I just upgraded my iPhone 3GS to iOS 5, and played around looking for improvements.

Exploring the assistive touch panel, I found the 'rotate screen' options work also when portrait orientation is locked. Effectively, we can select any of the 4 possible orientations, and it will stay locked while moving and rotating the device. Switching apps will cause a reset to default portrait orientation.

While a bit complicated to reach, this will still be useful. I'm hoping for a shortcut or dedicated way to activate, like quad-clicking the Home button to rotate right, for example. I like the triple-click to activate white-on-black, for a basic night mode.

All of these and more options are available under Settings » General » Accessibility and enabling 'AssistiveTouch.'

[crarko adds: There are indeed a lot of useful settings in there. Explore them. It looked slightly different on the iPad, and the 3GS may have different settings ...

I've always wondered how to delete music off of an iOS device running 5.0.x, which can be a pain what with iCloud downloading music to your iOS device, and then adding the same song a second time when syncing with iTunes.

When in the Music app on the iOS device just swipe like you would for deleting basically anything on an iOS device and you'll get the option to delete the song. If you have a bunch of songs you want to delete this will take some time to to but at least now you wouldn't have duplicates thanks to the new features of iCloud downloading the song and then iTunes syncing another copy of the song on the same device.

[crarko adds: The standard method for deleting line items in iOS comes to music.]

I have (somewhat reluctantly) configured my iPhone to receive my work email. This account uses Exchange (Active Sync). But when I'm home on the weekends or away on vacation I really, REALLY do not want to have my work email in my face.

The solution? Go into the iPhone's Settings » Mail, Contacts, Calendars » [Email Account] And turn 'Mail' Off. All of that account's email mailboxes disappear from my iPhone, never to alert me of what I have coming to me on Monday morning. But when I turn it back on, it's all right there - right where I left off. Very handy.

The same can be done for Calendars. I have not tested it with Contacts, but that may work, too.

[crarko adds: This works with any system where the primary data repository resides on the server; Exchange, IMAP, CalDAV. Just be patient while the app resynchronizes the data. I've use this as a troubleshooting technique, but this hint is also a clever idea.]

I've recently written a blog post on using S/MIME with iOS devices. I've found that settings things up isn't entirely straight-forward so I've documented what I needed to do to make it work.

The article explains how to set up your iPhone or iPad to send and receive encrypted emails via S/MIME. The prerequisite is an S/MIME certificate from a certificate authority. Some CAs provide them free for personal use. The procedure is not very complicated even though the description may look lengthy due to the many screenshots. The biggest hurdle is to pick the correct file format when exporting your S/MIME key on your Mac.

The key is to export the certificate in Personal Information Exchange (.p12) format. These can then be imported to iOS.

Outline of the set-up for receiving encrypted e ...

Maybe everybody already knows this, but I missed it in all the new features of iOS 5. The iPad mail app adds a new gesture to show and hide the message list window when in portrait orientation.

I always use my iPad's Mail app in landscape mode because I get to see my message list in addition to the message detail. And for some reason, I find it tedious to push the mailbox button at the top left of the screen to see the message list. iOS 5 added the ability to swipe right anywhere on the message window to pop up the message list and to swipe left to hide it again. Nice! Not having to move my finger six inches has somehow made portrait mode much more bearable for me.

[crarko adds: Well, I didn't know it either, so here's the hint. I also was a landscape mode only iPad mail user.]

As you know, there are plenty of tools to keep track of shipments that are shipped with UPS. There is an app called Delivery Status which even recognizes an UPS shipment by just copy and pasting the tracking number into the app.

I just noticed that iOS seems to recognize the shipment all by itself.

In iOS Mail (iOS 5.0.1) every number is highlighted to be called as a possible phone number. But in this case the number was my UPS tracking code. Upon tapping the number I got the options to either copy it or track it.

By tapping tracking it opens an ups site with the tracking number already applied to the script so that you can see the status of your shipment. Ergo no need to copy and paste an UPS tracking code to any other program or the UPS site itself.

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. As mentioned in this previous hint this was a new feature i ...

If you're looking for an easy way to sort your iOS device screenshots in iPhoto, here's a few handy smart album configurations that may help.

For documentation at work I take numerous screenshots of the different iOS apps we use.

In an attempt to organize these screenshots easily in iPhoto, I came across these two Smart Album configurations that might be helpful to others.

For iPad match all of the following conditions:

• Aperture is Unknown
• ISO is Unknown
• Filename starts with IMG_
• Filename contains PNG
• Any Text contains 1024

The last step filters out the iPad screenshots from other iOS device screenshots (iPhone, iPod Touch).

For iPhone (or iPod Touch) match all of the following conditions:

• Aperture is Unknown
• ISO is Unknown ...

On a French system, one cannot edit Game Center settings (country, emails, and more importantly, confidentiality -- if your profile is public, you can't switch it to private).

Steps to Reproduce:

• Setup iOS in French.
• Go to Game Center.
• Touch the mail address (it has to be already configured).
• Choose to view the account.
• Try using one of the following actions:
  • change email address
  • confidentiality
  • country

Additional note : there is no Save button on the upper right corner.

Workaround :

A solution to perform changes is to switch the system to English and when done, switch it back to French.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one. I presume this affects other non-English language localizations as well, and they would use the same workaround, until Apple improves on international support for Game Center.]