Put a Web Site on Your iOS Home Screen

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If you have a Web site or Web app that you use all the time on your iPhone or iPad, you can make accessing it as easy as any iOS app by making it an icon on your Home screen. Open the site in Safari, tap the Share icon, and tap Add to Home Screen. (You may have to swipe left to see Add to Home Screen.) Give it a name (just a word or two), and then tap Add to create the Home screen bookmark icon. From then on, tapping that icon will open the associated site in Safari.

Find Buried Options in the iOS Settings App

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by Adam Engst | Jun 1, 2016

Find Buried Options in the iOS Settings App

iOS 10 offers about 40 top-level categories in its Settings app and seemingly innumerable options in those categories. How can you find a little-used setting, particularly since Apple sometimes moves things between categories during major iOS releases? The solution is the Settings app’s hidden Search field. To reveal it, pull down on the main settings screen (iPhone) or left sidebar (iPad). Tap the Search field, enter text describing the setting you want to find (try typing Fa to find Facebook, FaceTime, and Safari Favorites), and the results appear immediately. Tap a result to jump to it, but also notice that each result shows a path, so you can find that setting manually in the future.

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Find on Page in Safari in iOS

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by Adam Engst | May 1, 2016

Picture yourself looking for something specific on a long Web page on the small iPhone screen. Did you know that you can search through just the text of the page? Tap the Share button, and in the bottom row of icons, swipe left until you see Find on Page. Tap that, and then enter the word you’re looking for in the search field that appears. The Up and Down arrow buttons in the upper left of the keyboard help you find subsequent instances of your search term.

Type Accented Characters and URLs Faster in iOS

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by Adam Engst | May 1, 2016

Did you know that many keys on the small iPhone keyboard are hiding additional characters? To type an O with an umlaut, for instance, press and hold the O key, and a popover appears with accented variants of O. Without lifting your finger, slide it over the Ö and then pick it up to insert that character. This trick is also useful for getting different dashes (under the Hyphen), different currency symbols (under the $), curly quotes, and more. The most interesting one? When the Period key appears on the main keyboard screen, as it does in Safari or Mail when entering a URL or email address, press and hold on the Period, and you can quickly select from .us, .edu, .net., .org, or .com to finish the address you’re typing.