How-To

If you have an iPhone, you have the ability to send short video and audio messages right from a text message. This could be useful for sharing video or audio of where you are or what you’re doing with a friend without opening your camera or recording audio in the Voice Memos iOS app.

You can even set messages you send or receive to go away after two minutes (the default) or to stick around on your iPhone for a year. (Note that this will not determine how long the messages stay on a recipient's or other sender's phone.)

Instead of waiting by the phone for a call or text, what if you’re waiting for an important email? Sure, every few minutes you could unlock your phone, visit the mail app, open your Inbox, and see if it’s arrived. Or, you can ask Siri if you’ve received that email yet. Remember asking your parents from the back of the car, “Are we there yet?” Well, here’s how to ask Siri if that email is here yet.

Subscribing to a feed allows you to easily view and manage blogs, websites, or social media feeds from any Safari page. For example, if you discover a blog you really like, adding it to your subscriptions will allow you to quickly access and read any new posts. You’ll know which websites allow you to do this by whether or not the Add to Shared Links icon appears in your Share options. For websites that do allow it, here’s how to subscribe to a social media feed.

Many apps provide extra content or enhancements for a fee, but in-app purchases are a good way to accidentally rack up a high App Store bill. Those 99 cent extras add up quickly and before you know it, you (or your kids!) have gone way over your monthly phone bill budget. No worries though; there’s an easy way to prevent this in your Settings app. Here’s how to restrict in-app purchases.

How to Cancel Siri Commands

By Conner Carey

Apple’s AI, Siri, is constantly improving. You can use Siri to do more now than ever, including including playing albums, asking about sport scores, and turning on and off certain settings such as Low Power Mode or Bluetooth. However, sometimes you ask Siri to do something and change your mind or need to ask another question. For instance, if you ask Siri to set a reminder but realize you don’t need the reminder, it’s easy to cancel the command. Here’s how to cancel Siri commands.

There’s two ways to add events in mail to your calendar app. With iOS 9 or later, there’s a feature in Settings that allows for Events Found in Mail to automatically be added to your Calendar app. You can turn this feature on or off. If you’d prefer to turn it off, you can also add individual Mail events to your Calendar app manually. This tip will show you how to do both.

How to Sort Notifications

By Conner Carey

With iOS 9, you have the option to sort pull-down notifications. This allows you to group or ungroup apps and view notifications sorted manually or by most recent. When you group apps, they’re sorted into blocks under notifications with the most recent app appearing at the top. When apps are ungrouped, notifications will sort intermixed by most recent unless sorted manually.

In iOS 9, you can view specifics on which apps are using your iPhone’s battery. If you find your battery is draining quickly, viewing detailed battery info is a great way to figure out why. You can see which apps use chunks of your battery life, how long the app was active, and how long the app was running in the background. This is also a great way to see how much time you're spending on a particular app; in case you're still in denial about your Facebook habit.

How to Sketch in Notes

By Conner Carey


Notes receives my award for most improved app of the iOS 9 update. One of the big upgrades is the Sketch feature. Now, Notes combines text, sketch, picture, and sharing to give you many note-taking options. With three different "marker" tips, a ruler, eraser, and color easel, it's a pretty basic sketch application, but it's effective and easily combined with text or images. 

Touch ID has seen some major improvements since the release of the iPhone 6s. It’s more accurate and works much more often than it used to. But now, I find Touch ID unlocks my iPhone before I have a chance to check the notification that has popped up. Or, if I’m driving and I just want to change the song from the Lock screen, sometimes Touch ID works too quickly and I end up unlocking my iPhone and having to take the extra step of opening the Music app. Well, here’s our trick to get around that.

Depending on which apps or devices you have collecting information, the Health app on your iPhone can track your body measurements, fitness, nutrition, reproductive health, sleep, and more. It’s a great way to get an overview of your activity level and health in general. I particularly like the calendar menu which allows me to select any day and see the stats organized below. Should you want to export your data from your Health app, whether it be to share with a personal trainer or your doctor, here’s how to do it.

Many movie files that work on your computer don’t necessarily work on an iPhone or iPod. If you’re attempting to sync a video that isn’t compatible, iTunes will flash a message letting you know it can’t play on your device. What that message doesn’t tell you is that there’s an easy way you can convert the video so that it will play. Here’s how to convert a video for iPhone.

The placement of app icons on your iPhone’s Home screen can make life simple or hard. OK, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement, but app icon placement is important to those of us who crave organization. You can choose to organize your apps using your iPhone, but you may find it more efficient to do so using iTunes, since you can do things like reorder Home screen pages and sort apps according to your preferred criteria.

As we accumulate more apps, we need more screen space to organize them all. You can create multiple Home Screens, allowing you to swipe through Home Screen pages and have access to as many apps as you want. At the bottom of your Home screen, above your stationary Dock apps, are dots indicating how many Home Screen pages you have. If you find you’re running out of space or want to step-up your organization game, here’s how to create a new Home Screen.

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