iOS has additional system wide zoom abilities accessible by a gesture, much like OS X’s zoom feature. To use the extra zoom gestures on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, first you’ll need to enable them in iOS:

1. Open Settings and tap on General
2. Scroll down to “Accessibility” and tap on “Zoom”, flick the switch to ON
3. Verify the zoom gesture works by using a three fingered double-tap on the screen

Once zoom is enabled, using three fingers you can:

• Double-tap with three fingers to activate zoom and zoom in and out on any application
• Double-tap and drag with three fingers up and down to increase or decrease zoom level, from 100% to 500% zoom
• Drag three fingers while zoomed to move around screen

This zoom feature is systemwide and will work in any iOS app running on the device, including even the lock screen, and it works in addition to the standard pinch and spread gestures that are active in many apps already. Standard app functionality also remains while zoomed in allowing for manipulation of onscreen controls and data.

Want to see more of an email than the default two lines of body text? Don’t want to see any preview of email contents, other than the subject of a message? If you’re not happy with the default setting, you can change the line count of mail previews within iOS easily:

1. Tap on “Settings”
2. Tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”
3. Under the “Mail” subheader, tap on “Preview”
4. Select a preview length, ranging from no preview to 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 lines of body text

Double-tap the Home button and switch between Settings and Mail to get a quick visual of how the change will look.

These settings will be the same on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, although how good each setting looks varies per device, with the larger previews fitting best on iPad and the smaller 1-3 line previews working better for the smaller screened iPhone and iPod.

iMessage in iOS and the Messages for Mac beta let you send files like movies, text, pdf, audio, and pictures between a Mac and iOS device easily. To use the file transfer feature:

• Drag a file from the Mac into a Messages chat window
• Click send from the Mac
• The user on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iMessages will receive the file in a familiar fashion to iChat file transfers

The iOS user is then able to open the file, be it an mp3, video, picture, whatever. This is a great feature that is easy to use and welcome for all Mac and iOS users.

Use iMessage With Unsupported File Types & As SFTP Alternative

Now, what is less known is that you can technically transfer just about any file type between the two OS’s using the same technique, even obscure file formats. This means iMessage can be used as a simple method of moving any files to an iOS device without using SSH and SFTP, although the destination folder of these files creates some limitations.

Files sent to and received by the iOS device end up at the following location:

/var/mobile/Library/SMS/

This is where the limitation comes in. Accessing that directory isn’t possible without a jailbreak and an app like iFile to navigate around the hidden iOS file system, and moving files around within the iOS file system after the fact requires an SSH client like Prompt, in addition to some knowledge of the command line. This makes it a useful feature for advanced users who are comfortable with jailbreaking, but for the average person sending anything other than standard media files and documents isn’t too useful.
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You probably know by now that you can delete songs on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, just by swiping on a song and tapping “Delete”, but what if you want to remove all music from an iOS device? That can be done too, and although it’s a few settings deep to prevent accidental access, it’s easy to do in just a few steps.

1. Tap on “Settings” and tap on “General”
2. Select “Usage” and tap on “Music”
3. Tap the Minus symbol next to “All Music” then tap on “Delete” to remove all songs from the device

The total storage space taken up by the music collection will be listed alongside the “All Music” label, letting you know how much space is about to be freed up by removing all the songs.

Just remember, there’s no going back if you choose to do this without resyncing to iTunes or downloading songs again from iTunes Store or iCloud. Also keep in mind that if you have iTunes Automatic Downloads enabled on the device, any future music downloads on other iOS devices will continue to copy over to the once cleared out list.

Growth of iOS, the mobile operating system that powers iPhones, iPads, iPod touch, and Apple TV, is exploding. To put iOS’s success into some context, Asymco crafted the above chart to demonstrate the growth curve relative to years of Apple products on the market. The most staggering observation? Apple sold 156 million iOS devices last year alone, that is over 30 million more units shipped than all 28 years of the Macs existence, where it has sold 122 million computers. Overall, the iOS platform totals over 316 million devices sold in a few short years.

Look to iOS to Understand Mac OS X
If you’re wondering why Apple has been pushing the Mac platform to more closely resemble iOS with the release of OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion, this is it. The simplicity, familiarity, and success of iOS is too much to resist. PC’s, and Macs too for that matter, are indeed becoming the “trucks” that Steve Jobs predicted several years ago at D8 2010, becoming greatly outnumbered by the “cars” (in this case, iOS devices). Jobs’ now famous quote from that conversation:

“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people. … I think that we’re embarked on that. Is the next step the iPad? Who knows? Will it happen next year or five years from now or seven years from now? Who knows? But I think we’re headed in that direction.”

The only thing Jobs’ was wrong about was how soon it would happen. As Asymco notes, it only took four years for iOS to overtake OS X.

Simplicity is the Future
None of this means the Mac is dead or dying though, in fact Mac sales are more impressive than ever before, but it does signify the changing roll of computers and how we define a PC. It makes us question who needs what hardware, and for what purpose. Frankly, for many users an iPad – or iPhone – is more than adequate to handle the routine tasks of daily technical life, be it reading or sending emails to browsing the web and listening to music. The Mac (and PC) will certainly still be around for those required to perform more complex tasks, but that market is undoubtedly smaller, and this has already been proven by the runaway success of iOS. As a result, traditional desktop operating systems are evolving towards simplicity. The Mac and PC are ultimately over-engineered and too powerful for the average users technical needs, this helps to explain Apple’s OS X strategy and Microsofts Windows 8 concepts, the power and underlying complexity is still there, but the experience is becoming simpler.

As DaringFireball noted when linking to the Asymco chart, “The lesson: simplicity sells.” If you have any doubts about this or where the industry is going, just look at that chart.

You can prevent the installation of new apps onto an iOS device by enabling a restriction setting. There are plenty of reasons to want to disable app installing, but this is a particularly effective kid-proofing feature before letting a youngster use an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to prevent any accidental charges or purchases.

Disable App Installation in iOS

• Launch Settings and tap on “General”
• Tap on “Restrictions”
• Tap “Enable Restrictions” to allow access to additional options and set a passcode
• Scroll down to “Installing Apps” and swipe to OFF

While in the Restrictions settings, disabling in-App purchases is a just a bit further down the list and makes some sense to use as well. Similarly, you can also disable the ability to delete apps in the Settings screen, preventing any accidental deletion of data or apps.

To undo the app install restrictions, you will need to reenter the previously set passcode, then swipe the ON switch next to “Installing Apps” again.

iOS is generally very stable but every once in a while you’ll encounter a third party app that isn’t. Apps can freeze or become stuck, you’ll usually know instantly because the iPad or iPhone becomes unresponsive to touch behavior or something within the app is clearly running amuck. When this happens the best thing to do is to force quit the app.

Force Quit an App in iOS

This will be the same on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch:

1. Hold down the Power button at the top of the device until the “Slide to Power Off” message appears and then release the power button
2. Now hold the Home button at the base of the screen until the app forcibly quits, this can take several seconds

You’ll know force quitting was successful because the app will close and you will be returned to your home screen and icons.

iPhone and iPad apps should rarely freeze, if you continuously encounter stability issues you may want to backup and then reset to factory defaults or restore to try and resolve the problems.

What would iPhone’s iOS look like had it been made in 1986? Maybe this, and it looks awesome in that retro sort of way. This is just concept art from a few designers who posted their ideas to LiveJournal, but I know I’m not the only one secretly hoping that someone will make a jailbreak skin or theme that matches the concept art, and if it happens we’ll certainly let you know.

Check out some more pictures below:

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Photo Stream is a nice feature of iCloud that pushes all of your pictures automatically to your other iOS devices and your Mac with iPhoto or Aperture. If you haven’t used it before, this means if you take a picture on your iPhone, it will automatically show up in the Photo Stream on your iPad, and also in iPhoto on your Mac. Oddly, there isn’t an option to choose a destination other than iPhoto or Aperture in Mac OS X though, but this cool trick allows you to specify a folder and then download all the images from iCloud to your Mac, without using iPhoto or Aperture.

In order to use the following script, you will need iOS 5 and OS X 10.7.2 or later, as well as iCloud set up and configured and the Photo Stream option enabled in Mac OS X’s iCloud System Preferences.

Save Photo Stream Images to a Folder in Mac OS X

• Open AppleScript Editor, found at /Applications/Utilities/AppleScript Editor.app
• In a new blank AppleScript window, paste in the following code, replacing “USERNAME” with the short user name of your Mac OS X home directory:

tell application "Finder"
set this_folder to "Macintosh HD:Users:USERNAME:Library:Application Support:iLifeAssetManagement:assets" as alias
set target_folder to "Macintosh HD:Users:USERNAME:Pictures:MyStream" as alias
try
duplicate (every file of the entire contents of this_folder whose name contains "IMG") to the target_folder with replacing
end try
end tell

• This will look something like this in the AppleScript editor:

• Adjust the target_folder variables as appropriate – Change “Macintosh HD” if your hard drive is named something else, and change “MyStream” if you want the final directory to be something other than that name located in the user Pictures directory – remember with AppleScript, rather than slashes the colon is used instead to type and show file and folder paths
• Run the script to verify that it works and then save the script with an appropriate name like “PhotoStreamDownloader”, and select “Application” as the file format for easy access and launching later

Now anytime you want to download your Photo Stream to your Mac, just launch that saved script app and you will grab your latest Photo Stream images to the configure directory in Mac OS X. For best results, place the application into your /Applications directory and add it to Launchpad for easy future use.

AppleScript Editor is fairly intuitive, and if you entered a directory or path wrong when you attempt to run the script it will let you know with an “AppleScript Error” message. If you get a “iLifeAssetManagement:assets wasn’t found” message, then you haven’t enabled Photo Stream in iCloud’s System Preference panel.

Hopefully a future update to iCloud and Photo Stream will allow us to choose an image download destination directly, but until then this great trick from iDownloadblog works just fine.

Like this? Check out some more iCloud tips.

A new free app will soon be available on the Cydia store that puts an active Console log as the background wallpaper of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, giving you an overview of all low level events going on with iOS on the device.

WallpaperLog will be a free download on Cydia. Of course, to use and access the Cydia store you will need to have a jailbroken iOS device. Nowadays that isn’t too hard to do and it’s easy to reverse, so if you don’t have jailbroken hardware and are interested in trying this out, backup your iOS device and then use either Absinthe for iOS 5.01. on iPad 2 and iPhone 4S or redsn0w for iOS 5.0.1 on all other iDevices.

It’s not known for certain yet, but it looks like this scrolls through /private/var/log/system.log, as you can see up top on an iPhone (left) and iPad (right), and larger full size screenshots below. Is this useful? Not necessarily for everyone. Is this cool? Yes, absolutely, and the geekier amongst us should get a kick out of it, much like a GeekTool script running atop the background of a Mac OS X desktop,

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