How-To

Not all streaming services are created equal. With the release of Apple Music, listeners quickly realized there were no quality control options. The difference, until now, was automatic: you heard higher quality sound when streaming music over a Wi-Fi connection than when streaming across cellular data. With iOS 9, Apple is letting you decide for yourself whether better music quality is worth increasing your cellular data usage or not. 


One of the smaller changes with iOS 9 is the appearance of the keyboard when using the Shift key. Before, the keys were uppercase in appearance and the highlighted shift key was the only way to know you were typing in uppercase. With the update, the keys are lowercase except when Shift is active: the entire keyboard changes to uppercase. This can make it easier to know which case you're typing in; however, if you prefer the previous set-up, there's a simple Settings change to turn the lowercase keys off.

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. 

If you’re on an iPhone 6, the iOS 9 update likely works wonderfully and does what Apple intended. However, users of earlier models of the iPhone are reporting a major lag in performance since updating. With every software release there are bound to be bugs. If you’re considering reverting to old software, keep in mind that iOS 9.1 will soon be available. If the performance bugs are minor, I recommend you wait; however, if the update has turned your iPhone into a fancy calculator, we’ve got four ways to make it a super computer again.


With iOS 8 came iCloud Drive; and now, there's an app for that. iCloud Drive is, simply put, Apple's Dropbox. When you're logged into iCloud, you can easily save files to the drive, which are then accessible across all iOS devices and work in conjunction with OS X and Windows. With iOS 9, Apple has added an iCloud Drive app that makes it easy to view, edit, and manage the documents saved to your drive. The app is automatically included in the new update; however, the option to display the iCloud Drive app is hidden in your Settings.


An interesting new feature of iOS 9 is auto email event suggestions for your Calendar. The software scans your emails to see if there are any events you haven't added to your schedule. This can be very helpful, especially if a lot of your emails contain pertinent events. However, if you find yourself with a cluttered calendar, you can easily turn off the automatic addition.

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