Spotlight Exclusions Make Your Phone More People-Friendly
As the iOS and devices that run it become more PC-like, so will the options that the iOS offers. The best example in iOS 4 is the ability to control what the Spotlight search feature is allowed to search:
You now have the ability to exclude contacts or emails among other things from appearing in your search results. This is an important feature if you let other people use your phone from time to time and don’t want something sensitive accidentally popping up when your friend searches for something innocent like snowballs on your phone.
The updated Spotlight search also lets you change the order of search results. If you’d like emails to appear above SMSes you can easily do that, just drag the icon to the right of the item you’d like to prioritize up or down in the list.
Another Password to Remember: Simple and Complex Passcodes Now Supported
Security is further improved by now allowing both simple and complex passcodes. The former is just a four digit number while a complex passcode can by any combination of letters, numbers and symbols. You can still configure the iOS to automatically erase everything on the phone after 10 failed passcode attempts.
SMS
SMSes are now fully indexed and searchable either in the SMS app itself or using Spotlight to the left of the home screen. This is super useful but also quite dangerous, thankfully Apple included the option to exclude SMS from your Spotlight search results so you don’t have to worry about any racy text messages appearing if someone uses Spotlight on your phone.
You can now enable a SMS character count if you send messages to friends on other carriers that don’t properly handle AT&T’s auto-split messages. The option is in the Messages control panel and the character count appears near the Send button the moment your SMS goes beyond a single line.
Two Wallpaper Options: Lock and Home Screen
Like the iPad you can now set background wallpaper for both your lock and home screens. While browsing your own photos you can now opt to set each photo as either or both backgrounds.
Calendar Options
Apple is a global company and as such it now offers multiple calendar options. You can choose from Gregorian (default), Japanese, Buddhist or Republic of China calendars.
Large Font Support
There’s now font size control for contacts, mail, messages and notes, whereas in iOS3 you could only specify minimum font size for email messages:
Location Services
Location services (access to the hardware GPS receiver) can be turned on/off on a per app basis. And apps that have used the GPS in the past 24 hours are marked with an icon in the Location Services settings panel. This is one area where Apple’s complete control over the app store is actually welcome, otherwise who knows what sort of viruses might exploit this panel. At least viruses today don’t know where you’re physically located at all times.
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