Yes, I know that Yosemite is the newer OS, but I feel like I'm just hitting my stride with iOS 8. After a month or so with Apple's latest mobile OS, I've made it past proficiency and I'm embracing the little things—and I'm figuring out which of the hyped features I'm actually using day to day. Here are some of my favorite iOS 8 features, in no particular order, with an emphasis on things that haven't been exhaustively covered elsewhere.
Dan Frakes, formerly of Macworld, took some time on Monday to write up a giant compendium of iOS 8 tips, tricks, and hints he's compiled over his months beta-testing the operating system. There's a lot of good stuff in there for people interested in Mail shortcuts, Siri, and Safari, but my personal favorite new trick—and one I hadn't heard about until now—is how to dim the screen further than what Control Center allows.
I read a lot on my iPhone at night, and when surrounded by others, that screen can sometimes be just a tad too bright. Frakes's trick—which uses Apple's Zoom accessibility settings—drops your iOS device's low brightness setting by an additional third, and it's easy to set up.
- Visit Settings > Accessibility > Zoom and turn Zoom on.
- Tap the screen three times with three fingers, which pops up the Zoom options window. (You can alternatively select Zoom under the Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut menu, which lets you triple-press the Home button instead of triple-tapping the screen.)
- Tap Choose Filter, then select Low Light, which will further darken your screen.
- Tap anywhere to close the Zoom options window.
From there, you can do more minor brightness adjustments from Control Center. This tweak is awesome for low-light reading, and I'm going to use it all the time. (Those of you hoping it's another way to save your battery life will sadly be disappointed, though: The screen "dimming" is actually just a filter, not a physical dimming of your iOS device's screen.)
- Source: Dan Frakes
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