iOS 6 features you may not know about

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Chad Williams put together a nice list of lesser known features from iOS 6. Sometimes the coolest things aren’t always the most talked about.



  • http://twitter.com/forty2j Jim McPherson

    There’s a very important feature that somehow missed this list: You can now drag down Mail to refresh it.

    • http://twitter.com/pauloclayton Paulo Clayton

      Good call! I wondered where the refresh button went!

      • http://twitter.com/ChadwickWill Chad Williams

        My comment got flagged for review because I included a link. I just said that I did not include that in my post because I thought it was something widely known. Apple demonstrated it on stage, people talked about it on podcasts, and the iOS 6 page of Apple’s website mentions it: “And to refresh your mailboxes, all you have to do is swipe down.”

    • http://twitter.com/ChadwickWill Chad Williams

      I didn’t include it because I thought it was widely known. Gruber talked about it at length on his podcast.

      • http://www.aichon.com Brad

        Wasn’t it also demonstrated on stage at one point during the WWDC keynote? As soon as I saw that you were only including things that hadn’t been mentioned elsewhere, it seemed like an omission that made complete sense to me.

      • http://twitter.com/forty2j Jim McPherson

        Ah. Having not listened to Gruber’s podcast or watched the whole Keynote, I completely missed it. Discovered it by accident yesterday.

  • Matt Chea

    One thing I didn’t see on Chad’s list that may warrant being on there, newly downloaded apps come with a “New” banner on them until you open it.

  • http://twitter.com/pauloclayton Paulo Clayton

    The accelerometer effect on the silver slider buttons doesn’t appear to work on my iPad 2… ??

    • http://twitter.com/ChadwickWill Chad Williams

      Ya, I don’t think it works with iPads. It doesn’t do it on my iPad 3 either.

  • http://www.johncblandii.com John C. Bland II

    “Notification Center now syncs with iCloud. If you clear something out in Notification Center on one device, it magically disappears on the others. “

    That’s awesome. I was just thinking the other day I wish my Android devices had this and didn’t realize my iOS devices now have it. That’s a great addition!

    • http://twitter.com/ChadwickWill Chad Williams

      I took that out of the post. I heard from many people, and saw for myself, that it was not working as I had thought. I originally heard about the feature in iMore’s “The big list of iOS 6 features” article. They said: “Cleared notifications sync across devices.”

      Unfortunately it does not work as everyone had hoped. Sorry about that.

      • http://www.johncblandii.com John C. Bland II

        Well, that sucks. I only use my iPad seriously (iPhone is dev device) so not a big issue for me but the feature def’ has promise for two device users.

  • MacsenMcBain

    I don’t know if this is new to iOS 6, or just labelled more prominently: you can create your own vibration patterns to go along with alert or ring tones. This will come in very handy for distinguishing between different types of notifications and callers- time to brush up on Morse Code…

    • Baldman

      This was part of iOS5.

  • Vegardls92

    “Notification Center now syncs with iCloud. If you clear something out in Notification Center on one device, it magically disappears on the others. “

    Can’t get this to work, anyone else?

    • http://twitter.com/ChadwickWill Chad Williams

      It works with a couple Apple apps, like Reminders. I think that it might be something that devs need to enable and haven’t yet.

  • Arnaud

    Bluetooth is now at the top level of settings. No need to dig into general to find it.