inPhoe

IP Phone Home

Remote control of my Mac is one of the things I thought Apple would be including with the iPhone...and perhaps they will yet. Until then, there's Phone Home, a free program (donations accepted) which runs on your Mac and allows you to remotely control Keynote, DVD Player, and iTunes, with more promised. Phone Home runs through a nice browser-based interface on the iPhone, and requires a quick setup. It's not exactly speedy while downloading my large song lists, but it seems well up to the task of skipping tracks, adjusting volume, and scrolling through your playlists and tracks. Very very cool.

Take Your Best Shot

The iPhone's camera releases its "shutter" when you remove your finger from the button, rather than when you first touch it. This seemed counterintuitive to me initially, but I've found that it can actually be advantageous.

Don't tap the shutter release icon to take a shot. I find it's better to hold your thumb on the virtual button, frame the shot, and then slide your thumb off the icon, toward the Home button. This introduces less movement to the camera when the picture is taken, resulting in a sharper picture.

Hide the Button: Steve Jobs Has His Finger on It - WSJ.com

Link: Hide the Button: Steve Jobs Has His Finger on It - WSJ.com.

Fly Phone

FlightStats Mobile gives you flight status and airport information on your mobile device.

You Can Take it With You

I blogged before about how I'd like to see documents on the iPhone. Well, this hack will allow you to save a document as a bookmark under Safari. It encodes the data in the file into an insanely long URL. When you tap the URL, the iPhone decodes the data and opens the file. You can encode any type of file the iPhone will open, such as:

• JPEG
• PNG
• GIF
• PDF
• DOC
• RTF
• XLS

This is a great way to take files with you when you can't be online.

I find that very large images files make Safari a bit crashy, but I successfully encoded a 1800 x 2700 pixel image as a PDF. After a bit of a delay in loading (be patient), it zooms and pans just fine. I tried encoding a very small Quicktime movie, but Safari didn't like it.

Check it out: Filemark for iPhone

UPDATE: The long URLs seem to give Safari's address field trouble in some instances. If you get stuck, try opening a new tab and closing the first. If that fails, hold down the Home key to quit Safari.

You can see an example of an encoded URL after the fold...

...and a few more

These are photographic: iPhone Wallpapers - Airbag Industries

Copyright © 2007 Greg Storey, All Rights Reserved.

199 Wallpapers for the iPhone

Beautiful. 199 wallpapers on deviantART

Maximize Your Performance

Apple has tips on extending your iPhone battery's stamina. If you need a little help in that department, it's nothing to be ashamed of.

The Horns of an iLemma

Navigate to Apple's site on your iPhone. Now try dotMac. Or don't...not if you're on EDGE. Just take my word for it: they're not optimized for the iPhone.

Huh? Apple is in a better position than anyone to provide a wonderful user experience on the iPhone. They could serve up beautifully streamlined pages that would look superb on that great big little screen.

Except, they can't.

They can't because Steve keynoted us all about how Safari on the iPhone provides the "real" web. None of your WAP-ish, mobile-y, Skweezed and shrunk web for iPhone users.

And how the haters would sneer if Apple provided special pages for the iPhone. If pinchzoom is so great, why don't they use it?

Which is too damn bad.

Safari does a terrific job of presenting the web on the iPhone. But a site that requires doubletap, scroll, scroll, pinchzoom is one I won't be visiting often. (Yes, I haven't yet figured out how to integrate "viewport" into my TypePad templates, and no, the irony is not lost on me.) I find myself seeking out lean and mean sites that present the information in a legible manner on load. Zooming on the iPhone is a kludge, beautifully executed. But the kludge is not working around a flaw in the 'Phone. The flaw is in web pages that fail to scale.

Thanks Again, Google

Google has put up a search page specific to the iPhone. I really appreciate these versions of pages with low bandwidth requirements (a Google staple, of course) and with text formatted for easy reading on the iPhone's screen. For RSS feeds, I switched from NetVibes to Google Reader for this very reason. Give it a look-see.

Link: iPhone Search.