The Great iPhone Blog

Running the new iPhone 2.0 software? Want to grab a screenshot of something? Turns out it's amazingly easy. Hold the Home button down, then tap the power button on the top of the phone. The screen will flash white, and that's it -- the screenshot has been taken. Open your iPhone's Photos app, and you'll see the just-taken photo in your image library. This works amazingly well, and it's nice to see a factory-bundled solution for those of us who write about the iPhone!

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

You can set up MobileMe to use any email address as a 'push' email on the iPhone. The first thing you need to do is set your non-MobileMe (.Mac) email address for auto-forward to your MobileMe (.Mac) account.

When you create the email account, make sure you set it up as Other (not as a .Mac or MobileMe account.) Then select IMAP as the type of account. Enter the name and auto-forwarded email address. (This is the email address that will show as the "From" email, even though you're using your MobileMe account.)

For your mail server settings, use your MobileMe settings:

• Incoming settings:
  • Host Name: mail.mac.com
  • User Name: MobileMe user name
  • Password: MobileMe password
• Outgoing Settings:
  • Host Name: smtp.mac.com
  • User Name: MobileMe user name
  • Password: MobileMe password
• Advanced:
  • Use SSL - On
  • Authentication - Password
  • Server Port - 587
  ...

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

If you didn't read about it yet, the iPhone App Store is now open. Here in the USA, the iPhone 3G and iPhone 2.0 software aren't out yet, which means you can't actually use the apps. You can, however, browse the store. So that's what I was doing, deciding what I might buy later on, when I discovered a bugfeature of the App Store: there's no shopping cart.

When I buy songs at the iTunes Store, I use the shopping cart as my "wish list" storage location. I see something I may want to buy, and I add it to my cart. I blindly assumed the Store preferences setting in iTunes to use the shopping cart would also apply to the App Store. That is not the case.

When you click Buy in the App Store, you buy immediately. (You can see what you've purchased in the Applications section of iTunes 7.7's Library. If ...

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

My old mobile phone had a 'silent' mode: no ring and no vibrate. Alarms also wouldn't play when the ring was muted. To create similar behavior on the iPhone, I created five seconds of silence in GarageBand (iLife '08), and installed it as a ringtone. I used GarageBand because it's convenient.

This let's me have a 'silent' alarm using my silent sound as the ring tone with the phone unmuted, or a vibrate-only alarm when the phone is muted with the silent sound as the ring tone.

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

Here's a solution to a big problem with the Apple headset for the iPhone: the sound level in my headset had become so low, I could hardly could hear a conversation in the car. After some experimentation, I found the solution: high pressure air to clean the earpiece -- evidently the plug was clotted. The same can of pressurized air I use to clean my camera was the solution for my iPhone headset as well. It is now loud and clear again.

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

Prior to the iPhone software version 1.1.4, you could listen to the iPod audio over a Bluetooth headset if you did the trick of switching to the voicemail screen and selecting the headset for audio. This still works, but you can't leave this screen and you can't sleep the phone, or the headset audio is disabled.

What I found was that you can get the old functionality back by doing the following:

1. Start the iPod audio.
2. Go to the voicemail screen and enable the headset audio.
3. Double tap the home button to bring up the iPod controller.
4. Press "iPod", which will take you to the iPod app.
5. Double tap the home button again, which will take you to the speed dial screen.

The headset audio will now be on, and you can also go to other apps or sleep the phone and it will continue. If you go back to the voicemail screen and move away from it normally, the headset audio will stop. In fact, you have to do this step to turn it off (I think a...

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

Like most people, the iPhoneWriter.com team hates spam in all it's forms and permeations. Electronic mail, snail mail, Boy Scouts selling popcorn, and unsolicited telephone calls all qualify as "spam" in our book and they're all obnoxious. We find unsolicited telephone calls to be particularly irritating. How many times have you been in a meeting or driving or whatever, and had your Apple iPhone ring only to find a "phone spammer" on the other end? Ugh.

Well, after one too many calls wondering if we were interested in having our carpets steam cleaned, enough was finally enough and we decided to stop the madness once and for all. The end result is a simple (and dare we say elegant) way to silence telephone spammers forever. Ah, the sweet sound of silence. Here's how you can silence the telephone spammers on your Apple iPhone:

1. Download our Silent Running ringtone (...

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

I often use my iPhone as music player, travelling around the city with my headphones and answering calls by clicking the microphone. I was looking for a way to announce Caller ID, and was surprised there's only this hint here and it doesn't use built in speech technology.

This process could be scripted somehow, but as I didn't need hundreds of contacts, I just created them one by one. The described process is, however, optimized, taking only about 20 seconds per person.

First, open GarageBand and create a loop of desired length. I chose just about six bars. Then place your favorite ringtone sound (I used one from GarageBand's Library, found in Sound Effects » Work/Home » Cell Phone Ringing, and boosted its volume a bit) and place it at the second bar.

1. Copy the person's name in Address Book.
2. Paste it to Terminal as part of this command: say -o ~/Desktop/Output.aiff [p...

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

Sometimes it's annoying to have to use Mail on my iPhone to review a PDF, Word or Excel file I received a couple of days before. I wanted to have permanent access to some of my inportant files (roadmaps, notes, lists etc.) even when I can't go online. All you need is a jailbroken 1.1.3 (or newer) iPhone, an FTP client on your Mac, and the "Safari 1.1.3 Patch" for your iPhone (see the Big Boss' repository: "Adds file:// support for local files viewing to Safari.")

For PDF: Use your FTP client to create a new folder on your iPhone in /var/mobile/Media/. Name it PDF and drag your PDF files into it. Some of them have to be renamed to meet the usual URL naming conventions. This means: no spaces, no umlauts, etc. I dragged a file named regex.pdf in there. Now I only have to type in the following URL in Safari on the iPhone:

file:///var/mobile/Media/PDF/regex.pdf

Safari can display PDF, Word, Excel, and any HTML file you put in the Media folder (...

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips

If you set up groups before transferring contacts to the iPhone, you can then show only a certain group (or all groups) when browsing contacts. I set up several groups in Address Book, but noticed that you can't change which group a contact is in on the iPhone itself. Nor can you add new groups on the phone, either. However, if you want to add a new contact to a group that is already on the iPhone, first go to the Phone Application, then tap "Contacts" and then tap the "Groups" button at the top left of the screen to select the group to which you want to add the new contact. It will return you to the Contacts screen with the group name at the top. Now tap the "+" button to add a new contact that will be associated with that group. If I get a call or email from someone not in my contact list that I know I want in a particular group (like "Work" contacts), I go through the above steps to create the new contact in that group, then go back to th...

written by macosxhints iPhone Tips