Some tips for iOS 10

It’s been a little while since Apple released iOS 10 to the masses and overall it seems like a good update.
But we do have some tweaks which will make it a little more fun.  We’re not going to go through
what the new features are in iOS 10 because you’ve probably already read about that. These are some tweaks you can make to the settings so you can get the most out of the new features.

Revert Home Button
The most jarring aspect of iOS 10 was the removal of Slide to Unlock. Even more so than that was the fact that you now have to press the home button rather than just rest your finger on it to unlock the phone. I preferred the old method and wanted it back. Thankfully, Apple put in an option to allow you to unlock iOS 10 by just resting your finger on the home button. To do this, go to Settings – General – Accessibility – Home Button and then enable the Rest Finger to Open option.

Raise to Wake
This is a really small feature, but something I am using all the time now. It should be enabled by default,
but if not, go to Settings – Display & Brightness and turn on Raise to Wake. Before iOS 10, the screen would only light up if you got a notification on the lock screen, but with Raise to Wake enabled, you can just pick up the phone and the screen will come on for about 1 to 2 seconds. This is great for quickly seeing any notifications you missed or for unlocking your phone without having to press the Home or power buttons. If you’re thinking that this feature will significantly drain your battery, you’d be mistaken.Our  battery life has remained the same before and after iOS 10, which was surprising!

Invisible Ink
You can do all kinds of crazy stuff in iMessage now, but one of my favorite features is Invisible Ink. It
basically lets you type in a normal text message, but hides the content with a visual effect. To see it, you
must tap on the text. It’s worth noting that the message remains hidden on your phone and the other person’s phone too. In addition, after you tap to unhide it, the message will become hidden again after a few seconds.  I have found that I use this quite a bit for sending messages I wouldn’t want anyone else to see on either my phone or the recipient’s phone like passwords, financial details, health info, etc.

Using More Emojis
I personally am not a huge emoji user simply because of my age probably, but also because I find it annoying to have to look through 500 tiny emojis to find the right one for the text. With iOS 10, the software will try to figure out which emoji is the best to use for the text. All you have to do is write out your message and then tap on the smiley face icon (emoji icon) that is located on the bottom of the keyboard. You’ll see certain words highlighted in orange and if you tap on those words, you’ll get suggested emoji. If you tap on the emoji, it’ll replace the word. It would be nice if you could also add the emojis to the end of the message rather than simply replacing the word, but overall it’s still a useful feature.

3D Touch Apps
3D Touch has been around since the last iPhone, but I don’t think many people use it all that much. Luckily, Apple made it a bit more useful in iOS 10 by allowing apps to display information from the app along with the shortcuts. As of right now, this feature is mostly only useful for the default Apple apps, but it is slowly gaining traction in other apps. You can also use it on the bottom row of icons in the Control Center.  Basically, any app that has a widget that you can add to the home screen can eventually show that information when you hard press on the app icon. This doesn’t happen by default, though, so you have to wait until the  developer updates the app.