Did You Know...? (iOS Tips & Tricks)

John Yester

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Ahhhh I thought you meant Natively from the camera roll and sending that way. But yes the browser does work this way.
 

getdamned

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Not true, the beauty of it is that it works right from Safari, just like uploading from a laptop.

Agreed, this was one of the improvements in Mobile Safari in iOS 6. To stray just slightly from things for a brief moment-- I wanted to point out another improvement/fix that I noticed in iOS 6's Safari... thankfully, since it was extremely irritating.

The way that Safari handles forms or proprietary input boxes, etc was fixed. I have never delved past the surface to see what web tech the issue affected in particular-- but a shining example of a before (disastrous) and after (functional) thing is Disqus's input/comment boxes. To move the cursor, you'd have to hit Done, precisely place your cursor in the exact spot so that you could backspace to fix something, hit Done again, scroll back down to the bottom of the input box and reposition your cursor at the exact end. Half the time, this would fail, and you would end up with a cursor frozen in place, where typing would not produce characters, and backspacing would not remove any.

This wasn't a behavior unique to Disqus by any means, but to me, this was the most obvious and painful example of this rendering/handling of things gone terribly awry, since it is so widely integrated into so many websites as a comment platform.

I suspect it has to do with similar unhandled or mishandled web programming techs... These days there's so many of them out there from AJAX, stateless transactional models, to the now "old school" CSS, DHTML(?), JavaScript-- I'll be honest, I used to be pretty well-educated and up on all the current web technologies-- and in just a few short years of inattention, I can humbly admit that I now don't have a clue what the current fad techs are or which of the ones that used to be fundamental to web programming are even still in use today! Keeping up with technology is a real PITA if you're not constantly on top of every aspect! Blink your eyes and you aren't in Kansas anymore-- and that's said with minimal hyperbole...

So. Point is-- I noticed that they fixed a lot of these kinds of functional deficits or buggy implementations going from iOS 5 to iOS 6 and I am very happy about that! Now only if Passbook would become more than a pretty multi-colored icon on my home screen, lol. One can wish... (and why do we have Compass as a stock app? Are people regularly losing their way in the wilderness?

If you're packing an iPhone, I think the last thing you'd turn to would be the compass for good ole survivalist navigation. Before I came to that point I would likely have drained my battery playing some stupid game or something-- then die. Except I remember that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. And by default, it's not a concern, because if there's no cell signal there, there's no ME there. Lol. Yes, it's a sad state of affairs.
 

linsiris

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That you can use assistive touch to your advantage.
For example use the home button it provides if yours is damaged.
You can also set custome gestures that might come handy if your reading a long blog or document, it can scroll up or down or even unlock your iDevice for you ;).
 

TurboTiger

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For example use the home button it provides if yours is damaged.
You can also set custome gestures that might come handy if your reading a long blog or document, it can scroll up or down or even unlock your iDevice for you ;).

linsiris,
Also prevents home button from getting damages.

I could never figure out how to customize the gesture feature. Can you explain how to do what you suggested on scrolling or point me to some instructions?

TIA
 

linsiris

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linsiris,
Also prevents home button from getting damages.

I could never figure out how to customize the gesture feature. Can you explain how to do what you suggested on scrolling or point me to some instructions?

TIA

Sure. I have a couple of custom gestures for example one I named DnUp
1. Settings --> accessibility --> assistive touch: on
2. Create new gestures: here it shows a gray screen that says "touch to create custom gesture" for this DnUp gesture slide your finger from the bottom to the top of the gray area, it is as if you were drawing. (you can also do this directly from the assistive touch button--> favorites--> any area with the "+")
3. Save it. And you're done!

There a couple of things to take into account.
- To access your custom gesture: assistive touch button--> favorites
- Speed: the gesture speed depends on how fast/slow you "draw" it on the screen.
- Can be accessed from locked screen.
- You can set as many gestures as you like. For instance I have one that goes from left--> right (it can unlock your iPhone, silly and slow for regular users I know, but might be useful for other people, also for playing Angry Birds ;).

I say imagination is the limit with this option!
 

TurboTiger

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Sure. I have a couple of custom gestures for example one I named DnUp
1. Settings --> accessibility --> assistive touch: on
2. Create new gestures: here it shows a gray screen that says "touch to create custom gesture" for this DnUp gesture slide your finger from the bottom to the top of the gray area, it is as if you were drawing. (you can also do this directly from the assistive touch button--> favorites--> any area with the "+")
3. Save it. And you're done!

There a couple of things to take into account.
- To access your custom gesture: assistive touch button--> favorites
- Speed: the gesture speed depends on how fast/slow you "draw" it on the screen.
- Can be accessed from locked screen.
- You can set as many gestures as you like. For instance I have one that goes from left--> right (it can unlock your iPhone, silly and slow for regular users I know, but might be useful for other people, also for playing Angry Birds ;).

I say imagination is the limit with this option!

Okie Dokie. I'll give it a go.
Tks linsiris
 

getdamned

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Set your phone to strobe the camera flash upon alerts. It's under General-> Accessibility. You can also define custom vibration patterns here. Both of these were available in iOS 5 I think but they just came to mind thinking about accessibility.

A relevant example was last night I had everything on mute; but at 4:30am my bedroom temporarily turned into a rave because of this? but otherwise I would not have ever known someone was trying to get in touch with me.

One last thing in here is the ability to set the click speed of your home button. My iPhone 4 is getting a bit long in the tooth and it's getting harder to nail that turbo double tap fast enough. I just set my tap speed to slower or slowest and I can double click the home button with a little less fervor. Don't feel like I'm playing NES trying to hit the button a 300 times per second anymore. Which btw, I used to be able to average about 7-9 button presses per second, "in my day". That's mostly true. Somewhat true. Possibly untrue... but possibly not untrue. It may not be totally accurate, but I can't say that it is impossible that it may not be totally inaccurate.

Ouch. I mindf***ed myself. I was supposed to be the one doing the pumping there. I hate it when that happens. I guess when you end up f***ing yourself.

Where the hell am I, anyway?!
 

Massie

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...that you can specify what Spotlight does and doesn't include in its search results by going to Settings>General>Spotlight Search?
image.jpg

That you can set your Home Button triple-click to a few different things, including Invert Colors (handy for night reading)? See Settings>General>Accessibility.
image.jpg

(Interesting: a screenshot taken with colors inverted still uploads as regular looking. Here's an example.)
image.jpg
 

linsiris

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Anytime TurboTiger!

So another one is that you can split your keyboard on your iPad and move it up and down the screen. This makes typing with two thumbs waaay easier on iPad.

You can do it by:
- Holding two keys on each side of the keyboard and pull to oposite sides. Or
- Tap and hold the "keyboard" key, it shows both options.
 
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getdamned

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Had no idea this was possible...

I knew that you could do this by quickly tugging the banner down then flinging it back up (like you're opening the blinds really quick), but I didn't know the same worked for horizontal swipes.

The only reason I never really do this is because notifications are on your screen for like, what... 1-2 seconds max? I can't think of a time when I need the banner to go away *that* urgently that I can't hold 1 second for it to go away on its own.

Anyone have an example of when they may feel the need to get rid of a banner ASAP like that? Just curious.
 

mumfoau

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I knew that you could do this by quickly tugging the banner down then flinging it back up (like you're opening the blinds really quick), but I didn't know the same worked for horizontal swipes.

The only reason I never really do this is because notifications are on your screen for like, what... 1-2 seconds max? I can't think of a time when I need the banner to go away *that* urgently that I can't hold 1 second for it to go away on its own.

Anyone have an example of when they may feel the need to get rid of a banner ASAP like that? Just curious.

Likely when there are multiple emails coming through.
 

linsiris

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Anyone have an example of when they may feel the need to get rid of a banner ASAP like that? Just curious.

A good example would be right now, I'm getting a lot of whatsapp notifications while I'm actually trying to type a website address on the address bar on my browser and the notification banners are annoyingly getting in the way.
 
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SnapThrow

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The only reason I never really do this is because notifications are on your screen for like, what... 1-2 seconds max? I can't think of a time when I need the banner to go away *that* urgently that I can't hold 1 second for it to go away on its own.

Anyone have an example of when they may feel the need to get rid of a banner ASAP like that? Just curious.

I do this ALL THE TIME. I just sent myself a test email and I counted to eight-one-thousand (so approx 8 seconds) before the banner went away. IMO that is a longtime ... which is fine if you need to interact with the banner, but if you just need to glance at the notification and then continue on with what you were doing that is too long. Therefore I swipe them away all the time!
 

Epitome

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So, what's the secret to surviving when your replying to a mail or message and the '.?123 - space - return line is not visible'?

Frustrated inquiring minds want to know.

I'd probably really like the iPhone my wife forced me to get as her company provided her with one and I am the 'geek' that was supposed to support her, (ain't that a hoot) if I didn't have to spend so much time getting things to work as I expect them to!

I probably have a full day of waste coming up this weekend trying to create an empty icon so that I can get rid of all the ap icons that have not value to me yet - ex: Newstand (unless I should put my USA Today ap in there) and Passbook and what's the difference between Calendar and Reminders, and get the icon's back in the order I had them before they all went poof between 6.0.1 and 6.1.

Don't I recall that as I was hanging out and mastering DOS and Windows 1.0a that it was all you Apple freaks that trampled on my feelings. Well, I happen to be living a little D?j? vu at the moment.

:cool:
 

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