What you’ll need

All you need is any iOS device; this works with all versions of iOS, and only uses a website to set up the icons on the home screen. The only thing to keep in mind is to make sure you only add icons for settings your device actually has; for example, using the website, it’s possible to set up a shortcut to the Siri settings page, but only the iPhone 4S has that settings page, so the link will break on other devices.

Method

1. To get started, use your iOS device to open the IconSettings page, over on iPhoneZA. Scroll down and you’ll see a long list of links with the names of pages from the Settings app.
2. Tap one of the links to open a new page. A pop-up will appear asking if you want to open in Settings; tap cancel, because you still need to be in Safari for now.
3. Tap the Action icon in the toolbar, which looks like an arrow coming out of a box, then tap Add to Home Screen. A new sheet will slide in, allowing you to rename the shortcut if you wish. Wait a couple of seconds, and an icon will appear in the square to the left of the text field.
   
4. Tap Add at the top of the screen, and the icon will be added to your home screen. It can be moved and deleted in the same way as a regular app icon. Tap the icon, and you’ll be taken to the corresponding page in Settings. You can add as many of these to your home screen as you wish.
   

Things to consider

First of all, don’t worry about breaking any rules doing this; it’s all above-board, since these icons are simple links using Apple’s “prefs:” URL scheme. It’s the same as when a developer uses a custom URL scheme, so Apple is fine with people using it.

It’s also worth noting that although these shortcuts can make it easier to access buried settings pages with one touch, this isn’t quite the same as the popular jailbreak app, SBSettings, which actually toggles settings when you tap the icon, not just take you to the Settings app. However, short of jailbreaking, this is the best alternative.

Finally, you may notice that some of these don’t save much time over simply opening Settings. For example, Wi-Fi is right at the top of Settings, so it only takes a few seconds to open it manually. However, some of the other available icons are quite handy; for instance, Bluetooth is buried under General, and so takes a few taps to open. Using IconSettings makes accessing the Bluetooth settings a lot faster.

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The setting to turn off Siri when an iPhone is passcode-locked isn’t found in the dedicated Siri settings, where you might expect to see it. Instead, head to the iPhone’s Settings app, the go to General > Passcode Lock. Here, under the setting to choose whether or not to use a simple 4-digit passcode, you’ll see an option called “Siri” next to an on/off slider. As the screen itself says, this tells your phone whether or not to allow access to Siri when your phone is passcode-locked.

Note that you must have a passcode active on your device. Siri is always active from the lock screen on devices without passcodes, which makes sense, since your info isn’t protected anyway in that case.

As a bonus, you can also choose to put Siri behind a parental code lock if you choose. Do this in the Settings > General > Restrictions section, once you’ve enabled restrictions. You can choose to lock Siri out altogether, or just lock out its ability to display profanity and explicit language in the Siri interface screens.

If it garners enough negative attention, we might see Apple make Siri inactive from a passcode-locked device by default with the next iOS update, but in the meantime, following the steps above keeps you covered.

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Luckily though, the good old ‘defaults write’ command for OS X’s Terminal.app is still around to help us pop open that hood and tweak all the stuff that can’t be configured with just a point and a click. Here’s a quick roundup of a few defaults write commands that might make your early days with the new big cat a bit easier.

A few words about ‘defaults write’

The ‘defaults’ command allows users to interact with their user defaults via the terminal (located in the Applications>Utilities folder). Users can read, write, and delete user preference values that often aren’t available for configuration within an application’s normal preference panel. These commands can all be executed via the Terminal, and reversed by simply repeating the command with the original value swapped in for the replacements below. In most cases you’ll have to restart the application you’re trying to tweak before you can see the command’s effect. If you don’t want to mess around with the terminal, I’m sure many of these commands will soon find their way into an updated version of Secrets, which is a GUI preference pane for configuring this type of behavior.

The roundup

• Animations. There are a lot of new animations in Lion. New windows will warp into existence from a single point on the screen; email replies will fold their way out of threaded conversations; and desktops will go swishing by as you move from space to space. There’s at least two of these you can put an end to right now if you want:
  • Disable Mail Reply animations: “defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool YES”
  • Disable New Window animations: “defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO”
• Character picker. If you’ve ever been frustrated by hunting around in the character viewer for accented characters like the “è” or the “ë” then you probably want to just leave this setting alone. If however, if you’d rather be able to hold down a key and just have it automatically repeat, like it used to, then this defaults write is for you.
  • Disable the character picker: “defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool NO”
• Window restore. Want to keep applications like Preview or QuickTime from restoring old windows that happened to be hanging around the last time you quit? Just switch out the name “Preview” in the command below to target other applications.
  • Disable window restore: “defaults write com.apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool NO”
• Bookmarks bar. You can get rid of both the Reading List icon and the Top Sites icon with this quick defaults write command:
  • Clean out icons from Safari’s bookmarks bar: “defaults write com.apple.Safari ProxiesInBookmarksBar ‘()’”
• Save sheet shortcuts. Lion changes around the default save sheet shortcuts for a little added safety. If you’ve got a lot of muscle memory devoted to “Command-D” as the shortcut for “Don’t Save,” you can bring it back if you want — though to be honest, with “D” and “S” being so close together, I prefer the new settings.
  • Revert save sheet shortcut: “defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSSavePanelStandardDesktopShortcutOnly -bool YES”
• iOS spell check pop-up. Part of the overall “iOS-ification” effort in Lion was to bring over those helpful but sometimes annoying little spell correction pop-ups you get as you type. The autocorrect can be enabled on a document by document basis with a right-click in “Spelling and Grammar,” but if you just want to kill it off altogether, you can.
  • Disable the iOS-style spell correct: “defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticSpellingCorrectionEnabled -bool NO”
• ~/Library reveal. This last one isn’t technically a defaults command, but it’s too good to leave out. By default in Lion, user libraries are hidden. You can still navigate to the user library by holding down the “option key” while in the Go menu in the Finder, but if you want to restore ~/Library back to it’s proper place, just crack open the terminal and enter in the command below.
  • Restore ~/Library visibility: “chflags nohidden ~/Library”

I’m sure more hidden commands will surface as folks begin to settle into the new OS. I grabbed as many as I could find floating around, but if you’ve got some additional ones you’d like to share, please do so in the comments.

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In order to change which apps can send you notifications, open your device’s Settings app, then tap Notifications. In here, you’ll find a list of all the apps you have installed which are able to send notifications, as well as a switch to turn off all notifications at once. However, I don’t recommend killing all notifications, since you’ll probably want important ones, such as those from to-do list apps to remind you of deadlines, to stil show up.

To edit what notifications a certain app will send, tap its name in the list. You’ll see up to three switches — Sounds, Alerts and Badges — depending on what options the app supports. From here you can choose how you’d like the app’s notifications to behave. Alerts is the option you’ll want to switch off if you’d like to stop the blue message boxes appearing. Badges determines whether an app should show a number badge (in a red circle) on its home screen icon. And sounds, as the name implies, controls whether or not you’ll get an auditory notice when a new notification arrives.

In my opinion, for an application which isn’t important, the best thing to do is turn off alerts and sounds, and just leave badges on. That way, you’ll still be able to tell which apps need your attention by glancing at their icons, but they won’t pester you with alert messages.

I much prefer the iOS experience without having to tap on a blue message box every three minutes. Adding the option to turn them off was a good decision on Apple’s part, and one that it pays to know how to use.

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There are two methods to chose which programs open which file extensions. This first method will change which program always opens the designated file, and the designated file ONLY:

1. Right click on the file and select “Open With > Other”



2. Select the program from the list that you always want that file to open with
3. Click the “Always Open With” checkbox



4. Click “Open”
5. Now whenever you double click on that file, it will always open with the program you specified.

This next method changes the program that opens all files with a matching file extension. For example, if all of your .jpg’s are opening in Photoshop and you want them to open with Preview you would use this method:

1. Right click on the file and select “Get info”



2. Go to the “Open With” section and expand it
3. Select the program you would like to open that file extension with from the drop down list
4. Click the “Change All” button



5. A pop up window will appear, if you’re sure you want to make the change click “Continue”



6. And you’re done! Now all of your files with that extension will open with the program you specified!

So I’ve gone over two different methods, with different purposes: the first method is used for single files, while the second is for all files with a certain extension. I hope this helps eliminate some future headaches for everyone!

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