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More great tricks and useful apps

By Staff | Jan 21, 2016

Hi everyone. I’m still alive, and starting off this year I’m going to show you some great tricks and good apps.

Battery power is needed by apps that are running or updating in the background. To turn off this feature that allows applications to refresh or update automatically in the background, go to Settings, General, Background App Refresh, and set the switch to off. This saves you from draining your battery.

There are also some great battery management apps available such as Battery Doctor. The Battery Doctor app claims to double your battery life if used properly. I tried it, and it works great.

Dynamic backgrounds are pictures on the iPhone when you first turn it on; they look pretty cool, but they also drain more power than a simple static background image. To disable dynamic backgrounds, go to Settings, Wallpaper, and Choose a New Wallpaper. Select a background from your stills or from your Camera Roll options instead.

Keeping control of the settings and apps on your iPhone is another way to preserve battery power. Apps that are opened or running unexpectedly in the background, or apps that are no longer being used, drain battery life. The Memory Booster feature of the iCleaner app by Cydia for iPhones will help clean up unwanted apps and free up RAM on your iPhone. It works really well.

My neighbor, Carolyn Jackson, who is a communications specialist, turned me on to an incredible app called Petralex. When you plug in your earphones and start up the app, it works like a hearing aid and amplifies the sound right near you. You no longer have to say “speak louder.” It is the best app of last year.

The new iOS 9.2 upgrade has many cool features, and Mail Drop now allows you to send large files in Mail. I’ve waited a long time to be able to send large files and more pictures.

iBooks now supports 3D Touch to peek and pop pages from the table of contents, your notes and bookmarks, or from search results inside a book. Plus iBooks now supports listening to an audiobook.

iPhone charging in midair is the coolest thing happening. For a demo, go to kinja.com/andrewliszewski and choose More Stories. A company called Ossia is planning to get it into consumers’ hands by the end of the year. This new innovation could eliminate all the charging devices out there. You may be able to charge many devices at the same time. Imagine, no more wires!

The upcoming iPhone 7 won’t have a headphone jack port but will use the lighting port.

Skype will soon be adding one of its most requested features, free group video calls, to Skype’s iOS, Android and Windows 10 mobile apps. The update is expected to roll out to Skype’s respective apps over the next few weeks.

Lastly, here is a neat trick. Open up the App Store icon and press the Feature ten times. It will go blank and refresh the old apps that were showing. More to come next month…

Send your computer-related questions to mauimist8669@yahoo.com.