By Conner Carey
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.
By Paula Bostrom
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.
By Conner Carey
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.
iPhone 6s and 6s Plus users can utilize 3D Touch for a plethora of convenient actions and previews. One such action is the ability to 3D Touch a group text in order to individually text a specific person from the group. This saves you the step of opening a new message and searching for the contact when you already have their information right in front of you. Here’s how to 3D Touch a group text to contact anyone in the text individually.
By Conner Carey
Game Center is the main station for keeping up with your favorite iOS games, your ranking in the games, fellow friends who play, and challenges between friends. Game Center also makes it easy to request a multiplayer game with a friend. Here’s how to do that.
By Conner Carey
Game Center is the main hub for iOS gaming, keeping score, and challenging friends. When playing multiplayer games, you can Auto-Match with a random person, or invite your friends to play. In order to play with your friends from real life, you need to add them to your list of friends in Game Center. Here’s how to send a friend request in Game Center.
By Conner Carey
With a subscription to Apple Music or iTunes Match, you can use the iCloud Music Library. This is an easy way to have access to your music across all of your devices. When your iCloud Music Library is enabled, you can add an Apple Music song to My Music from your iPhone, then check your iPad and the song will be there.
By Conner Carey
When you’re browsing through Apple Music songs and playlists, you’ll likely find music you want to download. If you want to make sure your songs are accessible across your devices, you’re going to want to add it to your iCloud Music Library. Luckily this is easy to do; here’s how.
By Becca Ludlum
Take out the trash, do your chores, don't forget about your sister's dance recital... these are all things I'm sure we find ourselves saying to our children often. Reminders help keep everyone in the family on schedule without you and your spouse having to remember it all! Here’s how to setup a reminder for the family.
By Conner Carey
iPhone Proactive suggestions are really helpful sometimes. If you often invite the same group of people to meetings or events, or if you often email the same group of people, your iPhone will make it easy to continue to do so. Both the Calendar and Email app will provide suggestions when you begin to add commonly grouped contacts.
By Jim Karpen
There are likely occasions when you're listening to a playlist or to shuffled music, or listening to Apple Music, and you hear an artist you like — and you want more. At that very moment you want to listen to more from the album or to hear more from that particular artist. Siri is here to help.
By Jim Karpen
Apple introduced third-party keyboards in iOS 8 after a lot of user requests. Now, the options seem endless, from the popular SwiftKey app to adding a gif keyboard for fun communication between friends. To add a third-party keyboard, the first thing you need to do is download a keyboard app from the App Store. Once downloaded, the setup is easy.
By Conner Carey
The iBooks app for iPhone is a great way to collect and read your favorite books or pdfs. The iBooks store has the latest in e-reading across all genres. However, if you’re an avid user of iBooks, it’s easy to lose track of which books you’ve read and how many you haven’t. iBooks doesn’t let you filter by read and unread, but you can create collections to organize your reading list.
When Apple announced iOS 9, I got really excited about the forthcoming News app. And now that I'm using it regularly, I feel my excitement was warranted. Plus, I like the snappy and seamless manner in which one can toggle between the overview of the news and a specific story. And I recently learned there's an even easier way to return to the overview, as well as to read the next story without going to the overview.
By Paula Bostrom
I love using Wallet. Instead of my actual wallet or keychain getting weighed down with shopper loyalty cards, the Wallet app stores them all in one place, no plastic required. Here's how to switch from plastic to the Wallet app.
By Conner Carey
Maybe you’re not ready to buy those songs you love in iTunes, but you do want to save them for purchase later. Well, in iTunes you can easily create a wish list for those songs.
By Conner Carey
The iBooks app is extremely useful for keeping books and pdf files together in one place on your iPhone or iPad. From the iBooks app, you can visit the iBooks store and browse the top charts and featured books on the market. However, storage space fills up quickly and you may not want to keep all the books forever. When your My Books storage is getting cluttered, here’s how to remove iBooks from your iPhone or iPad.
By Conner Carey
In the Apple News app, you have the option to view stories you tap as a preview or as the full story. Preview is the default function and makes sense for slower Internet connections; however, if you want to automatically read the full story, here’s how to change the setting.
I use reading glasses for some things, a concession to middle age, but fortunately I don't ever need them when I'm using my iPad. That's because I've adjusted the settings so that the text is larger and bolded, making it much easier to see. These settings apply to all of Apple's apps and to third-party apps that support Apple's Dynamic Type. Ever since iOS 8 was introduced, Apple has gathered text size, bold, view, and brightness into a single panel in Settings.
If you receive an iTunes gift card or app code, you’re going to want to use it. You can redeem music in the iTunes app and other codes in the App Store. Doing so is easy and who doesn’t love free music and apps?
