IOS/iPadOS 15 tips/tricks

I’ve installed iOS 15 on my devices. I thought it might be helpful to share tips and tricks so we can get up to speed quickly–especially those of us who do not install Betas.

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Mac Rumors has a good summary of 10 things to set up. https://www.macrumors.com/guide/ios-15-start-guide/

I’ve been on the beta for the last couple weeks and it’s been pretty solid. I’ve also switched from Things 3 to Reminders. It does what I need it to.

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This is a good summary. I have to say that I’m very happy with some of the productivity related adjustments to features in the OS. Focus is the one feature I’ve been wanting for years and while they weren’t the first to offer granular support for this type of feature I really like their implementation of the feature so far.

I’d recommend really looking at how just the features found in Focus can make for a more peaceful life.

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I’m very much looking forward to those…as soon as Monterey is available and they will be sync’d between Mac and iOS. That will be excellent.

(And actually that will just sync my iPhone and my Mac. My iPad stays on DND all the time.)

The 1Password Safari extension is awesome!

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I’m also testing this. This may work well–but I won’t know until the new Reminders comes to the Mac with Monterey.

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This really blew me away. I took a picture of a sign with Chinese text on it. I selected the Chinese text in the photos app and tapped on translate and it translated to English! I verified with my wife that the translation was accurate. Now I feel like I’m living in the future!

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Thanks for this tip. I was about to skip upgrading to iOS 15 after reading Apple’s own what’s new because I didn’t care much for new stuff in FaceTime and iMessage as I don’t use both of this. But, more privacy, iCloud enhancement and custom notifications? I’m interested! How will it run on a Xs Max? I am also very hesistant on new iOS as it does gives some overhead to an older phone.

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My iPhone Xr zips along with iOS15 still.

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I’ve been running the betas since July I think, with no substantive issues. Quick Notes on iPad are brilliant.

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Runs fine on my (even older) iPhone X.

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I’m usually an “all in on the beta” kinda guy, but I had a shaky experience with the iOS14 beta (which, it turns out, may well have been a USB-C bug*) so was a little more cautious this year. Keen to upgrade, but have any heavy Shortcuts users here experienced any issues? I’ve seen a few reports…

*It turns out that the issue I experienced back in 2019 that seemed to take down my device might have been a USB-C bug triggered by rebooting the device while charging… a few other people have described similar experiences during the 15 betas…

my iPhone SE 2016 handles iOS 15 as if it is iOS 14. Or in other words, no noticeable performance degradation

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I’ve not been a beta tester (I don’t have time to watch developer events), so I had no idea that fully featured extensions were coming, what a nice suprise!

The 1Password extension is really impressive, and I look forward to finding more.

AgileBits did not release a (public?) TestFlight version of 7.8, so I had no idea either…

(I also do not run OS betas, but I did run the Release Candidate for 1 week)

My two favorite features are:

  1. On iOS you can use drag and drop systemwide. So you can (finally) drag and drop a Mail message to create a link to it on your task manager of choice. We’ve been able to do that on iPad for a while, but that’s new on iPhone.

  2. Keyboard shortcuts for multitasking on iPadOS:

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I was not aware this could be done on the phone. I have tried but can’t figure out how to drag the message to the Reminders app. I can drag the message but can’t figure out how to get it to Reminders on the phone. Am I misunderstanding you?

I do this a lot on the iPad but for the life of me can’t figure out how to do it on the phone with iOS 15.

  • tap and hold an email message item in the message list.
  • after you feel haptic feedback, drag your finger to ‘grab’ the email item.
  • while still holding your one finger on the screen (to keep the ‘grabbed’ mail item), use your other finger to go to Reminder (or Things 3/Notes) via application drawer
  • you have to make sure Reminder/Things 3/Notes already have blank page. if not, use the other finger to tap on “new page”
  • finally, drag you one finger holding the mail item on a textfield of that new page. make sure it shows a ‘green plus’ sign before rising that ‘grabber finger’

or in other words, you need at least 2 fingers to grab a mail item and the other to navigate your iPhone

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You can hold your finger on the screen with the selection and then use another finger to go back to the Home Screen and open the desired app.

So a Mail to Things workflow would look like this;

  1. Hold your finger in the message (blank part of the header seems to work best for this)
  2. Wait till the drag and drop cue for item selection shows up
  3. Use a second finger to swipe up the Switcher bar (or swipe left for the last used app)
  4. Open your app of choice (Things in my case) and use the first finger to drag it there.

Here’s a quick demo:

image

EDIT: Works great for Safari URLs too. Yet another reason why that bar belongs to the bottom of Safari! :laughing:

EDIT 2: Yoink users may find it far more useful on iPhone now.

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wasn’t this possible for years with Google translate. Holding your camera to a street sign and Google translates it for you in the picture.

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