All the Useful IPhone Landscape Features You Might Have Forgotten
When it launched, Apple made a big deal out of the fact that you can turn your iPhone sideways and see the app differently. Many of us these days keep the rotation lock and don’t switch to landscape mode if we are not watching a video. If this sounds like you, you are missing out on some useful features.
Most of the time, when you flip your phone to landscape mode, you get the same look as in portrait mode, only sideways. But from time to time, something great happens and you get a whole new interface filled with useful features and options not found in portrait mode. Some of these tips are old news and are a bit dependent on what phone you have (we’ll have a few extras in the end that are exclusive to iPhone 6s Plus and iPad users), but some of them are even an experienced iPhone user. possibly missed.
Calculator has become a full-fledged scientific calculator
This is an old app that is easy to forget about if you don’t use a calculator every day. Open the calculator and you will see an old boring normal calculator. Flip it horizontally and you have a complete scientific calculator. This means you get access to features like squares and square roots, memory slot, cubes and cube roots, as well as good old fashioned sine, cosine, and tangent. This may not be enough for an advanced college math class, but it is good enough for all of us.
Safari makes it easy to browse tabs and search open tabs
When you open the new tab menu in Safari in landscape mode, you not only get a new view with a grid of tabs instead of a stack of tabs, but you also get a search box. The grid view for tabs makes it easy to quickly find a tab, but if you have a ton to search for, the search tool looks at all the titles of all your currently open tabs.
Calendar and Fantasy Get a detailed overview of the week
If you flip the default Calendar app or Fantastical app aside, you get an eye-catching view of the week that makes it easy to see upcoming appointments for next week as well as your schedule. Sure, you can press a button on the screen to switch to the week or month view, but it’s even easier and makes better use of the screen space.
The keyboard adds a few (extremely useful) keys
When you’re in landscape orientation, you get a slightly different keyboard. There are actually two incredibly useful additions here. On the left side of the keyboard, you will see an arrow and semicircle button that deletes everything in the text box in one fell swoop. On the right side, you will see arrow keys that make it easy to jump to a specific letter in a word without touching the screen or swiping your finger across the screen to make sure the cursor is in the right place.
Promotions provide a zoomed view of daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly prices
Do you like the Stocks app? Congratulations, you’re the only one. However, it’s great that when you flip the phone on its side, you get a better understanding of how the stock price has gone up and down over time. As you would expect, you can switch between multiple time slots from one day to ten years. While in landscape mode, you can look at one specific price anywhere on the chart with one touch, or touch with two fingers in two places to compare data for, say, a month.
Health increases data and displays information based on hour, day, week, month or year
Like the Stocks app, the Health app enhances the data you select to make it easier for you to view it. Select the data you want to get a closer look at, such as steps, number of flights, heart rate, or anything else that you track in the Health app, and then flip your phone on its side. You will see an enlarged version of this data in which you can easily change the time intervals by hour, day, week, month or year. This is useful if you want to see where and when you usually do the most exercises, or if you just want to take a broader look at the data you track in general. You can also change the time intervals to view data for a year, month, or day.
Special landscape view available on iPhone 6 Plus and iPad
The large screens of the iPhone 6 Plus and iPad give developers more options to incorporate useful landscape features into their apps, and many of them aren’t available on small devices. Some of them are pretty good, and it’s a shame they aren’t on smaller phones, but if you have one of them, here are some of the most useful landscape modes.
Mail, Outlook, Messages, Facebook Messenger Add columns for better message viewing
Most apps that have landscape view, especially on the iPad or iPhone 6S Plus, add column mode when you turn your phone on its side. In Mail, Outlook, Messages, and even Facebook Messenger, you’ll see a left column filled with recent messages and a right column that displays your selected message (just like in the desktop app). There are probably many other messaging apps that do this as well, so if you have a preferred email or messaging app not listed here, switch it to landscape mode to see what happens.
Tweetbot provides a custom column filled with any information you want
Tweetbot , which we chose for the best Twitter app for iPhone , has one of the best landscape modes we’ve ever seen. When your phone is flipped, the navigation bar slides to the left side and you get an extra column that you can customize with a list, specific search result, mentions, statistics, or a stream of your activity (which includes mentions, likes, retweets, and new followers). The extra screen space is suitable for people who prefer to display more than just the main feed on the screen.
Weather shows all weather data on one screen
When the Weather app is in landscape mode by default, you get a full hourly forecast for the day, plus a weekly weather summary, sunrise and sunset times, chance of rain, humidity, and current wind conditions. Basically, it makes everything in a scrollable portrait view available on one page.
The world clock gets a handy map that makes it easy to know the time around the world
You may not be spending a ton of time in the Clock app, but if you enter the world clocks section of the Clock app while in landscape mode on the 6 Plus, you get a very handy little map of everything. your watch. This makes reading time much more interesting than the boring list you see in portrait orientation.
Of course, many other apps have dedicated landscape view modes on larger devices. Workflow has a handy little navigation menu in landscape mode, Transmit adds a column view, and 1Password moves the navigation bar to the left, just like Tweetbot. We’d bet that more apps you regularly use have these views than those that don’t, so if you haven’t flipped your phone over for a while, give it a try. The new beautiful landscape view may surprise you.