iOS 15 is now available to download and there are a lot of new features that you’re going to love. I want to cover some of my top tips and tricks for iOS 15, especially for new users so let’s get right into it.
1. How to use Live text in iOS 15.
First of all, let’s talk about one of the coolest features with iOS 15 and that is something called Live text. live text is a feature that lets you basically select text directly from your camera or a picture and lets you copy and paste it, look up a definition or actually translate it. to activate this feature, you can do it in a couple of different ways. The easiest way to do this is to open up the camera app and point your camera at the text you want to select. when the camera recognizes that text, you will see an icon pop up in the bottom right. select that icon and you will see a little pop up of a photo that your iPhone took and all of the text in that image. from there all you have to do is drag and hold your finger over the text in the photo, like you would with any other text on your iPhone and you will be able to select all of the text or a specific portion of it, and then from there, you can copy the text, paste it into another app, look up a word for a definition, translate the word into another language or share the text with another app.
Another way to activate this feature is just to go into your photo library and any photo with existing text should already be retroactively added to use this feature. so, you can select text even from older photos you took before iOS 15 even came out, and it works exactly the same way as if you opened up the camera app directly with all of the same options. This is a really cool feature and I find it extremely useful for copying and pasting information, especially on those certain websites or apps where you actually can’t select text for some reason. Well now you can just screenshot it and then copy and paste from there or if we’re just taking quick photos of something you want to share like a menu at a restaurant, and you could just take a photo of it then copy and paste it to one of your friends. This is one of the most useful iOS 15 features and it’s really easy to use and understand for new users.
2. Safari new address bar trick.
Now, if you are not a new user to iOS, I mean a lot of people have been using iPhones for a long time, you might have noticed that when you opened up Safari, things look a little bit different with a new tab bar option which now places the address bar at the bottom of your iPhone screen and move some things around as well. And while you may like this new tab bar design, I’m sure there’s a lot of people reading this article may not like it based on preference. After being used to almost 15 years of the iPhone browser design, where the address bar was at the top of their iPhone and I totally get that because it took me so long to get used to the address bar being on the bottom and I would just constantly tap the top to enter in a new website and it was so frustrating. So, if you don’t like this new change, fear not, because you can actually revert it back to the old-style single tab design. To do this, all you have to do is go into settings, scroll down to Safari. Tap Safari and then scroll down to the tabs area, from there you can change the settings of Safari from the new tab bar back to the old single tab design. Once you do this, you will get the old design and everything will be where you remember it from iOS 14 and basically every other iOS version before that. The safari URL will be at the top.
3. Face time new feature.
Perhaps one of the most use feature with an iPhone is FaceTime and iOS 15 gives us a simple feature that I think is actually going to be one of the most used features on this list. Now, while a lot of the share play features are unfortunately delayed with iOS 15, One feature that is not delayed is the ability for the first time ever on FaceTime is to have a FaceTime call with Android users and not only Android users but Windows users or frankly any user that can access a web browser. So now you can FaceTime with anyone, even people who don’t own an iPhone and doing this is so simple, all you have to do is go into the FaceTime app and on the top, you will see a new option to create a link, tap on it and you will get options to share this link easily to services like messages, email, Twitter, and more. Or you can just simply tap on copy and then you can paste this link to anyone. When you send this link to a non-iPhone user, all they have to do is click on the link and it will open in their web browser. they get to pick a name, and then they are right in your FaceTime call. so now you don’t have to leave out that one random sibling who just, you know, kept on refusing to get an iPhone and everyone else in the family got an iPhone, and they were constantly left out of the family FaceTime calls lol.
4. Offline feature added to Siri.
Another thing you need to try in iOS 15 is the faster offline Siri because now in iOS 15, certain Siri requests can be done on device without a connection to the internet and will even work in airplane mode because you don’t need an internet connection, and because you don’t need an internet connection, you don’t need to wait to send and receive this data and Siri can do voice tasks very quickly. For example, you can now tell Siri to open an app control system setting, set a timer or an alarm or skip or play a previous music track. all of these requests work offline now, and because of that, they are just super-fast to activate. so, give it a try for yourself.
5. Custom focuses added in iOS 15.
Another tip, you’ll want to try is taking control of your digital lifestyle by setting custom focuses. focus is a new system in iOS 15 that completely changes the way you manage your phone’s notifications and what apps you see, and like its name implies focus helps you focus on the task at hand by creating a custom status that allows you to control what notifications you can receive on your device from people, as well as apps, and you can even customize it with personal dedicated pages that surface when you turn on that focus. So, let’s say when you are in work mode, you can allow notifications from a select group of close family members, friends or other people that you communicate with for work reasons. then you can also choose to mute notifications from apps that can be distracting. And finally, you can have a custom page with the apps that you use most frequently during your work day. For example; mail, YouTube studio, Whatsapp, Calculator and so on, along with some other helpful widgets. You can set these focuses to be enabled automatically depending on time, location or even when you are opening a specific app. So, let’s say you are watching YouTube or playing a game and you don’t want any notifications to come through. Well, you can set that up as well. custom focuses are one of the biggest overhauls to how you manage notifications on the iPhone.