If you want to use an iPhone or iPad during a plane flight, you’re supposed to turn Airplane mode on to disable the built-in wireless communication aspects of the device. Airplane mode disables cellular and 3G/4g connectivity, GPS, wi-fi, and Bluetooth capabilities, but how are you supposed to use inflight wi-fi service if everything is turned off? The solution is to enable Airplane mode as usual, but then manually turn on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth separately on the iOS device:

• Launch Settings and flip “Airplane Mode” to “ON”
• Tap on “Wi-Fi” and flip the switch to “ON”, join the wireless network as usual
• For Bluetooth use, within Settings tap on “General” and then tap “Bluetooth” to enable separately

Either choice will not reenable the cellular modem or connection, typically keeping you within the realm of acceptable behavior for most flights. You’ll probably want to check with the specific airline before doing this, but chances are if they offer inflight wireless service then it’s acceptable behavior.

Outside of flying, using Airplane mode but turning on wi-fi is an easy way to temporarily turn an iPhone into an iPod touch, letting you use wifi networks but avoid any potentially expensive voice or data roaming charges.

The iPhone has the Compass app to help show you which direction you are facing, but if you’re in an area with cellular reception a much more practical and useful approach is to use the Maps app. This lets you see which direction you are facing on a map of the area, so you can quickly see landmarks or whatever else you are looking for.

This will work on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with internet connectivity, though it’s likely most useful in the 3G/4G enabled models for obvious reasons.

• Launch Maps app and tap the Arrow icon to locate where you are
• When Maps has centered on your location, tap the Arrow icon again

The arrow icon will switch to show what looks like a flashlight beam coming out of the point, this orientates the Maps app based on which way you are facing. Use this feature to either quickly find North, South, East, and West, or if you’re in the middle of the nowhere you can use it to find your way to the nearest road or familiar landmark that you find on Google Maps.

The primary weakness with this method is that iOS and Google Maps does not store or cache maps data locally on the device. This means if you’re out of cell range and you use the compass feature of Maps, you’ll just have a direction pointed out on a blank grid, unable to find any meaningful landmarks or points on the Map. This prevents an iOS device from serving as a true GPS replacement for serious outdoor uses, but if you’re in a bind it can be better than nothing.

This feature will not work if location services is disabled, a feature some people turn off because it can reduce the life of a battery charge on some iOS devices.

Running out of iCloud backup capacity happens quick whether you have a single iPhone or a handful of iOS devices. You’ll know this has happened because you get a friendly popup informing you of “Not Enough Storage” and that the automatic backup can not occur as a result. So what to do? There’s really two choices, one is the most obvious and involves upgrading the iCloud account, and the other is free and relies on you more actively managing your backups.

#1 – Upgrade iCloud Storage

Obviously the easiest and most immediate solution is to just buy more iCloud storage, it’s cheap and a variety of plans are offered starting at $20/year for a total of 15GB storage. Going this route is simple and recommended for those who can afford it:

• Tap on Settings, tap “iCloud” and scroll down to tap on “Storage & Backup”
• Tap “Buy More Storage” and choose the plan that works for you

Easy enough, but what if you don’t want to add a yearly expense to your iCloud account? That brings us to option number two, which is free but will involve some more effort.

#2 – Manage & Delete Old iCloud Backups

If you want to stay free, you’ll have to manage your iCloud backups a bit more hands on to clear up some space, here’s two options on how to do that.

1. Launch Settings, tap “iCloud”, then tap on “Storage & Backup”
2. Tap “Manage Storage” and tap the name of the device you are going to manage storage for, now you have two real options:
• Option 1) Turn off iCloud backups for certain apps
• Option 2) Delete the current Backup and create a new one

Option 1 really just thins down the backup size, but it’s not always a reasonable choice. If you’re going that route the first thing you’ll probably want to do on an iPhone is move the pictures to a computer and then delete them from iCloud. You can also selectively remove other apps from the backup list, though outside of photos and movies you likely won’t save much space using this method.

Option 2 clears out the existing iCloud backup and could be a better solution, but before doing so it’d be smart to connect the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a computer with iTunes and create a quick manual backup by right-clicking on the iOS device and choosing “Back Up”, this saves a backup locally to the computer just in case something goes wrong. After you’ve done that, delete the backup from iCloud Settings and then immediately start a new manual backup with iCloud by tapping “Back Up Now”, that will become the most recent backup. If you’re going this route you’re probably right on the brim of iCloud storage capacity again though, so you’ll have to do this on your own anytime you get the popup alert warning of not enough iCloud storage.

For those with multiple iOS devices, it’s probably best to just upgrade the iCloud storage. This is especially true for Mac users who intend on updating to OS X Mountain Lion, since the new version of Mac OS has even more iCloud integration and you’ll undoubtedly end up storing plenty of data in Apple’s cloud.

Certain Wi-Fi networks require clients to use static IP addresses or manual DHCP information in order for a device to connect properly, setting either of these is easy within iOS.

1. Tap on “Settings” and then tap on “General”
2. Tap “Wi-Fi” and look for the network name you are connected to, tap the blue (>) arrow next to it
3. Tap the “Static” tab and enter network appropriate DHCP/static IP information
4. Close out of Settings and launch Safari or another network app to confirm connectivity

Settings are applied automatically after all the information is typed in, if you need an easy to remember DNS try using Google’s 8.8.8.8 server.

I’ve had to set manual DHCP information in order to connect iPads to certain older Wi-Fi networks on more than one occasion, something I’ve encountered in Mac OS X Lion before as well.

Photo Stream is an excellent iCloud feature that automatically syncs all pictures taken on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch to one anothers Photo libraries, and it will even sync with Mac OS X through the iPhoto app. Not everyone uses iPhoto to manage pictures though, and if you just want quick access to those pictures from the OS X Finder you can use a neat trick to access the entire iOS Photo Stream directly from the Mac desktop.

In order for this to work, you will need the following:

• Mac OS X 10.7.2 or later on the Mac, with iCloud configured
• iOS 5 or later on all iOS devices, with iCloud configured
• Photo Stream must be enabled on all iOS devices involved, and must be enabled on the Mac

If you don’t have iCloud set up and Photo Stream turned on, do that before proceeding.

Accessing the iOS Photo Stream from Mac OS X Finder

1. From anywhere on the OS X desktop, hit Command+Shift+G to bring up Go To Folder and enter the following path:

~/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement/assets/sub/


2. In the upper right corner of the Finder window, search for “Image” and select “Kind: Image” from the pull down menu



3. Now click the “Save” button to save this search, name it something like “Photo Stream” and check “Add To Sidebar” to keep the item in the sidebar

Now anytime you click “Photo Stream” in an OS X Finder window, you will get instant access to all images from the iOS Photo Stream from your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or all of the above.

For quick access to photos, this is easier and faster than transferring them all from iOS to the computer because it’s practically instantaneous and automatic, and it’s simpler than using the past tip for an AppleScript to save all images from Photo Stream because there is very little potential for error.

Once you have this set up you’ll likely find yourself using it very often, it’s so useful that hopefully the upcoming release of OS X Mountain Lion will include a similar featured enabled by default.

This is a variation on a great tip that was posted a while back by IconMaster to get to iOS screenshots from OS X, but by specifying any images in the search you can access all the Photo Stream images rather than only screen captures. If you do want to see only screen shots searching for file type “PNG” will achieve that.

iOS updates can come with some unexpected surprises regarding battery life and iOS 5.1.1 isn’t much different. While there are a fair amount of reports of positive battery improvements not all of us were so lucky, the battery life on my iPad 3 absolutely tanked after updating to iOS 5.1.1.

After rebooting several times and trying a handful of troubleshooting solutions, I discovered this to be a fairly common issue with users who updated iOS through on-device OTA updates, though there doesn’t seem to be much explanation as to the cause. Fortunately the fix is simple, so if you have experienced a drop in device longevity after the 5.1.1 update try the solution below.

Before proceeding you should perform a quick manual back up through iCloud or iTunes just in case something goes wrong. This process resets all iOS device settings, meaning you will have to re-enter Wi-Fi passwords, auto-fill info, Apple ID, etc.

1. Open “Settings” and tap on “General” then “Reset”, tap on “Reset All Settings”
2. Enter the passcode if you have one set, then tap “Reset” to confirm the settings adjustment
3. Reboot the device and set it up as new, reentering personalization data as necessary

Battery life should be immediately improved, though a comment left on Apple Discussion Boards suggests letting the iPhone/iPad/iPod touch drain down to 0% and then recharging for an hour or so past 100% before disconnecting from a power source is a good follow-up.

This worked wonders for my 3rd gen iPad and battery life is now back to the 10+ hours I had before the update. If you’re still having problems you can try some of our past tips on improving and maximizing battery life for iDevices.

Having a backup of your iOS device and its settings is important, so rather than completely disabling iOS backups in iTunes, you can choose to selectively disable only the automatic backup process. This is a much better solution because it allows you to create and retain local backups of an iPad, iPhone, or iPod when you want them, but they are no longer initiated on their own during the sync process.

The vast majority of users should retain the default behavior and allow iTunes to manage and back up your devices. This tip is intended for advanced users who have a compelling reason to disable the automated process.

Disable Automatic iTunes Backups

1. Quit iTunes and then launch Terminal, found in /Applications/Utilities/
2. Enter the following defaults write command:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes AutomaticDeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true

3. Relaunch iTunes for changes to take effect

Once automatic back ups are disabled, you can backup manually at any point by right-clicking on the device within iTunes sidebar and choosing “Back Up”, and you can continue to use iClouds manual initiation as well.

Re-Enable Automatic iOS Device Backups in iTunes
To reverse the change and re-enable automatic device backups, open Terminal and use the following defaults command before relaunching iTunes:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes AutomaticDeviceBackupsDisabled -bool false

Both sides of this change should only impact iTunes and have no effect on iCloud behavior.

A big thanks to Matt for the tip left in our comments!

We’ve all had the experience of one of our favorite app getting updated and the new version being worse than the previous version. Maybe it’s more intrusive ads, maybe it’s a terribly annoying feature, whatever it is, a poor app update can easily ruin your app experience. The easiest way to avoid this potential letdown is to save a copy of iOS apps, allowing you to downgrade them if you discover the new version is worse. This is much easier to do than you may think, we’ll cover the process of saving a local backup of the app and also how to downgrade to the prior version if you dislike the newest iteration.

Note that if you backup exclusively through iCloud you won’t have this option because the apps will not be stored locally. You can always backup locally in addition to iCloud to prevent that being an issue.

Save iOS Apps & Easy Version Downgrading

This process is best done manually before you update an app.

Saving & Backing Up Individual iOS Apps

1. Navigate to the iOS app location, this can be done by right-clicking the app in iTunes and choosing “Show in Finder” or by manually going to the local iOS app location at ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Mobile Applications/ and finding the app
2. Copy the app file to another location to serve as the backup, the iOS app files have a .ipa extension

If you feel like it, you could backup that entire directory to another location, though that’s usually unnecessary.

Sidenote for Windows users: the directory you are looking for is: C:\Users\Username\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Mobile Applications\

With the app backed up, you can now safely update to the newest version directly on the iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. If you decide the new version is awful, downgrading is very simple.

Downgrading to Previous Version of an iOS App

1. On the iOS device, delete the app you wish to downgrade
2. On the computer, quit iTunes
3. Again navigate to the local iOS app location at ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Mobile Applications/
4. Remove the newest version of the app .ipa file from that directory
5. Copy the previously saved version of the app to the /Mobile Applications/ directory
6. Relaunch iTunes
7. Resync the iPhone, iPad, or iPod, and the older app version will restore to the device to complete the downgrade

In some situations the older versions of apps won’t be compatible with the newest version of iOS, you’ll know this is the case because the app won’t launch when you attempt to open it on the iPhone/iPad, or you will get a message stating a new version is available and asking to upgrade.

Finally, if you use something like Time Machine, you can always dig through the Time Machine backups to access older versions of apps if you’re in a pinch, but it’s generally easiest to just keep a specific backup of an app if you prefer a past version.

Anytime an iOS device is connected to a computer it will sync and backup the device, and though the syncing process can be annoying sometimes, the backup process should be considered crucial so that you always have a way to restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod should anything go wrong.

With that said, there are a few limited situations where some users may want to disable the iTunes & iOS backup process completely, which is different than stopping iTunes from automatically syncing because it continues to allow for device syncing but minus the backing up aspect.

We’ll show you how to turn off backups, but we want to warn everyone this is not a good idea unless you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, leaving this option best for select jailbreakers or just for demonstration purposes.

Disable iTunes Backups for iOS Devices

• Quit out of iTunes and launch the Terminal, then enter the following defaults write command:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool YES

• Relaunch iTunes, connecting iOS devices will sync but without a backup copying over

With backups disabled nothing will be added to the local directory or iCloud, and anything already there can be deleted through iTunes or manually. Remember, disabling this feature removes the ability to restore an iOS device should you need to, which for 99.9% of people is a bad thing.

Re-Enable iTunes & iOS Backups

• Quit iTunes again and launch Terminal, entering the following defaults command:

defaults delete com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled

• Relaunch iTunes and connect an iOS device to confirm backups are working again

The instructions above are intended for Mac OS X, but Windows users can disable the device backups by launching iTunes with a flag attached to it, this can be executed from the Run menu or by right-clicking iTunes:

"%ProgramFiles%\iTunes\iTunes.exe" /setPrefInt DeviceBackupsDisabled 1

To reenable backups with windows, change the 1 to a 0 and run iTunes exe again.

Thanks to Jeremy for the tips.

By using a custom URL inside of an anchor tag, you can place a link on any website that will initiate a new iMessage conversation. Anyone clicking the link will then launch the Messages app in iOS or iMessages in Mac OS X to begin a new conversation with the specified Apple ID. Even if you have limited knowledge of HTML the link structure is easy to use:

Mac OS X: imessage://your@appleid.com

<a href="imessage://your@appleid.com">Send iMessage to a Mac</a>

iOS: sms://your@appleid.com

<a href="sms://your@appleid.com">Send iMessage to iOS</a>

Replace “your@appleid.com” with your own Apple ID that is configured to use with iMessage. Note that the iOS link uses “sms” as the identifier, meaning some users may send you an actual text message rather than iMessage if they are not set up to use Apple’s messaging protocol.

Because iOS and OS X use different URL schemes, you’ll need to use two different links by default. This could have advantages, if you only wanted people from iOS to reach you for example, but if you don’t like that idea there’s a nice workaround to the dual links by using the short PHP script offered by Beuagil.es. This script will detect the user agent and determine which link to use based on that, effectively combining the two iMessage links into one intelligent link:

<a href="<?php
$useragent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
if(preg_match('/Macintosh/',$useragent)) $os = 'imessage';
elseif(preg_match('/iPhone/',$useragent)) $os = 'sms';
else $os = 'sms';
echo $os;
?>:your@appleid.com">Send an iMessage</a>

Obviously you’ll need a PHP capable website for the above script to work, otherwise you’ll have to use the HTML snippets offered at the top of the post.

You can also use similar URLs to initiate FaceTime calls from the web.