IPhone news, updates and Iphone information

Archive for November, 2007

According to some posts on tuaw.com (here and here), it's now (once again) easy to add your own 30 to 40 second (maximum) ringtones to the iPhone.

Just trim down a song or sound (using iTunes, GarageBand, Audacity, etc.), save an AAC-encoded version, change the .m4a suffix to .m4r, and drag the file into the Ringtones folder of the iTunes library (you may have to delete the original .m4a file from the library if it's already in iTunes).

Y ou can add songs longer than 40 or so seconds to the iTunes ringtone section of the library, but they won't sync to the iPhone or show up in ringtones tab of the iPhone sync page in iTunes.

I'm not sure how long this has been around; I'm expecting since 1.1.2 released. If your iPhone locks (sleeps) when it's inside of any application, you can quickly return to the home screen without extra button pushes:

1. Lock your phone while in an app, like the iPod.
2. Press the Home button to wake it.
3. Immediately swipe to unlock. Speed is key; usually the swipe has to be started before the screen lights up.
4. When the iPhone unlocks, the iPhone returns to Home screen instead of the iPod. (Some apps seem to be tougher to do this with than others.)

This doesn't happen when the phone is awakened with the Lock button, and it's clear that the application isn't crashing, because you can occasionally grab glimpses of the retreating application's animation and the Home screen's animation.

A quick poll of my two iPhone-owning coworkers think it's a bug, but it's a slightly useful one.

I use a another provider for international calls from my mobile: OneTel (although, this hint should work great with others). This service allows me to dial a local number, then, when prompted, enter the international number I wish to connect to and it connects me as usual. This works fine on the iPhone, in that I can use this plan as described. But my previous mobiles allowed me to set-up 'calling cards' which, when turned on, allowed me to dial the international number directly. The phone would then intercept this and dial the local number for me, then enter my destination number. This is, to me, indispensable on a mobile phone, because without it, you have to either memorize the destination number (or write it down again) so you can enter it after the prompt -- a cumbersome task while you're on the go.

Until Apple starts to more properly support calling cards, I improvised by writing an AppleScript which will create 'onetel' versions of the numbers I am interested in. I f...

If you, like me and others on the Apple discussion boards, find POP3 email on your iPhone touch and go at best (unread but unavailable messages anyone?), try this!

1. Register a new Gmail account, via the web.
2. In the Gmail account, go to Settings » accounts » Get mail from other accounts.
3. Add your POP3 account to Gmail, thus allowing it to regularly check your POP3 messages. Authorize as instructed. Ensure you set the option to leave messages on the server -- this means that your email program can still function as previously, getting all messages from POP3 directly.
4. Set up the Gmail account on the iPhone as an IMAP server, but when you enter your email address, use your POP3 address instead!

The above allows you to shadow your POP3 email account via the much more reliable IMAP service, without affecting or moving the messages from your POP3 email, which will still be available to your Mac/PC when you n...

iPhone syncing is tied to the other kinds of synchronizations your Mac may undertake -- like .Mac syncing. If a conflict occurs with the .Mac sync, the "conflict resolver" window will appear, usually accompanied by an orange icon. If you've got your dock hidden, you might not notice that the resolver has activated, since the window doesn't appear in the foreground. As long as that window is open, however, your iPhone sync will appear to hang.

This happened to me this morning, when I plugged my iPhone in. An automatic .Mac sync during the night had found a conflict, and having not noticed it, did a full reset -- which also failed -- of the iPhone before realizing what had happened. Resolve the overall sync issue, or dismiss the resolver window, and iPhone sync will continue normally.

There are two places I can think of that use "dots" to denote unseen pages or screens on the iPhone: in the Weather widget and in Safari's "pages" mode.

In the Weather widget, you can use horizontal area of the screen where the dots are as an alternative navigation method. While you 'swipe' the panels to move them out of the way, you can swipe the opposite direction in the dots area, swiping 'to' the direction you want to go. Alternately, you can also just tap to the left or right of the dots to move the weather panels in that direction.

I thought that same method might remain consistent in Safari, but it does not. However, in trying to get it to work, I did discover that instead of swiping from one page to another in Safari, tapping on the edge of the screen where you see the edges of other web pages will also allow you to move from one page to another.

Since Leopard's Mail.app keeps notes associated with a mailbox, if you associate your Notes to your Gmail IMAP account, the Notes folder will then show up in your Folders on the iPhone.

It's not Notes in the Notes.app, but it gets your Mail.app Notes onto the iPhone where they might be of some use.

Apple has started pushing out the v1.1.2 firmware to existing iPhone users. The obvious changes bring better support for international users in preparation for the European release in just a few hours. There is also an update to the radio firmware. This may also be targeted at international users, but it might also bring fixes [...]
Copyright © 2007 -- This post was imported from the feed for iPhone Unlocked
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