Quick, Direct Access to the Camera

Apple read my mind on this one. I always hated when a photo opp came about unannounced and by the time I’d get my phone out, unlock it, go to my camera app, and launch it, the opportunity had come and gone.

In iOS5, you have direct access to the camera from your lock screen. When Apple announced this, I was very excited. Basically there is a camera icon on the lock screen next to the unlock swipe area that you can click to go to the camera. However, after updating, I didn’t see this button anywhere. It turns out you have to double tap the home button when the phone is on the lock screen to see the camera icon, then you’re all set to go directly to the camera!

As I'm writing this, it's my birthday and I have received numerous birthday messages from friends that were too funny not to be able to share with other people.  For years now I've been trying to come up with an easy solution to get my voicemail from my phone into some kind of digital format that cane be shared, mp3, mp4, etc.

There is a service called GotVoice that I used to use but found it wasn't as convenient as I'd like.  It basically emails you your voicemail every time you get one.  This was what I wanted, but quite frankly, I only wanted certain voicemails, I didn't want to every single one emailed to me, so I stopped using this service.  Today, after receiving a few voicemails I wanted to share, I tried to reactivate my account but I don't think the service works with iPhones as I kept getting an error.  It wasn't ideal anyway so I kept looking.

The quick solution was right under my nose and I never realized it.  Some of you guys may be familiar with the Mac application PhoneView.  It's a great little app that I got in one of those Mac Bundle specials they do occasionally.  It turns your phone basically into a hard disk, which is nothing new, but it gives you access to everything currently on your iPhone (or iPad) in a very friendly user interface that I've not seen in any other application.

You've got your hard disk which allows you turn your phone into a portable drive to store files on.  You can view all of your contacts with the option to "Send them to your Address Book".  You've got access to all your Notes, your call log, your Messages (displayed in a fairly cool iChat-like style), your web history and bookmarks, and YES, your voicemail too!

You get a nice list of all the voicemails on your phone and can select any of them and choose to "Copy from iPhone" which copies the voicemail, converts it to an mp4 and exports it to your location of choice.  At this point, you can do whatever you want with the file - email to friends, post on your website, etc.  It's pretty nice.

On another side note, but to continue to give props to PhoneView, you also have access to all your media.  This becomes a great solution to grab music off of your friends' phones.  Just plug in their phone to your computer, open PhoneView, and click on their music and all of the music in their iPod library is available to you to either play from right within the application or to copy to your computer.  It's pretty nice.

The only kicker with this is that it's not free.  It's $19.95 but I'd say definitely worth it.  It's a very well made program and they are great about keeping it updated for the latest versions of iOS and any new iOS gadgets that become available (I use it for my iPad too).

Check it out and start sharing your voicemail with friends through email, sms, web posts, etc!

I was recently faced with the question of “How do I add a birthday event to my calendar on my iPhone?” Quickly, I said, “You just tap the plus sign to add a new event and select the “Birthday” calendar, right?” Wrong! You can’t select the birthday calendar on your phone, it just defaults to your main “Personal” calendar. This is very strange and I don’t understand why you aren’t given the option to select the “Birthday” calendar, but the fact is, you can’t. I was completely stumped. My birthdays just show up automatically because of an application I use called AddressBookSync (read more about that), so I’ve never been faced with this dilemma.

After almost completely giving up, it dawned on me that I can also see a contact’s birthday when I’m viewing their information in the contact list. Could it be that you have to add birthday information within the contact list to get it to show up on your calendar? Sure enough, if you view a contact on your phone and edit their information, you can tap the “plus” sign to add a new field at the very bottom. One of the options for this new field is “Birthday”. This allows you to add that person’s birthday. Now switch back over to your calendar and you’ll see that person’s birthday on your calendar.

It’s kind of an odd way to do it in my opinion, but it seems to be the only solution to manually add birthdays on your iPhone.

This is a tip for Facebook and Address Book users.  iPhone owners know that Facebook added a neat feature awhile ago to that allows you to sync your friend's profile pictures with your contact information right within the Facebook app.  This way, when a friend calls you, their facebook profile picture displays on your screen.  If you weren't aware, you can go to your friends list within the iPhone app and at the top right is a button called "Sync", tap on that and from there is it pretty self-explanatory.

However, I was looking for this same functionality long before the Facebook dev team added it to their app.  I came across an application called AddressBookSync.  It does essentially the same thing but with some great bonuses Facebook sync doesn't provide.  It scans your Address Book contact list and matches it up against your Facebook friends list and grabs information from Facebook and adds it to your Address Book.  This is all pretty standard, but one cool bonus is that you can also manually link up contacts with their Facebook profiles.  For example, I am on Facebook under my nickname so anyone trying to sync my contact information would have to have me in their phone under my nickname (which most do anyway, but that's besides the point).  If they don't have me in their Address Book under my nickname, no connection is made and none of my information is transferred, so the ability to manually tell Address Book that Matt Kreikemeier and Goon Kreikemeier are the same person is pretty nice.

The other absolute awesome thing is that it grabs your friend's birthday information if they have it listed!  This is such a great feature.  I didn't know it would do that, I wasn't expecting it to do that, but when it did it was a great surprise.  It scans all my friends and anyone that has their birthday listed now shows up in my calendar in iCal or BusyCal under the Birthdays calendar.  You just have to make sure that you are subscribed to the Birthdays calendar within the iCal preferences.   If you need direction on this, just leave a comment and I'll let you know.  Imagine the surprise when I opened up BusyCal and all of the sudden all of my friend's birthdays were scattered about on my calendar.  I have a terrible memory and this has been a great way to remember birthdays without having to go through and add everyone manually.

AddressBookSync is free and you can download it from their website.

I know by now most people know all the little secrets about the iPhone, but I was surprised to find a few people that didn't know that you could enable Caps Lock on your iPhone.

All you have to do is go to Settings > General > Keyboard and turn on the "Enable Caps Lock" toggle.  Now, when you are typing an email or text message, just double tap shift and you'll see the key highlighted in blue signifying that Caps Lock is enabled.  You are now ready to SHOUT in your messages.

Any other good tips?  Leave them in the comments below...

Here’s what to do. Open up the facebook application on your iphone and navigate to one of your favorite photo albums. When you open the album, it shows a collage of thumbnails. All we want to do is take a screenshot of this view and then set it as our wallpaper.

If you don’t already know how to take a screenshot or screen capture on the iPhone, simply hold the on/off button on the top of your phone and then click the home button. Your screen will then flash and save an image to your photo library. You can now go in your photo library and set the image as your wallpaper. You then have a custom, personalized wallpaper using nothing but your iPhone and the facebook application!