Tips and tricks

Many of you have probably run into the “not enough free space” message even though it clearly looks like you have enough space, right?

Even though an app may report that it’s small enough to squeeze into the last few gigabytes on your iPhone, every app is compressed before it’s downloaded.

This means that an app is transferred to your phone, uncompressed, and then the compressed version is discarded, requiring a little more than twice the space.

For example,  iTunes reports the TomTom app as taking 1.21GB but once uncompressed. This means that you’d need at least almost 2.5GB free to install the app.

One way I know to squeeze one of those big apps into your iPhone or iPod touch is to delete some music. Music doesn’t require zipping and unzipping to get on the phone, so you can sync your music right back on your phone later.

With 3 GPS apps on my phone, my poor iPhone can’t keep up!

Enjoy

There were some welcome changes in the first release of the iPhone 3.0 software. Some of which I forgot I could use!

From any SMS/MMS message, an “Edit” button has been added to let you select individual messages for deletion or forwarding in another message.

This one really comes in handy for those who like to hold onto those SMS conversations (like myself).

Now all we need is MMS’s to forward, which will be here September 25th.

Enjoy

Don’t you hate it when you accidently delete an app from your library on iTunes?

When you purchase an app on your iPhone it automatically shows up in iTunes. This is because your iPhone automatically transfers new app purchases during a sync.

What happens if the apps in iTunes are lost? You can force a sync anytime you want. Simply right-click your iPhone in the iTunes Devices section and choose “Transfer Purchases.” Any application on your iPhone that isn’t in iTunes will immediately be moved.

I discovered this when trying to get an app off my phone after I cancelled the message asking me if I’d like to transfer files. You’ll also notice you can do more by right-clicking such as backing up on command.

Enjoy

It’s that day of the week. How about a tip to get you through the weekend?

When the 3GS came out, one thing that bothered me was trying to find the percentage of battery left on the iPhone. There were pictures all over the net with this, but I couldn’t find it on my iPhone. More than likely, most of you have probably been able to find it, however, if you have not, I can help.

If you are worried about your battery life, then all you have to do to enable it is head to Settings—->General—->Usage, and then flip the “Battery Percentage” switch on. Now you’ll see the percentage of available battery right next to the battery icon.

Now that I have had this on a while, I don’t like seeing my percentage drop below a certain percentage before I start freaking out thinking my battery is going to die, so I have turned this off, but if you find this rather useful, let me know. I am curious.

Enjoy!

One of my favorite features is Spotlight! It’s brilliant and I can’t tell you how much I use it. It’s essentially a super fast, smart search system.

I wanted my searches to be categorized differently when searching, and you can do the same thing by going to Settings—-General—-Home—-Search Results, and you can rearrange the result categories any way you like. You can even disable categories from showing up all together. Pretty cool, eh?

You can even search the bookmarks you make via Safari that look like little applications. Of course to get to spotlight, you can swipe left, but not only will pressing the home screen get you back to the first page, but if you press it again, you will be taken to Spotlight!

Enjoy!

It has been a while since I’ve posted a tip, however, now that we have a fresh new iPhone out, I have some fresh new tips for you!

The most anticipated feature of the iPhone 3GS is the ability to record video. It looks great, and you can post it to YouTube right from your phone, although I haven’t started doing this yet.

One thing that was bugging me was the ability to get it on my computer. Of course Mac users like myself can simply pull up iPhoto - voila! But that is a big import sometimes.

So the quickest way I know of is to use the Image Capture app which sees both photos and videos recorded on your iPhone. Just open it up, find the video, drag it into Finder, and watch! Simple, eh?

Windows users can get to their iPhone 3GS videos in Windows Explorer.

Enjoy

Have you ever wanted to play the audio part of a video in the background while you do something else on your iPhone? If you try to pull it off in the most straightforward way possibly you’ll think that you can’t. You could, of course, download the video and pull out the audio and listen to that while doing something else on the iPhone but that would be a real hassle. Are you stuck? Nope, thanks to a mere seven step workaround concocted by Erik Vold. Using Erik’s method doesn’t involve jailbreaking or adding apps just a convoluted sequence of hitting buttons and choosing what built app plays your video. Sure it’s a few steps that shouldn’t be there but now you can listen to the audio portion of videos while doing something else with your iPhone.

Not so much a tip rather than a hack, however, I thought it was rather cool that the iPhone can use your wireless Apple keyboard. This is only for those who have jailbroken your phone, so for those that are staying true to the original, like myself, then we are out of luck.

Hackers have linked an Apple Bluetooth wireless keyboard with a jailbroken iPhone via the creation of a new Bluetooth stack developed by researchers at ETH Zurich according to Ralf Ackermann, a blogger.

The software was created to interface the two devices, and is intended to be used within any applications that would use the onscreen keyboard, but of course with much better results using a keyboard that is both efficient and comfortable to use.

Click here to check out the video.

PC Mag has a list of ten iPhone secret powers up. The tips range from tapping to scroll to using the iPhone as a Wi Fi hotspot finder and likely stuff you’ve at least heard of but might not be using. Sure the tips aren’t on the level of Jovan Washington’s Tip of the Week (those are nice) but you might find something handy. Check it out.

I enjoy taking pictures with my iPhone. With geotagging built in and my iLife 09’ software, it is just great to take pictures on my phone, however, you can’t take the clearest pictures with the iPhone. Let me tell you how they can get a little clearer - just a little.

This may seem more like a review more than a tip because I use an application from the app store. Either way, this is a great app to take clearer pictures. The app is called ClearCam. You may have passed by it a few times in the App Store.

What make ClearCam neat is that it takes 4 megapixel images through special processing on your iPhone. This is cool because ClearCam claims to use special processing technology to produce a crisp image equal to 4 megapixels out of the built in 2 megapixel camera.

Using the camera is just like the default iPhone camera app, point and shoot. When you take a picture it actually takes six pictures to produce the highest quality image. From there you can choose to align the images and enhance them. Once done you can save… more...