There’s no question but that some people find iOS 7 a challenging transition. In this week’s video I try to ease your way by offering a few tips for making text easier to read, create a more private browsing experience, and remind you of a technique or two that hasn’t changed a lick from iOS 6.
Transcript
iOS 7 is a radical departure from previous versions of the iOS and because it is, some people aren’t entirely comfortable with it. (And, okay, some of you just hate it for good reasons and bad.)
In this short video I’ll offer a few tips for making iOS 7 a bit easier to use.
Let’s start with text.
The text in iOS 7 is thinner than the text found in earlier versions of Apple’ s mobile operating system. And that makes elements of the OS more difficult for some people to make out. There are a couple of things you can do to help.
The first is to go to Settings > General > Text Size and slide the slider to the right. This increases the size of some of the text on your iOS device. For example, open the Notes app and you’ll see that the text size has enlarged. This is also true in Mail, Messages, and Reminder, but not in Contacts or Calendar.
You can also make text bold, which can make it easier to read. You do this by going to Settings > General > Accessibility and then tap on Bold Text. Tapping Increase Contrast can also help make some text more legible.
And if you’re one of those people who gets a little queasy with the device’s parallax effect where the background seems to move behind the home screen’s icon, flip on the Reduce Motion setting, which you’ll also find in the Accessibility setting.
If you’re an international man or woman of mystery, you’ll appreciate Safari’s new Privacy feature. In the past you had to go to Safari’s settings to engage a privacy mode. But now you can do it directly within Safari. To do that on an iPhone or iPod touch just create a new window by tapping the New Window button and then tap the Private button in the bottom left corner of the device. You’ll be asked if you want to close other tabs. Make your choice and your web browsing becomes private, as indicated by the black bar at the top of the screen. In this mode you won’t collect cookies or have sites you visit added to your browser history.
And I want to mention a couple of other things not because they’re new, but because some people seem to have overlooked them. I’ve heard complaints that in iOS 7 you can’t create multiple alerts for Calendar events. You can, and it works exactly as it did in the past. Tap the Plus button to create the event, tap on Alert, and choose an alert time. When you do, this Second Alert field appears. Tap there to create that alert.
Another complaint I’ve heard is that you can’t scale and move wallpaper images. That’s true only of the images provided by Apple. You can easily grab an image of your own and scale it exactly as you have in the past. Just tap General > Wallpaper & Brightness, tap Choose Wallpaper, choose your Photostream or a photo album, tap an image, move and scale as you like, and tap Set. Works like a charm.