iPhone Tips For Seniors: How To Make Your iPhone Work For You!

0:00 If you're anything like me, whenever you need to do something quickly on your iPhone, you often find yourself flipping and scrolling around looking for an app and then after finding the app and opening it, tapping around to get it to do what you want it to do. Sometimes I just feel like it would be easier, especially when taking a quick note or jotting down a name and a phone number, to carry a little pocket notepad and pen. I could just handwrite it faster than I can do it on my iPhone. Well, that's not true if you know about quick actions. And that's what this video is all about. Hi, my name is Rich and I make simple videos on how to use your iPhone and iPad. You know, without going nuts. Today I revisit a topic I covered a

0:47 couple of years ago, quick actions. This has got to be one of the iPhone's most overlooked and underused features. And there's really no learning curve. It's more of a remembering curve because all you have to do is long press an icon to get to that app's quick actions. So, the title of this video is make your iPhone work for you. Well, I did that in two simple steps. I took every app off my home screen and put back only the apps I use. And then I started using each app's quick actions. And what a difference it made. Let me show you what I mean. Okay, the first thing I did to make this whole thing work was just choose the apps that I wanted on my home screen. And you can do the same thing. And the apps that you

1:33 use may not be the apps that I use. But what I did is I just started figuring out what are the things that I use the most on my iPhone. And that's what I put on my home screen. At the bottom, I typically keep communication stuff, although I've got reminders in here, but I keep my phone and messages, FaceTime. And then up here, I have a few other apps that I use. I have the weather, photos, cuz I always look at photos. I have YouTube because I watch YouTube videos like you, I hope. And I have music. I have notes, calendar, a clock, which I don't normally use all the time, but occasionally I do set a timer. So, I put that on there. And then the camera. And I know there's various ways to get to all of these apps, but this is just

2:19 the stuff that I put on my home screen. And that's really special real estate for me. Only important stuff go on the home screen. So, if you want to try this out on your phone, just think about the apps that you use and then those will be the apps that you put on your home screen. Now, the second thing I did was just take a look at all of the quick actions that each one of these apps has. Let's take a look. If I open reminders, I've got a series of lists and some stuff up here like you always have. But if I just tap and hold, I can add a reminder just by tapping and holding the quick actions. It just pops up. And I can put something in each one of these lists. I typically

3:06 put things in the inbox and then I sort them out later. So, I can just quickly tap on new and inbox like that and I'm done. That was actually quicker than opening the app, going to the inbox, tapping the little plus sign to add a new reminder. It was just a very quick thing to do. Over here with phones, you can tap and hold. You can create a new contact and you can view your most recent call and then you can search for calls. But what makes this unique for me is the create a new contact. Sometimes people will just want to give me their name and phone number and I can just tap on that create a new contact and put a phone number in. So

3:52 quick, much faster than going into contacts itself and doing that. So I can just do it right from there. Now, I know there's ways where you can hold your phone together and you can do a bunch of stuff, but you know, if I'm at a restaurant or I'm out somewhere and I'm talking to someone and I want to get a name and number, I'm not going to do any of that stuff. And probably neither are you. But being able to just know that I want to remember a phone number and then I can add a new contact there is super handy. With messages, you can tap and hold and you can just send a message to some of your most recent people that you've sent messages to, or you can just tap on new message. You don't have to go into the app and then tap on the plus and then start a new message. You can do it right from quick actions with the camera. You can tap and hold. And this

4:38 is kind of handy, too, because if you want to take a video uh or anything else, you have to go in the app and choose and slide and do this and do that to get to where you want to be. But if if you're out somewhere and you just want to take a quick video, you can tap and hold and tap on video and you're good to go. Same thing with portrait or portrait selfie mode. That's handy. With the clock, you can tap, you can create a new alarm or you can start a stopwatch or start a timer, something like that. I typically use it for alarms. If I've got my iPhone beside the bed, you know, I can just set an alarm. With calendar, the only thing I really want to do with the calendar is just add an event. I need to make an appointment for something and I don't want to go into the app and find the new appointment thing or whatever is in there. I can

5:26 just tap on add new event and I'm good to go. If I need to take a note very quickly, I can tap and hold on that and I can just tap on new note. Or I can actually scan a document and that's come in handy too. I can record audio. I don't do that as much. That's kind of a new feature, but I'm I may play around with it. But the new note and scan a document are things that I use all the time. And I can access those directly from quick actions. So handy with music. I can play my favorite songs. You know, if you go into music and you find a song that you like, you can tap the little heart and you've created a favorite with it. And I just do that from time to time, but occasionally I want to listen to those favorite songs. And so just tapping that and hitting play favorite song is just a

6:13 killer way to get straight to it. With YouTube, I can tap and hold. And what I like about this is while I can go to shorts and search and all that kind of stuff, what I really like is the ability to go to my subscriptions, those channels that I've subscribed to. And if I tap on that, it takes me here. And up here is the list. But if I just tap on all like this, now I get a list of everybody I've subscribed to. And I can just tap on any one of these names and get to their videos without having to go in and do a whole bunch of searching. That is so handy. With photos, I can tap and hold here and I can go to my favorites. Kind of like the same thing in music. And I kind of like just one year ago. What was I doing one year ago?

7:00 occasionally that's fun to look at, but you know, tapping on favorites every once in a while and just bringing those up, jumping straight to them, I think that's handy. And then lastly, with the weather app, if you tap and hold, you can just go to the weather. I can tap on Raleigh and I can go straight to the weather just like that. A little bit quicker than opening the app itself. You can also go in here if you want to add a new location and you can just do that and that's pretty easy too. So that's quick actions and the only thing you have to do to get to them is just tap and hold the icon. Once you figure out what apps do what with their quick actions, you'll figure out the ones you need to put on your home screen. Okay,

7:46 that's it. A quick look at quick actions. For me, the hardest part of using quick actions was remembering they were there. Now that I've made this video, I hope we all remember quick actions. Okay, that's it for today.