Posts Tagged ‘iPhone’

Quick Tip: Reading in Bed

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

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!

Quick Tip: Pesky Wi-Fi Networks

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

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!

iPhone, Concrete. Concrete, iPhone.

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

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.



How To: Request iPhone App Features

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

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.
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Review: Dayta

Friday, February 19th, 2010

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.

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Quick Tip: MAMP

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

If you’re using MAMP to design or edit a website offline, on your Mac, then I have a tip for you. If you know (or suspect) that there are people out there who will view your site on an iPhone or iPod touch, you’re going to want to know what they’ll see when they load your page. Because you can’t open the localhost site on anything other than the Mac, you won’t be able to use a real iPhone. But there is a way! If you haven’t already, download XCode from Apple, which is free and comes with the iPhone Simulator. Fire up the Simulator and launch fake Mobile Safari. Then type the address of your offline site into the address bar, and lo and behold, there’s the site you’re working on, as if you were using an iPhone!

iPhone Simulator Web View

If you’re wondering how this works, I’m not sure, but I think it’s something to do with the Simulator being able to access everything on your computer, including the internet type things. Don’t hold me to that, though.

Review: Lego Photo

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

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.

App store link: Lego Photo (free)

Untangle Those Headphones

Monday, October 12th, 2009

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.

[Via The Apple Blog]

MCSMS: Revamped, and Re-Resolution-ed

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

It’s been exactly two months I’ve kept you all waiting for this moment, but it’s finally here: MCSMS Episode 23 has been released! In case you’ve forgotten, access it by adding the episode number (23) onto the end of http://bit.ly/mcsms – so in the rare event you want to share a link with a friend, shove http://bit.ly/mcsms23 in their inbox/message window/throat.
But what’s this? Where is that endearing title sequence with the strange child sitting on a chair and waving? It’s gone, as of this episode. It’s one of the reasons this episode took so long – I’ve revamped the style of MCSMS and created new titles and credits. I hope you like them, but feel free to mouth off in the comments if you hate them!
And finally, you’ll notice a tiny little button in the bottom right of the YouTube player. It’s a rectangle with two letters in it… ‘H’ and ‘D’… Does this mean..? Yes, it does; MCSMS is actually in real High Definition for the first time ever! Just ignore the fact that it’s really blotchy and the image is noisy… I’ll sort that out next time… However, I have one more thing to bore you with: There’s also a new shortcut, if you want to access the HD version directly. Just take your bit.ly URL, then stick ‘hd’ on the end. So this one would be http://bit.ly/mcsms23hd – got that? Only episodes 23 and onwards will have HD, so don’t go trying it with the others!
I’ve been mean and not given you the links… Here you are:
Regular Resolution version
HD version
Happy viewing!

iPhones and Batteries and Other Things Like That

Saturday, September 12th, 2009

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.