iPhone 8 Series
How To: Change Your iPhone's Name with Just a Couple Clicks
Your iPhone's name matters more than you might think. It shows up when AirDropping files to other Apple devices, when keeping tabs on your devices' locations via Find My, and when syncing with your computer. While "Jake Peterson's iPhone" gets the job done, I'd rather give the phone I spend all my time with a proper name.
How To: Why You Should Open the Wallet App Before You Tap & Pay with Your iPhone
When you place your iPhone over a card reader for Apple Pay, it'll always pull up your default card. That might work fine for you, but perhaps that isn't the card you want to use. The problem is, you don't have time to switch cards before the payment goes through. That might result in using your rewardless debit card to buy groceries when you could've snagged 2% back by using your Apple Card.
How To: This Is the Quickest Way to Disable Face ID or Touch ID in a Pinch
Here's the situation: you need Face ID or Touch ID disabled, yesterday. You don't have time to dig around in your settings, slowly working through an authentication reset. If you find yourself in a place where you think your own face or fingerprint will be used against you, use this trick to instantly protect your iPhone.
How To: The Fastest Way to Find an App on Your Cluttered iPhone
Confession time: I hardly ever leave the first page of my iPhone's home screen. No, my iPhone isn't super organized and, no, I don't limit the number of apps I download as well (trust me, this phone is a mess). The truth is that you don't need to rely on your iPhone's home screen pages to find and open an app. In most cases, there's simply a much faster way.
How To: Toggle Adjustments in Your iPhone's Photos Editor to Compare Effects Before & After
The Photos app on iPhone has long offered basic editing features for quick edits to pictures, but iOS 13 greatly expanded them and gave the same love to videos. One of the best additions offers the ability to turn off photo and video edits without undoing them, so you can preview how your shots look with or without an effect.
How To: Open Previous Drafts Faster in Your iPhone's Mail App — From Any Mailbox or Folder
All of your partially written, unsent emails live in your "Drafts" folders, in limbo until the day they are sent off or deleted. In Apple's Mail for iPhone, you can access all drafts from all accounts in a combined "All Drafts" folder from the app's main Mailboxes list — but only if you added it manually. But there's an even better way to access all of your drafts in Apple Mail in iOS; it's just not obvious.
News: iOS 13.3 Brings Back the Like & Dislike Buttons in Apple News Stories
Apple's upcoming iPhone update, iOS 13.3, doesn't add as many new features as iOS 13.1 or 13.2, but there's one under-the-radar change you'll love if you use Apple News on a daily basis.
How To: Create Ringtones for Your iPhone Using 'Music' in macOS 10.15 Catalina
Have you ever heard someone else's iPhone ringing and thought it was yours? Of course you did. iPhone ringtones are iconic, but not varied. If you're using one of the more popular iOS sounds, you'll likely encounter it in the wild multiple times. Why bother, when you can create your own custom ringtones right on your Mac.
How To: Stop Your iPhone from Turning on Every Time You Pick It Up
When you pick up your iPhone, the display turns on. Often, that's convenient since you want to use your iPhone anyway. But think about those times you're simply picking it up to take it with you somewhere. The display turns on anyway, and now you're accidentally responding to messages, turning on your flashlight, opening your camera — you get the gist.
How To: There's a Faster Way to Open Recent Files on Your iPhone
With the updated Files app in iOS 13, iPhone users finally have decent file browser. But, as with any file browser, it can easily become crowded, making it hard to find the files you want.
How To: The Fastest Way to Select Multiple Photos on Your iPhone
Whether it's to delete a few photos or share a bunch with another app, there are times when you need to select several pictures at once. This would usually be annoying since you'd have to tap every picture you wanted to select, but there's a much faster way to batch select.
How To: The Hidden Gesture for Switching Between Apps on Home Button iPhones
I love my iPhone 8 Plus, but the allure of modern iPhone gestures is sometimes more tempting than I care to admit. I imagine many of you with a home button iPhone feel the same. What if I told you, however, that your iPhone is capable of iPhone X-like gestures? In fact, you can use a gesture to switch between apps. Welcome to the future.
How To: The Hidden Action That Opens Apple Pay from Your iPhone's Lock Screen
I think everyone with an iPhone should be making every purchase they can with Apple Pay. I also think everyone who uses Apple Pay should open the Wallet app ahead of time, instead of simply tapping their iPhone to the card reader. But there's a much faster way to open Wallet than slogging through the sea of apps on your iPhone. You can open it right from the lock screen.
How To: Share Any Password from Your iPhone to Other Apple Devices
In iOS 11, Apple made it easier for you to share passwords with friends. Back then, it was just Wi-Fi passwords, which made sense. "What's the Wi-Fi?" gets old after a while. But now, whether you're running iOS 12 or 13, you can share any password you want with any iPhone around, all with one of iOS' best features: AirDrop.
How To: Return to the Default Font in Mail Drafts After Using a Custom One
One of iOS 13's coolest features is the ability to download, install, and choose fonts in select apps like Pages and Mail. However, you might notice an issue when writing an email with a custom typeface: there's no option to return to the default font. What gives?
How To: Focus Your iPhone Photos & Videos by Adding a Vignette
If there's one tool at your photo editing disposal to instantly dramatize a picture, it's the vignette. It shades away the corners of a photo, which highlights the center of the image without any effort on your part. In the past, you'd have to look outside the Photos app on your iPhone to achieve such a result, but with iOS 13, a vignette is within immediate grasp.
How To: There's Finally a Way to Disable Those Annoying Memoji Stickers in Messages on iPhone
There's a lot to love about iOS 13. Permanent Memoji stickers though? Not so much. Whether you love or hate these personalized icons, most of us can probably agree it's super annoying Apple doesn't let you disable them in the "Frequently Used" section of the Emoji keyboard. Every time you go to use an emoji, you have to see the stickers, whether you want to or not. That is, until now.
How To: Cut Text on Your iPhone with a Simple Gesture
Why is it that "cut" is such an underappreciated edit function? It copies and deletes text, what more could you ask for? Well, how about a more efficient way to do so? With iOS 13, Apple introduced a suite of new gestures and swipes to edit text easier on iPhone. It just so happens cutting text gets its own gesture as well.
How To: Bulk Delete Messages Faster with This Hidden iOS 13 Gesture
On the surface, deleting conversations in Messages seems harder in iOS 13 after Apple removed the "Edit" button on the main page. Fortunately, they added a new gesture that lets you remove entire threads and individual messages with ease.
How To: There's a Much Faster Way to Rearrange Your iPhone's Home Screen
For most of the iPhone's history, rearranging apps has been a giant pain. On the surface, iOS 13 seems to make things worse — with the new long-press gestures, it takes longer for iOS to know you want to move apps around. That might be true, but iOS 13 also introduced a way to make the process so much faster.