Apple’s iPhone has been a massive hit all over the world with many people loving the device’s sleek sexy looks, it’s intelligent features and it’s application support.
With the release of the App Store for the iPhone, users were able to download software that added to the usefulness of their phones, taking the device away from the mobile phone market and pulling it firmly into the portable computing sector.
Even with all this software, you may not have realised the small changes you could make on your iPhone to allow it to run just the way you wanted it to. Today I wish to share with you ten tips that will put you in more control of your iPhone’s inbuilt features.
- Taking A Screenshot – Say you are writing a review for a really cool iPhone App and you need to annotate the article with screenshots (kind of like this blog). Simply navigate to the screen you wish to capture, hold your Home Button and then the Sleep/Wake Button and you have yourself a screenshot waiting for you in your Photos.
- Removing The Annoying “Sent from my iPhone” Signature – Most people don’t know this piece of text is appended to the end of emails sent from their iPhone until they receive a reply to their email. To turn this option off or remove it completely, navigate to Settings –> Mail, Contacts and Calendar –> Signature and simply either delete the text inside this screen or change it to something more appealing.
- Teach Your Spellchecker – This tip is quite a difficult one to pull off, mainly because you never know when it will eventually learn the word and stop bugging you in the future. But if you wish to make your iPhone learn that swearword or name, simply press the small “X” in the little popup spelling suggestion each time it pops up. After a few times, this should (I repeat should) stop it from nagging you in the future.
- If you really hate the popup, you can remove it easily by heading to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> Enable Autocorrection and setting this to OFF.
- Saving Your Bookmarks To Your Home Screen – I don’t know how long I had my iPhone before I worked this one out. If you have some favourite iPhone enabled websites that you visit everyday but hate having to open Safari and manually find the bookmark, help is at hand. By saving that bookmark to your home screen, you can create a shortcut to your favourite website by simply pressing the “+” button inside Safari, and selecting “Add To Home Screen”. A shortcut featuring that websites Favicon should now be sitting pretty on one of your home screens.
- Exiting A Crashed App – At some time or another, you will be faced with an application that causes your iPhone to crash or to freeze. To quit the application, you will need to instruct your iPhone to Force Quit that app. This process requires you to just hold the Home Button for about five seconds until the iPhone decides to take you back to your Home Screen.
- If that isn’t enough, you can reboot the iPhone by holding the Home Screen button and the Sleep/Wake button for about 8 seconds, your screen will go black and the Apple logo should reappear.
- Share A URL Without Copy+Paste – Not having cut and paste on the iPhone is a massive disadvantage and the bugbear of many iPhone users. There is a way to share URL’s with your friends and family however. All you have to do is find the webpage you wish to share in Safari, press the “+” button and select “Mail Link To This Page”.
- View Map of Contacts Address – If you have entered the address of a friend or family in their contact entry, if you tap their address, it will display it on Google Maps.
- Save A Website Picture – When browsing and you wish to save a picture you found, hold your finger on the image you wish to save. Select save from the resulting menu and it will be saved to your Photos.
So, there you have it, eight little tips and tricks that you may or may not have heard about. If you have any tips that you wish to share, bang them in the comments and I will add them to the post, along with a link to your website.
Photo: William Hook
