iPhone Updates
This pertains to IOS 16.2 update and newer iPhones. As well as security fixes, some useful new features are included in this update. To get more information, you’ll need to do view some YouTube videos or other sources to become more proficient.
Apple Music Sing – available for Apple Music listeners allows you to lower volume of lead vocals so you can be the lead singer.
Advanced Data Protection allows uses to expand end-to-end encryption to iMessage, Notes, and Photos.
Freeform App – This is a new app many have been waiting for. Works best on iPad with the Apple Pencil or on your Mac. You can use it on your phone too but much easier due to screen size on other devices. You are presented with a document with not edges so you can present your ideas with symbols, text, scribbles, colors and more. The document is shareable with other on teams and up to 100 participants.
Lock Screen Widgets – two new widgets will include data from Sleep app and the others for the Health app.
Airdrop Setting – a change has been made so that if you select “everyone” is only lasting 10 minutes so if you forget to disable that it will do it for you to prevent unwanted sharing.
Satellite Service for emergencies (iPhone 14 and up only). What if you’re in an emergency and you have no cell phone service? Well, Apple has solved this by finally releasing its much-anticipated new feature for iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro devices – Emergency SOS via satellite. The company has partnered with satellite communications company Globalstar to create the feature and uses satellite connectivity to put people in touch with local emergency dispatch centers if they are in an area with no cellular Wi-Fi coverage.
Pin conversation at the top. For favorites or group chats, you can pin up to nine chats at the top of the screen so they are handy. To pin an iMessage chat, tap and hold it and then choose the Pin option. Anohter way is to tap and drag a chat to the top. Tap on the three dots to add other people.
Filter out unknown senders. Maybe more important than pining your favorites in iMessage is making sure you don’t get any spam texts. The good news is that iMessage has such functionality built in. Go to Settings, Messages, and then look for the Message Filteringoption. Enable the Filter Unknown Senders, and you’re done.
Hide alerts from specific contacts. What about texts from your contacts that you don’t want to deal with? Thankfully, there’s a hidden iMessage feature for that. You can Hide Alerts on a chat-by-chat basis. That way, when your family group gets busy, you won’t receive a ton of notifications. To do it, tap the chat icon at the top and enable the Hide Alerts option.
Dictate messages instead of typing them. Now that we handled contact management in iMessage, it’s time to talk about hidden tips related to the actual iMessage experience. To speed things up, you can dictate your message to your friends and family. And you don’t need to invoke Siri to do it. Tap the microphone on the right side of the text field. Be sure to look over what you said. Voice recognition is good, but it doesn’t hurt to see if you were understood.
Edit a text message. You only have 15 minutes to edit a message, and the original will not disappear. That’s how Apple makes sure people do not abuse the feature. To edit a blue bubble, tap and hold on the message and select Edit from the menu. Make your corrections and send the new text. You can only edit blue bubble messages not regular SMS texts. You can also UNSEND but you only have two minutes. Use same selection as mentioned but press unsend. These features only work if recipient has IOS 16 or MacOS Ventura. Reply inline to iMessage. If your chats are very busy and you want to reply to a particular line, then you can tap and hold the text line and select REPLY from the options like you would on edit or unsend.
(from an article by BGR)