Tag: General

Five iPhone tips

Some quick tips to get your iPhone skills slicker than the guy or girl next door. To rearrange the icons on the home page, tap and hold any icon until all the icons start to giggle. Now you can drag icons about, including on and off the Dock or between pages. Click the Home button to lock the icons again. The Dock is limited to four icons but, if you set the Home button’s double-click to call up your Contact favourites, you can remove the Phone icon from the Dock.

If you manage to crash your iPhone 3G playing with third-party apps, hold both the power and home buttons for 10 seconds to reboot the phone. Recalcitrant apps can be uninstalled using Installer.

Apple originally charged for custom ringtones but now you can create your own in GarageBand, while Windows users can follow the video tutorial at . SendSong supposedly lets you add any track in your iPod playlist to the custom ringtone list under Settings/Sounds/Ringtone, but we couldn’t get any love from it. Read More»

Posted in Mac | No Comments »

Simple Zip Code Geocoding

The ability to geocode, or translate into latitude and longitude, postal codes is a fairly useful hack to have in your programming toolbox. Quick and dirty zip geocoding allows you to do some neat things fairly efficiently and with a minimal amount of code. Though it’s U.S. centric, it allows you to add location-based functionality to your apps without requiring any real personal information to be transfered or stored.

If your application only needs to convert a zip code (or any address) into a lat/lon coordinate, say for simple mapping purposes, the easiest solution is to use the Google Maps Geocoding API. In addition to the client-side javascript functionality, you can directly query the geocoding system from php using an http request like this: Read More»

Posted in Internet | 10 Comments »