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iOS 18 Tips, Tricks, How-Tos, News

How To: Return to the Default Font in Mail Drafts After Using a Custom One

One of iOS 13's coolest features is the ability to download, install, and choose fonts in select apps like Pages and Mail. However, you might notice an issue when writing an email with a custom typeface: there's no option to return to the default font. What gives?

How To: Get Follow-Up Reminders in Apple's Mail App to Get Answers to Important Questions You Forgot You Sent

Important emails can slip through the cracks in any email client, especially sent emails you were expecting responses to but never received — and ultimately forgot about. Apple has an easy solution for this problem, helping you get answers in Mail for all your pending questions.

How To: Open Your iPhone's App Library Faster from Your Home Screen or Anywhere Else

The App Library is an excellent tool for browsing all the apps on your iPhone, especially since it includes every one of the home screen bookmarks you've made for websites and shortcuts. But it's all the way past your last home screen page. If you have a lot of visible home screen pages, that's a lot of swiping to open the App Library. Luckily, there is a trick to accessing it faster.

How To: Make Your Home Screen's Photo Widget Show Only One Image or Specific Albums in iOS 14 Instead of Random Pics Every Hour

Your iPhone's new home screen widgets are awesome — until they're not. Photos, in particular, is a big disappointment. It gives you a taste of having your favorite photos appear alongside your apps but ruins it by changing the photo randomly every hour without your input. While nothing can be done with the Photos widget, there is a way to get the pictures you want to see on your home screen.

How To: Hide All App, Folder, and Widget Names on Your iPhone or iPad's Home Screen

In recent years, Apple has made it much easier to customize the Home Screen on your iPhone or iPad, and some of the newer tools are perfect for neat freaks. Nonetheless, a tidy Home Screen can still feel cluttered when iOS and iPadOS force widgets, apps, and folders to have names — but a few workarounds can help you remove some of those icon labels for good.

How To: Set Up Grandma's First iPhone (A Guide for Newbie iOS Users)

So, your grandmother finally wants to ditch her flip phone for a shiny new smartphone? Congratulations. But helping her get used to her new device, even when it's an iPhone, is no small task. Grandma mastered checking her email in late-2012 and just recently learned there's a thing called "Facebook." But we love grandma, and thanks to this guide, we can definitely make this happen for her.

How To: Remove Unwanted Objects, People, and Distractions in Photos on Your iPhone, iPad, or Mac

Editing out unwanted objects, people, and distractions from your photos just got a lot easier on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Before, you would have to use apps like Google Photos or Snapseed to erase background distractions or perform spot healing, but it's now a native feature in Apple's Photos app for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

How To: Share Your Lost AirTag or Find My Tracker's Location with Contacts or Airlines for Easier Recovery

Previously, losing an AirTag or Find My network accessory meant relying on tech-savvy strangers to contact you via phone or email if they found it. With a new Find My update, you can ditch the passive approach and be more proactive about recovering your tracker by sharing its information with trusted contacts and even airlines, allowing them to track your tracker for you.

How To: Generate Text, Images, and Insights with Apple Intelligence's Built-in ChatGPT Integration

Siri has long relied on basic sources like Google and Wikipedia for answers, but with iOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2, Apple is taking its virtual assistant to a new level by integrating ChatGPT. Now, you can use Siri to generate text and images with ChatGPT — and that's not all. ChatGPT is deeply integrated into Apple Intelligence and goes beyond just Siri.

How To: Use Apple Intelligence's Image Playground to Craft Custom Drawings and Animations for Almost Anything You Can Think Of

Growing up, I was told that hard work could get me anything I wanted. But with Apple's Image Playground, I can create almost any illustration or drawing imaginable just by typing or selecting a suggestion. This groundbreaking feature in Apple Intelligence lets you generate images from simple prompts, opening up exciting possibilities for creativity.

How To: Apple's Messages App Has Some Cool New Text Editing Features and Effects for iMessage — Here's How It All Works

At first glance, Apple's Messages app has always seemed pretty basic when it comes to text formatting options. However, there were and still are hidden ways to format text in your messages. But Apple's latest software updates give us even more ways to dress up text in messages, including more text effects.

How To: Make Typing Text Easier to Read on iPhone, iPad, or Mac with Apple's Hover Typing Tool

If you can't always see what you're typing very well on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, you no longer have to adjust the font size for the app or entire system just to read your writing more easily. One of Apple's newer Accessibility features gives you a customizable, magnified view in a floating window so you can see every character with crystal-clear clarity in real time.

How To: Change Text Color and Background Highlights in Apple Notes on iPhone, iPad, and Mac — The Official Way

Apple Notes may not have all the bells and whistles that a more powerful word processor like Apple Pages has, but this simple text editor continues to gain helpful new features that make it more than just a basic note-taking app. One of these updates finally gives you the ability to highlight text and change font colors, adding yet another way to make important details stand out.

How To: Lock and Hide Apps on Your iPhone or iPad — The Official Way

You can lock practically any app on your iPhone or iPad behind biometric or passcode protection. And we're not talking about using any funky workarounds, either. There's now an official Apple way to protect sensitive apps and their data. It even safeguards your personal information, keeping it out of sight across the system. You can even hide apps, making it harder for others to know they're there.

How To: 19 New Messages Features in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15 You Didn't Know You Needed

Apple's Messages app already has a ton of great features, from audio message transcriptions to message editing and screen effect triggers. But some important new features and changes are included in the latest software updates for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that make Messages even better.

How To: Add Unsupported Cards and Passes to Apple Wallet for Quick, Easy Access on Your iPhone

Apple's Wallet app lets you store boarding passes, concert tickets, gym memberships, vaccination cards, movie stubs, rewards cards, insurance info, student IDs, and more in one place on your iPhone, and you just double-click the Home or Side button to access them. Unfortunately, many cards and passes are not officially supported — but that doesn't mean you can't add them.

How To: You're Using Lidar on Your iPhone and iPad — And You Don't Even Know It

Lidar, a technology first used by meteorologists and aerospace engineers and then adopted in self-driving vehicles, has slowly crept into consumer electronics over the last five years. If you have a Pro model iPhone or iPad, there's a good chance it has a lidar sensor, and you're likely using it whether you know it or not.

How To: Silence Annoyingly Loud Emergency Alerts on iPhone Without Disabling Them Completely

Wireless emergency alerts help warn mobile phone users of imminent threats to life or property, such as extreme weather and natural disasters. These alerts target affected geographic areas and come with a loud sound scary enough to make you want to turn off emergency alerts altogether on your iPhone, but there's a way to keep emergency alerts without the ear-splitting, intrusive sound.

How To: The Easiest Way to Secretly Record Someone's Conversation with Your iPhone

Your iPhone's built-in Voice Memos app is a great way to record the audio around you, whether it be conversations, lectures, meetings, interviews, discussions, chitchat, gossip, or other kinds of talks. But if your goal is to record audio on the down-low without being noticed, you'll need to know the hidden shortcut.

How To: There's an Easy Way to See All the Unsent Messages in Your iMessage Conversations

While you can quickly see the edit history of a modified iMessage in the Messages app, there's no way to view an iMessage that somebody in the conversation deleted unless you happened to see it before it disappeared. But that's only true if you didn't implement these security measures on your iPhone.

How To: Your iPhone Has a Hidden Text-to-Speech Tool That'll Read Articles, Books, News, and Other Text Out Loud to You

You may prefer reading news stories, web articles, and books on your iPhone over listening to them in spoken form. Still, sometimes it's necessary when driving, walking, cycling, cleaning, working, or performing other activities requiring a little multitasking. To help you out, Apple has a text-to-speech service on your iPhone — you just need to know how to find and set it up.

How To: 11 Ways Apple's Reminders App Is Even Better with iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15

With iOS 18, you get better note-taking capabilities in the revamped Notes app, advanced features like conversions and results history in the more powerful Calculator, and interactive Math Notes, a feature in both apps that's a game changer for students and professionals dealing with complex equations. But Apple didn't forget about Reminders, which has become more than a simple to-do-list app.

How To: If You Keep Valuable Information in Apple Notes, You Need to Read This

Apple's Notes app has an important feature many users overlook, yet it's arguably the most crucial thing you should use for all your notes synced across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and iCloud.com. And Apple makes the feature much easier to use than years before, so there's no reason you shouldn't be using it.

How To: Disable the iMessage Typing Bubble Indicator So Others Don't Know You're Currently Active in the Chat

Apple's iMessage is one of the main reasons to use an iPhone, and there's a lot you can do in chats without being overly complicated. But there's one issue that continues to drive people nuts, and that's the blue typing bubble indicator with the moving ellipsis (•••). Can you stop it? Not officially, but there are workarounds.

How To: Use Google Maps or Waze with Siri Instead of Apple Maps

When driving, you can get directions hands-free by asking Siri. You can also make general map searches, show a location's details, call a query's phone number, and view traffic details. However, Siri defaults to Apple Maps for all those. If you prefer Google Maps, Waze, or another third-party navigation app, the map-based Siri commands won't work. But that doesn't mean you can't still use Siri.

How To: You Can Run Shortcuts Right from Your iPhone's Lock Screen & Here Are 6 Ways to Do It

Shortcuts are meant to make your life easier, and iPhone shortcuts are no exception. They can use different triggers, manual or automated, to perform actions in the background, allowing you to do things like send a prewritten text message during a bad date or change your wallpaper at certain times of the day. However, sometimes it's not only about the shortcut itself but about how fast you can run it.

How To: Your iPad Has a Hidden Built-in Calculator You're Not Using — Here's How to Unlock It

There is no iPad version of Apple's Calculator app (at least, not yet), so you won't find it on your Home Screen, in your App Library, or as a shortcut in the Control Center. But that doesn't mean your iPad doesn't have an official calculator.

How To: Apple's Massive Control Center Update Gives You 11 New Must-Try Features on iPhone and iPad

Apple has finally given Control Center the love that it needs with an updated interface design and more customizations than ever before. Taking the more customizable overhaul one step further, iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 have elevated controls beyond Control Center, so you can use controls from other places on your iPhone or iPad for even faster access to your most-used shortcuts.