Tips: September 2008 Archives

Zink, the company that hopes you'll print the photos from your phone on its new high-tech paper, offers a handful of free applications to enhance your digital phone-photography. You don't even have to download them. Instead, send a photo from your phone to Zink and it will come back with the features you've requested. Get an image that's too dark? Send it in for image enhancement.

Like to spice up your shots with commentary? Use a template. Here's a before and after:

The steps are easy. Snap a photo. Insert it into a new MMS (not with the iPhone, of course) or e-mail message. For the "Caption 2" template that I used, type Caption2 (not case sensitive) as the first word of the body of your message, followed by a space and then the caption that you want. Send the message to pic@zink.mobi. You'll get a message back with your modified photo attached.

Check out all of Zink's mobile extras here.

As you may now, some Windows Vista users have gotten the blue screen of death error message after installing iTunes 8 and then connecting either an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPod to their PCs. Thankfully, Apple's posted detailed instructions on how to resolve the situation.

Here's what Apple recommends you do:

Solution 1

1. Disconnect your iPhone or iPod from Windows Vista.
2. Uninstall iTunes and Apple Mobile Device Support
   
   • For Classic View
     1. Choose Start > Control Panel > Programs and Features.
     2. First select Apple Mobile Device Support, click Uninstall.
     3. Select iTunes, click Uninstall.
   • For Control Panel Home View
     1. Choose Start > Control Panel > Programs > Uninstall a Program.
     2. First select Apple Mobile Device Support, click Uninstall.
     3. Select iTunes and click Uninstall.
3. Restart the computer.
4. Re-download and install the updated iTunes 8 installer from www.apple.com/itunes/download.
   Important: Do not use the iTunes8Setup or iTunes864Setup file you previously downloaded.

Solution 2

Refer to article TS1502 for additional troubleshooting steps if Windows XP or Vista computer displays a blue screen error message.

As for me, while I didn't run into this problem, I can't - for the life of me - get the new iTunes Genius function installed. iTunes 8 keeps crashing when attempting to make the transition from Step 1 (gather info about my music library) to Step 2 (sending the data up to Apple). I heard that other folks with large music libraries are running into similar issues.

Because of this, not only does the Genius function not work on my PC, it won't work on the iPhone either. As with many things iTunes, you can’t take it mobile without having on the desktop first.

Let us know if you‘ve run into a similar problem and, if so, whether you've found a workaround or, even better, a solution or not.

Author: Philip L. Graitcer

Last night, the woman next to me at the bar was having trouble with her iPhone. Calls were coming in, but the caller ID linking the phone number to the name and photo of the caller wasn't working. All she was getting was the phone number listed at the top of the screen.

I asked her when she last turn off her iPhone. She said, "Never." It stays on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I told her to turn off the phone.

"How?"

"The button at the top. Hold it down, wait for the red power off slider, and slide it to the right."

"I never have even seen this," she said.

We left the phone off for 5 minutes, and turned it on again - by pushing the power button on the top. The phone started up, the Apple appeared, and in a couple minutes, it was working - correctly.

Suggestion: If your phone is not working properly. Or if it doing or not doing something consistently, turn it off.

That seems to work much of the time.

Author: Amy Mayer

Ever wonder how your local paper gets far-flung stories or how an obscure bird sighting in remote Alaska makes it onto newspaper pages half a world away? Before there was the Internet, there was the Associated Press. And while its content has typically been provided-at great expense-to paying members who also contribute content, now there's a mobile news app from AP.

From your smartphone, go to www.apnews.com/mobile. Browse national and international news or enter your zip code for the local headlines. You can also then click on "Set Local News Preferences" to have your locale come up automatically.

The AP's mobile application received more than 16 million page views for the month of August, with 948 news organizations signed up to provide content. More than one million local stories featured on the Mobile News Network were read. August marked, what AP calls, the Mobile News Network's first full month following the July 10 release of its iPhone client application.

The network was optimized first for the iPhone to take advantage of the device's multimedia capabilities, and currently 95 percent of traffic comes from the iPhone and iTouch.

Author: Philip L. Graitcer

Sometimes something free isn't such a great deal. Let's look at the New York Times iPhone application. It's free, just download it from iTunes at the iPhone App Store.

With the Times application, you can browse selected articles in the paper. Each article is designed to look good on the iPhone's screen - and it does.

However, there is no way to e-mail the article to a friend or to have any idea at what time the article was first submitted to the web (particularly important if you are following current stock market doings!). Plus the application is painfully slow loading each article and updating.

But you can still read the Times on your iPhone by typing in www.nytimes.com in Safari. Up comes the home page - just like on the web.

It's a little more cumbersome to navigate the home page, but you have the same functionality: you can e-mail articles, search the archive, and know exactly when the article was posted. And the web pages seem to load faster than the pages in the application.

This is probably true of of other applications that also have a Web presence too.

Firmware 2.1 adds a number of new features to the iPhone and iPod touch, in addition to many much-needed bug fixes and enhancements. Among these new features is the ability to pause a download. So, for example, when you purchase an application from the App Store, an icon representing that title appears on the last page of your iPhone or iPod touch's Home Screen. Underneath the icon, the iPhone OS tells you the application is Loading (see left). To pause the download simply tap the icon. The wording underneath the icon will then tell you the download's been Paused (see right). To start the download up again, all you need to do is tap it again.

Apple's made it really easy to add and move around icons, both applications and Web clips, on the iPhone's home screen. They're not so easy to keep organized, however. So, after installing a few hundred or so additional icons, you may discover your having some trouble finding the standard applications that shipped with your iPhone. No problem. It's easy to reset the iPhone so these icons appear exactly where they did when you first turned on your device.

 

What you'll need to do first is find the Settings icon.

 

From there, hit the General

and then Reset.

 

Select Reset Home Screen Layout button.

 

Then, lastly, press the red Reset Home Screen button (see top image).

Go back to your iPhone's Home Screen and you'll the original icons back in their factory settings positions, followed by the ones for the applications and Web clips you added.

                             Before                                                              After

Author: Damon Brown

The iPhone is quickly becoming less a phone and more a computer.

Today I updated one of the several hundred programs available on the App store. (The iPhone will routinely let you know when a program has a new edition available.) I accepted the update and, halfway through the process, the iPhone froze in place. I tapped the screen. I held down the reset button. I even grabbed a bent paper clip and ejected the SIM card. Nothing.

The best medicine is a hard reset. Hold the reset button (at the very top of the phone) and the home key (the square button right below the touchscreen) for a few second. The phone *will* shut down. The Apple icon will appear and, hopefully, it will begin as new. In my case, my computer finally recognized the iPhone - which it wouldn't do initially - which enabled me to do a restore, available under the iPhone Summary on the iTunes menu.

FYI: My iPhone froze during downloading the "Movies" app. While indie and novice publishers bring more innovation to the machine, we can also expect many, many more errors.