iOS Tip 113 - Sign Documents Quickly

Sign Documents on iPhone & iPad from eMail Quickly

Have a contract, agreement, or service form emailed to your iPhone or iPad that you need to sign quickly? Perfect, because now you can digitally sign and return a document directly from the Mail app of iOS. The Mail signature feature lets you quickly sign a document attached to an email and send it back on it’s way without ever having to leave the mail app, the entire signing and returning process is very fast and easy thanks to the Markup feature set.

The Markup (see iOS Tip 112) feature requires iOS 9.0 or a later version installed on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The rest is easy and handled in the email client. If you want to try it out email yourself a PDF file, an image, or some document that could be signed – we’re just testing so it doesn’t actually need to be an official contract or anything, the Markup feature works with nearly all mail attachments. And yes, this works not only with attachments sent to you, but also to attachments you want to send out.

1. Open the email containing the document to sign, tap on the document attachment as usual to preview it within the Mail app then tap the toolbox icon, lower right corner
2. Tap on the Signature button in the lower right corner of the Markup preview

3. Use a finger on the touch screen to sign the document as usual, then tap on “Done”

4. Place the digital signature into the appropriate location on the document to sign, you can resize the signature if necessary by using the blue buttons to grow or shrink the signature, then tap on “Done” when finished to insert the signed document back into the same email as a reply

5. Write the email reply as appropriate and tap the “Send” button to send the freshly signed document back on it’s way to the original sender

Is that easy or what? No need to print anything, no need to scan anything, and there’s no need to use the signature feature on the Mac either, the entire process can be handled in iOS. The document can be signed and returned in just a few seconds.

You can also attach a document to a fresh email, sign that, and send it on it’s way too, so you don’t have to just sign and return documents attached to existing emails. This means that if you have a PDF document attachment you saved to iCloud you could attach and sign that using the same markup feature as well.

Of course if you don’t have the latest versions of iOS, you can rely on the Mac to use a very similar feature and digitally sign documents using the Mac Trackpad in OS X. The Mac approach is just as effective, and much earlier versions of the Mac Preview app even support scanning a signature with the Mac camera, meaning no matter what era of Apple hardware you’re using, you should find a solution for signing documents electronically and then returning them quickly, without ever having to use a printer, fax machine, or scanner.

iOS Tip 112 - Mark Up Attachments

With iOS 9, a new tool lets you easily mark up a document from within Mail, re-attach it to the email, and send it back in the same message thread.
To begin marking up an email attachment, perform the following steps.

1 Open the Mail app and select a message containing an image or PDF document.
2 Tap and hold the attachment you wish to mark up.
3 Select Markup And Reply from the action sheet that appears.
4 Tap and hold the attachment you wish to mark up, and select the Markup button to open the editor.

With the Markup editor open, you can change color of the drawing, alter the thickness of the lines, add callouts by drawing with your finger, add text by tapping the text box button, or add your signature by tapping the Signature button.
When you are done marking up the document, you can tap Done to attach the marked up item back to the email reply or, you can tap Cancel to quit without saving the edited changes.

Another "not Apple" Scam

Watch out for the latest “not Apple” scam: “Your Apple ID was used to sign in to iCloud via a web browser”. Of course a link is provided to enter your Apple ID and password. I see “not Apple” scams several times every day as they try to phish access to my personal Apple account and our Apple business accounts. What clued me in on this one was that I hadn’t logged in to iCloud that day. Of course if I’d of read the body of the essage I would have noticed the “Windows” operating system. Further examination showed the message coming from “noreply@Licloud.com” The real address is "noreply@insideicloud.icloud.com". Here's what it looked like:

Without much examination it looks to be legitimate. When clicking on the provided link you're taken to this site:

Again it looks good, but this is not an Apple site. As always be very circumspect on any link you click that are sent via email or that pop up in web browsers. If you do want what’s being purveyed, open your web browser and type the address you want to go to.

iOS Tip 111 - Change 3D Touch Sensitivity

This obviously requires an iPhone with a 3D Touch display, whether that’s an iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus, other models will not have this setting available:

1 Open the Settings app in iOS and go to “General” then to “Accessibility”
2 Go to “3D Touch” and locate the “3D Touch Sensitivity” portion of the settings, the slider below this is what you’ll want to change to fit your preferences, pick one of the following:
•Light – a soft amount of screen pressure activates 3D Touch peak, and a slightly more firm amount of pressure activates 3D Touch pop
•Medium – the default level of pressure sensitivity for 3D Touch displays
•Firm – a notably harder amount of screen pressure is required to activate 3D Touch peak and pop

If you find yourself activating 3D Touch when you don’t always want to, you’ll probably want to use the “Firm” option, whereas if you find the required pressure is too great, using the “Light” feature is ideal.
This is really largely a matter of personal preference, but it also depends on what you’re using to activate the touch screen, if you use a case on the iPhone, and your general usage patterns, and whether or not you use a finger, toe, stylus, or other pointing device.
My personal preference is for the “Light” setting but when demonstrating the feature to a friend they found it way too easy to activate, so they strongly preferred the Firm setting. Try it out yourself and see what works for you, you can always make another change again by returning to 3D Touch settings

iOS Tip 110 - Free Up Space on your iPad/iPhone

Quickly delete multiple images in Messages to free up space without losing yourconversations:

When you send pictures, videos, audio messages and other attachmentsin Messages on iPhone and iPad, it stays on the device by default taking up memory. For a lot of people, Messages is the second biggest app on their device in terms of storage, with Photos often being the biggest, because of the fact that the photos they share from Photos actually gets stored twice on the device: withinPhotos and withinMessages. In thisarticle, I’m going to discuss how to delete multiple images in Messages very quickly. Before you do this make sure any content you want is backed up!

First open up the Message app, and select the conversation that has the pictures that you want to delete and get rid of.

Then you are going to press on Details in blue in the upper right hand corner. Scroll down until you see the Attachments.

Then you are going to tap and hold on one of the images until you see Copy, Delete and More appear.

Tap on More and select all of the images you want to delete.

Then you are going to press on the blue trashcan in the lower right hand corner to delete them. To confirm you want to delete them, you are going to press the red words Delete Attachments.

This is how you delete multiple images very quickly and easily in iOS 9, allowing you to get storage space back on your device and without losing the rest of your conversation. If you don't care about the conversation you can delete it which will erase all the attached photos, videos, etc.

iOS Tip 109 - Limit Ad Tracking

Limit advertisers tracking your location, data
Safari had a mini-makeover in recent versions of iOS, and now offers even more privacy-related tweaks. One of the more recent settings is blocking ad cookies and trackers.
This one is a little tricky to find (as it's not in the Safari settings). Head to Settings > Privacy > Advertising and enable the Limit Ad Tracking option. From here, make sure you hit the Reset Advertising Identifier option, and then accept any prompts.

iOS Tip 108 - Share Voicemail

Saving and sharing voicemails on iPhone is remarkably simple, but since it’s a fairly new feature many users are not aware it exists. You’ll need iOS 9 or newer to have this feature available in the Voicemail section of your iPhone Phone app.

Open the Phone app on the iPhone and tap on the “Voicemail” button

Tap on the voicemail message you wish to share or forward to, then tap on the share button, which looks like a little square icon with an arrow pointing out of it

•Choose “Message” to send the voicemail as text message or iMessage to a recipient
•Choose “Mail” to email the voicemail to a recipient (or yourself)

Fill in the recipients contact name, phone number, or email address and send the message or email as usual

A shared voicemail delivered through messages or email will arrive as a .m4a file labeled as “voicemail-#.m4a”, this is the same type of m4a audio file that many audio players can recognize, including iTunes, which makes the shared voicemails universally available to just about any recipient, whether they’re on iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac OS X, Windows, or Blackberry.