WezM.netThe weblog of Wesley Moore

I read through the 150 odd pages of the iPhone user guide look­ing for tips and short­cuts and for infor­ma­tion on usage that I haven’t dis­cov­ered yet. The fol­low­ing is a col­lec­tion of the things I found useful or inter­est­ing, some may be well known already but they’re mainly here for my ref­er­ence. How­ever they may be useful to others as well; Par­tic­u­larly those who’ve just picked up an iPhone for the first time fol­low­ing the world­wide release of the iPhone 3G.

The quotes are mostly copied ver­ba­tim from the iPhone User Guide (PDF), Copy­right Apple Inc. As noted at the end of this post the iPhone User Guide is also avail­able for view­ing directly on the iPhone at http://​help.​apple.​com/​i​phone.

General Usage

[When scrolling] you can wait for the scrolling to come to a stop, or tap or touch any­where on the screen to stop it imme­di­ately. Tap­ping or touch­ing to stop scrolling won’t choose or acti­vate any­thing on the screen. To quickly scroll to the top of a list, web­page, or email, just tap the status bar.

The point about tap­ping status bar is useful. It also men­tions that in Safari tap­ping the status bar will reveal the address bar allow­ing you to search or enter a URL.

Handy tips for more effi­cient typing:

Quickly type a period and space

Double-​tap the space bar.

Turn caps lock on

Enable caps lock (see “Keyboard” on page 108), then double-​tap the Shift key. The Shift key turns blue, and all let­ters you type are upper­case. Tap the Shift key again to turn caps lock off.

Type let­ters or sym­bols that aren’t on the keyboard

Press and hold the related letter or symbol, then slide to choose a variation.

See a link’s des­ti­na­tion address:

[In Mail, Safari] touch and hold the link. The address pops up next to your finger. You can touch and hold an image to see if it has a link.

Save a photo attach­ment to your Camera Roll album:

Press and hold the image, then tap “Save Image.”

Applies to images in Safari too.

Delet­ing mes­sages in Mail or SMS:

You can also delete a mes­sage directly from the mail­box mes­sage list by swip­ing left or right over the mes­sage title, then tap­ping Delete.

Phone

Jump to favorites from anywhere:

Double-​click the Home button.

Requires set­ting to be enabled under Set­tings > Gen­eral > Home Button.

Bring up the last number you dialed:

Tap Keypad, then tap Call. Tap Call again to dial the number.

Block calls and main­tain Wi-​Fi access to the Internet:

In Set­tings, turn on Air­plane Mode, then tap Wi-​Fi and turn it on.

Set iPhone to add the cor­rect prefix when dial­ing from another country:

In Set­tings, tap Phone, then turn Inter­na­tional Assist on. This lets you make calls to your home coun­try using the num­bers in your con­tacts and favorites, with­out having to add a prefix or your coun­try code.

Safari

Scroll within a frame on a webpage:

Use two fin­gers to scroll within a frame on a web­page. Use one finger to scroll the entire webpage.

Submit a form:

Once you finish fill­ing out a form, tap Go or Search. Most pages also have a link you can tap to submit the form.

Close the key­board with­out sub­mit­ting the form: Tap Done.

iPod

Con­vert a video to work with iPhone in iTunes:

Select the video in your iTunes library and choose Advanced > “Con­vert Selec­tion for iPod/iPhone.” Then add the con­verted video to iPhone.

Return to the iPod browse lists:

Tap ← Or swipe to the right over the album cover.

You can dis­play play­back con­trols at any time when you’re lis­ten­ing to music and using another application—or even when iPhone is locked—by double-​clicking the Home button.

Requires iPod Con­trols to be enabled in Set­tings > Gen­eral > Home Button

Unlike music you can delete videos on iPhone:

In the videos list, swipe left or right over the video, then tap Delete.

Set a sleep timer:

From the Home screen choose Clock > Timer, then flick to set the number of hours and min­utes. Tap When Timer Ends and choose Sleep iPod, tap Set, then tap Start to start the timer.

Photos

Add a photo to your Photo Library:

Press and hold the photo, then tap Save Image.

Maps

To con­serve bat­tery life, turn Loca­tions Ser­vices off when you’re not using it. In Set­tings, choose Gen­eral > Loca­tion Services.

Just spec­u­la­tion but this might help when loca­tion ser­vices go AWOL

Zoom­ing out:

Pinch the map. Or tap the map with two fin­gers. Tap with two fin­gers again to zoom out further.

See a list of the busi­nesses found in the search: From the Map screen, tap List.

I wasn’t sure what the List option was for. It seems kind of out of place next to Map, Satel­lite and Hybrid.

Settings

Set­ting the double click func­tion of the home button:

Choose Gen­eral > Home Button to set pref­er­ences for double-​clicking the Home button. You can set iPhone so that double-​clicking the Home button goes to either to the Home screen, Phone Favorites, or the iPod screen.

Reset the key­board dictionary:

Choose Gen­eral > Reset and tap Reset Key­board Dic­tio­nary. You add words to the key­board dic­tio­nary by reject­ing words iPhone sug­gests as you type. Tap a word to reject the cor­rec­tion and add the word to the key­board dic­tio­nary. Reset­ting the key­board dic­tio­nary erases all words you’ve added.

Reset the loca­tion warnings:

Choose Gen­eral > Reset and tap Reset Loca­tion Warn­ings. Loca­tions warn­ings are the requests made by appli­ca­tions (such as Camera and Maps) to use Loca­tion Ser­vices with those appli­ca­tions. iPhone stops pre­sent­ing the warn­ing for an appli­ca­tion the second time you tap OK. Tap Reset Loca­tion Warn­ings to resume the warnings.

Its a pity this and the one above it are all or nothing.

Set iPhone to add the cor­rect prefix when dial­ing from another country:

In Set­tings, tap Phone, then turn Inter­na­tional Assist on. This lets you make calls to your home coun­try using the num­bers in your con­tacts and favorites, with­out having to add a prefix or your coun­try code (not avail­able in all areas).

Store

Check­ing for updates to App Store apps is all automatic:

When­ever you access the App Store, it checks for updates to appli­ca­tions you’ve installed. By default, the App Store also auto­mat­i­cally checks for updates every week. The App Store icon shows the total number of appli­ca­tion updates avail­able. If an update is avail­able and you access the App Store, the Updates screen appears immediately.

Ensure all iTunes and App Store items on the phone are listed in iTunes:

You can use iTunes to verify that all the music, videos, appli­ca­tions, and other items you bought from the iTunes Wi-​Fi Music Store or App Store are in your iTunes library. You might want to do this if a down­load was inter­rupted. Verify your purchases:

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Make sure your com­puter is con­nected to the Internet.

In iTunes, choose Store > Check for Purchases.

Enter your iTunes Store account ID and pass­word, then click Check.

Pur­chases not yet on your com­puter are downloaded.

Update: This did not entirely solve the prob­lem I had where not all apps on the phone were appear­ing in iTunes. How­ever The Apple Blog seemed to have solved it with their “Trans­fer Appli­ca­tions from iPhone to iTunes“ post.

Troubleshooting

Restart iPhone:

Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the red slider appears. Slide your finger across the slider to turn off iPhone. To turn iPhone back on, press and hold the Sleep/Wake until the Apple logo appears.

Reset iPhone:

Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button at the same time for at least ten sec­onds, until the Apple logo appears.

It isn’t made clear what the dif­fer­ence between restart and reset is.

iPhone Doesn’t Respond

• iPhone may be low on power. Con­nect iPhone to your com­puter or to its power adapter to charge. See “Charg­ing the Battery” on page 33.
• Press and hold the Home button below the screen for at least six sec­onds, until the appli­ca­tion you were using quits.
• If that doesn’t work, turn iPhone off and turn it on again. [See Restart iPhone above]
• If that doesn’t work, reset iPhone. [See Reset iPhone above]

Mainly included this quote for this point on force quit­ting apps.

iPhone Is Too Warm

If the inte­rior tem­per­a­ture of iPhone 3G exceeds normal oper­at­ing tem­per­a­tures, you may expe­ri­ence the fol­low­ing as it attempts to reg­u­late its temperature:

• iPhone stops charging
• dis­play dims
• weak cel­lu­lar signal
• tem­per­a­ture warn­ing screen appears

Impor­tant: You cannot use iPhone while the tem­per­a­ture warn­ing screen is dis­played except to make an emer­gency call. If none of the above mea­sures suc­ceeds in low­er­ing the inter­nal tem­per­a­ture, iPhone auto­mat­i­cally goes into a deep sleep mode until it cools. You cannot make an emer­gency call when iPhone is in this mode. Move iPhone to a cooler loca­tion and wait a few min­utes before trying to use iPhone again.

Inter­est­ing that this calls out the iPhone 3G specifically.

Final Notes

The iPhone User Guide, opti­mized for view­ing on iPhone, is avail­able at: help.​apple.​com/​i​phone

My Notes

Press­ing the number/symbol button and slid­ing to the appro­pri­ate key is a quick way of adding punc­tu­a­tion and single numerals.

Time scan­ning after sit­ting idle is a strange UI anom­aly. Could be related to net­work time.

There’s an inter­est­ing sec­tion on Back­ups and man­ag­ing them in iTunes that I won’t repeat here, pp. 139.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 4:53 pm and is filed under iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.