With the advent of iOS 11, Apple device owners gained a quick and easy way to make video recordings of their screens, making it a cinch to create tutorials or even share weird happenings (great for reporting issues with apps, for example). Here’s how to record the screen on an iPhone or iPad.
Record the screen on an iPhone or iPad
Control Center is the grid of useful options that you get when you swipe up from the bottom edge of the screen (except on the iPhone X, where you swipe down from the upper-right corner of the screen). By default, video recording isn’t there, so this is something you’ll need to add first.
Go to Settings > Control Center > Customize Controls
Tap + next to Screen Recording
If you wish to change the order of the items in your Control Center you should tap and hold over the three horizontal bars to the left of any item – this then allows you to drag the order of the individual items
Modifying the Control Center layout on my iPhone X
My Control Center, including Screen Recording option on the bottom row, second from the left
Creating a screen recording
Whenever you wish to create a video of your screen activity, head to Control Center and select the Screen Recording option (it’s the one that’s a solid circle inside another circle). This will capture both the screen content as well as any audio output.
You will get a countdown, after which the recording will start
All screens, animations, etc. will be recorded until you either:
Head back to the Control Center and click on the Screen Recording icon* or
Tap on the red status bar at the top of the screen (on an iPhone X, you will find the left-hand corner is red and you will need to tap this instead)*
You will now find the video in your Photos app, where it can be edited and shared just the same as any other video on your phone
(*The prompt that appears to ask you to confirm that you really want to stop recording ISN’T included in the final recording.)
Now read this: How do I close Twitter images on my iPad/iPhone?
Never mind the lack of a home button - why look at a phone when you can admire the sea?
With its nearly edge-to-edge screen there was no longer a place for an iPhone X home button, so all the many functions that required it needed to be allocated elsewhere. Here’s what Apple did and, remarkably, why it works so well…
iPhone X: Waking up & unlocking
You tap the screen to wake up the iPhone X, or press the button on the right-hand side. Note I didn’t call this the ‘power button’: because it’s no longer used to power off the iPhone, that would be a misnomer.
To unlock, as everyone knows by now, the iPhone X uses Face ID instead of Touch ID. Rather than press your finger against a reader, infrared sensors identify your face, even if you’re wearing sunglasses or a scarf. It’s not quite as quick as Touch ID but it’s very effective. Swipe at the same time and you can be on your home page almost as quick as you were before.
iPhone X: Returning to the home screen
So with no home button, how do you return to the home screen? Simple. No matter which app you’re in, you now swipe up from the bottom of the screen.
iPhone X: Reachability
Did you use the Reachability feature on previous iPhones? Many didn’t but it was actually really useful, effectively shifting the screen down when you were trying to use the phone one-handed – this ensured everything on-screen remained within a finger’s reach.
It was achieved by lightly double-tapping the home button. Do it again to get the screen to return to normal. For the iPhone X, you have to first switch Reachability on. Go to Settings > General > Accessibility and activate Reachability from here.
For the next bit, you need to understand what the Gesture bar is. This is the horizontal bar you’ll see at the bottom of each screen – it can actually be used for other things but, in this case, we’re going to use it for Reachability. You can see the Gesture bar at the bottom of the following screenshot, in white. (Apologies to republicans in advance.)
It wasn’t so widely reported, but Kate was also thrilled by the removal of the home button from the iPhone X
Whenever you’re in an app, simply swipe your finger down over the Gesture bar – the screen should now move down. Swipe up over the Gesture bar to return it to normal.
iPhone X: App switching
Double-clicking the home button on previous iPhones displayed a history of your app usage, making it easy to switch between them. With the iPhone X, it’s more complicated but, once you get the hang of it, it feels quick and perfectly natural. Promise.
When you’re in an app, swipe up from the bottom, as if you were closing it. However, pause when you get part way up and you’ll find the slowly minimising screen joins the others as the app switcher appears.
You can also close apps from the switcher but this too has changed – instead of swiping them away, you now need to press and hold on the app icon. A red minus icon will appear in the corner of each minimised app window. Tap on these to close them. Tap elsewhere to return back to the switcher.
If you’re using the Handover feature (where you can transfer usage of an app across devices) then any such apps will appear at the bottom of the app switcher (see screenshot below for an example).
Fear not, you can still close apps quickly and easily on the iPhone X
But that’s not all, as they say in all the best infomercials, as there’s a second way to switch quickly between apps. You remember the Gesture bar at the bottom of the screen? Swipe left and right across that and you can easily glide between apps.
iPhone X: the Control Center
On previous iPhones the Control Center was accessible by swiping up from the bottom of the screen, giving you access to Airplane mode, brightness controls and suchthelike. Now you just need to swipe down from the top-righthand corner of the screen (i.e. to the right of the ‘notch’).
iPhone X: Powering off
As I said earlier, pressing that button on the right-hand side won’t work. To power off you now hold the volume down and right-hand button at the same time. From the same screen, you can also send out an emergency SOS and display important medical information.
And, finally…
Notifications – Swipe down from the top-left of the screen (to the left of the ‘notch’).
Taking screenshots – Hold down the volume up and right-hand button simultaneously.
Has your iPhone/iPad battery life significantly worsened since the upgrade to iOS 11? If so, it would appear you’re not alone.
After almost every major update to Apple’s operating system, people immediately report that device battery life has suffered. This is normally because an upgrade to the next major version of the OS requires the device to rebuild its search index (in other words, relocate all the files on the device so you can find them with search). This process runs in the background, taking a chunk out of your battery life for a few days before things eventually settle down.
This time around, however, things don’t appear to be settling.
I went to bed on Saturday night with my iPad Air’s battery life teetering at around 15%. I forgot to put it on charge overnight, but would normally still expect it to be only a percentage point or two down in the morning. Instead, the device was stone dead, requiring defibrillation from the mains. That was more than a week after the upgrade to iOS 11, more than enough time for the iPad to rebuild the search index.
Others are reporting similar problems, such as Ewen Rankin from the British Tech Network podcasts:
iPad Pro Charged to Full at 9pm Friday. Not used in bag 44% this morning. Normal?
One possible cause of this problem could be something going awry with the search re-indexing. As Ian Nock points out on Twitter, the process can become corrupted, leading to the indexer getting stuck on a process and bleeding away battery life in the background.
Interestingly, since my iPad Air died completely on Saturday night, effectively forcing a hard reboot of the iPad, the battery life problem appears to have gone away. I left it on 97% charged last night and it’s on 95% this morning.
If you’re still suffering from post iOS 11 battery blues, fully powering the device down (by holding down the power button and flicking the on-screen power switch) and back on again might sort it out. Or, in other words:
That might seem like an oddly specific question, but the original iPad Air is on Apple’s death row. It’s one of the oldest devices still to receive the latest operating system, and so iPad Air owners (such as myself) might wonder if iOS 11 will prove too much of a handful for their device.
It’s certainly not an unfounded fear. My ancient iPad 2 was one of the oldest devices to receive iOS 9 and that absolutely crippled the device. Seriously. If I want to play a song via Spotify on the iPad 2, it would be quicker for me to nip down to Woolworth’s and buy the single (throwing in a topical joke for the kids, there).
So, having installed iOS 11 on the iPad Air last night, how does it run?
The verdict: iOS 11 on the iPad Air
The good news is it’s not the device-destroying update that iOS 9 was for my poor old iPad 2. Things are a shade more sluggish – screen transitions dangle a little longer and switching between apps is a touch tardier – but it’s not a lethal injection.
The iPad Air is, however, spared some of the fancier, performance-smashing features of iOS 11. There’s no split view – having one app in half the screen and another in the other half – so true multitasking is out. Also omitted is the new drag-and-drop feature, where you can, say, swipe a photo into an email attachment. And if you’re looking at the listings for the all the new AR (augmented reality) games in the revamped App Store, forget it: AR games are only for the latest devices.
You do get a good smattering of new features, though. The Mac-like Dock is supported, allowing you to pin up to 11 apps to the bottom of the screen for easy access. The new App Switcher is there too, although as you can see from my screenshot below, thumbnails of open apps often take a while to load and scrolling through those thumbnails is a stuttering, jaggedy affair.
Minor irritations aside, there’s no reason not to install iOS 11 on an iPad Air. In fact, cherish it, because it’s probably the last iOS update you’re getting.
