The iPhone is sensor-ific. It can sense if it’s turned sideways, held up close to your face, and whether or not you are in a dark room or out in the sunlight. This week’s Tip o’ the Week is a simple way to exploit one of the sensors on your iPhone to save you some steps and power at the same time. Curious? Read on for the Tip!
Once I finally trained myself to no longer reflexively reach for a stylus on my iPhone, it truly hit me that the world was at my fingertips (warning: pun alert). Flipping through photo albums with the flick of my finger just doesn’t get old. Pinching text and photos to fit on the screen or expanding the same with my thumb and index finger was intuitive from the time my iPhone came out of the box.
I like the little things, like tapping the very top of the screen to return to the top of a web page after scrolling down for miles. Conversely, it would be nice to have a similar mechanism for instantly jumping to the bottom, eh?
Read on for more Tapping, Scrolling,
Well known consumer-friendly site, the appropriately named Consumerist, brings the confessions of an anonymous Apple Specialist. While these cover everything Apple sells, from Macs to iPods, they certainly apply to the iPhone.
Top tips? If you can’t reset or restore your iPod (or iPhone!), it’s done. AppleCare extends your warranty, that’s it. .Mac and ProCare may not be worth the cash, but One-to-One is a deal. If your item (and iPhone?) is outside the return date, Apple may take it back if it’s still sealed, maybe even if it’s not. No insider info on unreleased product. And the email survey is your one way ticket to managerial ear-time.
Of course, your mileage, and your individual Apple Store, may vary, so buyer still beware.
I remember well the days of yore when I had a whopping 5 channels to choose from for my viewing pleasure. Now before you start doing some quick math and send me Geritol for my birthday, I was just a wee lad then. Although I didn’t have much in the way of choices, I made sure to never miss an episode of “The Six Million Dollar Man”, re-runs of “Star Trek”, and a generous helping of “Sesame Street” and “Electric Company”. I also had to (gasp!) actually GET UP off the couch, WALK to the t.v., and MANUALLY change the channel! Ahhhh, those were the days.
Times have certainly changed. The average home now has about 114 channels to choose from. I switched to DirectTV recently and I get lost in the maze of menus and virtual cornucopia of channels and programming to choose from. You may be wondering what all of this may have to do with your iPhone. HARK! There is a handy AOL site designed just for the iPhone that can help you navigate the ever-expanding universe of televised entertainment!
Your iPhone does a better job displaying album and and sorting through all your music than any other device on the planet, past and present. However all that sweet, sweet music on that sweet, sweet interface doesn’t do you much good if you don’t know what exactly it is you’re looking for. We’ve all had it happen: a friend makes us a mix CD and iTunes can’t figure out what’s what. Which “Track 2″ was that again? Hassle.
iTunes can auto-grab album art, but it can’t do it unless it knows which album to grab. Enter in some automated solutions for tagging your music with the proper song, artist, and album names. These little add-ons “listen” to tiny bits of each song and compare them to the MusicBrainz database, then are able to identify the song. Instead of manually punching in everything yourself, you can just have these little programs do all that tiresome work for you.
On the Mac, you’ll want to check out iEatBrainz [via TUAW], which was just re-released today in a Universal form. On the PC side of the world, my favorite app is still Picard.
Get iTunes Cleaning!
My favorite innovation on the Treo 700w was touchscreen photo speed dial. Instead of a list of names, you have a grid of faces you can tap to call. The iPhone, mysteriously, doesn’t take advantage of its gigantic and gorgeous screen to do the same. That’s a pity, too, because I can recognize the face of the person I want to call much more quickly than I can their name.
No More!
Step 1: Make a bunch of thumbnails of the faces of your favorite contacts. Upload them to a server (or Flickr, or wherever) and copy their image addresses.
Step 2: Go grab use the little hack here to add speed dial links to your home screen, but as the “Advanced” instructions suggest, paste the URL of your favorites’ face thumbnails (from step one) onto the end. (No Jailbreak required)
Step 3: Move all your cute photo speed dial faces onto their very own Home Screen page. Voila, you can now hit the home button, swipe over to your speed dial screen, and there are up to 16 faces per page you can dial by tapping.
(Thanks to rener for the inspiration!)
figure 1: for Windows PCs
Ever since the iPhone was announced, people have been clamoring to write native applications for it. Sadly, Apple has not yet released the tools necessary to develop those apps. However, if you’ve been following the iPhone news you realize that the iPhone has been “hacked.” What does this mean to you, the nonhacker? Well it means that thanks to the mighty efforts of many dedicated people, you can install applications directly onto your iPhone. The best part, it’s easy. Read on for our full How-To on how to hack your iPhone so you can install applications.
figure 1: for Macs
Ever since the iPhone was announced, people have been clamoring to write native applications for it. Sadly, Apple has not yet released the tools necessary to develop those apps. However, if you’ve been following the iPhone news you realize that the iPhone has been “hacked.” What does this mean to you, the nonhacker? Well it means that thanks to the mighty efforts of many dedicated people, you can install applications directly onto your iPhone. The best part, it’s easy. Read on for our full How To on how to hack your iPhone so you can install applications.
Read the rest of this entry »
After hours of active use, your iPhone’s screen will become filled with more greasy fingerprints and smudges than the front doors of your local McDonalds. How can you see through all that film? Wipe if off? No, be creative. Express your inner artist. Let your fingers inspire you. Rub your iPhone’s slippery glass surface in delicate strokes, forming shapes and contours. Create images and silhouettes from the deposited facial oil. Where others see a smudgy screen, I see the face of a clown.
Now spray Windex onto a sheet of paper towel, lightly dampened. Then clean your filthy screen, and get back to work. Stop wasting time.
  
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The iPhone Blog merged with the Phone different site in May of 2008. Both sites were founded on a premise that comes one from one of Apple's old slogans: Think different. The iPhone Blog: for people who dare to phone different.
