Spread the word
Now, go into any app where you can highlight text. Your options include Mail, Safari, Notes, and many others. Select some text, and you’ll see a new option appear in the contextual menu (you may have to tap the right arrow to view more options). Tap the Speak command, and your iOS device will start reading the text aloud.
You don't: Apple treats those symbols, called Emoji, as an international keyboard. Launch Settings, and tap General, International, Keyboards. Then tap Add New Keyboard and find Emoji. Now open an app where you can type some text.
Next to the spacebar, you’ll see a little globe icon. Tap it to switch between your regular keyboard and the Emoji one, which contains many tabs full of different characters. Tap on those characters to insert them wherever you’d like. (If you have many international keyboards, tap and hold the globe to bring up a menu of all your options.)
Spoken Emoji. For real fun, type in a bunch of Emoji symbols, select them all, and then tap the Speak button. You’ll hear the often-entertaining names of each symbol read in sequence.
A series of Siri tips
Use the “in transit” cue. Ask Siri to help you find an address with a couple extra words at the end, as in: “give me directions to San Francisco International Airport via transit.” iOS will open up the Maps app and display the routing pane, which lets you choose which third-party app you’d like to supply your directions.Attentive readers will know that Google Maps is included among these routing apps, which means that you can actually use this trick to get directions via Google Maps using Siri.
Get movie reviews. Not sure if a given movie is worth your time? Just ask Siri: “Is Rugrats In Paris any good?” Siri replies with a review from Rotten Tomatoes.
Editing Siri. Sometimes Siri doesn’t understand you quite right. Maybe you told it to call your friend “Aaron” and it thought you said “Erin.” Fortunately, you can fix Siri’s mistake; after Siri reports that she doesn’t know what you’re talking about, scroll up and find the speech bubble where Siri records what it thinks you said. Then tap that bubble, and you’ll find that you can now edit what Siri heard and resubmit your request.
If you don’t want to bother typing out a long correction, you can also use iOS’s built-in dictation feature to enter your corrected text. Just tap the microphone in the keyboard and speak your text aloud. We’ll give you time to make your own Inception joke about using Siri to fix Siri.
Siri can help you post to your favorite social network. If you use Facebook and/or Twitter, Siri offers a bunch of helpful options. You can say “Post to Facebook I love reading Lex and Dan’s stuff at Macworld.com,” or “Write on my Wall I love Siri,” or even, “Post I’m an over-sharer to Facebook.” With Twitter, you can say “Tweet I’m eating breakfast” or “Post I’m still eating breakfast to Twitter,” along with other, similar variations.
Fun with Settings
Restrictions. Go to General and then to Restrictions. You’ll be prompted to enter a passcode. You can then select which features you would like to lock down on your iOS device. If you’re planning to hand the iPhone off to Junior, and Junior has a habit of unintentionally deleting your apps, you can specifically disable that capability from the Restrictions screen. You can also prevent access to the iTunes Store, the iBookstore, Safari, Camera, FaceTime, and more.
Now, if you want, you can black out certain regions of the current app’s interface. Say, for example, that the game your kid will play has an omnipresent Settings button. You can trace a circle around that button, and that section of the app will ignore any taps. The other key feature of Guided Access is that it disables the Home button, so your kid won’t accidentally quit the app prematurely. To exit an app in Guided Access mode, you triple-click the Home button again, and provide your passcode.
One added benefit of Guided Access is that it can serve as a better Do Not Disturb, since it silences banner notifications and alert sounds while enabled.
The second option on this screen is a button to reset your advertising identifier—a new creation of Apple’s in iOS 6; it’s meant to be an anonymized tracker that advertisers can use to recognize your interest when showing their ads in apps. Apple doesn’t yet require that in-app ads use the identifier, but says that one day it will. If you start seeing in-app ads that seem to know you too well, you can reset your advertising identifier here to start from scratch.
Manage storage on your device. Maybe your iPhone won’t let you snap another photo. Perhaps your iPad refuses to let you download one more app. Because iOS storage space isn’t expandable, it’s important to monitor what’s gobbling up the available gigabytes on your device. Here’s how. Go to General > Usage in Settings, and wait for a moment or three as iOS calculates which apps are using the most space.
Elsewhere on the list, you’ll spot the apps you use, sorted with the most storage-intensive ones at the top. If you see apps that you rarely use but that take up a ton of space, tap on them in the list, and then tap Delete App to remove them in an instant.
Manually manage iCloud backup space. While we’re saving space, don’t forget that you can control what iCloud stores for you in your online backup—especially if you’re just using the free 5GB allotment that Apple offers. Find instructions here.
Picture perfect
Snap photos while shooting videos. You’re using your iPhone 5 to film a magical moment, and you wish you could snap a photo at the same time. Don’t stop recording! Just tap the camera button, which appears on-screen in addition to the shutter button as you film. You aren’t using the iPhone’s true photo sensor; you’re getting the slightly less impressive video sensors instead, but the photos should still turn out pretty nicely. Note that this tip doesn’t work on older iPhones.In the Mail
Quickly add photos and videos to messages. Suppose you snapped the perfect panorama and want to email it to your friend. You needn’t start from the Camera or Photos app. Instead, head over to the Mail app and start composing your new message. Tap once in a blank section of the message to bring up the contextual menu, and then tap on Insert Photo or Video. You’ll get the familiar photo selecting screen.Get back to drafts in a snap. Maybe you abandoned that message before you tapped to send it. You needn’t navigate deep into the Mail app’s mailbox hierarchy to find your Drafts folder. Rather, you can tap and hold on the New Message button to bring up a menu listing all your saved drafts.
Archiving messages. You probably already know that you can archive messages from your Gmail account on iOS. But you can also add an archive option for messages to your iCloud email address. To do so, navigate to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendar and tap on your iCloud account. Tap on the Account entry at the top, scroll down to the Advanced section, and tap on your email address; swipe down until you find the Archive Messages switch. Slide it to On, and then make sure to tap the Done button in the upper right corner twice to save the change.
Now, all instances of the Delete command in Mail will be replaced by an Archive button.
Surf’s our turf
Quickly access your recent browsing history. In Mobile Safari, tap and hold on the Back button to see a list of your recently visited pages. On the iPad, tap and hold on the browser’s New Tab Plus (+) button to get a list of recently closed tabs.Full screen mode. New in iOS 6 is an option to browse the Web in full-screen mode—at least when you’re using your iPhone in landscape orientation. This frees up the pixels otherwise occupied by Safari’s location bar and tab bar. Rotate your phone to landscape mode, and then press the full-screen double-arrows at the bottom right corner.
Stream of photo consciousness
To create such a stream, open Photos and tap on the Photo Stream button in the toolbar. In the upper left corner is a Plus (+) button; tap that and enter a name for your shared stream along with a list of people you’d like to invite. Photos can be added from your existing photo albums or Camera Roll by tapping on the Share button and selecting Photo Stream or by tapping Edit while viewing your shared stream and tapping the Add button that appears at the bottom. While the people you’ve shared the photo stream with can write comments on or “like” your photos, they cannot add their own photos to the stream.
You can do this when you create a Shared Photo Stream by tapping the Public Website slider; after you’ve made a stream, you can find that same option by tapping the blue arrow next to the Shared Photo Stream in the Photos app. An icloud.com link to the stream will be generated; be aware that it is public, so anyone who has the URL can access it, though it’s not something that people are likely to stumble across. You can tap the Share Link button to send the link via email, an iMessage, or a Twitter or Facebook post, or just copy it to the clipboard.
Phones, texts, and such
By default, you’ll get three pre-canned options, along with a button that lets you enter a custom text. However, you can also customize those pre-canned messages under Settings > Phone > Reply with Message.
Create custom ringtones and alert tones in GarageBand. It’s true, you can create custom ringtones for your iPhone—on your iPhone. Here’s how.
Open Phone or Contacts; select a contact, then tap the Edit button in the top right corner. Scroll down to find the ringtone field; below it is a vibration field. Tap that, and you’ll see an assortment of built-in vibration patterns you can choose from. Further down, though, is the ability to add a custom pattern: Tap Create New Vibration, and you can just tap on the screen to create your own rhythm. When you’re satisfied (tap the Play button to see what it will feel like), tap Save to set the pattern.
If that’s not enough, go back to the contact record and also assign a custom vibration pattern for text messages.
But wait, there's more
Swipeable Map directions. We’ve all run into problems with iOS 6 Maps taking us places that we weren’t sure we wanted to go to. But if you simply get directions for a route by tapping the Quick Route button in Maps, you can’t always tell what route Maps has in mind.If you’d like to get a preview of your route, tap your destination on the map and choose Directions to Here. Then, instead of using the Current Location option for your starting point, enter your address manually and tap Route. Once you’ve chosen your route and tapped Start, you’ll be able to swipe through the instructions at the top and see exactly which turns Maps wants you to take. (It’s the same way you got directions back in iOS 5.)
Location-based reminders for specific locations. If you want to be reminded to do something when you leave your home, work, current location, or any address in your address book, that’s pretty easy to get with iOS’s Reminders app. But what if you want to remember to buy something when you’re at the grocery store or pharmacy? You probably don’t want to add their locations in your address book just to get that feature.
Fortunately, you don’t have to. When you create a reminder, tap on it and turn on Remind Me At a Location. By default, Reminders will populate your current address—tap that and you’ll get a host of options, including, at the bottom, a text box to enter a custom address.
Easier music controls over USB. Perhaps you’ve abandoned the notion of hooking your iPhone up in your car over USB, because you’re so sick of the Accessory Connected screen that dominates the Music app in that setup. Good news! iOS 6.1 improved matters, and—finally—the Music app now remains accessible even when you’ve plugged your iPhone into a USB playthrough device that lacks the Made for iPhone distinction. It’s a delight.
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