One more thing…(well, 14)

Beyond the big hitters like Screen Time and Memoji, check out these invaluable enhancements that iOS 12 has to offer

1 Identify your tabs

Make tabs easier to tell apart by going to Settings > Safari and turning on ‘Show Icons in Tabs’. They appear at the top of each item in the tabs overview. Also turn on Show Tab Bar to see them there. (On iPhone, it appears in landscape mode.)

2 Check data usage

It’s easier to work out which apps use the greatest amount of your mobile data allowance. In Settings > Mobile Data, they are sorted in descending order of usage, not by name, so you can identify hogs without scrolling through them all.

3 Double Face ID

Does Face ID fail to recognize you some days? It may be because you’re wearing different headwear than usual, for example. Register a second face scan in Settings > Face ID & Passcode > Set Up an Alternative Appearance.

4 Search by lyrics

Enter a snippet of lyrics in Music’s Search tab. No Apple Music subscription is needed to search its lyrics library, and you can be fairly inexact. So, ‘Looks like a limb torn off’ finds ‘It’s looking like a limb torn off’ in a Band of Horses song.

5 Podcasts playback

Scroll down in Settings > Podcasts to find new settings for what happens when you tap the skip buttons during playback. You can choose from 10, 15, 30, 45 and 60–second jumps, and forwards and backwards can be set differently.

6 Hardware controls

Under External Controls in Settings > Podcasts, you get a choice of actions for the skip buttons on your headphones/ in your car. You can go to the next or previous podcast, or skip forwards or backwards in the episode being played.

7 Do Not Disturb

Hold a finger on Do Not Disturb’s button in Control Center — or press firmly if your device is equipped with 3D Touch — to turn it on for an hour, until evening, until you leave your location, or tap Schedule for a different period of time.

8 Get a quiet night

The Bedtime option appears when Do Not Disturb is scheduled. If turned on, it sends alerts in that period to Notification Center (grouped under During Bedtime), rather than tempting you on the Lock screen if you wake up.

9 Hearing aid access

If you use iOS’s Live Listen feature with a Made for iPhone approved hearing aid or headphones, the Hearing item in Settings > Control Center provides you with quick access to a widget where you can turn it on or off with a tap.

10 Get help with words

You’ll find new British and American thesauri options in Settings > General > Dictionary. Highlight a word and choose Look Up to use them. Also new are translation dictionaries between English and Arabic, Hindi, and Hebrew.

11 New Siri accents

There are two new accents available: Irish and South African, each in male and female genders. They are available for the Speak command too (in the contextual bar): pick one in Settings > General > Accessibility > Speech.

12 Scan documents

Hold a finger on Notes’ button in Control Center — or again, press firmly if your device is equipped with 3D Touch — and you’ll see the New Sketch command has been replaced by one that ‘scans’ a document to a new note.

13 Scan QR codes

If Camera remembers its mode (Settings > Camera > Preserve Settings), you may have to swipe to Photo mode to scan QR codes. Add Scan QR Code in Settings > Control Center; this button opens Camera to that mode instantly.

14 Work with text

Devices that lack 3D Touch have a new way to move the insertion point and select text. Hold a finger on the space bar, then slide around the screen. While doing that, tap elsewhere on the keyboard to begin selecting.