I’ve heard a few people searching for a solution that would make the iPhone audibly speak the name of their contacts. So I thought I’d pass on this tip from a reader over at our sister site, Mac OS X Hints. While it’s not automated, it does offer a somewhat streamlined process, taking full advantage of OS X’s built-in speech capabilities—though, to be honest, depending on how difficult your contacts’ names are to pronounce, you may need to do some tweaking. Also, depending on how many contacts you have, this process may be prohibitively long.
You’ll need Garage Band and a brief foray into the Terminal in order to make this all happen, but it’s not to complicated, so don’t fret. The full instructions are over at Mac OS X Hints. While the process could probably be automated, I think that’s going to take someone with more AppleScript/Automator skills that I possess.
The iPhone, as we know, is many devices consolidated into one: your music player, your phone, your email and Internet. But aside from meaning that you can save pocket room by getting rid of your other devices, the iPhone can also help you slim down your wallet.
Blogger Albert Alberts set out to prune his wallet of all those pesky membership cards; he scanned the front and back of each and created a Photo Album on his iPhone to keep them all organized.
To test it out I went to the local hardware store and asked the girl behind the counter if she could scan the barcode from my phone. The first look I got was pure amazement. To her the physical card was transformed into a picture on a shiny device. On top of that the barcode was scanned successfully. The result; a slightly confused girl and a happy me.
Like most iPhone tricks, this one falls in the “simple-but-brilliant” category. I don’t have a scanner to give this a try right now, but I’ll file it away for the next time I’m cleaning out my wallet.
[via Lifehacker]
Has Safari been naughty and stopped syncing your bookmarks with your iPhone? The culprit, it seems, is the recent Safari 3.1 update. Fortunately, the fix is in, direct from Apple. According to this Knowledge Base article, running the following command in Terminal should fix all your woes:
defaults delete com.apple.safari RegisteredSafariSyncClient
You’ll need to resync after issuing the command, but then you ought to be all set. I haven’t noticed this problem on my own machine, but about half the time I forget to sync my iPhone anyway—come on, where’s the wireless sync support, Apple?
[via Daring Fireball]
Some might say there are no stupid tricks—only tricks that are, say, less smart than other tricks. I disagree. Take a look at our fearless leader, Editorial Director Jason Snell, as he demonstrates for you—in full color and sound, no less—the full range of somewhat ridiculous tricks that you can do with just your iPhone and a little bit of time.
Covered in Jason’s video are a workaround for syncing notes to your iPhone, creating fake “podcasts” for more flexible syncing, and how to use your iPhone as a flashlight (that was my contribution to this repertoire, and it’s one that I have to admit I find myself using pretty frequently—especially when I can’t find my key).
All that and more are laid bare for you in the latest Macworld video. So hit the link above and prepare to be, well, stupefied.
Reader John wrote in to tell us of a problem he (and others) are experiencing with the iPhone's battery going dead very rapidly.
Dissatisfied, John decided to do a little detective work and found that the culprit on his phone is an errant IMAP connection. Apparently, in some circumstances the iPhone's Mail client may not correctly terminate the conversation with an IMAP server.
Because the iPhone is continously sending commands, the mail server will not consider the connection idle and time it out, as far as the mail server is concerned they are all legitimate requests. Because the iPhone is continously sending commands, the iPhone WiFi (or EDGE) transmitter is constantly working and therefore constantly draining the battery. This also explains why the iPhone gets very hot (because it is working flat out).John's experience has been in particular with a Kerio Mail Server and a QuickMail Pro server; though he says he had the same problem trying to access GMail over IMAP with the 1.1.3 firmware, that seems to be working for him on 1.1.4.
My initial hypothesis would be some sort of incompatibility between QuickMail Pro/Kerio Mail and the iPhone's IMAP client, since I've got a variety of IMAP clients set up on my iPhone (Yahoo, Gmail, .Mac, and a couple of my own), and haven't run into this problem at all.
How about it readers: experienced excessive battery-draining that can be traced back to IMAP? Sound off below.
One of the most useful advantages to the iPhone's software keyboard is that it can change—mutate, if you will—depending on the context in which you find yourself. Safari's location field is perhaps the best example of this: the iPhone removes the spacebar and replaces it with buttons for the period, slash, and ".com" suffix—all handy additions when you're typing in URLs.
But what of those other domains besides .com? Well, as a tipster over at Mac OS X Hints points out, it turns out if you've enabled any international keyboard support (under Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> International keyboards), you'll find an extra added bonus. When you switch to those keyboards in Safari's location bar (by using the Globe button), holding down the ".com" button will also give you the option of choosing the country domain for the keyboard you're using. So, for example, using the French keyboard layout will let you pick between ".com" and ".fr," German will give you the option of using ".de," and the British keyboard layout will let you choose ".co.uk".
Sure, that's all great, but there are more than just country codes. I'd like to see Safari's keyboard offer the choice between ".com," ".org," and ".net". Why the hate towards those non-.com sites? Is this because of that whole boom and crash? That was years ago! Time to move on.
Want to save a little battery life while listening to your favorite video podcast on your iPhone? Or maybe you just want to cue it up to listen to when you're at the gym working out, but don't need to watch the video. An anonymous tipster over at our sister site, Mac OS X Hints, points out that if you access a video podcast through the Podcast section of the iPhone's iPod application, you'll get just the audio—if you want to watch the video as well, you have to access it through the Video section.
The same, I happened to notice, is true of music videos. You can get to them through the music listings, like Artist, Album, or Song, but you'll just get a video still when you listen to them. In order to get the full video effect, you'll have to go through the Video tab.
I don't know if iPhone theft is a huge problem—I've had mine for over six months, and the only people who've tried to steal it are people I actually know, but I presume that, like any expensive gadget, it's a tempting target for thieves.
But hey, unlike your average iPod or your fancy Nike sneakers, your iPhone actually knows where it is (if you've taken advantage of the 1.1.3 update, that is). Wouldn't it be convenient if—were your iPhone to get stolen—it could tell you exactly where it is?
iPhone hacker extraordinaire Erica Sadun has come up with just such a solution. Her program, findme, will have your iPhone broadcast regular updates about its location over Twitter. Getting the program installed will take a little work: your phone will need to be jailbroken, you'll have to set up a private Twitter account, and there's some Terminal magic required, but hey: that could all be worth it if you manage to actually use this set up to retrieve your stolen iPhone. And hey, it's probably more practical than setting up your iPhone with The Club.
OS X has long allowed you to specify what application gets launched when you attach certain devices, such as a digital camera, to your Mac, but sometimes this can be more annoyance than feature. For example, say you've got both a digital camera and your iPhone: you probably don't mind launching iPhoto when you connect your digital camera, since you'll likely want to download some photos. But when you hook up your iPhone, you may just want to sync some contacts and calendars, not transfer the pictures you've taken. Wouldn't it be nice if you could tell your Mac what app to launch based on what device you're connecting?
Sam Stephenson at 37signals, the fellows behind web project software like Backpack and Basecamp, has come up with a workaround for just such an occasion. Create an Apple Script application that gets launched when you connect a device and then decides, based on the name of the device, what application to open.
You'll need to do some command-line work in order to get the app set up correctly, but Sam lays out all the steps you need in good detail, and explains what each of them do. All in all, a good solution if you suffer from multiplecameraapplicationlaunchitis (don't worry; it's treatable!).
