Tips: February 2008 Archives
Author: Philip L. Graitcer
The January 2008 iPhone software revision added new map features, that give your iPhone almost the same capability as Mapquest on the Web or the $800 GPS system in your car. Like most new features on the iPhone, how to use them is not well documented. Here are some tips to get you started mapping.Current Location
In maps, you are now able to map your current location.
The smaller the circle, the more accurate the location. iPhone uses triangulation from nearby cell phone towers to determine location. It's not a true satellite GPS system, but depending on how many towers are nearby, it can be fairly accurate.
Drop Pin
On the lower right side of the map screen is an "eye" icon. Touching that will reveal a screen with several options, one of which is "Drop Pin".
Real Time Traffic
On the page revealed by the "eye" icon, there is an option to color code the map with real time traffic information on major highways.
Map Options
iPhone can show a flat map, a satellite image or a hybrid picture of both satellite and map. You can also list driving directions.
Getting Directions
iPhone can help give you driving or walking directions, much like you can get from Google Maps or Mapquest or from your automobile's GPS system
o Touch Bookmarks - either your current location or any bookmarks you have saved. o Recents - a list of recent searches or directions; to chose one of these, touch one.
o Contacts - your contact list. Find a contact, then touch the contact's address. You'll go back to the keyboard screen.
Years ago, there was this song that would come on over the loudspeakers nearly every time I worked out at the gym. I still don't know its title, let alone the performer or what album it was on. How cool would it have been if all I needed to do was take out my cell phone and have it automatically identify the track name and artist for me?
Although technology that does this very thing has been available to some (see here and here) already, a new hack called Listen, developed by tuaw contributor Erica Sadun, promises bring song identification to the iPhone. Very much in beta, the software samples 5 seconds of music before trying to contact a song ID server remotely to come up with title, artist and album information. Comments on Sadun's Web site regarding Listen have been generally positive thus far. Click here to give it a try. 
(image from tuaw)
Keep in mind, you'll need to jailbreak your iPhone to run third-party applications before running this or other hacks. The iPhone won't be capable of officially supporting native applications—software that runs directly on the iPhone and not from a remote server in the smartphone's Safari Web browser—until after Apple releases a software development kit for developers next month.
Author: Damon Brown
In August, Apple started holding classes in its Apple Music Stores to help people operate the iPhone. As many of you know, the iPhone doesn't come with an instruction booklet. Instead, there is a little pamphlet (see top picture), twelve or so pages, with drawings like something from IKEA (see: finger rubbing on the phone). A National Public Radio program interviewed me about the phenomenon—Apple teaching classes instead of just including instructions like everyone else— but I was never able to attend the classes myself. It may have been for the best, the author of the first book on the iPhone sitting in.
In all honesty, even so-called experts are learning more about the iPhone every day. Apple updates the iTunes and/or iPhone software as often as twice a month, so the capabilities are literally evolving as they are learned. There is plenty little hidden goodness within the iPhone, inluding tips and tricks that are undocumented and often undiscovered.
Some of these you may already know. All of them are simple.
Silence is Golden
Like many cell devices, the iPhone has a silent/buzz function. Unlike other companies, Apple doesn't actually tell you about it. Take your iPhone and look on the left side. There is a small, all black switch above the volume buttons.
Flip the switch and a red dot will appear. The iPhone screen will show a bell with a line through it a la Ghostbusters. 
Now all calls will buzz, not ring. Flip the switch again and the screen will flash a regular bell, indicating that rings are normal now.
Battery Power
Another area that has not been discussed is battery power.
Some users err on the paranoid side, wary from all those short battery life concerns six months ago, and connect their iPhone to a nearby power outlet as soon as the "20 percent power" warning flashes. (I would be in this category.) The iPhone will warn you twice, at 20 percent and again at 10 percent. It will then shut down. No beep. It will cut off a phone call or any other activity immediately.
The phone will not function at all until it is charges for roughly 15 minutes. 
Press any button and a Mac-like set of icons will appear on the screen: the current battery power followed by a powerplug and an arrow pointing to a lightning bolt. Expect to see this screen for about an hour.
Call it poor design, but once the iPhone juice runs out, it requires a long time to power up again. (Connecting it to the computer doesn't help, either.) Consider investing in a car charger if you're planning a long road trip.
Music @Home
There is "Home", the square button located at the bottom of the iPhone's face. Its main purpose is to take you back to the default menu screen, but it can also make controlling your music easier.
Let's say you are listening to one of your favorite songs on the iPhone, for instance, James Brown's classic "Funky Drummer". Press the sleep button at the top of the iPhone to make the screen lock. 
It will say "slide to unlock" at the bottom, along with the current time and song. Now double tap the "Home" button. The music controls will appear immediately under the time (see just below).
Press rewind, fast-forward or pause as you would normally do, or use your finger to adjust the volume by sliding the silver ball along the blue line below. 
A similar "Home" technique can be used on the main menu screen. Press the "Home" button to get to the main screen. Now tap "Home" again. Music info will pop up, including performer, song and album, as well as the volume ball. Unlike the previous mode, you remove the information—by hitting the onscreen Close icon—or move to the actually iPod menu - by tapping the onscreen iPod button.
iPod Mode
A simple, often neglected music control is actually in the iPod mode. Press the iPod icon on the main menu, find a song and press play. The album art will appear as the music starts. (If it has no art, a grey music note will appear instead.) Now tap the center of the album art. A nice list of options will pop up at the top of the art.
The first icon is a loop. Press the loop once and the current playlist or album will repeat. The icon will turn blue. Tap it again and a small "1" will appear on the bottom-left corner of the loop. Now the current song will repeat.
In the middle is the current song number within the current album or playlist (4 out of 14, for instance). Above the song number is the song time elapsed, song time remaining and a silver-and-blue line identical to the other menus. However, the line here represents the song track. Move the ball with your finger to rewind or fast forward the song.
The last icon is two arrows twisted together. Tap it once to randomize the current album or playlist.
Last But Not least
As a final hidden goody, look in the upper-right hand corner when in iPod mode. You'll see a series of three lines.
Tap it.
The icon will "flip," turning into a miniature version of the current album art, and the large album art will turn into a list of the current album songs. (It will always list the current album, even if you are playing from a playlist.)
Click on another song to hear it.
The list icon is always available in iPod mode.
Although the most obvious thing (aside from bricking unlocked iPhones and causing 3rd-party apps to disappear) about firmware update 1.1.1 is the addition of iPod Touch-like access to the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store—after all, a bright purple iTunes icon is placed on the home screen—it is not the new feature you will likely use the most. That honor will probably go to the expanded responsibilities Apple has given the otherwise underused Home button—the only button on the iPhone.
All the Home did before the upgrade was take you back to the Home screen - the center of the iPhone universe - with a single tap from within any application. While it still does that, the Home button now has a second, context-sensitive purpose to take you to your favorite contacts or bring up iPod music controls.
Here's how it works:
When no music is playing on the iPhone, a double tap of the Home button brings up the Favorites menu within the smartphone’s phone application; all the better to make a quick phone call. 
Double Tap for Favorites
However, if you've got music playing, a double tap will bring up translucent iPod playback controls over whatever application you happen to be in. That is from within all except the iPhone's iPod software, which would be kind of redundant, right? From there, you’re taken to the Favorties menu just as the double tap does when no music is playing at all. 
Double Tap for Music Controls
The translucent music controls box tells the name of the track playing, the album it comes from, and the artist. You can also pause then restart audio playback, skip to the next or previous song, or bring up the full iPod application. Simply hit the Close button to exit out of the music controls and return to what you were doing before.
The Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) has come to Gmail. What this mean for smartphone and handheld users, especially iPhone owners, is a far smoother and easier to manage mob-e-mail experience. That's because IMAP synchronizes your inbox across all the devices you use, be it desktop or palmtop, instantly and automatically. So if you read or write an e-mail on your iPhone, for example, the changes you make in Gmail are reflected when you got to access messages on your desktop.
This is quite different from POP-based e-mail, which Gmail has always supported. With POP, you can pull messages down to a mobile device from a mail server, but the changes your make to your inbox on your smartphone, for instance, aren't automatically reflected when you go to access your e-mail somewhere else.
So the next time you access your inbox from your desktop, all the messages will stream in as unread or new (even if you've opened them already on your smartphone), making it difficult to differentiate between e-mail you've already read or managed and those messages that are really new.
Gmail, IMAP, & The iPhone
With the iPhone, you can access your Gmail account through the smartphone's Mail application or through afari at m.gmail.com.
Although accessing Gmail through the mobile Web site gives you the same Gmail features you get through a browser on your desktop, most iPhone users will want to use the smartphone’s native Mail application.
To do this, the first thing you do is enable IMAP in your Gmail account from your PC or Mac. Click here for directions on how to do that.
Next, on the iPhone, you need to setup a new mail account. You do this by tapping Other in Settings --> Mail --> Add Account. Although Gmail is represented in the list (along with Yahoo! Mail, .Mac, and AOL), do not tap it. Currently, this will only let you setup a POP account. This is a problem Google says it is working on.
After tapping Other, you need to fill out your account settings, making sure IMAP is highlighted. The Host Name is imap.gmail.com and your user name is your full Gmail address. The Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) Host Name is smtp.gmail.com. 
Click here for Google's detailed directions on how to setup IMAP-based Gmail on your iPhone.
1- A letter isn't entered until you lift your finger off a key. So if you touch a wrong key by accident when typing, simply slide your finger to the one you meant to type. Let go when the correct letter or symbol appears.
2-While Apple's auto-correction feature is useful, many iPhone users often find themselves accidentally accepting a suggested word when they didn't mean to. There are two things to keep in mind to prevent this from happening:
a) To accept a suggested word you either type a space, punctuation mark or hit return. 
b) To reject the keyboard's correction finish typing the word your want and then tap on the word itself. I know that's a little inconvenient, but it works. Do that twice and the iPhone adds the word to its dictionary.
If you want to start from scratch with the dictionary, say it has accepted and is now suggesting a number of wrongly spelled words, you can reset it. To do this go into settings from the home page, hit general, and tap reset. Once there, tap Reset Keyboard Dictionary. This will erase all the words you've added.
3) Its easy enough to capitalize a letter, right? Simply hit the up-arrow (Shift) key next to the letter Z before you tap a letter. But what if you want to capitalize a whole word?
a) To do that you must first go into Settings on the home page, hit General, and then Keyboard.
b) Turn Enable Caps Lock on.
Now when you double tap the Shift key before typing, all letters you then type will be uppercase. The Shift turns blue in this mode. A single tap will still only cause a single letter to be capitalized.
4) This is also where you can turn off Auto-Capitalization, which is on by default to capitalize the first word of every sentence, off.
5) The keyboard automatically appears when you go to enter text into a form on a Web page in the iPhone's Safari Web browsers. Conveniently, you can hit the blue Go or Search key, whichever appears depends on the type of form, when you're finished entering the text to submit what you've entered. 
Sometimes you may want to close the keyboard before submitting the information in the form. To do this, simply tap the Done key just above the keyboard on the upper-right hand side.
6) If you hold down the E, Y, U, I, O, A, S,L, Z, C, or N key for more than a couple of seconds, the keyboard will offer up anywhere from 2 to 9 additional characters for you to choose from. These additional characters mostly include these letters with various forms of accents. 
More keyboard Tips:
Click here to watch a video Apple has posted about the iPhone keyboard.
iPhoneDrive ($9.95), from Ecamm Network, allows you to use your iPhone for file storage, something you can't do with Apple's iPod/smartphone combo out-of-the-box, as there's no disk mode for iPhones like there is for iPods.
Launching iPhoneDrive brings up the utility’s browser window and toolbar. It is from there you can transfer files and folders back and forth between your Mac OS X computer and iPhone.
There are two ways to perform transfers to an iPhone: Drag and drop content from the Mac Desktop or a Finder window into the iPhoneDrive browser or click the "Copy To iPhone" button on the toolbar.
To do the reverse, you can either click the "Copy From iPhone" button on the toolbar to move highlighted files or folders to a location of your choosing on the computer; drag content directly from the iPhoneDrive browser window into a Finder window or onto the Desktop; or simply double-click a file to download it to your Documents folder. 
With iPhoneDrive, you can also create folders on and delete files or folders from your iPhone.
You can't view content you've transferred from your computer on the iPhone with iPhoneDrive, however, as the software is for storage purposes only.
When you use the iPhone with the smartphone's Safari Web browser, try typing in a Web address. You'll notice two keys appear on the alphabet side of the device's virtual keyboard – period ('.') and .com – that normally aren’t there.
What you'll find after using the keyboard for a little while is that the .com button isn't necessary when typing out a .com Web address a lot of the time. So if you want to go to http://www.pdastreet.com, for example, all you need to do is type pdastreet into the address bar and hit the blue Go button. You'll save yourself the time it takes to type a period and three letters (com).
If this tip turns out to apply to all .com sites, and it seems to work on all the sites I’ve tried it with, then perhaps Apple should consider changing the .com key to .net in the future.
Here’s another tip to keep in mind when surfing the Web through iPhone’s Safari browser: If you go to a site a lot, but normally wouldn't put it into your bookmarks, we highly recommend you bookmark it anyway. That's because Safari forms a list of bookmarked sites as you're typing a Web address just underneath the address bar.
The number of sites listed dwindles as you get closer to the site you want to go to. So, even before you finish typing the full site name, if the site is bookmarked, you should be able to more speedily select it from this list.
We recently offered up a couple of tips on how to make up somewhat for the lack of a period key in the alphabet side of the keyboard; it only sits on the numeric side of the keyboard. This puts a number of unnecessary steps between the end of a sentence and an ending period, for example. That is, until Apple, we hope, adds it to the alphabet side of the keyboard through an update.
The New York Times David Pogue has posted a tip to circumvent this problem:
The alphabet section will automatically reappear. 
Tuaw posted an alternative tip in response to Poque's.
As with the previous tip, this will also automatically bring up the alphabet section of the keyboard.
The folks of over at iPhone Atlas have posted a short FAQ to help guide those interested in upgrading from a 4GB or 8GB iPhone to the new 16GB announced today. In short, you can return an iPhone you've bought within the last 14 days for a full refund to purchase a 16GB model. It'll cost you $10 if they packaging been opened, however. You do not need to sign up for a new contract when switching iPhones. Simply pop out your SIM card from your old model, put it the new one, and activate it through iTunes to use with your current service agreement. Don't have the SIM? Simply activate the 16GB for use with your current your account with a new SIM card. In addition to the U.S., the new 16GB iPhone can be had in the UK for £329 and Germany for 499 Euros .
For the full FAQ, see here.
Author: Damon Brown
At Apple's biannual MacWorld Expo in San Francisco last month, big cheese Steve Jobs rattled off a number of new innovations, such the MacBook Air and a deal to allow movie rentals directly onto desktop, iPod or iPhone. The most important announcement to us, however, is a cool iPhone update, the first significant one in a few months. In this post, author Damon Brown describes and explains how to use some of the iPhone's new features.
iPhone’s Faux GPS System
First off, Apple has managed to patch up a feature originally rumored to be in the iPhone: a GPS system. However, it's still a virtual global positioning system (GPS)—a real one at this point would probably require a change in your actual iPhone hardware.
The iPhone uses a technique called triangulation, which essentially measures your distance from different cell towers rather than GPS satellites to determine your approximate location.
Go to the Maps section and press the Directions button. In the "From:" section, instead of typing in your current address, press the little Bookmark icon to the right (the one that looks like an open book). At the top of your bookmarks will be "Current Location". Click on it to return to the map screen, then type in the desired location in the "To:" area as you normally would do. Press the Route button and it will give you directions.
The system can also track your progress as you get closer to the destination. Notice the new target icon in the lower-left hand corner? Press the icon and, after a brief loading, the iPhone will create a large purple circle overlay around your current location. It will move as you move. That said, the iPhone won't recalculate directions unless you redo the "Current Location" bookmark described in the previous paragraph.
We tested "Current Location" in the most unruly of places - downtown Los Angeles - and it was accurate within a few city blocks. It was much more precise in less congested areas, as in down to the current building location. 
The iPhones new faux-GPS system is definitely useful.
Home Screen Management
One update that really should have been available six months ago and is now is movable icons. This allows you to reconfigure the order of the icons so as to better manage the iPhone's home screen.
press and hold one of the icons with your finger. All the icons will begin to wiggle. Now you can hold any icon and use your finger to place it in another place on the screen. The iPhone will automatically swap or move the icons as you manipulate it.
Furthermore, you'll now notice two dots at the bottom of the menu screen, just above the final row icons (which, by the way, can also be individually moved around). 
Press the Home key, the indented button with the square at the bottom of your iPhone, to get out of movable icon mode.
SMS
Damon will cover more new iPhone features next month.
Got an iPhone or iPod touch? Travel often? If the answer to both those questions is yes, you may want to try directing the iPhone's Safari browser over to iphone.travelocity.com to access a version of Travelocity that's been optimized for Apple's iPhone.
The new web application is streamlined to allow you to manage your Travelocity itineraries through a My Trip icon (it helps to be a Travelocity customer) and receive information on flight status, TSA security point wait times, local weather, maps, traffic and airport driving directions through the iPhone portal's Flight Information icon.
Travelocity isn't the only company to offer streamline travel information for iPhone and iPod touch users. A week ago, mobile software developer Handmark unveiled a free Travel version of its Pocket Express wireless information portal for these devices.
This version of Pocket Express offers unlimited access to airline schedules and flight status; hotel information and bookings from Hotels.com; dozens of click-to-call travel numbers (airlines, rental car agencies, etc.); around-the-clock travel reservations service; and automatic conversions for 164 global currencies.
To access Pocket Express, simply point Safari over to www.pocketexpress.com.
At MacWorld last month, Mobile software developer Handmark unveiled a free Travel version of its Pocket Express wireless information portal for the iPhone and iPod touch. Various editions (free and paid) of this software, which has been around for half a decade now, is already available for the Nokia Eseries, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and RIM BlackBerry platforms.
The concept behind Pocket Express is to downsize the Web to make it more manageable or usable for small-screened mobile devices. Pocket Express uses a channel metaphor rather than a browser to deliver Internet content to PDAs and smartphones. Handmark asserts the service is faster than mobile Web surfing by orders of magnitude.
Handmark's version of Pocket Express offers unlimited access to airline schedules and flight status; hotel information and bookings from Hotels.com; dozens of click-to-call travel numbers (airlines, rental car agencies, etc.); around-the-clock travel reservations service; and automatic conversions for 164 global currencies
The travel services in this edition of Pocket Express are free because the software is supported through advertising rather than a subscription model.
To start using Pocket Express on your iPhone or iPod touch, simply point your device's Safari Web browser to www.pocketexpress.com. It’ll work through either a Wi-Fi or cellular-wireless EDGE data connection.
