Get to grips with iOS 9’s new features

Discover the improvements Apple just made to your touchscreen device with Alan Stonebridge.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that iOS 9.3 has little to offer on the grounds of its relatively small bump in version number. Yes, it fixes and tweaks some existing features, but it also adds some significant new ones to your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad as well.

Its headline feature is Night Shift, which reduces the amount of blue light emitted by your device’s screen. Research says this kind of light disrupts your circadian rhythm and your sleep quality. The idea of counteracting this has been around for a long time on PC and Mac, in the form of f.lux (free, justgetflux.com). Learn how to use Night Shift in iOS below.

If you have an iPhone 6s or 6s Plus, more of iOS’s built-in apps offer 3D Touch shortcuts when you press firmly on their Home screen icons. The most notable of these is Settings, which provides shortcuts to its Battery, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth pages. The App Store now has an ‘Update All’ action that takes you directly to its Updates page and starts downloading whatever is available in your queue — though we’ve found that, sometimes, the process fails to start.

Apple’s ebook reader, iBooks, now plays nicer with things in ePub or PDF format that you’ve bought from places other than the iBooks Store. The app can now sync those items between all of your devices over iCloud. However, you still can’t annotate PDFs, so you may prefer to stick with an app such as PDF Expert ($14.99, readdle.com) if you need that.

You’re now able to redownload your past purchases of audiobooks, and they’re eligible for Family Sharing too.

TAKE NOTE

Notes already became far more capable in iOS 9.0 with the ability to add checklists, sketches, media and other items. Now you can lock individual notes too, and later gain access to them using a password or Touch ID. (The former method is also avalable in OS X 10.11.4.) There are new sorting options for arranging your notes, and new shortcuts to help you start a new sketch or checklist, as well.

There’s a lot more to discover in iOS 9.3, including improvements to Health and News, sharing Live Photos with Macs using AirDrop or Messages, enhanced support for hardware keyboards, and the ability to pair multiple Apple Watches with a single iPhone. We’ll walk you through the most important features, but check the full list at bit.ly/ios9info as well.