5 great features in iOS 7
Whether it’s the first time you’ve picked up an iPad or the
seventeenth time you’ve pulled out your iPhone today, there are probably
still some iOS 7 features and functionality that you’re not familiar
with. Don’t sweat it: We’re here to help. We’ve collected some of our
favorite and most useful tips and compiled them here, just for you.
Make iOS 7 look nicer
1. Make the text larger and bolder: As nice as the
thinner version of the Helvetica Neue font is in iOS 7, it’s not always
the easiest to read. If you’re having trouble reading text on your
iPhone or iPad, just go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Larger Text
to increase the default font size on your device. You can make that
font size even larger in apps that support it by enabling Larger
Accessibility Sizes. And if you want Helvetica Neue to show up just a
bit bolder, visit Settings > General > Accessibility and enable the Bold Text slider. (Note: You will have to restart your iPhone when you enable Bold Text.)
2. Buttons, buttons, everywhere: iOS 7 has ditched
most of the traditional buttons present in past versions of Apple’s
mobile software, but if you’re jonesing for that old familiar arrow
shape, you can enable it via Settings > General > Accessibility > Button Shapes.
3. Contrast is key: Some of us like white text on
light backgrounds, but others find it causes headaches and hurts their
eyes. If you’re part of that latter group, there are several options for
your viewing pleasure under Settings > General > Accessibility > Increase Contrast.
If you want to increase the text and background contrast for features
like Control Center and Notification Center, turn on the Reduce
Transparency option.
If you wish to darken the highlight colors found in an app’s menu and
tab bar (the pink color of the Music app, for instance), toggle the
Darken Colors switch.
And if you’d like to darken the white backgrounds found in apps like
Settings, the Reduce White Point screen brings the pure white coloration
down to a more ocularly-friendly light grey.
On the map
4. Turn-by-turn walking directions: We’ve long had
the ability to do turn-by-turn directions for driving, but iOS 7 also
adds the ability to get those same prompted directions when you’re on
foot. Just tap the Directions button in the top left hand corner, select
the Walking icon at the top of the screen, enter your destination, and
tap Route. Siri will guide you to your destination, alerting you by
voice when it’s time to make a turn.
5. Prefer walking directions: Say you’re on vacation
and don’t have a car: Wouldn’t it be useful if you didn’t have to
remind Maps that you want those walking directions every time you put in
a location? Easy enough: Just go to Settings > Maps and
scroll down to the Preferred Directions section. There you’ll be able to
choose between Driving and Walking. Now, when you launch Maps, it’ll
give you pedestrian-friendly directions by default.
6. Notify you about your friends’ location: Apple’s
free Find My Friends app can be super useful at times, such as when
you’re meeting up with a friend. You can even use the app to
automatically tell your friend when you’re heading out—or be notified
when your friend is arriving someplace—all thanks to geofences.
Just launch the Find My Friends app, select the friend you want to be
notified about and tap the More… button in the toolbar. At the bottom
of the contact card, choose either Notify Me or Notify [your friend’s
name]. You’ll be prompted to choose whether the notification will show
up when you arrive at or leave a place, as well as specifying the
location (and even how big a radius from that location will trigger the
notification). If you choose to notify your friend about your location,
you can also send a message immediately.
7. Ask Siri to notify you about your friends’ location:
If setting up those geofences is a little too cumbersome, you can ask
Siri to handle it for you. Just trigger the virtual assistant and say,
for example, “Notify me when John leaves his current location.”
8. Geofencing in Reminders: Not only can you can set
geofences on people, you can also place them on locations. Using the
Reminders app, you can have a notification sent to you when you’re
arriving at or leaving a location. Just create a reminder, tap the ‘i’
button next to it, and choose “Remind me at a location.” Under the
Location sub-menu, search for a contact, place name, or specific
address; as with Find My Friends, you can even specify the size of the
radius around the location, just in case you want to be reminded to get
cookies when you’re even remotely near the supermarket.
Master your photos
9. Save your favorite Burst Mode images (iPhone 5s):
The iPhone 5s’s Burst Mode is an excellent way to ensure that you
capture fast-moving action, but you also don’t want to take up lots of
space with photo duplicates. After you’ve captured an image in Burst
Mode by pressing and holding down the shutter button for a few seconds,
you can tap the Camera Roll to view your images.
Your burst appears as a single photo in the album, represented by
what iOS 7 thinks is the best photo of the bunch. You can go back and
look through the full burst collection, however, by tapping the
Favorites button; select the photo (or photos) you’d like to showcase by
tapping on them and pressing Done. From there, you can choose to keep
the entire burst for future perusal, or delete all the images you chose
not to select.
10. Enable automatic HDR (iPhone 5s): Back in 2010,
iOS 4.1 added the High Dynamic Range (HDR) feature to its Camera app,
which allowed you to take a photo of a subject with both sharp light and
deep shadow and have it render as evenly lit. But HDR took longer to
shoot than the average image, which for most people meant manually
turning it on whenever you wanted to capture that perfect sunset.
With iOS 7 and the iPhone 5s, however, you can turn on automatic HDR
mode: In normal light, your iPhone will shoot a regular photo; in
situations with multiple light patterns, however, your device will
automatically recognize that an HDR photo might be best and attempt to
capture that, instead. (As always, the iPhone always takes two
photos–the untouched one and the HDR version; you can save both to your
Camera Roll if you wish by going to Settings > Photos & Camera > Keep Normal Photo.)
11. Put permanent filters on your camera: Both the
iPhone and iPad offer front and back hardware cameras, and on the
software side, fun filters for Photo and Square modes to make your
pictures more interesting.
If you like having a specific filter on images, you can set either
Square or Photo mode to always launch with the image manipulation of
your choice. Personally, I have iOS 7’s Square mode set to the Noir
filter, as I like Apple’s black and white correction more than, say,
Instagram’s.
To set the filter, all you have to do is tap the Filter button in the
Camera app while in the mode of your choice. Switch to another mode and
you’ll once again have a clean slate, but return to your original mode
and your filter of choice remains.
12. Share your Photo Stream with others (and let them add images, too):
When Shared Photo Streams first launched with iOS 6, they let you share
groups of images with any of your friends for liking and comments, but
your buddies couldn’t add images or video of their own.
iOS 7 has changed all that, letting you open up your Shared Photo
Streams to anyone you deem fit for posting. Now, when you create a
shared stream, viewing it presents you with two tabs: Photos and People.
Tap the People section to access your stream’s settings; there, you can
turn on or off the Subscribers Can Post toggle. (You can also choose to
create a public website, add or delete friends to your stream, and show
notifications for the stream.)
13. Use iMovie to create slo-mo clips: iPhone 5s
owners can make slow-motion clips to their heart’s content thanks to iOS
7’s 120FPS slo-mo mode in the Camera app. But older iPhone owners can
get in on some of that fun, too—they just need to download iMovie.
After you’ve filmed something, open iMovie and create a new project
with your clip. Next, separate your clip into three segments by swiping
down on the film strip: the intro normal-speed segment, a slow-motion
segment, and the ending normal-speed segment. Finally, tap on the middle
segment, choose Speed, and drag the slider toward the Tortoise icon.
Voilà : easy in-and-out slow-motion.
Phone it in
14. Block annoying calls: We haven’t solved the
problem of email spam, but telemarketing can be slightly less annoying
with a new feature of iOS 7: call blocking. You can choose to not
receive calls from a specific number or contact by tapping the ‘i’
button next to that entry in the Recents or Voicemail sections of the
Phone app, scrolling down, and choosing Block this Caller. (It also
works on any contact card in the Phone or Contacts app.) Note that by
doing so you also won’t receive text messages/iMessages or FaceTime
calls from that number or contact. If you’ve blocked someone in error,
you can edit the no-call list under Settings > Phone > Blocked.
15. Make FaceTime Audio calls for cheap: Calling
plans are pretty cheap these days, but if you’re looking to pare down,
you can make FaceTime Audio calls over Wi-Fi or cellular data networks.
Just make sure you’ve enabled FaceTime in the Settings app, then find an
entry in the Contacts or Phone app and tap the phone icon next to
FaceTime. You’ll immediately launch into an audio-only FaceTime call,
though you can switch over to a video call at any point by tapping the
FaceTime button. You can even add a FaceTime Audio call to your Phone
app’s Favorites by tapping Add to Favorite on any contact card, and then
selecting FaceTime Audio.
16. Enter a phone conference code at a tap: Many of
us have had to dial either hard-to-remember extensions or conference
room codes at some point. If you find yourself making those calls
frequently, you can simplify the process. Go to the Keypad section of
the Phone app and enter the phone number you dial; then, at the end, tap
and hold the pound key until it turns into a semicolon. Now enter the
passcode or extension, and then add the whole shebang to a new or
existing contact record. Next time you dial that contact or number,
you’ll see a small button in the bottom left that says “Dial” with the
code you entered; tap that to have it entered on the keypad
automatically.Talk to Siri
17. Speak your settings: Siri’s become a bit smarter
across the board in iOS 7, and one of those IQ improvements deals with
controlling your settings. You can ask Siri to turn Bluetooth on or off,
open a specific Settings pane, and even turn on Airplane Mode—though
Apple’s voice assistant gets a little snarky if you ask for that last
one.
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| There's lots to talk to Siri about in iOS 7 |
18. Make Siri better understand your friends’ names:
If you heard it spoken out loud, my little sister’s name is a pretty
standard one—“Caitlin.” Unfortunately, that’s not how my parents chose
to spell it; instead, her contact card reads “Caetlyn.” In iOS 6, Siri
had a bit of trouble with that, expecting me to either pronounce her
name “Keet-lan” or use the nickname I’d given her. Thanks to Siri’s new
pronunciation engine, though, my phone can be a little smarter about her
contact card—along with any of yours.
Just say “Learn how to pronounce [name]’s name” and Siri will comply,
first asking you for your pronunciation of the first and last name,
then providing you with several pronunciation options.
19. Talk and talk and talk and talk to Siri: Raise your digital hand if you’ve ever run into this situation when talking to Siri:
“Remind me to—” “What would you like me to remind you?”
Siri may be there for us, but sometimes, she’s just not listening as
closely as she should be. If you have iOS 7.1 installed, however, you
can hold down the Home button to make Siri listen as long as you
like—she won’t stop until you lift your finger. Helpful for recording
the entirety of messages and reminders; even more helpful when you just
need someone to talk to—even if that someone is digital.
Navigate the jungle of Safari
20. Playing Favorites: In iOS 7 there’s a new
bookmarks section called Favorites; on the iPad, this is used to
populate the Favorites Bar in Safari, but on both the iPad and iPhone,
it also determines which bookmarks pop up when you’re in a blank tab.
You can make Favorites work for you by going to Settings > Safari > Favorites,
where you can select any folder in your Bookmarks as your Favorites.
Now when you open a blank tab in Safari, you’ll see those specific sites
are just a tap away.
21. View saved passwords and credit card info:
Whether or not you have iCloud Keychain syncing password information
between your iOS devices and/or Macs, you can have Safari on your iOS
device save your usernames, passwords, and credits cards locally. In
both cases, you can take a look at the information under Settings > Safari > Passwords & AutoFill.
In both cases, you’ll have to enter your device’s passcode—sorry, no
Touch ID here—to view the full credit card number or password; it’s yet
another reason to choose a strong passcode, as though you needed one
these days. Both sections let you remove entries, but the Credit Cards
section will also let you add a new card right from Settings.
Mail call
22. Search all mailboxes: Searching Mail in iOS 6
could be a drag, especially since you could only search the mailbox you
were currently viewing. In iOS 7, it’s a bit easier: When you enter a
search term, pull down on the search results, and you’ll reveal a toggle
that lets you choose between searching only the current mailbox or all
mailboxes.
23. Undo trash/moved/junked messages: We’ve all done
it: accidentally deleted or moved a message we didn’t mean to. Yes, you
could go all the way out of the account and then into the Trash and
move it back to your inbox, but here’s a much faster way: Give your iOS
device a shake and you should see an Undo dialog box pop up. Tap Undo to
put your messages back where they belong.
24. Smarter mailboxes: While we still don’t have
true, customizable Smart Mailboxes in iOS 7, there are a bunch of handy
specialized mailboxes that you can add to your main Mail screen. Just
tap Edit and scroll down to see a list of options, including your VIP
mailbox, flagged messages, those that have attachments, and even one
containing just those messages which have you in the To: or CC fields.
Select any to show them (or deselect those ones you want hidden); you
can also rearrange them by tapping and dragging them into the order you
want. When you’re finished, just tap Done at the top of the screen.
Messages
25. Check the time: As you go through your
conversation in the Messages app, you might spot the occasional
timestamp between conversations. But sometimes you want to know exactly
when a certain text appeared. Messages offers just this feature in iOS
7—all you have to do is swipe and hold left on a conversation to expose a
set of timestamps for every text you and your friends have sent.
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| What time was that message sent? Swipe left, and you can find out |
26. Send that text onward or banish it from existence:
In prior versions of iOS, you could delete text messages from your
phone or forward them on via the Edit button. In iOS 7, that button is
gone; instead, to forward or delete a text, you must first tap and hold
on it. Tap the More pop-up, and circles appear to the left of your
messages, with the current one selected. It’s up to you whether you want
to delete or forward a single text, or select multiple messages.
Miscellaneous
27. Send everything with AirDrop: One of the most
powerful, if under-appreciated, features of iOS 7 is AirDrop. Most
people think of it only as a way to send pictures, but in truth anything
that you can text or email you can probably send via AirDrop. For
example: Got a bunch of friends meeting at a location? Fire up Maps,
search for your location, tap Share, and AirDrop it to everybody present
at once. It doesn’t require a Wi-Fi network, or even that you know the
other person’s contact info. Just make sure that the recipients have
AirDrop set to Everyone or Contacts Only in Control Center.
28. Short names in Messages and Mail: Have too many
Dans in your Messages app? You can make their names show up as “First
initial, last name” thanks to iOS 7’s new Short Names feature. To enable
it, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Short Name
and turn on the Short Name toggle on that screen. You can choose from
the aforementioned First Initial & Last Name setting, or pick First
Name & Last Initial, First Name Only, or Last Name Only. You can
additionally opt for your device to Prefer Nicknames, if they’ve been
set in a contact record.
29. Monitor what cellular data your apps use: It’s
easier than you might think for your device to gulp up cellular data,
especially when on speedy LTE networks. To avoid running up expensive
overage charges, you can view how much data each app is using by going
to Settings > Cellular and scrolling through the app list.
Under each program’s name, you’ll find how much data it’s been using—to
the right, there’s a toggle for disabling cellular data for that app.
Scroll all the way to the bottom and you can also check how much your
system services (Personal Hotspot, Exchange Accounts, Messaging
services, and the like) are using, along with a button to reset these
numbers to zero and start counting all over again.
30. Disable Background App Refresh for certain apps:
Is your battery lagging in iOS 7? You might be the victim of too many
apps using the operating system’s Background App Refresh feature. For
apps like your Mail client, it’s important to be able to grab new data
even if that program isn’t running in the foreground; other apps like
Facebook might not need such extravagances.
To disable Background App Refresh on an app-by-app basis, go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh. From there, you can turn off the feature altogether or individually disable just the offending apps.
31. Find the Compass’s hidden features: Not only is
iOS 7’s Compass app a thing of beauty, it has some neat functions hidden
away. One such function: compass headings. If you know you have to head
340° North, for instance, you can tap the screen once to set a compass
heading; whenever you deviate from that path, a red bar appears along
the side of the compass from your heading start point. To clear it, tap
once more.
Swipe left, and you’ll find a second app inside Compass: a level.
Though not as accurate as a traditional bubble-level, it’s still a
useful tool in a pinch—and if you’re looking to distract yourself from playing Threes, try leveling your phone while you hold it in your hand like a game controller.
32. Customize Notification Center’s Today pane:
Swipe down from the top of your device’s screen and you’ll visit
Notification Center, iOS 7’s repository for your alerts. In addition to a
list of your current notifications, this pane also offers a Today view,
which provides you with the current date, a list of birthdays, the
weather, calendar data, reminders, stocks, and a preview of your next
day. You can choose which of those features actually appear by visiting Settings > Notification Center and toggling features in the Today section on or off.
33. Tips and tricks with Touch ID (iPhone 5s): If you have an iPhone 5s, you’re probably pretty familiar with the device’s fingerprint scanner. Here are a few ways to make it even better.
If you’re having trouble getting Touch ID to recognize your print,
try scanning the same print multiple times, or deleting the original
print and starting over. Because Touch ID is constantly attempting to
refine your print, it can occasionally get confused and its data can
degrade.
In addition, if you can’t remember which finger it was that you scanned in, visit Settings > Touch ID & Passcode and put your finger on the Touch ID reader; the appropriate print under the Fingerprints section should highlight in grey.
