iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

If your App Store icon disappeared from your Home screen and you’re wondering how to restore it, we’ve got great news for you: A missing App Store icon on the iPhone doesn’t mean you deleted the app. While there are other native apps that you can delete, the App Store is not one of them. Our guide will show you several ways to find and bring back your missing App Store icon, so you can download and update your apps once again.

The Blood Oxygen app for the Apple Watch Series 6 is a timely and important update in our COVID-affected world, but it's not obvious how to set up the Blood Oxygen app the first time you use it. We'll show you how to set up your Apple Watch oxygen monitor, plus we'll help you understand the basics of how to read your results so that you can monitor your oxygen saturation levels.

Improve Your iPhone with These MagSafe Accessories

(Sponsored Post) By Olena Kagui on Tue, 01/11/2022

If you have any iPhone 12 or 13, you have MagSafe, Apple's magnetic technology that can help you do more with your phone. STM Goods creates a unique lineup of MagSafe-compatible accessories that can make your life easier. Keep reading to learn more about the MagArm, MagLoop, and MagPod!

If you're getting ready to trade, give away, or sell your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you're probably wondering how to erase your iPhone, then restore your iPhone to factory settings, so all your data and settings are deleted. If you want to know how to factory reset an iPhone, there are two methods for accomplishing this. If you have a computer available, you can factory reset your iPhone with iTunes or the Finder. If you need to know how to reset your iPhone or iPad without a computer, you can still factory reset your iPhone from the Settings app. If you're wondering how to delete everything on your iPhone, it doesn't matter which model you have. A factory reset for an iPhone works the same way, whether it's an older generation like an iPhone 4, 5, 6, 7, or a newer iPhone 8, X, or 11. Ready to learn how to wipe an iPhone or iPad and completely reset it? Let's get started! 

There are two ways to set a custom image as the wallpaper of your opening “unlock” screen:

  • Go to Photos, display the desired image, tap on the lower-left options button, and select “Use as Wallpaper” from the pop-up menu.
  • Open the Settings app and select General >Wallpaper.

Either of these methods allows you to use any photo or image on the iPhone/iPod touch as wallpaper. Follow these steps to add a wallpaper folder, so you don't have to look through all your photos to find an image:

Yesterday I wrote about a FAIL where movies for many iphone users are not playing. I do not have a the full answer as to why it’s not working, although it seems that the .flv (flash version) of the video is playing instead of the h.264 (apple version).   As of this writing, it still does not work for me; even after a few reboots.  However, I did find a way to get video to work.

I represented iPhone Life magazine at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and there was plenty of news to report for iPhone and iPod touch users. The following are notes from the event, plus brief reviews of some of the gadgets we were able to get our hands on after CES was over.

High-tech headwear

At least two vendors are trying to integrate headphones or speakers into something you already wear.

It can be a nerve-wracking step, buying your child their first iPhone. There's a lot of inappropriate content in songs, movies, and apps, not to mention creepers and weirdos on the internet. Luckily, the iPhone has parental controls we can set to keep our children from accessing the more unsavory side of the digital world. In this tip, we'll learn how to use the Restrictions screen to enable restrictions and set a passcode so those settings can't be changed by anyone but you. Let's get started learning how to block websites, lock apps, and decide on Allowed Content, Privacy, Allowed Changes, and Game Center features. 

In addition to the four icons in the bar at the bottom, the Home screen holds 16 application icons. You can create up to eight additional pages for application icons and each page can hold an addition 16 app icons. So a total of nine Home screen pages, each of which can hold up to 16 app icons, plus the 4 icons at the bottom, means that you can have up to 148 apps on your iPhone.

Due to the Apple SDK constraints on developers of iPhone software, data exchanges with your phone is limited to email and local area network connectivity. 

Some iPhone applications such as “Files” allow you to import and read your Word, Excel, and PDF files from your desktop computer to your phone, and move that data to the iPhone by establishing a wireless connection between the phone and desktop over a LAN.

 There are some things I like about lugging around a real dictionary: it requires no power source, and you can quickly flip to a section and scan page after page. In fact, I would argue that technology has yet to match the human hand/eye coordination and acuity for quickly scanning through written documents, but that’s another post.

Groucho Marx once said he wouldn't belong to a club that would have him as a member.  The iPhone club, while already setting records in the smartphone industry, is about to get bigger.

Not everybody has the luxury of an Apple store nearby, and not every AT&T store sells the iPhone.  Plus, when the iPhone 3G was introduced, online ordering went away.  With all of these obstacles, Apple knows there is always room for improvement.

There is a starbucks near where I live, but the wifi there is horrible. Worse, I cannot get 3G, so basically, I go elsewhere. Then AT&T announced they were going to give iPhone users free wifi access. Great! But, you have to go through this silly login process: Link to process.. Whatever. It’s not a chore so much as just plain annoying. So much so, I do not bother and stick with edge.

I'm American, but as a young budding musician in the 80’s, I was fully on board with English music (especially Punk), my guitar instructor was English, watch more then my share of BBC (young ones!!) and then lived in Oxford for 3+ years. So I can pull a pretty good accent when needed. So after reading this article on Digg explaining how various British accents will give odd results, I just had to give it a try.

If you want to transfer files from machine to machine on your network (without using a USB drive), there is a very simple application available in the iTunes App store called "Files lite". Look under the Productivity category to find it. It is an ingenious and free (if somewhat limited) way to turn your iPhone or Touch into a network attached storage device, as well as expand the ability to share files.

The iPhone Dock (some people refer to it as the menu bar or the Home screen bottom bar) provides a means to access your most frequently used apps from any of your Home screens. Apple's default Dock apps may be fine for you, but if you want to change the Home screen layout on your iPhone, you can move apps out of and into the iPhone Dock. Here's how to change, rearrange, and organize apps in your iPhone Dock. 

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