You’ve had an iPhone for years now and you think you know your way around it, but there are some clever tricks that even older versions have up their sleeves that could save you lots of time and frustration. Here’s just a few.
You can take a photo while taking a video
If you’re filming something amazing, you might find yourself wishing you could take a still as well. You might instinctively stop filming and use the regular camera function instead, but you don’t need to – just hit the camera button which should appear onscreen as your video.
Admittedly, you’re using the less-sensitive video sensors instead of the camera sensors, but unless you really need pin-sharp images, that should do the job.
Take a selfie with your headphones
Selfies aren’t going anywhere in a hurry, but if you’re sick of the omnipresent forearm, the dodgy angles and trying to crowd everyone into a frame curtailed by your arm-length, then this tip is for you.
You probably already know that you can activate the camera shutter by pressing the volume buttons on your phone and that this is really handy for keeping the camera stable. Many a phone gets dropped because someone’s scrabbling around trying to reach the shutter icon and so many a holiday is ruined because they end up looking for an iPhone repair in Miami rather than hitting the beach.
What’s great for selfies, though, is the fact that you can use the volume button on your headphones to take the snap! Obviously, they need to be plugged in, but that’s no big deal. By using your headphones, you can take a wider shot, or one that’s more natural and front-on, as well as less shaky. Genius.
Hit double space instead of schlepping to the full-stop symbol
Dead easy, and a brilliant time-saver. How often, when you’re typing out a long text, email or note, do you stop, change the keyboard to symbols, hit full-stop, then change back? More often than not you end up changing your keyboard to another alphabet altogether and then you have to undo that as well. Grrr…
Fear not, for all you need to do is to double-tap the spacebar and it’ll add a full-stop, then a space, and cap up the first word of your next sentence. You need to be pretty nifty, though, or you will just end up with large spaces in between your words, which you then have to delete and still head to the symbol keyboard…
Customize your QuickType
The iOS QuickType is great at predicting what you’re going to write and it gets to know you after a while, too.
What’s even better is that you can customize it so that you can set up shortcuts and abbreviations that turn into full names, phrases or sayings all by themselves! If you frequently have to enter your address into forms, letters and so on, then you could have “homedeets” turn into your entire address, zip code and all. Go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement and then + to add your own.
