Apple Apps

Apple's new operating system, iOS 13, has a helpful new feature in the Health App; Cycle Tracking. This period tracker is useful for not only logging your menstrual cycle, but also symptoms associated with it, such as spotting, basal body temperature, fertility tracking, and calculating when your next period will start. Let's get started learning how to set up Cycle Tracking on your iPhone. 

High-Key Light Mono, for the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max, is a gray-scale portrait effect that whites out the background and turns up the highlights on your subject. To use this effect, open your Camera app and use the Portrait Mode lighting wheel to select High-Key Light Mono. Here’s how to use High-Key Light Mono in the Photo app on your iPhone 11, 11 Pro, or 11 Pro Max.

Sometimes, while browsing the internet, you'll come across words you don't understand or subjects you want to learn more about. The Look Up menu provides links to several options; Apple's dictionary, Siri suggested websites, Wikipedia, the App Store, Twitter, and more. You can even use Look Up as a free thesaurus app for Safari, or use the Look Up feature in Safari to find additional references to a word or phrase on the internet. Here’s how to use the Look Up feature in Safari.

One of the new features of Apple's latest operating systems, iOS 13 and iPadOS, are Memoji sticker packs for older iPhones right in the Messages app. It's been possible to send Animoji and Memoji stickers in texts before, but now it's easier than ever for a larger number of iPhones and iPads to send Memoji stickers, even if they can't create and send the animated emoji videos. Let's get started learning about Memoji and Animoji stickers, how to create them, and which devices can send and receive them.

Your Apple's HomePod delivers a high-fidelity audio experience and helps control Homekit devices with Siri. Did you know that you can also transfer phone calls from your iPhone to your HomePod for speakerphone calls? Simply tap the audio icon while making a call, and select the HomPod from the list of audio options. Using your HomePod as a speakerphone is a great way to go hands-free when you need to move around the room without carrying your iPhone or worrying about sounding muffled. Let's get started learning how to transfer calls on your iPhone to your HomePod so you can use your HomePod as a speakerphone. 

With the Files app, you can use your iPhone to view notes, images, documents, and files that you've saved from your computer or iPad to iCloud and other storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive. To view saved items using the Files app, you'll need to go to your Apple ID in the Settings app and enable iCloud Drive. Let's get started with how to use the Files app to access documents saved to iCloud Drive.

Apple's Health app can tell you how many flights of stairs you've climbed or steps you've taken, your cycling distance, calories, weight, and, starting with iOS 13, how often your headphones were too loud. Sorting through all that data could be daunting, but the Summary tab can be customized to show only what you want to see: simply go open the Health app, tap the Summary tab, tap Edit in the top right corner, and then select the kinds of data you want to see in your summary. More health minded? With a HealthKit accessory, you can track your resting heart rate, blood pressure, and respiratory rate. Looking to focus on nutrition? The Health app can show your nutrients including sodium, fat, carbohydrates, and fiber. Choosing which of all these metrics to view is easy! Let me show you how.

When you want lines to draw within or a grid to help you stay on track, you can choose a one-time paper style or set up a default paper style to automatically appear in your Notes. To change the style of paper to a lined or grid pattern in the Notes app, tap on the export icon and select Lines & Grids to open the style sheet. When you type, the paper style disappears in that part of the tip; but for drawing by hand in the Notes app, choosing the paper style can make a big difference. Here’s how to change the paper style in Notes on the iPhone.

Enabling notifications on an email thread lets you sit back and wait for that important reply without feeling the need to check your inbox every five minutes. You can turn on notifications for a thread either from the subject line of an email you are composing or by swiping left on a thread inside your inbox. Here are the two methods for enabling notifications on email threads in the Mail app.

The ability to mark, move, or delete emails using the Mail app comes in handy when you need to manage your inboxes. You can easily mark, move, or delete an email in your iPhone's Mail app from within the body of an email using the menu at the bottom of your screen. You can also manage individual emails from within your inbox by swiping to the left over the email. But this is tedious if you have a large number of emails to deal with.

The Apple Pencil is seen by many iPad users as a stylus (much to Jony Ive's annoyance), but its main use is as a tool for markups and creative projects in apps like Procreate or something more simple like Notes. Here are some quick tips for drawing with the Apple Pencil including adjusting opacity and line thickness, shading with the side of the Pencil's nib, erasing, and using the Apple Pencil 2's double tap feature to switch between tools. While there is some overlap with the basics functions of both a regular pencil and an Apple Pencil, you'll find the Apple Pencil has potential to unlock a digital flood of creative possibilties and may help with an artist block or two.

If you want to get a better handle on file organization on your iPhone, the Files app can really help. Here's how to make a folder in the Files app. You'll have to have iOS 11 or later, and have set up and enabled iCloud Drive on your iPhone. You'll only be able to create a folder within the iCloud Drive category in the Files app. The On My iPhone category only stores files from apps that are downloaded to your device and can't be manually changed. 

When searching the web on your iPhone, you can use the search suggestions that appear below the search bar in Safari or Chrome instead of typing out your whole query. Usually when you tap a search suggestion, it immediately searches with those terms. With iOS 12.2 or later, when you tap the blue arrow next to a search suggestion, the phrase is added to the search bar and you'll be able to continue typing or tapping to add additional search suggestions 

Now that Apple has announced that it's getting rid of iTunes and splitting it into three, everyone wants to know, without iTunes, what will happen to my music library, will my playlists be transferred, and will the iTunes backup be replaced with a new option? Don’t worry; we’ve got the answers to all your burning iTunes related questions. 

During today's WWDC keynote Apple announced a lot of new watchOS 6 features that will give Apple Watch users more ability to leave their iPhones at home and options to further customize their watch'spotential and appearance. Expect new watch faces, improved fitness tracking, hearing health features, and much needed apps like Audiobooks, Voice Memos, and Calculator to be added to Apple Watch. The watch will also get its own App Store when watchOS 6 is released.

The Do Not Disturb function on iPhone allows you to silence all incoming calls, texts, and notifications. Here's how to bypass Do Not Disturb for individual contacts using a feature called Emergency Bypass. This allows the people designated to reach you on your iPhone even if your Do Not Disturb settings are set to silence calls and texts from everyone. Here's how you can tweak the a contact's settings to override Do Not Disturb when it’s turned on so that you’ll still hear their incoming call or text or both. 

Are you wondering how to use the Safari app because you're not quite sure what the icons mean? Here's a brief overview of the main icons in the iOS Safari app and how to use them. All the icons reviewed can be found along the bottom bar after you open the Safari app on your iPhone. The icons do the same thing in the iPad Safari app, but may be located in a different part of the screen.

If you came of age in the pre-smartphone era, you already know the basics of phone etiquette. But now that texting and messaging apps have overtaken phone calls as the preferred method of staying in touch, it’s a good idea to become familiar with the dos and don’ts of texting as well. Here’s how to avoid being the bane of the group chat, telling someone it’s funny that their loved one died, and snubbing someone just by letting them see that you read their message!

Want to see what any given week has in store for you in your iPhone's Calendar app? Just turn your iPhone on its side and you'll see your week in more detail. The Calendar app is one of a handful of iOS apps that shows you a different view if you hold your iPhone horizontally instead of upright. (You can see the Week view in both landscape and portrait oritentation on the iPad.) Looking at events in the week view allows you to see at a glance what you have planned over the next few days and makes it easy to reschedule events by dragging them from one time slot or day to another. Here's how to see the week view in Calendar. 

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