Marianne Schultz

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iPad tips and tricks

December 28, 2011 by Marianne Schultz Leave a Comment

Did you just get a new iPad for Christmas? If so, you probably noticed that Apple doesn’t include a user guide with it and while it’s generally easy enough to use, there are a few tips and tricks that aren’t exactly intuitive to figure out on your own, especially if you’re new to Apple’s iOS products. Here’s a round-up of the most useful tips I use myself and that I’ve seen around the web recently:

Adjust screen brightness from the home screen

I do this often since I use my iPad primarily as an ebook reader and dimming its display at night is required if I don’t want to go blind while reading in bed. Double-clicking the home button brings up the app switcher bar and if you swipe all the way to the left (moving your finger from left to right), you’ll see a brightness control slider on the left side (the one on the right is volume). You can also mute the volume quickly here as well – just tap on the volume icon on the left.

Image courtesy of TechCrunch

Customize the function of the side switch

That little switch above the volume rocker can do one of two actions and you get to choose which. It can either lock in the current orientation of the iPad’s screen so it won’t change as you move, or it can serve as a mute switch to immediately make your iPad silent. You can access this in the Settings app under General:

I have mine set to lock rotation since this is something I need more often than muting the volume (I use the shortcut mentioned above for adjusting screen brightness to mute the volume when I need to).

Enable Emoji

You know those cute little smiley faces and other emoticons that can be handy (and fun) to use in your text messages on your cell phone? Well, they’re available on the iPad too. You just need to go to the Settings app and then to the General section and choose Keyboard. There, tap on International Keyboards, then Add New Keyboard and tap on Emoji in the list on the next screen. If that seemed confusing, see a more detailed step-by-step guide on Apple’s support site here. (This trick also works on the iPhone in iOS 5.)

“Restart” unresponsive apps

While most apps run without any problems most of the time, you’ll need to kill one every now and then and open it again to get it work right. TechCrunch covers how to do this in this guide that also contains a few other useful tips.

Starting from the beginning – complete guides

If you’re an absolute newbie to the iPad, check out this complete getting started guide by my friend Patrick Jordan over at iPad Insight.

A coworker at my day job, Nissa Campbell, has written an iPad/iPhone getting started and tips guide over at everythingiCafe here.

[frame]If you received a shiny new iPhone 4S for the holidays, be sure to check out my iOS 5 and iPhone 4S Tips & Tricks and iPhone 4S Camera Tricks articles for more useful information.[/frame]

I hope you are all enjoying the holidays!

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Filed Under: linkety-link Tagged With: ipad, iPhone, tips

iOS 5 and iPhone 4S tips and tricks

October 21, 2011 by Marianne Schultz 9 Comments

Since iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S were released last week, there have been several tips and tricks posted all over the web that I’ve found useful and I wanted to put these all in one place so you could benefit from them too without having to search high and low to find them yourself.

  • Have Siri pronounce your name correctly or call you something else entirely, via TiPB. As I mentioned in this week’s podcast, I have Siri call me “Mistress” (other alternatives I had in mind were too long or, um, not entirely family-friendly for use in public).
  • Use Siri to tweet, via Mashable.
  • Define contact relationships for Siri (so you can just say “Call Mom” or “Text my husband” and the like), via TiPB.
  • Disable Siri when your iPhone is locked to prevent others from using it if it’s lost or stolen, via Business Insider. This is a setting enabled by default and is a potential security issue since anyone could get your personal information by asking Siri “What is my contact information?” or other similar questions even when your iPhone is passcode-locked.
  • Change your iMessage caller ID to hide your phone number, via Cult of Mac.
  • Enable emoji in iOS 5, via 9to5Mac. Yay! You don’t have to use a 3rd-party app to enable emoji anymore!
  • Creating different lists in the Reminders app, via TiPB. The neat thing about this feature is that you can then use Siri to add to these lists. For example, I’ve created a list titled “Shopping” in Reminders and I can just tell Siri, “Please add milk to my Shopping list” and she’ll do it. This makes Reminders far more useful for me beyond reminding me about tasks at specific times and locations.
  • A list of Siri commands to add punctuation, special spacing and characters and more to text you dictate, at Crush Apps. You can also download this list to carry around with you if you have the Paperless app (link opens iTunes), which is one of my favorites for keeping lists.

If you’ve come across any other tips you’d like to share, post them in the comments!

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Filed Under: linkety-link Tagged With: ios, iPhone, tips, tricks

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