iOS Tip 168 - Close All Safari Tabs

1. Open Safari on the iPad or iPad
2. Tap and hold on the tab icon, it looks like two overlapping squares in the top right corner

3. Choose “Close Tabs” from the dropdown menu that appears, the item selection will also display how many total tabs are open in Safari

The feature exists on iOS for both iPad and iPhone, though it may look slightly differently depending on the screen it’s displayed on, nonetheless the feature is always accessed by a long tap and hold on the browser tabs button.

It closes every single browser tab that was open in Safari, leaving you a blank slate to open new tabs as needed. This can be particularly nice if you wind up with dozens of tabs open in Safari, something which is fairly easy to happen as you browse over time.

iOS Tip 167 - Magnify It

New magnifier:

This is great: You can triple-click the Home button to turn the iPhone into the world’s best electronic magnifying glass. Perfect for dim restaurants, tiny type on packages, and theater programs. You can zoom in, turn on the flashlight, tweak the contrast, take a picture - the works.

To set this up, open Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Magnifier toggle it On

iOS Tip 166 - Copy Phone Numbers

Copy Phone Numbers from Incoming Calls

Need to copy the phone number from an incoming call that’s not associated with one of your contacts? In the Phone app’s Recents screen, you can’t select the number to copy it, but here’s a hidden workaround:

Tap the i-phone-app-inline button next to the call, and then press and hold the number for a second or two until a Copy button appears. (It’s not a 3D Touch press, just a normal press without removing your finger right away.)

Tap Copy and you can then paste that phone number into Mail, Messages, Notes, or any other app.

To paste, tap where you want the number to go and tap the Paste button that appears.

iOS Tip 165 - FAST Redial

Redial the Last Called Phone Number on iPhone Quickly

Most iPhone users know that the Phone app keeps track of their outbound and inbound phone calls, and while you can use the Recents list in the Phone app to redial a recently called number, there’s another way to quickly fill in the last dialed number that is better suited for many circumstances.
This trick will re-dial the digits of the last called phone number on iPhone, but won’t actually start the call. This allows you to see the last number that was called, and also allows the user to make changes to the number dialed if need be

1 Open the Phone app and go to the “Keypad” tab
2 Press the green call button
3 The last dialed number will fill in instantly, you can make changes if need be or simply press the green button again to dial the number

This is particularly handy because it immediately displays the last called number on the numerical keypad, but without dialing it. This allows you to see the digits of the last number called, make corrections to the last number called, perhaps add an extension to the number, or make an anonymous call on the redial if need be. Another perk to this approach is this works to reveal the number even if the call history has been cleared on the iPhone.

You can also see who it is associated with by tapping and holding on the digits to copy the number and search for it.

iOS Tip 164 Quickly Open New Safari Tab

The latest versions of Safari for iPhone have an even faster way to open a new Safari tab, without having to enter into the broader tab view window. It’s a great trick, but it’s a little hidden and less than obvious, but nonetheless offers the quickest way possible to open a new browser tab in Safari for iOS.
1 Open Safari in iOS if you haven’t done so already
2 Tap and hold on the two overlapping square icons in the iOS Safari navigation bar (lower right corner)

Simple, fast, and easy. Even if the feature is a little hidden behind a long tap and hold, it’s still easy to remember once you get the swing of things.
Note this feature is primarily aimed at iPhone (and iPod touch users), as it’s less important on an iPad, since the iPad version of Safari in iOS always has the new tab “+” plus button in the navigation bar.
You can open as many new tabs as you want in the latest versions of Safari for iOS.

iOS Tip 163 - Block Unwanted Calls

Here’s a clever workaround that effectively prevents all “Unknown” calls and all “No Caller ID” calls and also prevents any other unrecognized number from getting through to you as well.

Do not use this approach to block unknown callers if you regularly get wanted phone calls from numbers or people calling from unrecognized and numbers. This workaround works by using your iPhone Contacts list as the allowed caller list. Anyone not in your Contacts list will not get through to you.

This is not the traditional block call method, it’s a workaround using Do Not Disturb mode and your contacts list to prevent any random unknown callers from reaching the iPhone. There are some caveats, so be sure to read through and understand how this works:

1 Open the Settings app on the iPhone and go to “Do Not Disturb”
2 Flip the switch next to “Manual” to the ON position – this turns on Do Not Disturb mode (as signified by the moon icon) which essentially keeps your phone silent, we’re going to customize this

3 Tap on “Allow Calls From”, from here you have two options for restrictions
•Choose “Favorites” if you only want your ‘Favorite’ contacts to be able to get through to your iPhone, this is an acceptable solution for people who have their family, friends, and other important people on their iPhone Favorites list, but never get calls from anyone else not in ‘Favorites’
•OR: Choose “All Contacts”, which will allow calls to come through from anyone in your Contact list (not just Favorites) but not anyone who isn’t already added to your address book – this is the better solution for many, since obviously an Unknown caller, solicitor, or “No Caller ID” call won’t be in the address book of your iPhone, but if everyone you do communicate with IS in your iPhone contact list, you won’t miss their calls
4 Exit out of Settings and enjoy your new peace and quiet

Remember: choosing ‘All Contacts’ will prevent any phone number or address that is not in your iPhone Contacts list from reaching the iPhone. Do not enable this without thorough comprehension, otherwise you may miss calls you actually want to get.

Remember Do Not Disturb mode silences the iPhone completely, stopping the iPhone from ringing or making any alert sound, and prevents any contact attempt if someone is not on your Favorites list or in the Contacts list, assuming you chose either of those options. Because of how this is designed, Do Not Disturb mode is an excellent feature but it’s generally best used on a schedule so that it kicks in automatically in the evening and turns off automatically in the morning, but some people like to have it on all the time.

It’s highly recommended to enable the “Repeated Calls” option in Do Not Disturb mode, since it is unlikely that anyone outside of an emergency situation would repeatedly call the iPhone.

iOS Tip 162 - Measure Your Signal Strength

If you're measuring your cellphone signal by the little dots in the top-left hand of your iPhone's display, then you're really missing out on a cool feature: using the built-in Field Test Mode feature.

You access this feature from your Phone app, but before you do that you need to do a couple of things:
• Turn off Wi-Fi (Settings > WiFi)
• Turn off LTE, because these readings can be different from standard cellphone signals (Settings > Cellular > Enable LTE)
Now you've got that out of the way, go to your Phone app, switch to the keypad and dial the following:
*3001#12345#*
Now press Call and you'll activate Field Test Mode.

To exit, just press the Home button.

If you want to replace the signal strength dots with a decibel value, press and hold down the power button until the Slide to power off message appears. Then release the power button and then press and hold the Home button for around five to ten seconds until the Field Test Mode screen disappears.
A high signal score is around -50 decibels, while a weak signal will be around -115 decibels, so basically the closer to zero the number is, the better your reception.

iOS Tip 161 - Record iOS Calls

Record iPhone Calls:

1 Open the Phone app and call the person (or place) as you normally would
2 Explain to the person that you are about to record the phone call, get their permission, and explain in order to do so you need to put them on hold for a moment to merge with the call recording function
3 Tap on the “Add Call” button and dial your own phone number, this will send you directly to your voicemail answering service
4 Once the voicemail starts recording as usual, tap on the “Merge Calls” button to merge the recording voicemail message with the live call in first step
5 Have your conversation as usual, when the call is finished end them as usual by hanging up then wait a moment for the recorded phone call to appear in the “Voicemail” section of the iPhone Phone app.

This is a popular trick that many interviewers and journalists use to record a call easily without other equipment and directly from their iPhone, and it likely has other purposes as well.

* Always get permission to record a phone call, and be sure to explain to the person you are going to record the phone call. In many regions it is illegal to record a phone call without consent to do so. Knowing the legality of recording phone calls varies per region, it is entirely your responsibility to know and understand these rules otherwise you could be breaking the law.

iOS Tip 160 - Delete Default Apps

Finally in iOS 10 you can delete some stock Apple apps that you may never use.

1. Locate the default app you want to delete from the iPhone or iPad

2. Tap and hold on the app icon to cause them to jiggle and make the (X) delete button appear, tap on that (X) to delete the default app

3. Confirm that you want to delete the app by choosing “Remove”

4. Repeat with other default apps you want to delete in iOS

Deleted default apps will disappear from the devices Home Screen and remain inaccessible to the device unless they are reinstalled again.

Some default apps can not be removed from iOS such as: Settings, Messages, Phone, Safari, Clock, Photos, Health, App Store, and Camera. If you don’t want those apps, you’ll need to hide (Tip 62) them in a folder or on another home screen.

Even after an app has been deleted it can be reinstalled again at anytime by going to the App Store, searching for the app in question, and choosing to re-download it again.

iOS Tip 159 - Check out 3D Touch

Preview Links with 3D Touch on iPhone

One of the more useful 3D Touch tricks is the ability to preview a link before opening it, allowing iPhone users a way to quickly see a preview of a webpage link before loading the entire thing in Safari. This can be activated from an email, from messages, or Safari itself, and it helps to determine if a link is what you’re looking for or worth opening. It’s use case is quite similar to previewing links with multitouch on the Mac, and it works much the same as well.
Previewing links with 3D Touch requires an iPhone 6s or better, since the feature obviously requires a 3D Touch capable screen

1. Open Safari to any web page (capmac.net for example) on the iPhone
2. Gently press and hold on a link to activate the preview “peak”, you’ll see the link target webpage load in a little hovering preview screen quickly
3. Firm press to visit the link in question, otherwise let go to return to the webpage you were reading before

You can also swipe up in the peak preview to see more options including Open in New Tab, Add to Reading List, or Copy, which copies the URL being previewed.

iOS Tip 158 - Amazing Messages!

Did you know you can hand write messages and notes in Messages for iOS 10 on your iPhone? With this feature you can scribble out a little note or sketch a simple drawing and send it along to any recipient.

1. Open the Messages app and then go into any message thread, or send a new message

2. Tap into the text entry box, then rotate the iPhone into the horizontal position

3. Write your handwritten message or note, then tap on “Done” to insert it into the conversation

4. Tap on Send as usual to send the handwritten message to the recipient

If you rotate the iPhone and don’t see the handwriting option automatically, you will need to keep the iPhone in the sideways position and then tap on the little squiggle button, it’s in the corner of the keyboard and kind of looks like a cursive ‘o’ or a tailed loop of some sort.

You’ll also want to make sure that orientation lock is not toggled on and preventing rotation.

2012, 13 in MacBook Pro Notice

Notice For 2012, 13 inch MacBook Pro Owners

If you have a 2012, 13 inch, Macbook Pro it is eligible for a hard drive cable replacement, FREE from Apple. We’ve been advised by Apple to replace this part in every qualifying unit that comes in. Turnaround time is typically 1 business day.

Check the age of your computer by clicking on the “Apple” logo in the top left corner, then About This Mac. You should see a window that will give you the date (and other info) of your computer. Only the 2012’s qualify for this program.

iOS Tip 157 - Delete All Mail

1 Open the Mail app in iOS 10
2 Go to the inbox or mailbox folder you want to delete all emails from
3 Tap on the “Edit” button in the upper right corner
4 Now manually tap on every single email you want to delete, as signified by having a blue check mark next to the email message
5 Now choose “Trash” in the corner
6 Confirm that you want to delete all selected emails by choosing “Trash Selected Messages”

Repeat with other folders and emails as necessary - a bit kludgey from prior method but it works.

iOS Tip 156 - Hide Widgets & Notifications

With iOS 10 came the removal of Slide to Unlock, which now if the slide right gesture is repeated sends you to the Today view Widgets screen complete with weather, calendar events, tabloids and news, Siri app suggestions, stocks, maps, and whatever optional widgets you have enabled on the iPhone or iPad. This Widget screen is accessible from the lock screen by default on any iOS 10 device.

If you don’t want widgets available on the lock screen - you’d prefer to maintain more privacy and not reveal anything about the device itself let alone the calendar or app suggestions, or notifications. For any reason, you can disable and hide the widget section of the lock screen completely

This works to disable the Today view, widgets, and Notification view with any iPhone or iPad running iOS 10 or newer:

1. Open the “Settings” app on iPhone or iPad and then go to ‘Touch ID & Passcode’
2. Under the “Allow Access When Locked” section, toggle the switches next to “Today View” and “Notifications View” to the OFF position
3 . Exit out of Settings and lock the device again, swiping over will now do nothing

Note that you will still have access to widgets, Today view, and notifications from an unlocked iPhone or iPad, just not from the lock screen.

iOS Tip 155 - Prepare for iOS 10

iOS 10 releases Tuesday September 13th. Are your ready?

BEFORE you download and install the update: BACKUP YOUR DATA and then do a “spring” cleaning. Wait a couple of days after the release to ensure there aren’t any issues with the new iOS.

Before you do anything major such as upgrading your device you need to make sure that you have a backup just in case things don't go smoothly. You can either back up your data to iCloud, or if you don't have enough space you can take the old-school road and connect your iPhone or iPad to your computer and do the backup through iTunes.

Details on how to carry out a backup can be found here.

SPRING CLEAN YOUR DEVICE
Chances are good that your iPhone or iPad has accumulated a lot of junk over the months and years, so what better time to get rid of it than now. While iOS 10 doesn't need as much free space to install as earlier releases, getting rid of apps that you no longer use -- or perhaps have never used -- makes good sense.

iOS Tip 154 -Free up Space on iOS device

Delete the App to clear out caches, data etc.

There are two types of “Documents & Data” stored on iPhone and iPad, both of which can take up space on a device. One is usually app specific caches and other related app data, and the other is iCloud related files for an app. The fact they share the same name but have different functions, and are references in different sections of iOS Settings, is a little confusing, but they are different.

The “Documents & Data” associated with an iOS app include things like caches, app data, preferences, login details, and assorted other app-specific information. Most of this data is expendable and in many situations for many apps that have large Documents & Data storage consumption, the data tends to be very heavy on caches. This is typically the type of Documents and Data on an iPhone or iPad that users want to remove to free up some space.
The simplest way to delete Documents & Data on an iPhone or iPad is by removing the app and then re-downloading it again. That may not make a lot of sense, but for the time being Apple offers no method in iOS to manually delete caches and app data, so instead if you want to delete that app data, you have to delete the app entirely.
Keep in mind that when you delete an app, and then re-download it, you will likely lose whatever data (game levels), logins, and other saved details from that app. Do not do this if you don’t have login information saved elsewhere, and do not delete an app or its documents and data caches if you have important data stored within that app. You should back up your iOS device before beginning so that you can restore in the event you mess something up.
1 Open the “Settings” app in iOS
2 Go to “General” and then go to “Storage & iCloud Usage”
3 Go to “Manage Storage” under the ‘Storage’ section
4 Find the application(s) that have the ‘Documents & Data’ you want to delete (for example, Twitter is a 64MB app but can often take up several hundred MB with its Documents and Data), then tap on that app and choose “Delete App”
5 Now go to the “App Store” and search for and re-download the app you just deleted
6 After the app has finished re-downloading, if you return to the same Storage screen you will find it now consumes much less space because the documents and data has been cleared out

(keep in mind that deleting and redownloading an app also will update it to the latest version available, so don’t do this if you want to keep using an older version of an iOS app)

iOS Tip 153 - What Your Phone Knows About You

Discover what your phone knows about you:

Your iPhone is always gathering data on you in the background —be it the apps you're using the most, how much data you're churning through...or even where you are/were. To see what we mean,head toSettings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services > Frequent Locations. Here you can see not just where you've been, but how long you've spent in each place

iOS Tip 152 - Share Audio Messages

The visual voicemail area of the Phone app now has a share button! You can send the audio of the message to a ton of apps—Email, Notes, Messages or Facebook Messenger (to send to others!), Voice Memos (to edit), even biz apps like Basecamp and Slack. Or shoot it to Dropbox to save in the cloud and on your desktop as an .m4a (MPEG 4) audio file—we call that a "forever blackmail." It's also a quick way to make voice memos to yourself when you can't access your phone; simply transfer your own message to other apps.

Open Voicemail on your iPhone, tap on the caller, tap on the Share icon, then tap to Share on the App of your choice.

iOS Tip 151 - Drift Off to Music or Lectures

iBooks in iOS has a built-in sleep timer that can automatically pause playback after a specified amount of time, which is great for listening to an audiobook as you go to sleep (tap the Moon button below the volume slider). What if you prefer listening to content that’s not in iBooks, like music or a college lecture? To set a sleep timer that works for Music, iTunes U, or any other app that plays audio, open the Clock app and tap the Timer button. Next, tap When Timer Ends (iPhone) or the selected sound (iPad), scroll to the end of the list of sounds, and select Stop Playing. When you’re ready to listen as you drift off to sleep, start the timer just before or right after you press Play in your audio app.

Watch the Rio Olympics Live on iPhone or iPad

You can easily watch any of the 2016 Rio Olympic games and competitions live right from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch (or Android too, but we’re obviously focusing in iOS), meaning you can watch any game and any country and any sport you want, you don’t have to wait for the evening highlights. You don’t even need a cable TV package, any iOS device will do.

All you need to do to watch live footage of any current Rio Olympic games is to download the NBC Sports app. Anyone can then watch live footage of the 2016 Olympics from within the app, it’s that easy.
• Get the NBC Sports app here from the iOS App Store
Just launch the NBC Sports app, go to the “Live and Upcoming” tab, and browse through the currently active games. Tap on what you want to see live, and away it goes, the live stream of the event will start immediately. It’s that easy.

You’ll also want to login to a local authorized TV or cable provider, which extends the length of time you can watch live coverage for beyond the 30 minutes. Just about every general TV provider in the USA is included, so whether you’re a member of a cable monopoly or a smaller provider it’s likely going to be in the provider list.