macosxhints.com iPhone tips

Create a 'silent' mode on the iPhone

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:30:00 -0700

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.

One possible fix for low iPhone headset volume levels

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:30:00 -0700

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.

Listen to music on iPhone 1.1.4 with a Bluetooth headset

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:30:00 -0700

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:

Start the iPod audio.
Go to the voicemail screen and enable the headset audio.
Double tap the home button to bring up the iPod controller.
Press "iPod", which will take you to the iPod app.
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...

Silence certain iPhone spam callers forever

Tue, 27 May 2008 07:30:00 -0700

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:

Download our Silent Running ringtone ...

Create custom iPhone ringtones to announce caller ID

Tue, 20 May 2008 07:30:04 -0700

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.

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

Read PDF, Word, and Excel files on the iPhone via Safari Thu, 01 May 2008 07:30:01 -0700 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 (... Add new contact to a specific group on iPhone Mon, 14 Apr 2008 07:30:00 -0700 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... Improve iPhone/touch location mapping database Fri, 11 Apr 2008 07:30:04 -0700 The 'Find Me' location feature in Google Maps on the iPhone and iPod touch is great, but if you are in an area with wireless access points that have yet to be mapped by Skyhook (the company that provides the location-acces point data for Apple), your shown location will rely upon cellphone tower position alone and so be far less accurate. Recently, Jazzdogg on the Australian MacTalk forum contacted Skyhook with regard to manually submitting the longitude/latitude of his own access point to improve the location feature. In response, Skyhook created a form that allows anyone to do exactly that. Whether to improve the accuracy of your iPhone's pseudo-GPS when at work or home, or to map out access points about town, you can now supplement Skyhook's database manually without having to wait for Skyhook to map your community... Display UTC on the iPhone's World Clock Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:30:03 -0700 For some hobbies and businesses, it's necessary to use Coordinated Universal Time or UTC, which is similar to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). The iPhone World Clock can display several separate clocks, so I thought it might work to add London as a substitute for Greenwich, which was not listed. But on a lark I typed utc in the search for city dialog, and it came up! Once selected, I had a clock dedicated to UTC. This is better than using a nearby city, as it should avoid problems with daylight saving time changes. Use two Gmail accounts to manage iPhone email Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:30:02 -0700 I am an avid Google Mail user, and recently purchased an iPhone (how couldn't I, after seeing the SDK demo). I configured the iPhone Mail app to use my Google Map IMAP account. Works like a charm, but, a lot of times I want to send reminders home from the iPhone. Obviously I'd see those mail on the iPhone as well. Too much information. So here is what I did: Set up a new Google Mail account -- username.iphone@gmail.com. In my main Google Mail account (username@gmail.com), I set up a filter like so ... in the 'Doesn't have:' field, I listed subject: -iphone, OR, from: -username@gmail.com. On the next page, enable Forward it to: username.iphone@gmail.com. On the iPhone, I created a new Mail account, but used the username.iphone@gmail.com as my main account. (I can still access the other gmail accounts through Google Mobile, just in case.) On the iPhone, I changed the outgoing SMTP server to username@google.com. Th... Make iPhone, Apple Mail, and GMail POP work together Tue, 25 Mar 2008 07:30:02 -0700 I was really sick of POP GMail and the iPhone not just working. I found several types of hints online, and none would really work for my situation. I use POP on GMail so that I can get mail on my Mac and leave a copy on GMail's server for archive and search purposes, which I do endlessly. The subtle implication here is that I have about 2,500 messsages in there. So I set up the iPhone and was all excited when it just took my accounts from iTunes and set them up. But I noticed one thing: even if I had Recent on, for some reason, my Mac and my iPhone would race to download a message and if one got it, sometimes the other did, and sometimes it didn't. I confirmed this to happen to other people via many furious and frazzled searches waaaay past my bedtime. Another thing I found was that I'm not a super great typer on the iPhone yet, and there were some messages I'd want to read on the iPhone but respond to on my Mac. In short, for a lot of reasons, it wouldn't... Choose international domains on the iPhone keyboard Fri, 21 Mar 2008 07:30:01 -0700 You probably know already that you can hold down a key on the iPhone keyboard to select international versions of a character (eg. Accented characters) I have just found that this also works for the .com button on the Safari version of the keyboard. Hold down the .com button, and you will be able to quickly select the regional domain suffix for whatever international language keyboard you are using. Eg .co.uk for the UK keyboard, .de for German, etc. Simulate gestures in the iPhone Simulator Thu, 13 Mar 2008 07:30:03 -0700 You can simulate the 'pinch to zoom' gesture of the iPhone in Apple's Aspen Simulator by holding down the Option key while clicking the mouse in the area you wish to pinch. This brings up a pair of dots that represent your fingertips. Better/continuous scrolling on iPhone/iPod Touch Thu, 13 Mar 2008 07:30:02 -0700 When you are zoomed in to read, for example, a column of text in Safari on the iPhone and iPod Touch, it can sometimes be hard to scroll in a straight line without accidently scrolling left and right. I found this quite frustrating until I changed the way I was scrolling. The important thing is the direction you start dragging in when you scroll. If you move only vertically then the scroll becomes vertically locked and will not scroll on the horizontal axis until you next lift your finger. Conversely, starting a horizontal drag locks scrolling horizontally. The problem is that it's too easy to start off on a diagonal and drag the column you're reading sideways. If you scroll by running your thumb along the very edges of the screen then you can always be sure you're moving in a straight line and you won't suffer this anymore. This has the added benefit of keeping your view of the screen uninhibited since your thumb can be practically off the display entirely. ... Launch iPhoto only on camera, not iPhone, connect Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:30:00 -0700 I have been continually annoyed with the way that iPhoto would start whenever I plugged my iPhone into my computer. The only pictures I take with my iPhone are to help me find my space in a parking lot, or so I can reassemble something I am taking apart. I do not want to archive these pictures. However, I do still want to use iPhoto to take the pictures off my digital camera. My previous solution was to set Image Capture to disable launching iPhoto in every case of camera attachment, and then manually launching iPhoto when necessary. Luckily, Sam Stephenson at 37signals provided me with a solution that will launch iPhoto when a camera is attached, but not when my iPhone is attached. Sam realized that within the preference pane of Image Capture, an arbitrary application can be set to launch whenever a camera is connected. This solution utilizes the shell command ... Change root passwd on iPhone 1.1.3 Mon, 03 Mar 2008 07:30:03 -0800 I have never tried using the passwd command on my jailbroken 1.1.3 iPhone, since everyone warns of its use. However, I don't like having the default root password that everyone in the world knows, so I wanted to figure out a way to change it. It's pretty easy actually. On a Mac or Unix/Linux, the openssl command will do what you need like this: openssl passwd -crypt -salt /s myNewPasswd The password can only be eight characters long; anything longer will be truncated. I don't know if the salt has to stay the same or not, but to be safe, I just used the same salt as the original password. I doubt this makes any difference, though. I ssh'd to the iPhone, and ran cat /etc/master.passwd, then copied that output to BBEdit (or other text editor). Then I replaced the passwd section (in between the first two colons) with my new hash for both root and mobile users. Finally, I copied the whole thing, swit... Watch slow motion video on the iPhone and iPod touch Fri, 29 Feb 2008 07:30:03 -0800 If you want to see something in slow motion -- either on YouTube or your videos in the iPod section of the iPhone -- here is something for you. Make sure your video is paused, then just tap and hold rewind or fast forward, and your video will begin to play in slow motion. [robg adds: I could make this work for the forward direction on my 1.1.3 iPhone, but not backwards. This slow motion feature isn't noted in the iPhone User Guide anywhere that I could find. By the way, Apple updates the iPhone User Guide somewhat regularly; the third revision was released at the end of January. As an interesting aside, it seems Apple optimized this latest version; it's about 4MB, versus 10MB for the first version -- and it's actually longer and has at least as many images as the first one.] Fix attachments not loading in iPhone's Mail app Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:30:01 -0800 I found that attachments fail to download once the iPhone's scratch disk is full. So when you fail to receive a critical voicemail or document, just reboot -- rebooting the iPhone clears the cache (I think it's 500MB in size?). Play only the audio of a video podcast on the iPhone Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:30:03 -0800 I thought something was wrong with my brand new iPhone. I went into the Podcasts section and played a video podcast I had subscribed to. I was dismayed to see a still image from the video while the audio played along merrily. It turns out that you get audio only if you access a video podcast through the Podcast section. If you access it through the Video section, though, you get both audio and video. The Apple rep I spoke to said this is to conserve battery life if you don't actually need to watch the video while you're exercising. I'm glad to know my iPhone isn't broken. Now I just have to figure out what this "exercise" thing he mentioned is all about. Trigger a mouseover event on the iPhone/iPod Touch Thu, 21 Feb 2008 07:30:04 -0800 I just found this out by accident on my iPod touch. And I haven't seen this as a hint before. It's actually possible to trigger a mouseover event in the Safari browser on an iPhone or iPod touch. You just have to click and hold the link that has the mouseover effect. At first, you get a popup with the link or description. If you then release your finger, however, the mouseover effect is triggered! It doesn't seem to work in every case, but it can be useful sometimes. For example, on websites that make use of a drop-down menu, or that give extra information in pop-ups on mouseover. I don't know if this is new in the 1.1.3 firmware, but it's a nice detail.