iPhone Tap Tips

There are plenty of tips on tapping and pressing on the iPhone, including Apple’s own “Finger Tips”. The below tables are my contribution to making the iPhone a little easier to use.

As a point of interest, the data for this page is held in a Google Documents spreadsheet, and as being referenced Loghound PlusKit "GTable" command in RapidWeaver. Please send me some feedback about this page, or subscribe to this site. Enjoy - I hope this site can help someone!

Power Commands - Shutdown, Restart, Sleep

Use these tap or button sequences to control sleep, shutdown and restart.
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Hold Sleep/Wake, slide red slider. Turn off iPhone.
Hold Sleep/Wake and Home simultaneously, for a few seconds. Force reboot iPhone.
Home then Sleep/Wake. "Sleep" iPhone (actually, sleep display).
Hold Home for a few seconds. Force quit a hung app.

Navigation

Navigate up, down, right, left.
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Swipe up and down. Scroll.
Swipe with two fingers, up and down. Scroll within a frame on a website, or in a PDF on a website.
Swipe left and right. Flip through pages or items. Try it with the Top menu. Notice also the little dots at the bottom of an interface with multiple pages indicating how many pages there are in the sequence. You can tap to the right or left of these to navigate to other pages in the sequence.
Tap upper "status bar". Tapping the status bar (the area at the top of an app with the clock) jumps to the top of a scrollable list.
Double-tap Home. Double-pressing the Home button brings you to phone favorites if the iPhone is unlocked, and to a screen with iPod controls if you are listening to music.
Press and hold a URL. Brings up information about the URL in Safari.

Manipulating Images

Take screenshots, save images, focus the camera.
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Press Sleep/Wake and Home simultaneously. Take a screen shot and save it to the camera roll.
Press and hold an image in Safari or Mail. Save image to camera roll.
Hold camera button to "focus". Similar to a normal digital camera, you can compose your shot holding down the button, and release your finger when you are steady.

Manipulating Text

Press text into your service.
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Double-tap Shift. Enter caps-lock mode, provided "enable caps lock" is selected in Settings, General, Keyboard.
Tap-slide to letter. Tapping the shift key then sliding to a letter on the mini keyboard enters the letter as a capital.
Hold down certain keys in keyboard. Holding down various keys gives you an option menu to choose optional extended characters (European language vowels), currency symbols, punctuation (curly quotes), and URL elements (.com, .org, .net).
Double-tap Space. Enter a period and a following space.
Enter URL without www. or .com. Safari will auto-complete the URL if you just type the middle part.
Prevent auto-correction of a word. Click the small X next to the correction popup, or, make a contact in Address Book and add the words to its contact information.

Headphone Clicker

Squeeze the mic on the headphone cord - it’s a mini mouse “clicker”.
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Squeeze mic "clicker" once when listing to music. "Click" (squeeze the mic) once to pause music, once to resume.
Squeeze mic "clicker" once when listing to music and a phone call comes in. "Click" once to answer the phone, once to hang up.
Double- or Triple-squeeze the mic "clicker during music playback. Double-"click" to skip to next track, triple-"click" to go to previous track, or beginning of current track that has been playing for more than a few seconds.

Applications

Various shortcuts in general iPhone applications.
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Rotate 90 degrees. Switches to scientific mode.

Phone

Control phonecalls and voicemail.
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Press Sleep/Wake when a call comes in. Silence a call when it comes in, before it goes to voicemail.
Press Sleep/Wake twice quickly, or press and hold the mic button on the headphones for a couple seconds until you hear two beeps. Send a call to voicemail.
Press and hold the * key when entering a phone number. Add a comma (acts as a pause) to a phone number. Great for calling cards, or conferencing call bridges like Premier.