The Great iPhone Blog

While the nickname field of Address Book entries does sync to the iPhone, it's not searchable on the iPhone. Also, it's not used as the display name in call lists or SMS chats. I much prefer reading friend's short names or nicknames instead of their full name when they call.

The easy solution to achieve that is to turn your friends into companies. Use each person's nickname as the company name, and check the Company box in Address Book. The only downside to this solution is that now their full names are not searchable on the iPhone anymore.

Quite a simple and obvious hint, but maybe helpful for some nonetheless...

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

Recently my nearly one-year-old iPhone kept telling me that an accessory was not compatible with the iPhone, even though I had not plugged in an accessory. A few days later, I could not put my iPhone into silence mode.

After getting ready to send it in for repair, I discovered it was simply compacted debris, collected from being carried in my pocket, in the bottom port that was making the iPhone think it was plugged into something. A blast of canned air did the trick, and my iPhone is now as good as new again.

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

A lot of people don't know that Apple provides a free iPhone configuration utility, but they do, and it can add some great features you can't get any other way. The simplest use of the program is to enable complex passcodes on the iphone. I know some people don't want to have to type in a long password to get into their iPhone, but I'm a bit paranoid -- so protecting all of my email accounts, contacts, etc. with an annoyingly-long and complex password seems worth it to me. Here is how you do it:

1. Install and launch the iPhone Configuration Utility.
2. Click on Configuration Profiles in the Library menu on the left.
3. Click the New+ button along the top of the window, and on the General tab, fill out the info (Name, Identifier, etc.); there is no need to digitally sign it.
4. Next Click on the Passcode tab, and check Require Passcode on Device. Check the various ...

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

I use a Mac at home and a PC at work. At home, I have a personal calendar on iCal and a family calendar on Goggle Calendars. At work, I have a work calendar on Outlook and a company calendar on Google. From Outlook, I publish my work calendar to a private server. At home, I publish my personal calendar to MobileMe. At work, I subscribe to the Office calendar, my personal calendar and the family calendar. At home, I subscribe to my work calendar, my office calendar and my family calendar. I then sync these calendars at home with my iPhone through iTunes. I select the "Sync iCal Calendars" option in iTunes to sync all of my calendars to my iPhone. I do not allow MobileMe to manage the syncing because it will not sync all of my subscribed calendars separately. While this has the advantage of showing me separate calendars on my iPhone, it does require me to sync the phone with iTunes to get all of the calendars updated rather than having automatic syncing in the background...

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

As many have discovered, the trick for scrolling in list boxes on the iPhone (using two fingers) doesn't work in form boxes. If you've ever tried typing a post on a forum or elsewhere from the iPhone, you've discovered that editing what you've typed is a near impossibility if the text entry box is too small, as two-finger scrolling doesn't work.

By tapping/holding inside a form and bringing up the magnifying glass, you can scroll up and down by dragging and holding the magnifying glass in the direction you wish to scroll.

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

For a while now, I have been looking for a way to keep my iPhone calendar in sync with my work Microsoft Outlook calendar. Now I've found a way!

Part 1: MobileMe, iCal, and iPhone:
At home, I sync my iPhone calendar with iCal on my Mac. Now with the new MobileMe, my iPhone stays in near constant sync with my MobileMe calendar. My Mac at home also stays in sync (syncs every 15 minutes) with my MobileMe calendar.

Part 2: Spanning Sync - iCal and Google Calendar
There is a program called Spanning Sync that syncs iCal on my Mac with my Google calendar. This program also runs every 15 minutes. (The downside is that this program costs a whopping $65.)

Part 3: Google Calendar Sync - Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook
Google has released Google Calendar Sync, a program that syncs your Google Calendar with Microsoft O...

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

If you're like me, it is often nice to know the time spent on a call (especially if you charge your services by the minute) and even though the cheapest cell phones out there can tell you the time you were just on the phone, that data is buried deep in iPhone's records and unaccessible from the touch GUI.

I have been using a script created in ruby called calllog2ical, which you can download from this page at Google Code. The install process is a breeze and it can be called from Terminal. After using the script for about a week, I decided it would be nicer to use an AppleScript to access the shell script, and so I wrote one. Its all of one line and goes like this:

do shell script "/usr/local/bin/calllog2ical.rb -v0 iPhone\\ Call\\ Log"

In the above code, the calendar I am syncing to is iPhone Call Log.

Notes:

• In order to get the AppleScript ...

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

Unfortunately, there’s something awry with the way the iPhone's geotagged photos are being handled in OS X. At the moment, whether you import photos through iPhoto, Preview or using Image Capture, at some point the GPS reference may get set to North/West. This is a problem if you don’t live in the northwestern hemisphere.

Regardless of whether Apple fixes this, you’re still going to have to retag all of your old photos. So tonight, I wrote an AppleScript that automates the process. This script can either be set as the Automatic Task in the ImageCapture utility, or you can drag files onto the script for processing.

Copy and paste the code below into Script Editor, customize for your location, and then save as an application (eg. File Format: Application). I've #commented the code to help you find where to tweak the North/South/East/West variables. ...

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

With no unified Inbox (for good or bad), people have come up with lots (and lots) of ways of combining their email accounts into one. And with MobileMe offering push, I'm guessing some people have tried this configuration: having all their emails forward to their mac/me.com address.

However, then the problem is with replying ... when you do so, you'll expose your mac/me.com address. So, there's always the option of setting up extra SMTP servers (which has already been documented). But that doesn't allow you to truly reply from a different account (let's say your email address is for a business, and the name is different).

At least for Google (and other IMAP accounts?), there's a way to create a "send-only" account -- which has already been documented as using the "manual" checking of that account only. But that could leave you with more emails unread than you expect (as your phone may check the non-MobileMe account).

So is there a way to:

• Set up a Gmail a...

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

In the past, video podcasts were also available in the Music section of your iPhone or iPod touch, and you could listen to their content content as audio only.

Since version 2.0, you can access video podcasts from the Music menu, but you can view their video now. You can also view them in both portrait and landscape mode.

[kirkmc adds: In this earlier hint, we mentioned that you would only get the audio of video podcasts when playing them from the Podcast menu. It's up to you to determine if this new behavior is good or bad.]

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips