How to Make Your iPhone Action Button Awesome!

0:00 So, the iPhone action button came out over a year ago on the iPhone 15 Pro models. Now, it's all on iPhone 16 models and newer. If you don't know what the action button is, it's a customizable button that replaces the traditional mute switch on the side of your iPhone, allowing you to perform a variety of actions with a single press. And you know, it seemed like a great feature when it first debuted, and I thought I'd use it, but for me, it turned out to be just, I don't know, sort of a gimmicky button that I forgot was even on my iPhone. That is until I remembered you could trigger shortcuts with it. Now, I use that little button all the time. My guess is you will, too, when you see how I set this up. That's what this video is all about.

0:46 [Music] Hi, my name is Rich and today's video is about two things. Creating a handful of simple shortcuts in a folder and then connecting that folder to the action button. It's not hard to do, but why would you want to do that? I'm sure there's a dozen other ways to accomplish the same thing. For me, it boiled down to creating a handy way to get to apps I use a lot, or oddly enough, apps or utilities I rarely use and always have a hard time finding. That was pretty much it. Of course, you can choose whatever shortcuts make sense for you. Okay, so in today's video, I covered just two simple steps. How to create eight simple shortcuts in a folder. And this will only take a minute since four of those

1:32 shortcuts are almost identical. and then two, how to connect the folder to the action button. Okay, let's get started. Okay, the first thing we're going to do is just create a folder in the shortcuts app. So, I'm going to tap on shortcuts and I'm going to tap on the little folder icon with the plus on it up here at the top. I'll tap on that and then I'm going to just give it a name. I'm going to call it action button. Like that. I'm going to click done. I'll click add. And now I've got the action button folder done. So now we're going to need to put some shortcuts in there, some simple ones. So I'm going to tap on that folder. And I'm going to tap on the little plus to add

2:19 some shortcuts to you. And I'll show you how I create those. The first one is just going to be open the calendar because I need to look at my calendar from time to time. So I'm just going to tap on open app. right there. And then from here, you choose the app you want to open. So, I'm going to tap on that and I'm going to choose calendar. And then I'm going to choose done. And now I've created an open the calendar app. I'm going to do it again for three more. I'm going to choose open app. And then it's going to be the magnifier, I think, is what I want this time. So, I'll choose done. And I've got that done. I'm going to tap again and I'm going to choose open app. And the app I

3:08 want to open for me is wallet because sometimes I need to get in there quickly. Not all the time but occasionally. And I'm going to put that in there. And then I'm going to choose open calculator. So I'm going to create that. I'm going to choose open app. And I'll choose the app. and I'm going to choose calculator and I'm going to choose done. Now, if you'll notice the names on them are like open app one, open app 2, three, and that kind of stuff. So, I want to rename these. So, I'm going to do that quickly. And how you do that is you just tap on the little three dots and you tap up here and you tap on rename. And I'm just going to name this calendar

3:57 like that. I'm going to click done. I'll click done. And so I've got that as calendar. This is my magnifier. So I'm going to do that again. Now I've got I've got them renamed in the folder. So those are four important ones. So now I want to add four more. So I'm going to just tap the plus again. And this time I'm going to search for something. I'm going to search for an alarm because sometimes I need to set an alarm. And there's one right here. I just started typing alarm and up came add alarm. So I'm just going to tap on that and I'm going to click done. And and it it actually names it correctly here when you search that way. So I

4:42 don't have to go in and rename it. I'm going to do that again. And I'm going to type reminder. Whoops. And here I can add a new reminder, but I need to actually tap on the word reminder right there and choose ask each time. So I'm going to tap on ask each time and it'll put the word text up there. Then I'm going to click done and done again. And now I've got add new reminder. I'm going to do the same thing for a quick note. So I'm going to type in quick And I've got show quicknote.

5:28 And I'm going to click done. And now I've got a quick note. And then the last thing I'm going to add is files. Scanning files because sometimes I need to quickly scan something and just get it into my files app. I don't do that often, but here I've got scan document. That's what I want to do. So I'm going to tap on that and I'm going to cl tap done. And there we have eight quick shortcuts in our action folder. And now all we got to do is just tie it to the action button. And you'll see how it works. So now we're done with the shortcuts. Now we're going to go into settings. And if you see, I had my action button here on the side set to silent mode. If I press on that action button, you'll see it just turns it to silent so that

6:15 it doesn't ring. I'll turn that off. But now we'll go back into settings. We're going to go down to action button. And I'm going to just scroll over. Keep going. There's lots of things you can do with it on your own. But when I get to uh shortcut, that's what I'm going to choose. And I'm going to say choose a shortcut. And I'm going to tap on show folder. And then it's going to ask me which folder do I want. Well, I've got one called action button that we just created. So, I'm going to tap on that. And now it says show action button. And now I'm done. And now when you press on and hold on the action button,

7:00 all of the shortcuts just pop up quickly for you. Just like that. And you can get into something quickly. So if you want to get to the calculator, you can just tap on it just like that. Again, if you're out and about and you need to take a quick note, you can tap on the quick note. And now all of a sudden, you've got a new quick note there. Likewise, if you're trying to remember something, you need to add a reminder, you can tap add new reminder, and you can just type it in. Buy groceries. Done. And now you've added a new reminder. So now the action button becomes a really powerful way to get to something quickly on your phone. For me, the ability to get into quick

7:48 notes or add a reminder um or check my calendar. Those are important things. I don't use the calculator or the wallet or the magnifier very much, but I do use them. And being able to quickly get to them without having to search around makes a lot of sense to me. But that is a really easy way to begin to use your action button. So that took a few minutes, but it wasn't really all that hard to do. And for me, and I hope for you, it makes your action button just a little better than before. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks so much for watching. And as always, I'll see you in the next video.