices and wait times are low enough to make you want to buy just about everything online. But once you’ve ordered something (or many somethings), you start receiving tracking numbers. And then to check the status of a package, you end up searching through emails trying to find your tracking number again. But what if there was an app that seamlessly synced across all of your devices, tracked your packages, and alerted you about arrivals? Ah yes, say hello to Deliveries: A Package Tracker ($4.99). Whether on iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, you’ll always know the status of your packages. Here’s more on what Deliveries does and why we love it.

An iPhone Live Photo captures 1.5 seconds before and after a shot is taken, making it easy to accidentally catch the blur from lowering your phone, or worse, something you don’t want anyone to see. The solution is simple, as you can just trim out unwanted frames. Here’s how to edit Live Photos on your iPhone.

Do you like to multitask and find yourself trying to text with one hand? Or are the newer iPhone models just too big for you to use one-handed? Well, the one-handed keyboard on iPhone has come in handy (pun intended) more than once after learning this tip. This one is super quick to access and makes quickly typing out a message that much more convenient when you only have one hand at the ready.

In the 70th episode of the iPhone Life Podcast, tune in as David takes on Conner in a debate over whether Spotify or Apple Music is the superior music streaming service. 

A heavily requested feature for iOS 11 was Dark Mode. Dark Mode essentially turns white space black while leaving media, photos, and content the same. However, we did not get an official Dark Mode in iOS 11, and we haven't gotten one for iOS 12, either. Hopefully this will come out soon because macOS Mojave does offer this feature. For now, though, the next best thing is pretty darn fantastic. Inverting colors on iPhone in the past meant distorting the look of photos and content as well. But iOS 11 introduced Smart Invert, which is (almost) as good of a Dark Mode as we need. Here’s how to turn on Dark Mode or Night Mode in iOS 12 on iPhone, this will invert colors on your display and reduce eye strain.