It’s helpful to know how to truly quit an app on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Some times apps stop working properly. When this occurs you can force the app to quit or close. In iOS version 4 and higher, here’s how to force an app to quit:

• Rapidly press the Home button twice in a row. The Home button is the round button on the lower part of the face of the iPhone.
• The multitasking bar appears at the bottom of the screen and shows you the most recently used apps. Tap and hold one of these app icons. (Note when the multtasking bar appears you can swipe from right to left to see more apps.)
• When the app icons start to jiggle tap the red and white icon that appears in the upper left corner of the app icon to force that app to close.
• Press the Home button again. Tap on the misbehaving app’s icon to open it and see if it now works properly.
• If your app continues to misbehave then I recommend restarting your device.

Apple has an article which describes this same process and will be updated more often than this web page if the process changes over time.

On a related note, a widely-held misconception is that the applications listed in the multitasking bar are using some of your device’s memory and processor, thus slowing it down. This isn’t exactly correct. Read this excellent article to learn more about iOS multitasking features and how non-active apps are handled.

Do you find the iPhone’s keyboard too small for typing? Do you want to record a conversation, interview or reminders for yourself? If so, use the iPhone’s Voice Memo app. It’s a great way to make recordings that can be transferred to your Mac or sent as email attachments.

The Voice Memo app is available to almost all iPhone owners. Apple added the Voice Memo app to the second version of the iPhone which they introduced in 2008, the iPhone 3G. The Voice Memo app is not as capable as Siri, the intelligent personal assistant who can find you information and lets you control your iPhone with voice commands, but Siri requires an iPhone 4S or newer.

Here are a few ways I use the Voice Memo app. Hopefully, you’ll be able to adapt these uses to your own situation and needs.

1. When I leave a client appointment, I’ll record the date, duration and description of the work I did for them while the information is fresh in my mind. I can later transcribe this recording to enter the information into my billing system or send the memo as an email attachment to another person who can do the transcription instead.

2. When I meet with a client, I might record all or part of our conversation as we discuss a project and put together a game plan. This is especially useful if we’re walking around an office when writing notes is not easily done.

3. I’ll record short reminders about what I need to do, then email the recording to myself. This can be much faster than trying to type out this information. Of course, a recording could be emailed to anybody. I could record an email reply to a client and then send it to them.

Here are some quick instructions on how to use Voice Memos:

• Click on the Voice Memo icon to open it.

• Click the red dot in the lower left corner to start a recording. While recording, the iPhone displays the word “Recording,” followed by a timer, at the top of the screen.

• You can press the same button in the lower left corner to pause the recording. The status message then reads “Recording Paused” followed by the timer, as depicted in the photo to the right.

• To stop the recording press the round button in the lower right corner of the screen. The iPhone will then immediately take you to a screen which lists all of your recordings. Your newest recording will appear at the top of the list and the iPhone will start to play it back to you.

• To share the recording with others, press the Share button in the lower-left corner. Then choose Email or Message to send it as an attachment to either an email message or SMS text message.

When you sync your iPhone to your Mac, your voice recordings will be transferred to your Mac. They’ll appear in an iTunes Playlist named Voice Memos.

I hope this article has helped you to think of some ways you could benefit from using the Voice Memo app. Next week’s article will be the next installment in our series about setting email and web hosting for small businesses.

Do you have a lot of apps on your iPhone? Do you find it difficult to locate the one you need? By grouping related apps into folders you can find your apps more easily. By setting up folders you can reduce the number of screens that you have to flip through to locate your apps. For example, the iPhone can typically display 36 apps on two screens. I have 90 apps on my iPhone, and they fill less than 2 screens.

You might want to create a folder to store apps that you rarely use. Apple doesn’t allow you to remove the core apps they install on the phone. It’s likely that you don’t use all of these apps, so you could create a folder to store these apps together.

Here are instructions on how to create folders on your iPhone or iPad:

Tap and hold the icon of any one app on your device. After a couple of seconds all of the icons on your iPhone or iPad will start to jiggle side-to-side.

Tap and drag the icon of one app on top of the icon of a second, related app, then release the first app’s icon. (You need to have just the right touch. Otherwise, your iPhone or iPad will think that you’re just re-arranging your apps and it’ll just move the second app to the left or right.)

This first app’s icon will fall onto the second app’s icon and a folder will automatically be created. In the image below you can see that I’ve dragged the KOMO News app onto the SeattleCrime app. My iPhone automatically created a folder and proposed a folder name of News. I can either accept this name or tap on the name to edit it.

That’s it! You’ve created a folder. Press the Home button on the lower section of the iPhone’s face to stop the icon jiggling and indicate that you’re done organizing apps into folders.

You’ll now see the folder icon, which is a square with teeny-tiny icons of the apps that it contains inside the square. The image to the right shows the many folders that I’ve created on my iPhone.

It’s useful to know that a folder can hold a maximum of 12 apps. A folder can not be put inside of another folder.

Chances are good that you’ll want to add many apps to a given folder or create many folders all at once. If this is the case, after you’ve dragged one app icon onto another to create the folder, you can simply tap anywhere outside the folder to return to viewing all of your apps. At this point, you can then drag additional apps into the folder you created. You could also drag another app on top of yet another app to create a second folder. You get the idea.

At some point, you’ll want to remove an app from a folder. Guess how you do it? You tap on the folder’s icon, it opens, then tap and hold on any of the app icons to get them to jiggle. Then, simply drag the app’s icon out of the folder. You’ll see an animation of the app icon jumping out of the folder and back onto the iPhone’s main screen. When you remove the last app from a folder, the folder automatically deletes itself.

I’m surprised how often I’m asked how to remove an app from an iPhone or iPad. Consequently, I decided to write this short tech tip since there are, no doubt, many other people out there wondering the same thing.

There are numerous ways to remove an app, but here’s one simple method:

Tap and hold on the icon of the app that you want to remove. After a couple of seconds all the icons on your iPhone or iPad will start to jiggle side-to-side.

Tap the X that appears in the upper-left corner of the app. The X is a delete button. It will remove the app from your iPhone or iPad.

For example, let’s imagine that I want to remove the app named Navigon from my iPhone. I would press my finger on the Navigon app (see picture below) icon and hold it there. After a second or so, all icons on my iPhone start to jiggle. I can then tap the X button to remove Navigon.

Note: This technique only works for third-party apps that you’ve added to your iPhone or iPad. Apple doesn’t let you remove the core set of apps that come with the iPhone or iPad. If there are some Apple-provided apps which you don’t use often, the best you can do is to put these apps into a folder. What? You don’t know how to create a folder for your apps? I guess that’ll be next week’s Tech Tip.

Update: A reader asked how to remove an iPhone or iPad app when it’s listed in iTunes on your Mac. Here are two methods. The first method is remove the app from your iPhone or iPad as described above. Then, sync your iPhone or iPad to your Mac by connecting the USB sync cable to connect the two devices. As long as app synching is enabled the app will be removed from your Mac since you deleted it from the iPhone or iPad.

If this first method doesn’t work, here’s another option. Open iTunes, on the left-hand list click on Apps. Select the app you want to delete by clicking on it. Go to the Edit menu and select Delete. Click the “Move to Trash” button to fully remove the app from your Mac.