Reading things on an iPhone when you’re lying down in bed can be a bit difficult; either your arms start to ache from holding it up in front of your face, or you try to lie on your side but the darn thing keeps rotating so you can’t read it properly.
I can’t fix your aching arms, but I do know how you can solve the rotation problem. Lie on your back, then decide which way to roll to be on your side. Then, rotate your iPhone into landscape mode, with the home button facing in the opposite direction. That is, if you’re rolling to the left, you want the home button on the right. The screen will not rotate when you roll because it ends up being upside down, which doesn’t make it rotate. Happy reading!
If you’ve been out and about with your iPhone near other people’s houses, you’ve probably noticed many Wi-Fi networks called BT Openzone. Openzone is a service that BT broadband users can sign up to which gives them free access to other BT routers and Openzone hotspots. The problem is, they’re all called BT Openzone, which means that if you log in to one of them on your iPhone, it’ll remember it and try to connect to them every time you’re nearby one. This makes your life difficult because they require a password to be typed into Safari, and this means you can’t use other apps that require the internet to work.
To be able to use your data network even while you’re near an Openzone hotspot, you’re going to have to disconnect from the network. This usually requires turning off Wi-Fi, which is a pain because then you have to turn it back on again later.
There is a way to solve this though. Next time you’re near an Openzone hotspot, load up the Settings app. Choose Wi-Fi, then tap the little blue circle next to the Openzone network. At the top, there is an option labelled ‘Auto Login’. Turn this off and voila! Your iPhone will never again automatically connect to an Openzone network again!
My iPhone made a new friend today. Well, I say friend, but in reality they aren’t very nice to each other. I was walking home from work, checking Facebook, and I shook the iPhone to refresh the Facebook app. And then I dropped it on the pavement. The iPhone fought back, but unfortunately has come out of it with a couple of bruises. It still works fine, and none of the glass parts of it were broken, cracked or even scratched, which is a relief. A couple of parts on the back got roughed up quite a bit though, and it looks and feels a bit hideous. I suppose I’ll have to save up for the ‘iPhone 4′ or something so I can have a shiny new one again.
Now, I’m not interested in getting an iPad. Not one tiny bit. But there are many, many, many people who are, and some of them live here in the UK.
The tech website Geeky Gadgets has posted a tip-off they received from an unknown source regarding the pricing of the iPad here in the UK. However, take these with a pinch (or bucket) of salt, because the Apple site still has the prices up in US Dollars.
Geeky Gadgets reports that here in the UK, the iPad will cost:
£389 for the 16GB Wi-Fi model
£439 for the 32GB Wi-Fi model
£489 for the 64GB Wi-Fi model
They don’t mention a price for any of the 3G models.
However, the source notes that the iPad may be released sometime in April rather than in March in the UK. The prices they have suggested also make it a tad more expensive than in the US – £389 is around $600 at today’s conversion rates. The 16GB model is $499 in the US.
We’ve all been using an iPhone application and thought to ourselves, “I wish that this app could…”. This article is here to help you ask the developers of those apps for what you want. (more…)
Dayta is a fresh new iPhone app, just released yesterday. The developer, Sahil Lavingia, markets it as being ‘one app to manage all your data tracking’. It was created for his One Week App project, where he created an app from scratch and submitted it to Apple within the space of a week. I’ve been playing around with the final release version and I have to say, it’s pretty slick.
When was the last time you thought to yourself, “I wish I could turn that photo I just took into a mosaic made from Lego!”? Probably never. But just in case you ever have the urge, now you can turn photos into Lego mosaics with the first official app from Lego. It’s called Lego Photo, and it’s free to download.
User Interface
When you open up the app, the UI is extremely simple; just two great big buttons, one with a camera icon and one that lets you open up your photo library and choose a photo. Obviously on an iPod touch there’s no camera, but you can still Lego-ify the photos you’ve added through iTunes. It’s also very simple to create a mosaic – either take a photo or choose one and it’ll automatically be changed. Once your mosaic has been made, you can just tap it to change the colour of the Lego used.
Results
In some cases, the results of the app are very good – the photo of the hand in the gallery, for example. The colours don’t come out matching the photo’s colours, but they’re not supposed to. As I mentioned before, you can change the colours used if you don’t like the random ones chosen at first. As you can see from the hand photo in the gallery, the app does a good job at picking out small details. However, sometimes this detriments the effect. In a complicated photo, such as the second photo in the gallery, the app can get a bit confused and colour things a bit randomly (That second photo is a house and garden, by the way). Once you have created your mosaic, you can save the result by tapping the ‘i’ icon, and then tapping Save at the bottom. This very quickly saves the mosaic to your camera roll, ready to send in an email, an MMS or however you choose.
Verdict
Even though sometimes the app doesn’t always give perfect results, and it doesn’t have an amazing feature set, but it is free, and so it can’t hurt to download it and give it a go.
Everyone has the same problem with headphones: they get tangled as soon as you stop using them. If you put them in your pocket, or a bag, or anywhere at all, they tangle around each other and when you want to use them again you have to spent five minutes straightening them back out. There are many so-called ’solutions’ to this, but almost all of them require wrapping your headphones tightly around something. This is a bad idea because it can damage the cable inside the wires, which means you’re going to have to buy a new pair.
But now, for iPhone 3GS users, there is a way to stop tangling 99% of the time with no tight wrapping or damage occurring. Olly Farshi, of The Apple Blog has prepared a video tutorial on how to do this:
Hopefully this will stop tangling and damage to our Apple-issue headphones. If I remember to do this each time, that is.
We all have heard all the warnings, and have been told again and again: Let the battery in your portable devices run a full cycle each time to avoid damaging it. Well, firstly, what does this mean? It means that you should charge the battery right up until it’s at 100% (or tells you it’s finished). Then you should use it normally, ignoring the life left in the battery. The final step is to, once the battery has completely depleted, charge it then and only then. This is easy on something such as a MacBook or Nintendo DS – the MacBook will go to sleep when its battery runs down, sending you a message to plug it in, and the DS will just run out of charge and turn off. But what about the iPhone? Yes, you can charge it up to 100% and then use it normally, but when do you decide to plug it back in? At the first warning at 20%? At the second, at 10%? Or do you just let it run down to zero and turn off? The battery warnings tell us to run it right down to zero. But this isn’t practical on an iPhone, or any other phone for that matter. It’s a phone, which means we need it on permanently, or close to it, so that we can be contacted. That is, after all the whole point. So if you let the battery die, you’ll be left with a useless brick of metal and plastic until you can get back to a USB cable and either a computer or a plug socket. So why not start charging it back up once you get the 10% or 20% warnings? Well, according to the ‘label’, that will eventually mangle the battery; “If you don’t let the battery run down completely, you might cause it to never run down past that point again, lowering the life of your battery forever”, they say. They also call that effect ‘battery memory’ or something like that. So does the iPhone battery have a ‘battery memory’? If you plug it in when it gets to 25%, will it only ever go back down to 25%? I don’t know. Maybe Apple have solved this problem somehow. get back to me in the comments below if you know. There’s also another problem with the iPhone. Because it syncs with iTunes rather than just plugging into the wall, there are many times when you want (or need) to sync it when the battery is only down to 50 or 60% – what about those times? Will the battery be obliterated within three weeks? Again, leave a comment if you know the answer.
So that’s about it for this rant on batteries. As you may be able to see, since my last post the blog has gone through a bit of decoration. It’s not quite finished yet, B&Q ran out of the paint I need.
Well, for the first time in the seven months I’ve had my iPod Touch (2nd Generation), it has just had a major crash incident. And by that, I mean that it wouldn’t do anything at all – except charge. I was playing an innocent game of Wild West Pinball, and it suddenly turned off. I thought nothing of it, because it was running low on battery, and I assumed it had just run out. So I fired up the MacBook, and plugged in the iPod. Nothing. All it did was start charging (don’t you just love that little noise it makes when you plug it in?) and showed the dreaded Connect to iTunes screen. The next step in the Plan Of Action was to restore the device from a backup, but when I tried to connect to it in iTunes, it said that it was locked with a passcode – obviously I couldn’t enter the code because the Connect to iTunes screen was there. So I turned it off and on a couple of times, used a different USB cable and even tried a different MacBook, but nothing was working. In the end, I scoured the Internet for a solution. I ended up on some forum or other, which told me that I should put the iPod into DFU mode*. I tried it out, and sure enough, there was my iPod right there in iTunes! I hastily clicked the Restore button so that I could start using it again. The OS had been completely wiped and so I’m currently re-downloading the next version it would allow me to install, 2.2.1 – I don’t have a backup of 3.0 on the MacBook because I usually sync with the iMac. At the moment, the iPod won’t turn on – it doesn’t have an OS, after all – but at least I can see it in iTunes! The downside to restoring it on the laptop is I don’t have all the applications downloaded onto the hard drive, so I’m going to have to get them again from the iPod. I’m also going to have to wait until it has synced all my 260 songs back onto the iPod before I can use it properly again. At least it works, though! Problem solved!
*How to use DFU mode:
Connect your iPod Touch/iPhone to your computer using a USB cable.
Hold the Sleep/Wake and Home buttons together for about 10 seconds.
Release the Sleep/Wake button but continue holding the Home button.
Well, for the first time in the seven months I’ve had my iPod Touch (2nd Generation), it has just had a major crash incident. And by that, I mean that it wouldn’t do anything at all – except charge. I was playing an innocent game of