andy's nerd blog

Searching in iPhone Mail app

Another embarrasingly late and accidental discovery… I had no idea you could search all of your archived email from the iPhone Mail app! I use Gmail over IMAP so all of my email is stored in the cloud. Up until now when I needed to search for something I went to gmail.com in the browser and used the search function there. The other day I was scrolling through my mail in the Mail app and discovered that if you are at the top of a list of messages and scroll up, a search box will appear. And when you type in a search query it will give you an option to search on the server! I have a feeling I may be late to the party on this one but wow, very nifty.

Replacing SMS tones on iPhone

This is the basic method I’ve been using to manually replace the SMS tones on my iPhone. Must be jailbroken obviously, and comfortable with SSH. You could also use DiskAid or the other similar file copy applications. If the tone isn’t available right away try restarting SpringBoard or rebooting to force Settings to refresh it.

Visit this Link ➚

Cinch

High quality utility for Leopard that allows you to easily resize windows to fullscreen or half-screen and back. Tried it for a week and now I’m hooked. Free version with periodic nag or $7 paid.

Visit this Link ➚

MyWi

Ever since my fiance got a first gen iPod touch I’ve been looking for the best way to share internet with her in places where wifi was unavailable. In my search I found MyWi, but long ago when I did the 7-day demo I found the app buggy and slow so I didn’t buy it. After trying it again recently I changed my mind. It’s a fantastic app that turns your jailbroken iPhone into a wifi hotspot. There are other ways of wifi tethering but this is the only way that doesn’t require a PC to start the wifi network. With MyWi your iPhone creates the wifi network. If you’re phone is already jailbroken it’s available in Cydia for $10.

Visit this Link ➚

Fix for iTunes error 1600 when restoring 3.1.3 to 3GS

Sometimes when trying to restore a custom firmware to an iPhone using iTunes you get hit with an error 1600. There are a variety of causes but in my particular case, I screwed up the phone trying to change fonts and it wouldn’t boot. I turned to google and found about a million threads with various suggestions on how to make it go away. But none of them worked for me.

(There is a handy tool called iReb that will fix this issue for iPhone 2G and 3G, but it doesn’t work for the 3GS.)

And of course Apple stopped signing all previous firmware versions and restoring to official 3.1.3 would update the baseband, making it *currently* un-jailbreakable and unlockable. So, what’s one to do..I tried everything! Well, almost everything…

I was desperate and thought of one last thing to try. I put the phone in DFU mode and started an official 3.1.3 restore. It extracted the software and went to “preparing iPhone for restore.” At this point I saw an Apple logo on the phone. More waiting, and then I saw an empty progress bar appear on the phone. I continued waiting through the “preparing iPhone for restore” stage and the progress bar remained empty. Finally, after what seemed like several minutes the status changed to “waiting for iPhone.” I immediately unplugged the USB cable. The phone then rebooted into Recovery mode (or I rebooted it, don’t recall) but either way I knew that this was a step forward because I couldn’t even get it into Recovery mode before. At this point I force quit iTunes, restarted iTunes, and was able to restore my custom firmware!

The restore completed successfully and my baseband was not updated. Great success! Now I’m not sure if this has been attempted before but I haven’t seen any mention of this anywhere on the interwebz. Try at your own risk of course, but if you need this you’re probably desperate anyway. In that case, hope this helps. At the time of this writing I’ve used this method twice, both with iTunes 9.0.3, once on a Mac and once on Windows. Yes, I’ve been screwing with my phone quite a bit.

Microsoft Bashing

Not a complaint, but I’m a bit curious about all of the recent Microsoft bashing from fairly high profile MS alums. A few days ago Don Dodge, a former startup evangelist at Microsoft who’s now at Google, blogged about his positive experience discovering Apple products after escaping the Microsoft vortex. This is the same guy that told Venturebeat two months ago:

“At a high level, Microsoft today is where IBM was in late ’80s, early ’90s. When I was just starting my career, IBM ruled the world. IBM was the dominant computer provider in the world — hardware, software, network, you name it, IBM was king. I think in the late ’80s and early ’90s, we saw that shift and Microsoft became king of the hill. And in 2009, 2010, going forward, Microsoft is sort of like IBM. It’s a longtime company with a great tradition and still very profitable, but it’s not the leader. Microsoft is not making the innovative leaps and coming out with the new stuff.”

But the much larger news item was yesterday’s juicy New York Times op-ed by former MS Vice President Dick Brass in which he describes Microsoft as a “clumsy, uncompetitive innovator.” Microsoft quickly posted a pretty lackluster response to the op-ed that sidesteps Dick’s points entirely and instead claims Microsoft measures its contribution by its broad impact, whatever that means.

I’m interested in this topic now because these guys are definitely not morons. And I’m wondering what’s causing this to come out now. I think it might be because of iPad. That’s a class of product that Microsoft tried to pioneer, and failed. And if iPad does turn out to be a big hit, then it could be another big blow to Microsoft’s ego/pride/morale/perception. It’s kind of like MS is the dutiful older sibling that’s repeatedly being shown up by the golden younger brother or sister, not that I would know anything about that! In either case I guess only time will tell.

My New iPhone Home Screen

The results are in! Seven days later, here’s my new home screen:

And for comparison, here’s the before:

I may rearrange the order over the coming weeks, but otherwise this is what I’m going to keep. (In fairness I did use a few other apps over the course of the week, like Cydia and TripTracker, but decided not to move them because they aren’t apps I use on a regular basis.)

I must say it’s been a somewhat surprising exercise. There were seven apps on my home screen that weren’t being used regularly: Contacts, Maps, Weather, Mint, Pandora, Shazam, and Settings!

I’m not that surprised about Contacts. Some people like it but I find it redundant. Maybe I’m too much of an iPhone old-timer but I get to my contacts via the Phone app out of habit. I am surprised about Settings though. In theory it makes perfect sense to keep it on the home screen but it turns out I hardly use it. That is most likely because my phone is jailbroken and has SBSettings, which I use obsessively.