From the course: iOS 13 and iPadOS: iPhone and iPad Essential Training
Use Control Center
From the course: iOS 13 and iPadOS: iPhone and iPad Essential Training
Use Control Center
- [Instructor] Control Center in iOS is a collection of some of the most commonly used settings and tools on your device that you can access quickly from a central location. Opening control center varies depending on the device you're using. On the iPhone 10 and later and on iPads, swipe down from the upper right-hand corner of the screen. On older iPhones, swipe up from the bottom of the screen. Most of the settings here can be accessed elsewhere on your device, but for many of these you have to dig through several layers of menus to find them while a couple of these items reside here exclusively and can't be found anywhere else. So this is the default layout of control center. But as we'll see in a moment, you can also customize what appears here. Let's take a look at this current layout though. Starting here in the upper left-hand corner, we have four buttons grouped together. This is where you'll find the buttons to toggle airplane mode on and off and well as the WiFi and Bluetooth buttons and the green button allows you to turn your cellular connection on and off which is useful when you want to make sure you're not using your cellular data and want to rely strictly on WiFi, for example. And you can simply tap on these buttons to toggle them on and off, but there's actually a lot more to how airplane mode affects the WiFi and Bluetooth settings. So be sure to check out the movie on airplane mode in the chapter called important settings, to get the details. Now before we look at some of the other controls here, another important thing to point out is that most of the areas here contain additional hidden controls that you access by holding your finger on top of the controls for a second. This is also called a long touch. So for example, if I hold down on any of these four buttons in the section we're looking at, it pops open revealing additional toggles and information. So we now see labels under the buttons letting us know what they are and their current status. And you can see we now have access to the toggles for the AirDrop feature and to turn on the personal hotspot feature if you're using a device with cellular capabilities. And some of these buttons have further long touch options. For example, if I hold down on the WiFi button, it gives me a list of WiFi networks at my location so I can quickly select one without having to dig into my system settings. And tapping anywhere outside these buttons takes us back to the main control center screen. Moving to the right, we have the music control area where we have the play pause button, with the rewind and fast forward buttons on either side. This controls whatever media is currently playing whether it's in the music app or the podcast app or the books app and so on. And we can access more controls by pressing and holding down on this area. So we have a vine slider here at the bottom and the playback controls are a little larger and easier to use here too. If you have music playing in one of your apps, like the music app, you'll see the album or song information up here. Also note this is where the AirPlay audio streaming controls are hidden away. It's this button here in the upper right. This allows you to select any nearby AirPlay devices on your network that you want to play your iPhone's audio through. Now if you want to send video and audio to an Apple TV, you'll leave the music controls and here on the main screen, you'll tap the area that, on my phone, says dock connector. It says that because of the way I'm capturing this video you're watching, but on your device this will say screen mirroring. And from here, you'll be able to select the Apple TV or any other AirPlay devices on your network that also support video streaming. Above that area, we have the orientation lock and the do not disturb buttons. We'll talk about the do not disturb button later. And orientation lock keeps the display from rotating even if you turn your device sideways. Now this is the only place on the iPhone to access orientation lock. On older iPads that have a built in side switch, this might either be the orientation lock button or the mute button. It depends on which action you've assigned to the switch on the side of the iPad. But on the iPad Air two or later, you have both a mute button and the orientation lock button here. Now to the right, we have controls for brightness and volume level. You can just drag your finger up and down to turn the volume or brightness up and down. If you want a little more precision out of these controls, do a long hold on them. So we have a larger version here that lets me be more granular. And notice we have more hidden controls along the bottom here. We have the button for dark mode, which I'll talk about later in the course. And night shift, which is a feature for removing the blue light from your screen and that's supposed to be better for not interrupting your body's sleep cycle. And on the iPad Pro and the iPhone 10 or later, this is also where you'll find the button to enable or disable the true tone feature which changes the white point and brightness or your iPad to give you truer colors based on the lighting of the environment you're currently in. Alright and along the bottom we have some more buttons. Tapping the flashlight button turns on your phone or iPad's flash, but holding down on it lets you adjust the brightness of the light. Timer icon opens up the timer app, but if you hold down on it you get this quick control to set a timer right away from here without having to jump into the app. Now pressing down on the calculator button doesn't give you a quick calculator, but if you recently performed a calculation, it'll let you copy the result of the last calculation you performed so you can paste it somewhere else. And the camera button opens up the camera but pressing down on it gives you options to jump directly into certain camera modes. Alright, so that's a rundown of the default set of controls found in control center. But I also mentioned that you can customize what appears here, and we'll take a look at that next.
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