Cool iPhone 12 Tips and Tricks: New iOS 14 Features

If you just got yourself a brand new Apple iPhone, 

... or even a slightly older model but with the latest iOS 14 software downloaded. There are several new features that you can use to help utilise your phone much better and provide some customised settings!

So whether you have the iPhone 12 Pro Max or an iPhone X, there is plenty of features to explore with your phone. We will run through some of the cool tips and tricks we have discovered since using the new software.

Tap the back for additional functions

Apple’s iOS software has long been the source for many great accessibility features, and one of the more recent ones is the ability to tap the back of your phone to launch specific functions, like taking a screenshot.

To enable it, go to Settings, then find ‘Accessibility’, and select ‘Touch’ and scroll down to ‘Back Tap’. Choose either double or triple tap and then select ‘Screenshot’. Now when you double or triple tap the back of your iPhone, it’ll grab a screenshot.

One other cool feature to choose is the notification centre, so you can double or triple tap to quickly get to the notification centre. This trick comes in handy for those who prefer one-hand use.

Change your default browser and email apps

Another new feature in the latest software is using other apps as default for things like your internet browser or email app. So, if you want to use Chrome as your default browser, download Chrome from the App Store and then open your iPhone Settings app and find Chrome in the list at the bottom. Tap it and then choose ‘default browser’ from the next screen, and choose ‘Chrome’ on the following one. Now, Chrome will be the default browser.

You can do the same with email apps, so if you want to use Gmail instead of Mail as your default, you go to Settings, find your third party email app, tap on it, then choose ‘default mail app’ on the next screen, and then select Gmail (or whatever email app you’re using).

Organise your new apps from appearing on your home screen

With iOS 14, we now have an App Library, which is excellent for storing those apps you don’t use all the time. But by default, whenever you download a new app, it appears on your home screen. If you’d rather it went straight to the App Library instead and didn’t fill up your home screen, go to Settings > Home Screen and then choose ‘App Library only’ under the ‘newly downloaded apps’ section.

View all your apps in a list format

By default, App Library automatically sorts apps into folders for you, but if you’d rather see them in a list, you just drag down on the screen in App Library, and now all your apps are listed alphabetically.

 

You can search using the search bar at the top if you want to, or scroll quickly to the app you want by tapping the tiny corresponding first letter in the column down the right side (you can also scroll down this column).

 

Add widgets to your home screen

iOS 14 has changed things up quite a lot by allowing you to add widgets to your home screen, to add them, simply long-press on an app icon on your home screen and select ‘edit home screen’. Or, for a quicker method, just long-press a blank area on your home screen.

 

Now tap the plus sign in the top corner and find the widget you want to add. To see all the apps that support them that you have installed, scroll down to the bottom and select the app from the list. Now choose which size widget you want and tap the ‘Add Widget’ button at the bottom of the pop-up window that appears.

 

Build your own custom widget smart stacks

Image From McRumours

One of the widgets you can create is a smart stack, which lets you scroll through multiple widgets in the same widget on the screen. To create your own, all you have to do is drag and drop individual widgets on top of each other. Now they can be set to auto-rotate, or you can scroll through them manually.

Remove entire home screens

Long press a blank area on your home screen, and now tap the page indicator on the bottom of the screen. Tap the tick or checkmark at the bottom of each screen you want to move. It doesn’t delete the apps, just hides them away in the app library.

 

Have your own custom dark mode schedule

Dark mode has been around a while, and it’s easy to activate by heading into Settings > Display and then choosing the dark mode at the top. But if you want it to activate automatically to a custom schedule set by you, toggle the ‘Automatic’ option on and then tap on the ‘Options’ tab beneath that. On the next screen, select ‘Custom Schedule’ and set a light and dark time. Now it’ll activate and deactivate when you’ve set it to.

 

Adjust your Today view

As well as having widgets on your home screen, there’s the ‘Today’ view that lives to the left of your first home screen. To customise this just swipe over to it and then scroll down until you see the edit button. Tap that and now you can remove any widgets from the top, edit the window at the bottom of the screen with the old-style widgets in it, and tap ‘customise’ at the bottom of the screen to add and remove widgets from there.

 

Find the right emojis

Using Apple’s built-in keyboard, you can now search for emoji easily. Just launch the emoji keyboard and tap the ‘search emoji’ field to search for eggplants, smiley faces and poops. Or whatever else you’re after.

 

Fake eye contact in Facetime

So this is a cool trick. If you head to Settings > Facetime > Eye Contact, you can enable that toggle. Whenever you’re making FaceTime calls, it’ll make it look like you’re looking directly at the camera or person on the other side of the call, even when you’re looking at the screen.

 Bring up additional camera controls

When you load up the camera app, the controls are quite basic, but there are others hidden and easily revealed if you want to.

 Launch the camera app and then swipe up on the camera shooting modes row if you’re holding it vertically, then swipe left. Now you’ll get a whole new set of controls, which changes depending on the shooting mode you’re in.

If you’re in the regular stills mode, you’ll see a night mode option, live photos, photo aspect ratio and exposure as well as flash. To change exposure, for instance, just tap on the little plus/minus sign and then slide the slider on-screen until it’s exposed the way you want.

 

Launch the QR Scanner quickly

If you want to launch the phone’s inbuilt QR code scanning feature quickly, just swipe down from the screen’s top right to launch Control Centre. Here you can find the small QR code button. Tap on that, and you can quickly scan a code.

Burst photo button

You can use your volume up button to take a burst photo. Just head to Settings > Camera and then toggle on the ‘Use Volume Up for Burst’ option and when you hold the volume up button down in the photo mode, it’ll automatically shoot a burst of photos.

Image Source:Apple, Macrumours, Fast Company