The Power of iPhone's Built-in Tools: Unleashing Hidden Features and Functions

When it comes to using an iPhone, many people rely on third-party apps to get the job done. However, the iPhone itself has a wealth of built-in tools that can help with various tasks, from measuring distances to creating shortcuts. In this article, we'll explore some of these hidden features and functions that you may not know about.

Measuring Distances: The Measure App

One of the most useful built-in apps on an iPhone is the Measure app. This app can be used as a ruler, allowing you to measure distances by pinpointing two points and then moving the app around to get the desired measurement. However, what makes the Measure app stand out is its ability to mimic actual tools. With its gyroscope and accelerometer, it can level surfaces and detect tilts, making it an essential tool for hanging TV's, frames, or any other item that requires precise alignment.

For example, when you're hanging a picture frame, you can use the Measure app to ensure that it's perfectly level. Simply place the frame against the wall, open the Measure app, and tap on the screen where you want to place the frame. The app will detect the tilt of the surface and adjust its measurement accordingly. This feature is especially useful when working with uneven surfaces or trying to achieve a perfect level.

Shortcuts: A Game-Changer for Productivity

The Measure app is just one example of an iPhone's built-in features that can save you time and increase your productivity. Another handy feature is the ability to create shortcuts. With three fingers, you can tap on the screen to access a menu with various options, including undo, cut, copy, paste, and redo.

This feature may seem minor, but it can make a huge difference in certain situations. For instance, when working on a document or email, having the ability to quickly undo changes or switch between different versions of your work can be invaluable. Additionally, the copy and paste function allows you to quickly transfer text from one app to another, saving time and effort.

Calibrating Tools: Ensuring Accuracy

When using the Measure app or any other built-in tool, it's essential to calibrate it properly to ensure accuracy. The iPhone has a feature called UNC (Uncalibrated) calibration, which allows you to fine-tune the device's measurements. When you exit an app that uses this feature, your iPhone will automatically recalibrate itself.

This is especially important when using tools like the Measure app for measuring distances or leveling surfaces. A slight miscalibration can lead to inaccurate results, so it's crucial to take a few minutes to calibrate your tool properly before starting any task.

Safari: Closing Tabs and Clearing Cache

When using Safari on an iPhone, there are several features that can help declutter your browsing experience. One of the most useful features is the ability to close tabs by long-pressing on them. This allows you to quickly clear out unwanted tabs and focus on the ones you need.

Another feature worth mentioning is the cache clearing option. When you're done browsing a particular website or clearing out cookies, you can use Safari's built-in cache clearing function to delete temporary files and data that may be consuming storage space.

Notes App: A Versatile Tool for Text Formatting

The Notes app on an iPhone is a versatile tool that can be used for various tasks beyond just jotting down notes. One of its most useful features is the ability to create custom text formatting shortcuts. With three fingers, you can tap on the screen to access a menu with options like undo, cut, copy, paste, and redo.

This feature may seem minor, but it can be incredibly helpful when working with documents or emails that require precise formatting. By creating your own custom shortcut, you can quickly switch between different versions of your work or apply specific formatting styles without having to navigate through menus.

Guided Access: A Parent's Best Friend

For parents who want to restrict access to certain apps on their iPhone, Guided Access is a feature that can help. This feature allows parents to lock their child into a single app for a set period of time, preventing them from accessing other apps or switching between different screens.

This feature is especially useful when you need to keep your child occupied while doing chores or watching TV. By locking the iPhone into a single app, you can prevent accidental screen changes and ensure that they stay focused on their task at hand. Additionally, Guided Access can also be used to help children develop fine motor skills by limiting access to certain apps or features.

Conclusion

When it comes to using an iPhone, many people overlook its built-in tools and features in favor of third-party apps. However, the iPhone's Measure app, shortcuts, calibration feature, Safari options, Notes app features, and Guided Access are just a few examples of the many hidden gems that can help increase productivity, accuracy, and convenience.

By exploring these features and functions, you can unlock new possibilities on your iPhone and make it an even more powerful tool for getting things done. Whether you're a parent looking to restrict access to certain apps or a busy professional seeking to streamline your workflow, the iPhone's built-in tools have got you covered.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso everybody as more and more iOS and ipados iterations are released and we're getting closer to iPad OS and iOS 18 there's always those headlighting features like things like math notes or apple intelligence or again a bunch of other features that Apple really touts and advertises but under the hood there's a bunch of different features that have kind of accumulated and gotten better and better over the years so in this video what I want to do is talk about 10 features that go kind of under the radar unnoticed that has really helped me from a productivity standpoint and also just from an overall usability standpoint on my iPhone as well as my iPad so let's talk about these 10 features but before we get started definitely consider subscribing to the channel if you guys want to watch more videos like this one or becoming a channel member to get some awesome wallpapers as well as some other nice perks like a live podcast episode and much more but let's get into this video and talk about these 10 features and leave comments below if you guys know these or if you learn something new let's get into it so everybody let's hop right into this video and before we get started I do want to mention and you might notice that I am running iOS 18 right now but I will say that all the features I want to mention are not exclusive to iOS 18 you can be on iOS 17 or iPad OS 17 and they'll work just fine so I want to be as inclusive as possible with these awesome tips and tricks the first one I'm going to bring up is text replacement so you may or may not know but this has been around for a long time now so if I press the Notes application and I press enter enter and then I type in the at symbol twice I actually created a shortcut that will actually suggest and autocorrect it to be my email so I no longer have to type out my email Emil every single time it's actually very easy to do this and this has worked wonders and saved me so much time I used to spend so much time kind of writing out my email for some reason and also as well as my address but if you go into your settings then go into General and then scroll down to where it says keyboard you can actually go to text replacement so this is how you actually do this and it's very very easy if I press a plus sign right here let's say I want to do something else let's say I want the phrase to be hello what's up and if I just type HH as a shortcut I'll press save so now every single time I type in HH it'll show up as a suggestion to type in hello what's up so you don't have to actually go out of your way to type out the entire thing I know we live in a lazy moment right now but I absolutely love this so definitely try this one out if you haven't already so the next one is actually going to be screenshot annotations now we all know that to take a screenshot you do one of these so you do the up arrow and the lock button and then you have the ability to edit it in real time now this works a little bit better obviously on the iPad because you have the ability to use something like an apple pencil but it works the same exact way on your iPhone when you take a screenshot and what I like about this is that when you annotate there are some predetermined shapes as well as symbols that if you draw them out and you draw let's say an ugly Circle if I hold it down it'll turn it into a perfect oval right and this works with a bunch of different ones and I'm going to list them all to the side but let's try out a few here so another one I'm going to do is maybe an arrow so if I do this and do an arrow it'll actually point to that another one is a star so if you do a star it'll then fix that star for you and be able to actually change it perfectly it actually even does like pentagons and hexagons so if I do one of these it'll fix that turned it into a circle so it got a little bit confused another one is actually a cloud so if I do one of these it'll actually turn it into a nice little like cartoony Cloud but it has a bunch of other ones like I mentioned like a triangle a square a rectangle Pentagon an arrow Parabola so the list goes on and on definitely try out some shapes leave some comments down below what you were able to try and find out but this is a great one if you do want to play with it in your screenshots and again it works pretty much anywhere that you can annotate or anywhere that you can actually use it tools down here the next feature is going to be guided access and what this does is that let's say you're in an application right here and you want to leave the person in the application this is actually a perfect situation for if you have a child or something like that but if I triple press the lock button so 1 2 3 you get a little menu and the guided access basically locks you into that application you can Circle areas of the screen you would like to disable as well so if I don't want them to press the get button or anything like that I can Circle that it's going to disable that button we're going to press options here to see exactly what we're dealing with so you can even kind of make sure and disable different buttons and physical hardware buttons so the side button the volume buttons motion software keyboard touch time limit you can press done on there to set what you want to set we're going to press Start put a passcode in and now you get this little prompt the guided access has started and you cannot leave it so you can move around you can do anything you want in this application as you can see this little button is not available to press or at least this area isn't if I move it down I can actually press get right there which I'm not going to do so I like this again if you have a child and you want to give them your phone for 5 10 minutes but you don't want them kind of wandering off into places they shouldn't then this is a great way to do it and to get out of it you triple press it again we'll press guided access it'll go back you type in the passcode we'll press end and then you're back to guided access being ended and you can navigate your phone once again so a great way to be able to kind of keep one person in a single application locked in without having to worry about them leaving and going somewhere else another big one especially for me when you're using your phone at night I've noticed that the brightness levels and again it's going to be tough to show it here because it is very bright in this room but when you turn the brightness level all the way down if you're in a p black room it's actually not dark enough I feel like it's still too bright especially if you're using an application that has like a white background so if I go into Twitter and it does have that white background it'll actually be very very bright so one thing to kind of combat this which is something I learned very recently and has been working wonders is to reduce the white balance now to do this you can do this twofold you can just type into your search bar type in white balance and you can reduce the white point right there and turn that on and if I tap that it actually as you can see it got a little bit darker now to access this all you have to do is go into your settings go into accessibility go down to where it says display and text size and then you're going to want to go down here where it says reduce white points so if you tap on that as you can see it got much much darker and then if I do one of these and actually this is at full brightness if I lower the brightness all the way now this is like pitch black I don't even know if I can see it I could barely see that actually good thing I was able to see that and you turn that back off and now it's very bright so I think this is going to be awesome I use my phone in very dark environments you know putting my daughter to bed and Page black environments or things of that nature where the brightness is still too bright even at its lowest setting definitely try that out if you are in that same scenario now another really cool one is that you have the ability to actually mirror your Apple watch which is one of the cooler things again I don't really know what the situation or use case is but I want to show off that you can actually do that so if I go into accessibility scroll down you can actually see the Apple watch mirroring so if I tap on that we'll toggle that on and if I'm right here it usually takes a second or two so you got to give it a minute and it'll eventually actually turn on so there you can see that it's on I'm going to remove my Apple watch so we can actually see it side by side and even down to the actual locking so of course my Apple watch is is locked once I take it off my wrist and you can actually control your Apple watch not only from your phone but then you're also able to control the Apple watch from the phone itself sometimes it doesn't work it's a little bit glitchy so if I ex out of here and turn on the Apple watch mirroring again I'll let it do its thing it's actually resetting as you can see you have the blue outline right there we'll type in the passcode and you can see that I can actually use my phone to control my Apple watch you can see the little blue outline right there I think this is one of the cooler features again I don't really know what the perfect use case for this would be but as you can see it does work in real time it's a little bit smoother when you look at it over here versus trying to control it over here cuz again it's trying to mimic different kind of scroll wheels and things like that but overall big big fan of being able to do this with your Apple watch on your iPhone now another one I want to bring up you might have noticed when I triple tapped over here to get to guided access there's a couple other options so you have background sounds magnifier and live speech these are all things that you can access with this triple accessibility shortcut so if I tap on background sounds you can start to hear that it is playing a background ocean sound which can then be controlled through the control center if I long press on here tap on here and then you have all these different options so one way to access that is through the guided access another one that comes up is the magnifier so of course exactly what it sounds like it is a magnifier that if I kind of you can use it to then zoom in and zoom out so it works as intended it's another nice little trick that you can use as a tool inside of your phone that's kind of in a shortcut capacity and then in that same light when it comes to actual tools that your iPhone can actually mimic if you've never used the measure app it's been my actual leveler since the very beginning so first and foremost you can use it as a ruler it really isn't as accurate as something like an actual ruler you pretty much just pinpoint here you move it around you press it like that and then this is saying that it's about an inch and a half but what I personally use this for more is going to be for the leveler because there is a gyroscope in here and an accelerometer meaning that it's going to be able to mimic in an actual level and not only does it mimic the level but it mimics it perfectly so you can see we on a level ground if that tilt it this way it'll change this way it'll change again and as you can see it kind of moves around and you can even predetermine it so if you want this to be your level spot you just tap on here and then that is your level and then this is now -7 so a bunch of different ways you can use this if you're hanging a TV or a frame or whatever the case may be a beautiful tool to have and you just long press again and now you're level again and I will say that when you are calibrating it it will UNC calibrate itself or guess recalibrate to normal every time you exit the app the next tip I want to bring up is in Safari so if you go into your actual tabs over here as you can see I have over 115 tabs and for me I'm one of those people that kind of leaves the tabs to continue to grow until it gets to around 4 or 500 but but if you actually long press on your tabs you get a bunch of different options you have the ability to close that tab but then also close other tabs as well so if you want to clear out all your tabs besides the one you just press close all other tabs and as you can see all the tabs are now gone a way to kind of clear out your your cache and Safari now this next one is going to be in the notes app and pretty much can be used anywhere where you are dealing with text first and foremost if you tap anywhere on the actual screen and you're typing something out you can use a magnifier like this as we've had for years to kind of figure out where you're going but if you long press the space bar it turns your whole keyboard into an actual cursor and it lets you pinpoint it way better in my opinion than something like the magnifier so I'm right there I'm good to go I can kind of tap on on delete delete delete and then the final little trick is going to be a shortcut for your kind of text formatting tool so if you grab three fingers tap on here you get a little menu right here that says undo cut copy paste and redo so if I undo it'll actually bring everything back if I redo it'll delete everything again and of course you can copy and paste everything and this works across everything so it's not just a Notes app and it's not just text apps it'll work across pretty much anything and of course most of these features will work on your iPad as well as long as you're running I believe iOS like 15 or newer most of these will be available so definitely give them a shot everybody let's finish up this video so that will just about do it for this video like you saw again these are kind of all over the place in terms of what their functions are what they can do how they help you why you would use them and a lot of people are using these for different reasons like my two favorite out of these 10 have to be the shortcut for the text replacement because that is saved me so much time it's absolutely unbelievable with my email and my address and then secondly the guided access feature has been great especially now that I am a parent and I have I toddler her and she kind of wants to grab my phone but I don't want her going all over the place so I kind of just lock her into that one application to let her play with it for maybe 10 15 minutes but that'll do it for this video Everybody let me know in the comment down below if you learned anything new are you going to implement any of these are there some that maybe went overlooked that I should kind of take a look at and maybe do another version of this video let me know cuz there's so many more applications so many more features and so many more hidden like nuances in iOS and iPad OS that I think we should definitely go over but until next time everybody if you guys want to watch more videos like this one this video right here YouTube thinks you're going to like but this video I think you're going to like until next time everybody I'm Fernando peaceso everybody as more and more iOS and ipados iterations are released and we're getting closer to iPad OS and iOS 18 there's always those headlighting features like things like math notes or apple intelligence or again a bunch of other features that Apple really touts and advertises but under the hood there's a bunch of different features that have kind of accumulated and gotten better and better over the years so in this video what I want to do is talk about 10 features that go kind of under the radar unnoticed that has really helped me from a productivity standpoint and also just from an overall usability standpoint on my iPhone as well as my iPad so let's talk about these 10 features but before we get started definitely consider subscribing to the channel if you guys want to watch more videos like this one or becoming a channel member to get some awesome wallpapers as well as some other nice perks like a live podcast episode and much more but let's get into this video and talk about these 10 features and leave comments below if you guys know these or if you learn something new let's get into it so everybody let's hop right into this video and before we get started I do want to mention and you might notice that I am running iOS 18 right now but I will say that all the features I want to mention are not exclusive to iOS 18 you can be on iOS 17 or iPad OS 17 and they'll work just fine so I want to be as inclusive as possible with these awesome tips and tricks the first one I'm going to bring up is text replacement so you may or may not know but this has been around for a long time now so if I press the Notes application and I press enter enter and then I type in the at symbol twice I actually created a shortcut that will actually suggest and autocorrect it to be my email so I no longer have to type out my email Emil every single time it's actually very easy to do this and this has worked wonders and saved me so much time I used to spend so much time kind of writing out my email for some reason and also as well as my address but if you go into your settings then go into General and then scroll down to where it says keyboard you can actually go to text replacement so this is how you actually do this and it's very very easy if I press a plus sign right here let's say I want to do something else let's say I want the phrase to be hello what's up and if I just type HH as a shortcut I'll press save so now every single time I type in HH it'll show up as a suggestion to type in hello what's up so you don't have to actually go out of your way to type out the entire thing I know we live in a lazy moment right now but I absolutely love this so definitely try this one out if you haven't already so the next one is actually going to be screenshot annotations now we all know that to take a screenshot you do one of these so you do the up arrow and the lock button and then you have the ability to edit it in real time now this works a little bit better obviously on the iPad because you have the ability to use something like an apple pencil but it works the same exact way on your iPhone when you take a screenshot and what I like about this is that when you annotate there are some predetermined shapes as well as symbols that if you draw them out and you draw let's say an ugly Circle if I hold it down it'll turn it into a perfect oval right and this works with a bunch of different ones and I'm going to list them all to the side but let's try out a few here so another one I'm going to do is maybe an arrow so if I do this and do an arrow it'll actually point to that another one is a star so if you do a star it'll then fix that star for you and be able to actually change it perfectly it actually even does like pentagons and hexagons so if I do one of these it'll fix that turned it into a circle so it got a little bit confused another one is actually a cloud so if I do one of these it'll actually turn it into a nice little like cartoony Cloud but it has a bunch of other ones like I mentioned like a triangle a square a rectangle Pentagon an arrow Parabola so the list goes on and on definitely try out some shapes leave some comments down below what you were able to try and find out but this is a great one if you do want to play with it in your screenshots and again it works pretty much anywhere that you can annotate or anywhere that you can actually use it tools down here the next feature is going to be guided access and what this does is that let's say you're in an application right here and you want to leave the person in the application this is actually a perfect situation for if you have a child or something like that but if I triple press the lock button so 1 2 3 you get a little menu and the guided access basically locks you into that application you can Circle areas of the screen you would like to disable as well so if I don't want them to press the get button or anything like that I can Circle that it's going to disable that button we're going to press options here to see exactly what we're dealing with so you can even kind of make sure and disable different buttons and physical hardware buttons so the side button the volume buttons motion software keyboard touch time limit you can press done on there to set what you want to set we're going to press Start put a passcode in and now you get this little prompt the guided access has started and you cannot leave it so you can move around you can do anything you want in this application as you can see this little button is not available to press or at least this area isn't if I move it down I can actually press get right there which I'm not going to do so I like this again if you have a child and you want to give them your phone for 5 10 minutes but you don't want them kind of wandering off into places they shouldn't then this is a great way to do it and to get out of it you triple press it again we'll press guided access it'll go back you type in the passcode we'll press end and then you're back to guided access being ended and you can navigate your phone once again so a great way to be able to kind of keep one person in a single application locked in without having to worry about them leaving and going somewhere else another big one especially for me when you're using your phone at night I've noticed that the brightness levels and again it's going to be tough to show it here because it is very bright in this room but when you turn the brightness level all the way down if you're in a p black room it's actually not dark enough I feel like it's still too bright especially if you're using an application that has like a white background so if I go into Twitter and it does have that white background it'll actually be very very bright so one thing to kind of combat this which is something I learned very recently and has been working wonders is to reduce the white balance now to do this you can do this twofold you can just type into your search bar type in white balance and you can reduce the white point right there and turn that on and if I tap that it actually as you can see it got a little bit darker now to access this all you have to do is go into your settings go into accessibility go down to where it says display and text size and then you're going to want to go down here where it says reduce white points so if you tap on that as you can see it got much much darker and then if I do one of these and actually this is at full brightness if I lower the brightness all the way now this is like pitch black I don't even know if I can see it I could barely see that actually good thing I was able to see that and you turn that back off and now it's very bright so I think this is going to be awesome I use my phone in very dark environments you know putting my daughter to bed and Page black environments or things of that nature where the brightness is still too bright even at its lowest setting definitely try that out if you are in that same scenario now another really cool one is that you have the ability to actually mirror your Apple watch which is one of the cooler things again I don't really know what the situation or use case is but I want to show off that you can actually do that so if I go into accessibility scroll down you can actually see the Apple watch mirroring so if I tap on that we'll toggle that on and if I'm right here it usually takes a second or two so you got to give it a minute and it'll eventually actually turn on so there you can see that it's on I'm going to remove my Apple watch so we can actually see it side by side and even down to the actual locking so of course my Apple watch is is locked once I take it off my wrist and you can actually control your Apple watch not only from your phone but then you're also able to control the Apple watch from the phone itself sometimes it doesn't work it's a little bit glitchy so if I ex out of here and turn on the Apple watch mirroring again I'll let it do its thing it's actually resetting as you can see you have the blue outline right there we'll type in the passcode and you can see that I can actually use my phone to control my Apple watch you can see the little blue outline right there I think this is one of the cooler features again I don't really know what the perfect use case for this would be but as you can see it does work in real time it's a little bit smoother when you look at it over here versus trying to control it over here cuz again it's trying to mimic different kind of scroll wheels and things like that but overall big big fan of being able to do this with your Apple watch on your iPhone now another one I want to bring up you might have noticed when I triple tapped over here to get to guided access there's a couple other options so you have background sounds magnifier and live speech these are all things that you can access with this triple accessibility shortcut so if I tap on background sounds you can start to hear that it is playing a background ocean sound which can then be controlled through the control center if I long press on here tap on here and then you have all these different options so one way to access that is through the guided access another one that comes up is the magnifier so of course exactly what it sounds like it is a magnifier that if I kind of you can use it to then zoom in and zoom out so it works as intended it's another nice little trick that you can use as a tool inside of your phone that's kind of in a shortcut capacity and then in that same light when it comes to actual tools that your iPhone can actually mimic if you've never used the measure app it's been my actual leveler since the very beginning so first and foremost you can use it as a ruler it really isn't as accurate as something like an actual ruler you pretty much just pinpoint here you move it around you press it like that and then this is saying that it's about an inch and a half but what I personally use this for more is going to be for the leveler because there is a gyroscope in here and an accelerometer meaning that it's going to be able to mimic in an actual level and not only does it mimic the level but it mimics it perfectly so you can see we on a level ground if that tilt it this way it'll change this way it'll change again and as you can see it kind of moves around and you can even predetermine it so if you want this to be your level spot you just tap on here and then that is your level and then this is now -7 so a bunch of different ways you can use this if you're hanging a TV or a frame or whatever the case may be a beautiful tool to have and you just long press again and now you're level again and I will say that when you are calibrating it it will UNC calibrate itself or guess recalibrate to normal every time you exit the app the next tip I want to bring up is in Safari so if you go into your actual tabs over here as you can see I have over 115 tabs and for me I'm one of those people that kind of leaves the tabs to continue to grow until it gets to around 4 or 500 but but if you actually long press on your tabs you get a bunch of different options you have the ability to close that tab but then also close other tabs as well so if you want to clear out all your tabs besides the one you just press close all other tabs and as you can see all the tabs are now gone a way to kind of clear out your your cache and Safari now this next one is going to be in the notes app and pretty much can be used anywhere where you are dealing with text first and foremost if you tap anywhere on the actual screen and you're typing something out you can use a magnifier like this as we've had for years to kind of figure out where you're going but if you long press the space bar it turns your whole keyboard into an actual cursor and it lets you pinpoint it way better in my opinion than something like the magnifier so I'm right there I'm good to go I can kind of tap on on delete delete delete and then the final little trick is going to be a shortcut for your kind of text formatting tool so if you grab three fingers tap on here you get a little menu right here that says undo cut copy paste and redo so if I undo it'll actually bring everything back if I redo it'll delete everything again and of course you can copy and paste everything and this works across everything so it's not just a Notes app and it's not just text apps it'll work across pretty much anything and of course most of these features will work on your iPad as well as long as you're running I believe iOS like 15 or newer most of these will be available so definitely give them a shot everybody let's finish up this video so that will just about do it for this video like you saw again these are kind of all over the place in terms of what their functions are what they can do how they help you why you would use them and a lot of people are using these for different reasons like my two favorite out of these 10 have to be the shortcut for the text replacement because that is saved me so much time it's absolutely unbelievable with my email and my address and then secondly the guided access feature has been great especially now that I am a parent and I have I toddler her and she kind of wants to grab my phone but I don't want her going all over the place so I kind of just lock her into that one application to let her play with it for maybe 10 15 minutes but that'll do it for this video Everybody let me know in the comment down below if you learned anything new are you going to implement any of these are there some that maybe went overlooked that I should kind of take a look at and maybe do another version of this video let me know cuz there's so many more applications so many more features and so many more hidden like nuances in iOS and iPad OS that I think we should definitely go over but until next time everybody if you guys want to watch more videos like this one this video right here YouTube thinks you're going to like but this video I think you're going to like until next time everybody I'm Fernando peace\n"