My Mobile Life

Okay, I know it’s hard to get into the festive season sometimes, especially (I find) when it’s 30 degrees outside and you’ve got the mixed imagery of snow flakes and sleighs being thrown at you. So I thought maybe you could use a bit of a hand with a link to some festive wallpaper. Another good site for iPhone wallpaper is http://www.alliphonewallpapers.com/

Browse to the page that has the image you want to save in Safari on your iPhone

A bit of a tip for you if you’re not sure about the easiest way to get an image onto your iPhone? I suggest you browse to the page on your iPhone and then tap and hold down your finger on the image you want to save. A menu will then popup offering you the option to “Save Image”. When saved the image will be stored in your camera roll (just as if you’d taken the image with the iPhone’s camera). From there you can save is your wallpaper (if’ you’re not sure how to do that, see my post from yesterday).

Tap and hold your finger down to bring up the Save Image link

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Okay, so you’re probably aware that the iPhone doesn’t have MMS capability built in, at least not at this stage (I suspect there’s a good chance that it will become available in a soon to be released update to the phone). However, you may not be aware of how easy it is to send photos from your phone to someone by email. Personally I think Apple built this functionality into the iPhone thinking it would supersede the need to send someone a pic via MMS, though judging from how many people cite the lack of MMS capabilities as a major let down with the iPhone, it seems this calculation was somewhat misguided. While I have heard of a number of applications and/or tricks which allow you to MMS people photos from your iphone I haven’t yet seen any that work.

Bella with her doggles.

In any case, sending photos from your iPhone is extremely simple and can be done from the Camera roll or via the photo library. In either case, select the photo that you want to send and (if there are no buttons visible on screen), tap once on the photo with your finger. This will cause the buttons that allow you to scroll, return to camera, etc… to show up. When the buttons are visible select the icon in the bottom left hand corner of the screen (the one with the arrow emerging from a box). This will give you a pop up menu that allows you to choose to “Use as Wallpaper”, “Email photo” or “Assign to Contact”.

The photo menu

Selecting the “Email Photo” option brings up a new message with the photo you selected attached to it. (Note: you will need to have at least one mail account setup for this to work). From there you simply select the recipient, add a subject and any text you want in the message and send away. It’s that simple.

Emailing a photo from the iPhone

Note: if you find that the Email Photo link in the photo menu is greyed out, this is because an email is in the process of being sent. Once the email is finished sending the menu will become available again.

Seeing that this is the festive season, I guess it’s appropriate that I post something light and funny for readers of my blog. Those of you who have been reading for a little while have probably read a few posts where I’ve bagged out MobileMe, the offering from Apple which purports to be able to synchronise data between PCs, Macs and your iPhone. Well, after all my bitching and bagging it’s nice to be able to share a happy store about MobileMe. 

I came across this article today (thanks to my mate Scott Harris for sending me the link) about an iPhone thief who was thwarted by MobileMe. It’s always nice to hear about the happy by products of new technology.

Yesterday a friend of mine sent me a link to a website for a great free product called Evernote. As the name implies the software enables you to takes digital notes from your desktop and your mobile device. There’s a free iPhone app that you get from the app store.

The application supports a Windows desktop version as a well as Mac version which I’ve just finished installing on my MacBook Pro, so I’m still in the early stages of getting to use it. However, I was sold after watching the introductory video on the website. The product can do some amazing things: it allows you to not only take digital notes and save excerpts straight from a webpage to the application (using the Firefox or Internet Explorer plugin) but you can also take photo notes (from your iPhone) for example and the software is able to recognise text within the handwritten note and index this for when you need to find it again. 

Evernote (iPhone) splash screen

The first thing you will need to do is create an Evernote account, which is free and quite easy to do from either the website or from the application (once you’ve installed it). You then setup Evernote on your phone or computer to sign in with your newly created user account. The desktop application appears to be well written and very responsive, which is re-assuring.

The mobile application menu

Once you’ve created a note on your iPhone or desktop, it is stored there and then sychronised with your account on the web. This means that you can access your data via a website, even if you’re not in front of your computer or your iPhone is out of reach.

When saving notes from the browser, the web page address (URL) is automatically stored against the note so you can find your way back to it quickly and easily. Once you have notes setup you can email them straight from Evernote or categorise and tag them for ease of access later. You can even email notes into your Evernote account or use the “add to Evernote” menu in Outlook to save messages directly into the application.

When you set up your free account you get a quota for storage space (40MB) which will probably be more than enough for most users. However if you go over that you will need to upgrade your account (for as little as $3.99 per month) to keep synchronising your data.

I came across this great article today that features 10 useful iphone tips. While there are a couple that I’ve already covered in the blog such as how to take screenshots on your iPhone there are a few here that I haven’t mentioned and which will no doubt be useful if you’re a reader who is relatively new to the iPhone. Even if you have been using your iPhone for a while and consider yourself an expert there may be things that you can pick up (there were at least a couple that I hadn’t heard of previously).

My three favourites from the top 10 would have to be in order:

1.) When viewing email, swiping with your finger across the screen (to the left or right) brings up the delete button which allows you to delete an email without having to view it. Which solves the problem that I have had in the past, of being forced to open an unwanted email, to delete it.

2.) holding down the home button for six (or more) seconds forces the current app to quit which is useful if you find yourself with an unresponsive application.

3.) tapping the top of the screen twice scrolls to the top of the page (i.e. in Safari when looking at a long page).

Other tips and tricks covered in the post include how to reset your phone, register your wifi and access extra keys or hyphenated letters. The article has some great screenshots and pics that make it very easy to follow. Enjoy!

Okay, so after enjoying the 60 day free trial of MobileMe, I’ve decided for a number of reasons that it doesn’t meet my needs. While initially I thought it would be the perfect solution for syncing data between my PC at work and my MacBook Pro as it turns out, it doesn’t allow you to sync calendars with Exchange server (which we use in the office). While I know I will miss the MobileMe Gallery feature and being able to quickly and easily upload photos to my gallery and is nice to be able to add items to my calendar via the web from my PC, I’m not sure I’m willing to pay $119 for these priveleges.

So in the process of turning off MobileMe I discovered that it’s actually a little bit scary and thus I figured it would be a good topic for this post. 

The first thing you’ll probably want to do is sync your iPhone and computers via MobileMe one last time to ensure that your calendar information and any other info (such as contacts) is uniformly synced. This should prevent information being lost when you delete your MobileMe account.

Next I suggest that before disabling your account you clear out any emails that you want to keep from your mailbox. I just backed these up to a Mailbox on my Macbook Pro, so I can access them at a later date if desired. 

Once you’ve done this you will want to delete the mail account on your iPhone. To do this, go into Settings, Mail, Contacts, Calendars, pick your Me email address and then scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click the big red button that says “Delete Account”. 

If you have the account setup in Mail or Outlook or some other email client you will also want to remove it from there.

Finally you can then log in to MobileMe and deactivate your account via the Account Settings section of the website. You will get all sorts of warnings telling you that all information will be lost, etc… but don’t be shy, go ahead and delete the account.

Disclaimer: while I have done my best to ensure that these steps are accurate and will not result in any loss of data, I don’t take responsibility for any loss of information (important or otherwise) which may occur as a result of you following the steps in this post. Hehe! But do let me know if you think there’s anything that I missed or should add/change, etc…