By Conner Carey
Many apps provide extra content or enhancements for a fee, but in-app purchases are a good way to accidentally rack up a high App Store bill. Those 99 cent extras add up quickly and before you know it, you (or your kids!) have gone way over your monthly phone bill budget. No worries though; there’s an easy way to prevent this in your Settings app. Here’s how to restrict in-app purchases.
By Conner Carey
Apple’s AI, Siri, is constantly improving. You can use Siri to do more now than ever, including including playing albums, asking about sport scores, and turning on and off certain settings such as Low Power Mode or Bluetooth. However, sometimes you ask Siri to do something and change your mind or need to ask another question. For instance, if you ask Siri to set a reminder but realize you don’t need the reminder, it’s easy to cancel the command. Here’s how to cancel Siri commands.
By Tommy Ly
There’s two ways to add events in mail to your calendar app. With iOS 9 or later, there’s a feature in Settings that allows for Events Found in Mail to automatically be added to your Calendar app. You can turn this feature on or off. If you’d prefer to turn it off, you can also add individual Mail events to your Calendar app manually. This tip will show you how to do both.
By Conner Carey
With iOS 9, you have the option to sort pull-down notifications. This allows you to group or ungroup apps and view notifications sorted manually or by most recent. When you group apps, they’re sorted into blocks under notifications with the most recent app appearing at the top. When apps are ungrouped, notifications will sort intermixed by most recent unless sorted manually.
By Conner Carey
When you open a new tab in Safari, it gives you suggestions for frequently visited websites. This feature can be turned off in Settings.
By Conner Carey
Setting reminders for yourself on your iPhone has never been easier. With iOS 9, Siri has received a major intelligence boost and is capable of understanding terms such as "it" or "this," which means you can now ask Siri to set a contextual reminder based on what you are looking at on your iPhone screen.
By Conner Carey
In iOS 9, you can view specifics on which apps are using your iPhone’s battery. If you find your battery is draining quickly, viewing detailed battery info is a great way to figure out why. You can see which apps use chunks of your battery life, how long the app was active, and how long the app was running in the background. This is also a great way to see how much time you're spending on a particular app; in case you're still in denial about your Facebook habit.
By Conner Carey
Low-Power Mode is a battery life saver when your iPhone is running out of juice. It’s easy enough to navigate your Settings and turn it on; however, Siri can do it for you even faster.
By Conner Carey
In iOS 9 selfies and screenshots are now automatically saved to their own respective albums. If you’re an avid photo taker, you may have already discovered the new albums in Photos, which make organizing your photos and mass photo deleting much easier.
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.
Touch ID has seen some major improvements since the release of the iPhone 6s. It’s more accurate and works much more often than it used to. But now, I find Touch ID unlocks my iPhone before I have a chance to check the notification that has popped up. Or, if I’m driving and I just want to change the song from the Lock screen, sometimes Touch ID works too quickly and I end up unlocking my iPhone and having to take the extra step of opening the Music app. Well, here’s our trick to get around that.
By Tommy Ly
Writing and sending Emails from your iPhone or iPad is a quick and simple way to keep up with your correspondence while on the go. But sometimes you need to finish what you've started at another time.
By Becca Ludlum
There are a few different ways to leave a Family Sharing group, however, there are some rules you should be aware of before doing so. This tip will show you how easy it is to leave a Family Sharing group, then tell you about Apple's Family Sharing stipulations.
By Conner Carey
Many movie files that work on your computer don’t necessarily work on an iPhone or iPod. If you’re attempting to sync a video that isn’t compatible, iTunes will flash a message letting you know it can’t play on your device. What that message doesn’t tell you is that there’s an easy way you can convert the video so that it will play. Here’s how to convert a video for iPhone.
By Paula Bostrom
The placement of app icons on your iPhone’s Home screen can make life simple or hard. OK, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement, but app icon placement is important to those of us who crave organization. You can choose to organize your apps using your iPhone, but you may find it more efficient to do so using iTunes, since you can do things like reorder Home screen pages and sort apps according to your preferred criteria.
By Conner Carey
As we accumulate more apps, we need more screen space to organize them all. You can create multiple Home Screens, allowing you to swipe through Home Screen pages and have access to as many apps as you want. At the bottom of your Home screen, above your stationary Dock apps, are dots indicating how many Home Screen pages you have. If you find you’re running out of space or want to step-up your organization game, here’s how to create a new Home Screen.
iPhone 6s and 6s Plus users can utilize 3D Touch for a plethora of convenient actions and previews. One such action is the ability to 3D Touch a group text in order to individually text a specific person from the group. This saves you the step of opening a new message and searching for the contact when you already have their information right in front of you. Here’s how to 3D Touch a group text to contact anyone in the text individually.
By Conner Carey
Game Center is the main station for keeping up with your favorite iOS games, your ranking in the games, fellow friends who play, and challenges between friends. Game Center also makes it easy to request a multiplayer game with a friend. Here’s how to do that.
By Conner Carey
Game Center is the main hub for iOS gaming, keeping score, and challenging friends. When playing multiplayer games, you can Auto-Match with a random person, or invite your friends to play. In order to play with your friends from real life, you need to add them to your list of friends in Game Center. Here’s how to send a friend request in Game Center.
By Conner Carey
With a subscription to Apple Music or iTunes Match, you can use the iCloud Music Library. This is an easy way to have access to your music across all of your devices. When your iCloud Music Library is enabled, you can add an Apple Music song to My Music from your iPhone, then check your iPad and the song will be there.
