iPhone For Seniors For Dummies. Spivey Dwight

first time you turn on your iPhone, it will probably have been activated and registered by your phone carrier or Apple, depending on whom you’ve bought it from. Follow these steps:

      1. Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button a little bit below the top of the upper-right side of your iPhone until the Apple logo appears. In another moment, a series of screens appears, asking you to enter a password if you have an Apple ID.

      2. Enter your Apple ID. If you don’t have an Apple ID, you can follow the instructions to create one.

      3. Follow the series of prompts to set up initial options for your iPhone. You can make choices about your language and location, using iCloud (Apple’s online sharing service), whether to use a passcode, connecting with a network, and so on.

      

You can choose to have personal items transferred to your iPhone from your computer when you sync the two devices using iTunes, including music, videos, downloaded apps, audiobooks, e-books, podcasts, and browser bookmarks. Contacts and Calendars are downloaded via iCloud, or (if you’re moving to iPhone from an Android phone) you can download an app from the Google Play Store called Move to iOS (developed by Apple) to copy your current Android settings to your iPhone. You can also transfer to your computer any content you download directly to your iPhone by using iTunes, the App Store, or non-Apple stores. See Chapters 13 and 15 for more about these features.

      Meet the Multi-Touch Screen

When the iPhone Home screen appears (see Figure 2-1), you see a pretty background and two sets of icons.

      FIGURE 2-1

      One set of icons appears in the Dock, along the bottom of the screen. The Dock contains the Phone, Safari, Mail, and Music app icons by default, though you can swap out one app for another. You can add new apps to populate as many as 10 additional Home screens for a total of 11 Home screens. The Dock appears on every Home screen.

      Other icons appear above the Dock and are closer to the top of the screen. (I cover all these icons in the “Take Inventory of Preinstalled Apps” task, in Chapter 3.) Different icons appear in this area on each Home screen. You can also nest apps in folders, which almost gives you the possibility of storing limitless apps on your iPhone. You are, in fact, limited – but only by your phone’s memory.

      

Treat the iPhone screen carefully. It’s made of glass and it will break if an unreasonable amount of force is applied.

      The iPhone uses touchscreen technology: When you swipe your finger across the screen or tap it, you’re providing input to the device just as you do to a computer using a mouse or keyboard. You hear more about the touchscreen in the next task, but for now, go ahead and play with it for a few minutes – really, you can’t hurt anything. Use the pads of your fingertips (not your fingernails) and try these tasks:

❯❯ Tap the Settings icon. The various settings (which you read more about throughout this book) appear, as shown in Figure 2-2.

      

To return to the Home screen, press the Home button.

      ❯❯ Swipe a finger from right to left on the Home screen. This action moves you to the next Home screen.

      

The little white dots at the bottom of the screen, above the Dock icons, indicate which Home screen is displayed.

      ❯❯ To experience the screen rotation feature, hold the iPhone firmly while turning it sideways. The screen flips to the horizontal orientation, if the app you’re in supports it.

      To flip the screen back, just turn the device so that it’s oriented like a pad of paper again. (Some apps force iPhone to stay in one orientation or the other.)

      ❯❯ Drag your finger down from the very top edge of the screen to reveal the Notification Center items, such as reminders and calendar entries. (Notification Center is covered in Chapter 24). Drag up from the very bottom edge of the Home screen to hide Notification Center, and then drag up to display Control Center (containing commonly used controls and tools and discussed later in this chapter).

FIGURE 2-2

      

You can customize the Home screen by changing its wallpaper (background picture) and brightness. You can read about making these changes in Chapter 9.

      DISCOVER 3D TOUCH AND QUICK ACTIONS

      3D Touch allows you to get different results depending on the amount of pressure you apply to the screen, and get feedback on your actions with taps from the screen. For example, if you open the Photos app, you can tap lightly to select a photo, press a bit harder to see a preview of that photo, and press even harder to open the photo full screen. The ability to preview such items as emails, websites, maps, and photos before opening them can save you time. The medium press is called a Peek and the hard press is called a Pop.

      Quick Actions involve pressing an icon on the screen to see items you’re likely to want to select. For example, if you press on the Phone icon, you’ll get a shortcut list of commonly called contacts. If you press on the Maps app, you see a list of places you often go, such as your home, to quickly display a map of that location. Quick Actions provide a shortcut menu to your most frequently used items, saving you time and effort.

      Say Hello to Tap and Swipe

      You can use several methods for getting around and getting things done in iPhone using its Multi-Touch screen, including

      ❯❯ Tap once. To open an application on the Home screen, choose a field, such as a search box, choose an item in a list, use an arrow to move back or forward one screen, or follow an online link, tap the item once with your finger.

      ❯❯ Tap twice. Use this method to enlarge or reduce the display of a web page (see Chapter 11 for more about using the Safari web browser) or to zoom in or out in the Maps app.

❯❯ Pinch. As an alternative to the tap-twice method, you can pinch your fingers together or move them apart on the screen (see Figure 2-3) when you’re looking at photos, maps, web pages, or email messages to quickly reduce or enlarge them, respectively. This method allows you to grow or contract the screen to a variety of sizes rather than a fixed size, as with the double-tap method.

      

You can use the three-finger tap to zoom your screen to be even larger or use multitasking gestures to swipe with four or five fingers (see the “Learn Multitasking Basics” task, in Chapter 3). This method is handy if you have vision challenges. Go to Chapter 9 to discover how to turn on this feature using Accessibility settings.

❯❯ Drag to scroll (known as swiping). When you touch your finger to the screen and drag to the right or left, the screen moves (see Figure 2-4). Swiping to the left on the Home screen, for example, moves you to the next Home screen. Swiping down while reading an online newspaper moves you down the page; swiping up moves you back up the page.

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