Ios tips
SharePlay – Watch movies or listen to songs together when on a Facetime call
SharePlay. It’s a new software feature on top of FaceTime that allows you to watch and listen to movies, TV shows, music, podcasts, and more with friends and family while video chatting. To use SharePlay on an iPhone:
- First, make sure that everyone on the call is using iOS 15 and iPadOS 15.
- Next, start a FaceTime call — either one-on-one or a group call — with everyone you want to watch or listen with.
- Once you’ve done that, exit out of the FaceTime call (which will automatically move to a picture-in-picture window) and head over to a SharePlay-compatible app.
- After that, playing something over SharePlay is as simple as it is when you’re just watching or listening alone: just select whatever content you want, and it’ll play for everyone.
- Controlling a SharePlay stream just requires that you play, pause, and skip around as you usually would. SharePlay automatically keeps everyone’s streams in sync so that if one person pauses to get a snack, the movie will pause for everyone.
- You have two options for ending a stream: either end it for everyone on the SharePlay call or end it just for you (letting everyone else continue to watch. See also: All the ways Siri is changing in iOS 15
Connect A Mouse With Your iPhone
Let’s start with the tip that is the most unusual. With iOS 13 or later iPhone users can connect a Bluetooth mouse with their iPhone and use it to navigate around the device’s interface. You can play games, browse the web and do all the normal things with your iPhone through the Bluetooth mouse. iOS 14 even lets users to change the size of the mouse pointer and customize its color. You can use any Bluetooth powered mouse and connect it with your iPhone. Here’s a short tutorial on how to connect a mouse with iPhone.
- Open Settings -> Accessibility -> Touch -> AssistiveTouch -> AssistiveTouch -> Enable.
- Now head over to the Bluetooth settings section of your device and add your Bluetooth mouse to your iPhone.
- Once connected, you will be able to use the mouse to navigate around the iPhone’s screen. You can learn more about the iOS’s ability to connect with a Bluetooth mouse here. You can watch our video demonstration of using a mouse with an iPhone below.
Cross-App Drag and Drop
This is going to be a powerful iOS 15 feature if implemented effectively. With iOS 15, you can drag and drop files, photos, and text from one app to another. Simply touch and hold the file or text you’re trying to copy and as the pop-up menu shows up, drag the file upwards to enable drag mode. Now, use your second finger to swipe and move to another app and simply drop the file there. It’s really easy.
Tags in Notes
I use Notes all the time but even I acknowledge the limitations of the app when compared with competitors like Google Keep. With tags coming to Notes on iOS 15, it would become so much easier to search for specific notes such as recipes, directions, or secret keyphrases by searching for hashtags. Simply add #tag_name in a note and it would appear on the main Notes Screen. You can then tap the tag to search all the notes containing the tag.
Background Sounds
The iPhone now comes equipped with a noise generator that would allow you to play a balanced background noise such as white or black noise at all times. You can adjust how loud the volume of the noise should be when idle and when the media is playing. The sounds include balanced noise, bright noise, dark noise, ocean, rain, and stream. However, if this feature feels limiting then there are other methods to generate white noise as well. Navigate to Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual > Background Sounds.
Digital Legacy
You can appoint a nominee within iPhone and they can claim access to your phone data if you die. This makes sense and it’s the right step for people who die in an accident leaving behind a locked iPhone that can not be unlocked. Now, you can pass on your digital legacy efficiently.
Offline Siri
Up until iOS 14, Siri required an active internet connection to perform even the simplest of tasks such as opening an app, setting a timer, or turning on Bluetooth. However, now Siri has been equipped with advanced ML that would process most commands offline. What’s even better is that all the conversations with Siri would stay on the iPhone giving you peace and privacy.
Manage Your App Accounts
iOS has this feature where you can use Apple’s randomly generated email id to create an account in an app. This allowed you to create an account within an app without giving away your actual email. With iOS 15, you can now manage those randomly generated accounts and remove them if you want. This feature has an added benefit that prevents those apps from sending spam or contacting you on your real email id. You can find it under Settings > Apple ID > iCloud > Hide my email.
Health | Track your Entire Family’s Health
Apple already takes pride in offering a cohesive ecosystem that benefits from every Apple device. The Health app now offers the option to share your health data with your family which means you can track the elderly and their health if they choose to share the data with you. The health app can now track walking steadiness, blood glucose, lab test results, and covid immunization results.
Live Text | Copy Text from Photos
One of the most intuitive features of the iPhone has been the ability to recognize QR codes from the Camera app without needing any third-party apps. Building on that, iPhone Camera would now seamlessly detect written text from the viewfinder and let you instantly copy and paste it anywhere in the iPhone. This feature would only work with iPhones running on A12 or above. This means iPhone X and older would not support this functionality. Not just that, it would also work in the Photos app, Safari browser, etc. The best part is the intuitiveness, it feels like you’re selecting a normal text when actually it’s a photo. Along with that, you would be able to detect objects in a photo such as flowers, books, mountains, etc. It’s going to tremendously help in searching for that image you took three years ago.