Secret Features of Your iPhone

[dgstorm]

For many users, this list of 5 hidden features for the iPhone will not actually contain any secrets. Some iPhone owners know every nook and cranny of their device. For those who don't have the DNA of their Apple device memorized, here are a few handy hidden "secret" features of the current iPhone line. Enjoy!

Text Shortcuts: To find this one, you just need to go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement and tap the plus symbol. You then input a specific word or phrase in the Phrase field and then add something short and sweet (and easy for you to remember) in the Shortcut field. After that, each time you type that small series, it will type out the longer phrase or word you entered in the Phrase field. What a handy shortcut.

Custom Vibration Alerts: To find this, you just need to open up settings, and then go to Sounds > Ringtone/Text Tone/Etc > Vibration. Inside there is an option to Create New Vibration. This will let create a new vibrate pattern for calls and/or texts, and you can specify the pattern by tapping it out. This is like custom ring-tones for friends or family, except it's a custom vibration instead!

Hide Unwanted Apple Apps: Have you ever thought that many of the Apple apps just take up valuable screen real estate because you don't use them? You can actually take care of that yourself! Head to Settings > General > Restrictions and enable Hide Unwanted Apple Apps by entering your PIN or passcode. You will then be given the option to hit a toggle next to any of those pesky Apple apps, and it will hide them from your home screen. Neato!

Head Control: Not everyone knows that the iOS platform actually has some cool head gesture based controls built in. Most of these are designed for folks with special needs, but that doesn't mean we can't find creative ways to use them. If you go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Switch Control and activate it, you will be able to add Camera as a new Switch. Once you do this, you will be able to setup various digital actions on your iPhone just by moving your head left or right in front of your iPhone display.

Blinking Message Alerts: If you go to Settings, and General > Accessibility, you can activate the LED Flash for Alerts. After that, your iPhone's camera flash blinks each time you get a new message! I'll be some of you wished you knew about that one sooner!

Thanks for checking out our secret iPhone tips. If you can think of any we missed, please add them to the thread below.

 

[ffarl]

I use the text shortcuts every day. @@ is my main email. ## is my address and $$ is my phone number. Super handy. I didn't know about hiding unwanted apps tough. Thats good to know!

 

[JohnnyApple]

I only knew about the Text Shortcuts and the Blinking Message Alerts. Handy list!

I just copied @ffarl's list except I used the ## as my phone number, and the $$ as my address.

 

[cereal killer]

Nice Stormy! As a newb iPhone user this is super helpful! The hiding of unwanted apps and blinking message alerts is just what I wanted to see!

 

[DrumsOfGrohl]

I love messing with the custom vibrations. As a drummer, I program the vibrations to have beats I associate with certain songs, so I know who is calling me, or if I get a text without having to take the phone out of my pocket.

 

[bear7962]

Hide Unwanted Apps is not on my iPhone as yet.

 

[KevinJS]

Continuing on from the text replacements (for Mac users):

When you input a keyboard shortcut to iOS, it becomes available on your Mac. The Mac is nothing like as easy as the iPhone/iPad when it comes to strange characters, so when I'm talking about speakers and resistance I frequently want to use Ω instead of "ohm". So, I set up a shortcut on the iPad as follows "/ohm". If I want the word "ohm" I simply omit the "/", otherwise OS X will replace "/ohm" with "Ω".

 

[smalltowngirl13]

Hide Unwanted Apps is not on my iPhone as yet.

If you are on IOS 9, you should see several apps with toggles if you enable restrictions - just toggle off the ones you want to hide. Unfortunately, it does not include all the Apple apps but there is a trick to hide those other unwanted apps (it seems finicky at first to get it to work). If you put any unwanted, unremovable app in a folder you can transfer it to the last page of the folder (I found having an empty folder page between the other apps in the folder and app you want to delete, helped the process for me), while still holding the app in edit mode, press the home button. The app should fly out off the folder...this does not permanently delete the app as it'll reappear with a reboot and you can still search for the app in your spotlight search.

Here is a screen of the toggles in the restrictions menu...

Here is a youtube link for the other trick on hiding unwanted Apple apps...




~sent while mobile~

 

[bear7962]

Yes, thank you. I know this. But it had been reported that a feature was coming that would allow us to be rid of those unwanted Apple apps. This is what I was hoping the poster had announced but apparently it isn't ready for release yet.

 

[gaznshell]

I use the text shortcuts every day. @@ is my main email. ## is my address and $$ is my phone number. Super handy. I didn't know about hiding unwanted apps tough. Thats good to know!

What a good idea


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk