iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

Apple's Health app can tell you how many flights of stairs you've climbed or steps you've taken, your cycling distance, calories, weight, and, starting with iOS 13, how often your headphones were too loud. Sorting through all that data could be daunting, but the Summary tab can be customized to show only what you want to see: simply go open the Health app, tap the Summary tab, tap Edit in the top right corner, and then select the kinds of data you want to see in your summary. More health minded? With a HealthKit accessory, you can track your resting heart rate, blood pressure, and respiratory rate. Looking to focus on nutrition? The Health app can show your nutrients including sodium, fat, carbohydrates, and fiber. Choosing which of all these metrics to view is easy! Let me show you how.

If your eyesight isn't what it used to be, you may find the small text size on your iPhone or iPad hard to read and wonder, "Why is the font on my iPhone so small? How do I make the text bigger?" There's no need to strain your eyes; here are several tricks you can use to make reading on an iPhone or iPad easier, including changing your iPhone font size.

If you own an Apple Watch, you already know that the built-in speaker it comes with is not designed to deliver high-quality audio, at any appreciable volume. Yet with a respectable onboard storage capacity for your music, the Apple Watch has the potential to store and deliver great sounding audio wherever you go, if you have a quality Bluetooth speaker that is. A good Bluetooth speaker can also work wonders when it comes to phone calls and FaceTime chats, as most Bluetooth speakers these days also house a built-in microphone for such purposes. Here are three of our favorite Bluetooth speakers that serve as perfect complements to the Apple Watch.

As a tennis player, I often need to know when sunset will be (since the outdoor courts where I play don't have lights). Conveniently, Siri can tell me the time of sunrise and sunset. You cannot only find the time for today but also for any day of the next week. (Note, however, that Siri won't give you information for dates in the past.)

Apple's Health app helps iPhone users keep track of a variety of data concerning their health all in one place, such as tracking how many steps they take in a day, body measurements, heart rate, and more. In addition to information collected by the iPhone or imported from a healthcare provider, your Health app can also accept data that you enter manually. Let's get started learning how to manually enter data into the Health app on your iPhone.

If you need to call someone, but it's not convenient to place the call right now, you can use the Reminders app to help you remember to make the call later. If you use Siri to create the call reminder, you'll be able to call the person directly from the reminder notification.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure, and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 20 of the series. If you are just getting started now, check out the beginning of the series here (This post has been updated to Swift 1.2, Xcode 6.3 and iOS 8).

So far in this series, you have learned just enough about table views to get through some basic exercises. In this post, I'll cover some of the basics by way of review, and then we will take a deep dive into the world of managing lists of data with table views.