How-To

It’s easy to miss appointments when our calendars are always full, and pasting sticky notes to computer screens just doesn’t cut it anymore. However, your phone is happy to do the thinking for you; change the Default Alert Time and your Calendar app will remind you. 

Some of your Facebook friends like games. A lot. Some of your Facebook friends want you to like games a lot too. And you know this because they've sent you so many Facebook game requests that you are considering unfriending them just to make the onslaught stop. 

We at iPhone Life don't want to tell you who to be friends with, but you don't actually have to unfriend the Facebook gamers you know in order to make the game requests stop. Here's what you can do instead:

Have you ever been watching something on Netflix with your iPhone or iPad only to realize the app was using cellular data instead of Wi-Fi? Most of us do not have unlimited data available, so that can be an expensive mistake. To avoid using data when you don't have to, it's a good idea to prevent data-gobbling apps from accessing data as their default setting. You can do this by turning off cellular data for specific apps, like video and music streaming apps, and changing the frequency with which apps like Mail fetch new data.

It can be really handy to use Siri to create events and reminders — so much faster than opening the app and doing it manually. However, you need to be careful how you word your request, because Siri will sometimes mix things up: creating an event when you wanted a reminder, and vice versa.

Do you always measure ingredients exactly when following a recipe? Do you say things like, "According to my pedometer app, I've walked 3.8 miles today."? Do you use decimals when filling out your weight on medical forms?

If you do, you'll be happy to know you can also quantify exactly how much battery power your iPhone has left.

With all of our information in "the cloud," it feels like we have everything at our fingertips. Emails, dates, calendar appointments, and phone numbers easily pop up on whatever device we're using and sometimes we take for granted how it all syncs up. Syncing your Google and Yahoo contacts with your phone is a super simple process and I'm going to walk you through it now. 

In this age of multi-device households, sharing accounts with family members can be a little stressful. Add a tween or teenage into the mix, and it might be enough to push you over the edge. If you’ve ever had your phone ring with a FaceTime call from your 12 year-old’s best friend or received the “iCloud is full” error message after adding a new device to your household, this article is for you.

First, it’s important to know a little bit about your Apple ID and iCloud. Your Apple ID is what gives you access to iCloud, FaceTime, iMessage, iTunes, the App Store, and Game Center, among other services. Since these are the most-used services in my house, they are the ones I’m going to talk about here. Some families choose to share an Apple ID for some services and use separate Apple IDs for others. There is no “one size fits all” cure for family device management—it all depends on your family's preferences. If you forgot your Apple ID, here's how to reset your password.

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 19 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).

Now that you have learned the basics of Core Data and have learned how it works behind the scenes, we're going to finish implementing the main pieces of Core Data in the iAppsReview project and show you how to distribute a pre-populated database with your apps. You can download the project we have created so far from this link.

We've shown you before how to customize the Today view in your Notification Center by removing unwanted widgets and reordering the widgets you do want. But you may have noticed there's no option to remove the Apple Weather widget, which is frustrating if you've also got a widget from your preferred third-party weather app and want to remove any redundant widgets.