LAN, WAN, mobile data

You can use wireless LAN if available for fast data transfer, but when no wireless internet is available, the iPhone takes it way through the mobile SIM card. Ok, that is cool, but what if you do not want to use your iPhone that mobile data transfer? It could be very very expensive if you have no data flat in your contract.

Stop mobile traffic

Since iOS4 you have the possibility to complete deactivate mobile data transfer!

That is really great, because normally you are forced to use one of the big players (AT&T or T-Mobile). More and more providers are offering better and more fair tariffs. This lets you decide to have a contract or just a prepaid card with or without data options.

Freedom

With that tiny new slider you have the freedom to save some costs and dominate about your own data usage.

Lock your iPhone

Like on all other mobile cell phones you can set a lock code. Once it is locked  or fallen asleep by pressing the power button, you need to enter a code to unlock, and make it ready for use, again. To activate this option go to Settings -> General -> Passcode lock. Put in a PIN code. In the same settings, you can set how long it takes until it will be auto-locked either iPhone is unused or after what time it is sent to sleep.

Unlocking

Only with that previously determined code, your iPhone can be made useable after a lock.

Mistake, mistake?!

You have six tries to unlock your iPhone. If you mistake them all, it will be locked for one minute. No, problem! Just try again. Yet another mistake? The time to wait will increase to five minutes, then 15 minutes, followed by one hour! A clever idea would be just to reboot the iPhone, but Apple was clever, too, so this will not help you out. You need to wait until the time is expired!

First of all I thought it was corrupted, because even on plugging it out and in again did not change anything in that misbehavior. To be sure it is not my fault, before claiming the Apple support, I restarted my iPhone.

Still not working and I even made a complete reset and restore. The solution is somewhat strange!

In microphone jack was some dust – just such a little that I could not even detect it on blowing into the socket or plugging the headset connector in with a smart pressure. With a wooden toothpic I managed to get it out. It was just a very little tiny fluff.

After cleaning everything went fine, again. So keep it clean and easy going!

When I was playing around a little bit with it, after the upgrade to the 3.0 firmware and quit Skype, then it somewhat crashed. I saw the the dialog as the picture shows at the right hand side, but then, after relaunching the spingboard, everything worked fine.

For sure, I did I a reboot after that and noticed by the way, that one of the new 3.0 firmware improvements is the SIM-card-unlocking. It is so much faster, that I can not feel any delay, anymore.

The iPhone checks frequently for new mails and you will be up to date of what has been sent to you. Every mail is marked as unread and until now I do not a see a built in function in the iPhone to mark them all as unread.

This is really nerving me, especially if I do not use the iPhone for some hours. I do not want to click every single mail to get it marked as read. Here is my workaround:

1. Login to GoogleMail and go to the “inbox”
2. Select “all”
3. In the first line, you can select really all mails of your inbox and not only those which are listed on the first page.
4. “Archive”
5. On the iPhone, start Mail
6. Leave the inbox
7. Go back to the inbox

Now, all mails are even in the archive on the iPhone and nothing is unread anymore, besides you receive new ones meanwhile.

Delete Podcast Episode

When I am on the way I mostly consume my favourite podcasts instead of listening to music. When beeing back on my Mac I see which episodes are played in iTunes and then I do mark and delete them. But when I have listened to different podcasts I really hate it to search through my quite long directory and delete them manually one by one.

Today I have detected, that I can delete episodes directly on the iPhone which saves me some time and unconvinient title seeking.

When beeing in the episode list, slide the “unwanted” episode from left to right. The red delete button known from other built in applications will fade in. You can either click it to delete or slide again this entry to remove the button.

Guess what's in firmware 3.0

Apple invited to a iPhone 3.0 firmware presentation. Of course we are all awaiting new features and some things to be optimized. The iPhoneBlog.de invited this evening at 6pm CET to a live chat and a live audio stream.

There are many rumors what could be and would surely will be changed and added. I have created a voting rumor and you are welcome to take part and then let us see what of it will become true.

CSS frames

I am a big fan of creating websites with CSS. You may know, that is possible to have a frame like behaviour without having real frames using the iframe tags.

The secret is to put some divisions at the right place and to give the right properties. It results with only having one section scrollable and the rest of the site will remain and keep a great design. A good inspirating example is given by Stuart A Nicholls.

I have made a design using that technique and was testing it on the iPhone. But anyhow I did not know how to scroll the scrollable content. By accident I took two fingers, and that’s it. You can scroll those areas by using two fingers!

In an internal xml description, the iPhone and iPod devices are numbered. If the guess follows the same counting rules for the iPod, the new firmware checks for a new iPhone model which is not available, yet.

The gossip factory was talking about a iPhone nano, but that news was deprecated many times by Apple.

I guess, a new one is coming out with the brandnew 4G communication chip, faster GPU/CPU for better gaming performance and longer life battery. I don’t think they will change the screen resolution, because this would be a big challenge to all devolopers having two versions.

What do you think are the diffences between the iPhone 3G and the forthcoming one? What name will it get? iPhone 4G?

iPhone SDK 2.2.1

Yesterday, I was very suprised to see the iPhone 2.2.1 update in my iTunes and I am very proud to have discovered that before the invincible iphoneblog.de did.

Until now, I did not find anything what has really changed.

The readme told, that some bugfixes are done affecting the picture library and the mail account synchronization. The SMS texting should have changed, but I did not notice anything there. The Mail should receive some new features like deleting all mails, but I have not tested it, yet.

Apple keeps going fast in the moment. They released iWork 09 and iLife 09, continued bugfixes in Quicktime, building new hardware, and so on.

Today, I received also a mail, that the new SDK for the iPhone firmware 2.2.1 is available for the developers.

Go on, Apple, that makes me happy!

OneSec on iPhone

As a programmer, sometimes I need to deal with seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months and years to make it easy for the customer to have a glue of time.

Just have a look at some popular platforms like Youtube or even this blog showing you how old something is.

Timestamps are often used on unix-like systems and are counted in seconds since the year 1970.

The iPhone makes it easy for you to deal with it using the tiny freeware application OneSec.

Just slide the funky game roller displays to adjust and to see the results in real time.

Ping lite in action

Network problems can be hard to get fixed if you do not know the error source. But there are always nifty tricks to reach the goal. For the iPhone there is a little free and powerful suite helping you out with networking.

Ping Lite helps offers you Pings, Subnet Pings, Traceroute and Telnet.

The coolest in my opinion is the subnet ping.

It shows you all endings from 0 to 255. Then it makes a ping to the first. If there was an answer it will be marked green. Now, going to the next looping doing the same. So it is very easy to find how many and which IPs are used.

These tools are working all the time, even having WIFI disabled.

A useful example is when you try to open website or to reach a special server from your network, but anyhow this does not work. Make sure, your iPhone is not using the same network connection, so just disable WIFI. Then ping that website from your iPhone. If that works on the iPhone and not on your local network, then you certainly know, there is an issue. Commonly a reboot of the router will help.

Scientific Calculator

You may have noticed that the iPhone also has a nice calculator installed. That is really quite useful if you want to calculate some small things quickly.

But what about a science calculator mode? Sometimes I really do need those scientific functions.

Just turn your iPhone to widescreen and see the missing options. Rotate it back to the portait mode and it goes simple, again.

Domain Typing extended

Safari on the iPhone is really the best browser I have ever seen on a mobile device.

I had a lot of good mobiles in use before. Among them were MDA Pro or Blackberry 8110.

There is really no comparision in conform, speed and intuitive usability.

Typing of domains is just a snag and of course Apple integreated a well hidden feature giving you much more afford.

By default you see “.com“ in your keyboard.

Hold your finger on it and expands to the most other common domain endings like “.de”, “.net”, “.org”.

iPod Control

Secret #1: Awake
If the iPhone is sleeping you can click the home or lock button to awake it.

Secret #2: Get home
At any point you can go back to the homescreen if just click the home button. 

Secret #3: Screenshot
Do you have something interesting on the iPhone screen and would like to share with your friends? Then take a screenshot by holding the lock button and the home button together. On success the screen flashes shortly white and the taken picture is in the iPhones Photo gallery.

Secret #4: Quit application
An application hung off? When holding down the homebutton for 6 seconds, the current app will be forced to close and you get bumped back to the home screen.

Secret #5: Reboot / Shut down
Sometimes it even makes sense to reboot a Apple product. If you think it does react slower as used or apps are closing by themselfes unusally often, you are having connection problems, etc., then force a shutdown. Hold the lock button and the home button together for about 10 seconds. On the top you will see a slider and if you move it, the iPhone shuts down. Once it is powered off, just turn it on by clicking the home button or the lock button.

Secret #6: iPod control
If you are listening to music with the integrated iPod, it is sometimes unwanted to leave the current running application only to go to the next track or pause. Of course it is easy when a headphone is connected, because it can do those functions without touching the iPhone. But, if no headphone is on? Just double tap the home homebutton! Then you will see a simple interface for the most important play functions. Rember, this does only work when iPod was lauched before and is playing music.