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.

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.

Have you ever wondered how an iOS developer tests for application compatibility with the myriad of devices and versions of iOS out there? This picture from developer David Smith gives us an idea, as you can see it takes a lot of hardware. Four iPads, four iPod Touchs, four iPhones, each with a different version of Apple’s mobile OS running (there are even a few non-iOS devices thrown in there for other mobile testing, with two Android phones, a Windows Phone, a Kindle Fire tablet, and a Kindle 4). If you’re wondering why this is necessary, David explains:

I can test anything from iOS 3.1 through iOS 5. The older OS versions are especially helpful to keep around since it is essentially impossible to replicate an issue on iOS 3.X without having a dedicated device kicking around.

This isn’t a fragmentation thing though, this is more a look at how meticulous some iOS developers are for ensuring compatibility for even the most obscure use cases. How necessary it will be for developers to hold onto so many variations of iOS remains to be seen, but the adoption rate of the latest iOS versions looks to accelerate dramatically thanks to Apple bringing the OTA update feature to iOS 5. Of course this also means that those who are lingering on earlier versions of iOS will inevitably begin to miss out on new application features and full compatibility, as anyone using old iPhone and iOS gear can already attest to, and it’s likely that future iOS compatibility labs will include just two devices: an iPhone and an iPad.

For the Mac side of things, it’s also interesting to note that Apple has a Mac compatibility lab at the 1 Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino, California that developers can schedule appointments to use. You can read more about the Mac compatibility lab at Apple.com and explore its vast amount of Macs, but apparently no such lab exists for iOS gear… yet at least.

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,

Read more »

Restoring an iPhone or iPad to it’s default factory settings is easy whether you are restoring as a troubleshooting step or just preparing to transfer ownership of the hardware. You can reset the iPhone on the the device itself, but if the device is unresponsive, stuck on a boot loop, or otherwise needs to be restored directly, the next choice is to connect the iOS hardware to a computer and use iTunes.

Using iTunes is also typically faster than resetting through the iPhone or iPad itself, so keep this in mind if you tried the on-device method but it took forever.

How to Restore an iPhone or iPad with iTunes

If you want to restore to factory settings, do not restore from a backup during this process:

1. Launch iTunes
2. Connect the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to the computer and select it within iTunes, if it’s not visible check the “Show” button
3. Click on the “Summary” tab and click on the “Restore” button



4. iTunes will prompt you to back up the device, this is recommended but if you want factory settings only click “Don’t Back Up”
5. At the confirmation screen, click on “Restore” to begin restoring the device to factory settings

When finished, iTunes will alert you the device has been restored, but restoring may take a while. When the device is done, the iPhone/iPad/iPod touch will boot up and be reset completely to factory settings. This means that pre-iOS 5 will require the device to be connected to iTunes to finish, or after iOS 5 you will be presented with the familiar set up screens.

As mentioned before, to maintain the factory settings do not select to restore from a backup when this process is finished, otherwise you’ll simply be left with a device that has a freshly installed iOS but with the same data as when you started.

If you encounter error 3194 during this process, you probably jailbroke your device at some point and need to change the the hosts file.