IPhone news, updates and Iphone information

Archive for the ‘iPhone Tips’ Category

I do a lot of podcast listening and I hate the long sync times in iTunes to get the freshest content on my iPhone. As a result, I do most of my podcast downloading directly on my iPhone. When you have old episodes in your Podcast section, you can touch the Get More Episodes button to get thrown to the iTunes app and download a new one.

But if you always delete shows when you're done (to save precious space), the quick link is gone -- instead, you have to type the relevant podcast name into the iTunes app's Search bar. What a pain! So here's a way to make podcast links list in Mobile Safari that toss you right to the show's page in iTunes:

1. Go to iTunes on your Mac/PC, look up the podcast you want to bookmark in the store.
2. Right next to the Subscribe button is a down arrow; click that and choose Copy Link.
3. Paste this link into an email addressed to the account you access on your iPhone (or any other method for getting text snippets from your compute...

For you iPhone/iPad/iPod touch developers out there, did you know you can change the name of the carrier that appears in the iPhone Simulator? The default carrier name is Carrier, but you can change this to a custom name of your choice.

In Terminal.app, run this command, replacing your_user with your user's short username: [robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]

I checked a ton of forums and none of them had this hint -- only the same questions over and over. I hope I'm not embarrassing myself by stating the obvious. If it hasn't been noticed before, I guess I stumbled across the fix.

Open your iPhone's Safari browser and log in to your Hotmail account. Then, all you have to do is tap the Bookmark button. A screen will come up asking what you would like to do. Simply select Add to Home Screen. You should now see a Hotmail icon up on your home screen, just like an app; it even has its own App icon.

When you select the 'app,' your Hotmail will open up in Safari, automatically refreshing. It will live update, and maintain your folders, including folders you've created.

[robg adds: Microsoft offers this document, which explains how to set up Hotmail as a POP3 client on the iPhone. However, there a...

If you're like me and have no use for the Stocks application, I'm sure you've wished of a method to remove it so it doesn't take up home screen real estate. A few months back, I searched for a method but I found none that suited my needs. I wanted something that would not require a jailbreak, and I wanted the change to be permanent. I remembered that disabling an application through the Restrictions panel removes it from the home screen, so I figured adding Stocks to the list of restricted apps should have the same result.

Note that this hint requires connecting your iPhone to a Windows machine, either directly or through a virtualization application such as Fusion or Parallels. This could be done lots of ways, but I'll describe a couple. Keep in mind this is an iPhone hint more than a Mac hint, so unfortuanely it requires some Windos-only software. Unfortunately, I've found no comparable Mac version -- if anyo...

Let me preface this hint by explaining the use for the Navigon Connect Bookmarklet on my iPhone. I understand that there are apps out there that already connect to Navigon's MobileNavigator; this is just another option if you find yourself on Google Map's site in Mobile Safari and want to quickly open MobileNavigator with the destination you found on Google. With that said, lets get to business...

1. Drag this bookmark to your Bookmark Bar in Safari and sync your bookmarks to your iPhone through iTunes: Navigon Connect
2. On the iPhone, find a destination on maps.google.com in Mobile Safari.
3. Select the Navigon Connect Bookmark from Mobile Safari.

That's it; MobileNavigator will then open with the Longit...

On jailbroken iPhones where sbsettings is installed (nearly all of them) and the 'autolock' toggle is also installed, there is a chance of getting permanently stuck in a lock screen loop. When you slide to unlock the iPhone, it unlocks for a 10th of a second, then locks again.

The problem is that this unlock-lock loop stays through a restore. Try as you might: DFU mode, restarting, restoring from backup, etc., all will end with an iPhone in the same loop. This problem is caused by a bug in sbsettings' autolock toggle.

This is how I fixed mine when it happened to my phone last night... Now when I mean "fixed," I mean getting all my photos, SMS, calendars, contacts, app settings, call log, etc. back, but the phone is left unjailbroken. Since we have to do a restore through iTunes, the phone will be unjailbroken when finished. A re-jailbreak is necessary from the get-go.

1. Plug in your locked iPhone and manually force a backup (command-click on its icon in iTu...

This AppleScript will add the current track you are playing to a play list (currently named street) on your iPhone (or iPod). It will also make a backup of this added track to a playlist on the iTunes local playlists (also named street). The script also checks first if a song exists on the playlist, so as to not duplicate any tracks.

The latest version of the iPhone OS allows you to have 11 pages of 16 icons, plus the four permanent icons at the bottom of the screen, for a total of 180 apps. You can actually have more than 180, though only 180 icons will be visible.

To get to the invisible apps, just do a search (press Home from the home screen), and type part of the non-visible app's name. I don't know how many of these invisible apps you can have, as I have not tried more than three so far.

[robg adds: As far as I know, the limit is simply based on the available space on your device. Long before that point, though, you may run into a limit with your ability to remember the names of all the invisible apps.]

I used to have a mobile phone which I synced all the time with iSync, where there was an option to only sync contacts with phone numbers. After getting an iPhone, I noticed this didn't exist. So why not use a Smart Group to do the job? Because they don't sync with the iPhone. But I also wanted everyone's emails and other details.

So I wrote up an AppleSript that updates a regular Address Book group with only people who have phone numbers. This worked great, then after a while, I wanted some numbers to not show up (people you want to keep in your phone but will never call, or whose name you don't want to see every time you scroll down your list). I created a group called Not Phone, and modified my script so that they are removed from the Phone group.

This script will create the groups for you. Warning: if you have a group called Phone already in existence, I suggest renaming the group (or changing the group name that the script uses...

If you want to save a photo from the Flickr iPhone app as your wallpaper image, here's an easy way to do it. Find the photo you'd like to use in Flickr, tap it to view it on a black background, and then use the iPhone's screen shot feature (hold down Home, then tap the top button) to save the photo to your photo library.

Finally, open the Photo app, find your saved image, tap it, and set it as your wallpaper.

[robg adds: You can use this same method to easily convert any photo in any other app to wallpaper, as long as you can display it such that it takes up the entire screen.]]