Tricks and Shortcuts for your iPhone – Part One

The iPhone is a top of the line device that offer a wide range of technologically advanced applications and settings. While many people use them regularly, there are a few tricks that they may not yet know. These tips help with navigation and ease of use and will help you to get the most out of your device.

The Status Bar

While using Safari to browse the web you may find it annoying and time consuming to scroll back to the top of the page all the time. If you find yourself near the bottom of a long page and want to get back to the top, tap the status bar at the top of your screen and it will automatically take you back to the top of the page. Now you’ll be able to sift through emails, tweets, Facebook updates, notes and web pages quicker by being able to return to the top of the page with ease.

Screen-shots

Have you ever wanted or needed to take a screen-shot on your iPhone? It’s easy to take screen-shots of apps, messages, Facebook statuses or anything on your screen without the glare of an actual camera. By pressing down the Home and Sleep buttons on your iPhone at the same time you’ll hear the shutter of the camera, and the image that you’ve captured will appear in your Camera Roll!

Shift and Drag to Capitalize

While texting, writing emails or posting on Facebook using the keyboard on your iPhone, it’s at times annoying to have to tap the Shift every time you want a letter or word capitalized. This little trick makes composing that much easier, and while it’s a little hard to explain, it works and makes texting and emailing a little faster! All you have to do is tap and hold the Shift button, drag your finger to the letter that you want to capitalize, and then release. Though it’s different, I believe that it’s slightly faster!

Also, this trick can be used for punctuation: all you need to do is tap the keyboard switch key (from ABC/123), and drag you finger to the punctuation that you desire. What’s really cool is that after you use the desired punctuation, you’re back at the ABC keyboard. It’s a very useful, time saving trick!

Tap and Hold for Extra Characters

Have you ever wondered how and where you can find the other part of the quotation mark on your iPhone? Or send your friends a silly message with an inverted question mark? Well, it’s easy to do. All you need to do is tap and hold the letter or symbol on your keyboard that is the closest to the symbol that you want to use. This will bring up a hidden menu of extra characters on certain letters and symbols. Not only is it quick and easy to access, you can now send a text among friends quoting certain phrases, along with using the British Pound symbol or a tilde over a particular letter.

Though this list is by no means complete, these helpful tricks will make using your iPhone that much easier to navigate and short cuts save time when you’re in a hurry.