Need iOS help. Hope me!

January 7, 2013 9:10 AM

I've used iPhones for five years or so now, but there are a few things that bug me, and I wonder if there is a trick or preference I'm missing or a third-party app I can use or what. No interest in jailbreaking or switching phones. Specific questions inside.

I've loved my iPhones, but there are a few things I'd like to be able to do. Again, no interest in jailbreaking or switching to Android, etc.

1. Autocomplete suggestions / different suffixes. If I'm tapping out a word, is there a way to nudge the autocomplete suggestion to use a different suffix? For example, say I want to type "antagonized," and when I type "antag" iOS suggests "antagonizing." Right now, I might just accept the autocomplete and then delete the "ing" and type "ed"--in this case, it's the same number of taps to accept the word and delete and retype as it is to type "onized"--but I'd rather just given the choice of word in the first place. Autocomplete will learn to suggest a word, but my complaint is not limited to my commonly used words. I get different suggestions if I misspell a word, but not for different suffixes of a partial word.

2. More than just song name on lock screen. I have a lot of music, and I don't always recognize the name of a song--I need the artist and album. Even with tracks that have album art displayed, there are times when the art doesn't help. Is there really no way to add the artist and album to the lock screen?

3. Stopping websites from asking me to download their apps. If I go to IMDB, I have to click through a splash screen that asks me to download the IMDB app. On other sites, I get a little floater at the bottom of the screen that asks me to either download their app or save them to my homescreen. Please make it stop.

4. One touch settings switches. Is there any way to put a button on my home screen to toggle attributes selected in the settings app? For instance, if I want to turn off wi-fi (which I do often due to bad wi-fi in my apartment), I have to tap settings, tap wi-fi, then tap the on/off toggle. I would love a button on my home screen that just toggles wi-fi on and off. But not just wi-fi--I'd love to be able to do this for airplane mode, different levels of brightness, etc.--I'd like this to be customizable. Any ideas?

All this is on an ATT iPhone 5 running iOS 6.01 (10A525).

posted by Admiral Haddock to technology (10 answers total)

1: I don't think so.
2: not without jailbreaking
3: you can disable javascript or use a different browser and change the user agent string to not say you're using ios (which can cause it's own problems)
4: not without jail breaking.
posted by empath at 9:14 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]

1. Not really. You only ever get one autocomplete suggestion at a time, and other than making it learn new ones by using them, there's no way to change which one it is by fiat.

2. If you double-tap the home button on the lock screen, you'll get controls to change the song as well as more information about the song.

3. Infuriatingly, there is no way to stop this. It is awful and we all hate it.

4. There's no way to do this, either, though you're far from the only one who wants it, so... one day, who knows?
posted by Tomorrowful at 9:14 AM on January 7 [2 favorites]

1. No. I did find this app that has its own variation on autocomplete, but it'll only work in that app.

2. No.

3. Not really. There might be third-party browsers that let you block certain kinds of code, but setting them up to block these floaters or splash screens would probably be more work than clicking through them for the next 10 years. And you could maybe pipe your connection through a VPN that would do the blocking remotely, but that would be a lot of PITA, and again, require you to set filtering rules.

4. No.

All of this stuff would either require a jailbreak hack or a lot of farting around outside the iPhone's standard environment.
posted by adamrice at 9:17 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]

#4 is the reason I jailbroke my phone. I miss it, but I have a new iphone 5 now and am not sure if I want to bother jailbreaking this time around when the software is available, it made my phone too unstable. Hope apple opens their eyes that we want more customization!
posted by photoexplorer at 9:18 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]

There might be third-party browsers that let you block certain kinds of code, but setting them up to block these floaters or splash screens would probably be more work than clicking through them for the next 10 years.

You can just download atomics and change the user agent string to say you're using safari on the mac. Though you'll just get the standard safari format for the page instead of any fancy ios only formatting.
posted by empath at 9:23 AM on January 7

For #3, you should really give Google Chrome a shot. It's free, and you can set it to request desktop pages by default. I haven't seen a "get our app" banner in quite some time.
posted by Oktober at 9:24 AM on January 7

3. Apple has created "smart app banners" in an attempt to address this annoyance but it's on the websites to bother supporting it. You're stuck with them for the foreseeable future, until they fall out of fashion.

4. You could try this but apparently Apple blocked this trick on 5.1. So probably not.

Sorry.
posted by egypturnash at 9:25 AM on January 7

For # 1: Does this help? Custom Auto-complete in Settings-->General-->Keyboard-->Shortcuts

For common things you can have a "shorthand" way to start and then autocomplete fulfills so a special haddock@ would autofill to what you want it to be from the dictionary. This can be done to the most annoying words that need suffixes.
posted by jadepearl at 9:36 AM on January 7

#4. Launch Center Pro will toggle and/or set the brightness level, but not any other settings (that I know about, anyway). Launch Center does some other cool things, too, like quick adding of notes or todos or whatnot.
posted by agentmitten at 10:09 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]

For #3, you should really give Google Chrome a shot. It's free, and you can set it to request desktop pages by default. I haven't seen a "get our app" banner in quite some time.

Oktober, where is this option?

Launch center used to have shortcuts for wifi and other options but they went away with some version of iOS 5, I forget which exactly.
posted by ridogi at 11:43 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]