Iphone tips

Close three apps at once

Need to force-close multiple apps fast? At the risk of looking like you’re clawing at your phone, you can close up to three apps at once by swiping up with three fingers.

Quickly shut off the flashlight

Included in iOS’s Control Center is access to a flashlight. Once enabled, you can quickly shut it off by using the camera shortcut from the lock screen.

Hidden bubble level

Leave your lime-green bubble level in the drawer. iOS’s built-in leveling tool uses the phone’s gyroscope to help you find out if an object is perfectly horizontal (or vertical).  To access it, launch the compass, then swipe right to reveal the level.

Use bold, italics and underlining

In some apps like Mail, you can use rich formatting to make text bold, italics, or underlined. But if you don’t know it exists, you might miss it.  Just highlight the text you want to edit, and tap the arrow in the copy/paste pop-up. Then, choose “B I U” to access the formatting options.

Quickly ‘go back’

Unlike Android, the iPhone doesn’t have a dedicated “back” button. But, a little known gesture makes that completely acceptable.

In Messages, Mail and even Safari, simply swipe right from the edge of the screen to go to the previous window. The gesture even works in some third-party apps like Instagram.

Here’s how it works: when a user is in a supported app, such as Messages, Settings, Mail or Safari and they’d like to go back to the message list, the previous screen in Settings or the previous Web page in Safari, they can swipe from the left edge of the screen to the right.

The current screen will then be taken with the gesture, above the previous screen, and eventually pushed entirely off the device’s display. It’s a quick and easy gesture, but one that takes some adjustment. You can see it in action in this Vine video:

The back gesture now means users have to swipe from the right side of the screen to bring up the actions that can be taken on a message or e-mail. In previous versions of iOS, users were able to swipe in either direction to bring up the same actions.