Tag iPhone

iOS 4 Degrades Photos

Like millions of other sheeple, today I upgraded to , graciously provided by our benevolent overlords at Apple.

One problem I noticed is that after the upgrade, when I tried setting the wallpaper, all of the pictures I had had turned into their thumbnails, i.e., they were small grainy pictures. I could blow them up to full-screen size, but of course they lost a lot of resolution and generally looked like crap.

The fix turned out to be pretty easy: in iTunes→your iPod→Photos, uncheck the box that says “Sync Photos from”, and apply to delete all photos. Then check the box again and reapply. Evidently the pictures are still stored on the desktop, in glorious full resolution and everything. This reuploads them to the iPod.

iPhone Keyboard Trick

I’d noticed a while back that if you hold down a key on the iPhone keyboard, such as the ‘E’, for a second or two, you get a pop-up menu with variations on the ‘E’ theme, like ‘é’, ‘è’, ‘ê’, and so on.

But what I hadn’t noticed until just now is that the “.com” key, which appears when you’re expected to type in a URL, exhibits the same behavior: if you hold it down, you get a popup menu with “.net”, “.edu”, “.org”, and “.com”.

In addition, since I have the French keyboard installed, the popup contains “.fr”.

In the email application, when you’re entering an address, there’s no “.com” button, just a “.” (period) button. However, it also has the domain popup, with the same TLDs as the “.com” button.

I’ve gotta say: it’s little touches like this that help the interface get the hell out of the way of whatever it is you’re trying to do.

High-Tech Schlock

Less than a year ago, I mentioned Guitar Praise, a Guitar Hero knock-off that only plays Christian rock.

Now they’re making the same cheese available to today’s hip devil-hater on the go, with Guitar Praise for the iPhone.

Never before will you think to yourself, “what should I do while my hellbound teacher is trying to brainwash me with Darwinism, Copernicanism, and other satanic dogmas?” Just pop in your earbuds to block the blasphemous blather and pray for your teacher’s salvation — with rock!

Oy.

No, It Doesn’t Play Pong

Steve Jobs says
that he wants to keep third-party applications off of the
Apple iPhone:

Mr. Jobs also appears to be restricting the potential for third-party software developers to write applications for the new handset — from ringtones to word processors.
…

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

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