Dismantle Me

I learn new tricks on my iPhone all the time. Sometimes I assume I’ve stumbled on some unknown nugget of brilliance and then I tell someone else and I realize that pretty much everyone has known about said feature since less than a week after they got their device.

So at the risk of once again claiming discovery on the obvious, here are some of my favorite iPhone tricks and tips that you may – or may not already know…

Saving A Web Site As An App

You can save any website you visit in Safari as an app to your phone.  It puts an icon on one of your home screens and you have a shortcut directly to that site anytime you need it.

Simply click the + button in the toolbar on any web page and select "Add To Home Screen".  The web page is saved as a convenient icon.  Think of it as your ability to make custom apps out of any web page.

Taking Screenshots

You can take a screenshot of whatever is on your iPhone at any moment.  You can then MMS the message, or the next time you connect your iPhone, you can transfer the picture to your computer.  It’s quite useful for lots of things, like writing posts on iPhone tricks for example.

Hold down the sleep button and without releasing, press the home button.  You will hear a camera click and see a flash type effect on the screen.  You can then find your screenshot by going to your photos and looking under camera roll.

Navigate iPod When Phone Is Locked

When you are listening to the iPod on your phone, and you lock your phone to conserve power, you don’t have to unlock the phone to skip or pause a song.  If you have the iPhone headphones, you can use the clicker, but if not, you can always simply double-click the home button whilst the phone is still locked, and you will get a set of music controls that drop down at the top underneath the time.

Alarm

Your phone does in fact have an alarm on it, it’s just not in a quite-so-obvious place.  Under the seemingly useless “Clock” application, pick the alarm icon in the toolbar.  This will allow you to setup alarms with recurrence and change their sound.  An interesting side note is that the alarm will still sound with your phone on vibrate.  This is great because you don’t want phone calls waking you up, but you do want the alarm to.

Already knew about all of these?

I hope at least one of these is new to you.  They were all new to me recently.  The iPhone is such a great device in that it seemingly does everything and does most of it extremely well.  I personally am looking forward to owning an iPad in the near future.

One of the best things on a Mac has to be the expose feature. Not just the tiling of windows, but the ability to get to your desktop with one button press as well as tiling only windows related to the active application.

I’ve long wondered why we leave things like this out of UI. Microsoft is more than capable of writing something similar, and it can’t be that hard. Vista has Flip 3D, which is a start, but definately falls short of the grace of Expose.

For those of use who want Expose or Flip 3D on Windows XP, I have done my research and found the best program for doing this. It has a tiny footprint, and is fairly quick. It’s also the most graceful.

Its called Shock Aero 3D. You can download it here…

http://www.docs.kr/

The website is lame, but the software is good.

It has it’s limitations. It does not display the desktop as an option in the Flip 3D style. It is also not very customizable. It gives you base functionality and nothing else.

To get the Expose effect, change the option for “Screen Effect” to “Grid”.

By default, it uses the Windows + Tab combination to bring up the flip or grid. You have to continue holding down the Windows key the whole time you are in the grid or flip. You can use your mouse or arrow keys to select between windows.

Despite its limitations, I think its be best so far for XP. I’m definately enjoying it.