iPhone4idiots

Cydia App Review – Infinidock and ProSwitcher

hirtme — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:27:29 +0000

For those of you whose iPhone or iTouch is jailbroken I thought I’d share a few cool apps. First, watch this two minute video here to see what these apps do. IMO, this is the best video I’ve made in awhile. If you agree please leave me a comment. Infinidock, $0.99 on the BigBoss repo by chpwn, allows you to add upto 10 icons to your dock. While simple, this is very powerful. You find Infinidock under Settings and all you really have to do is set the number of icons you want in your dock. I’ve used 6 or 7 as any more and they seem too “tight” together and you may unintentionally tap the icon next to the one you want. Adding and removing apps from your dock once you set the number is just like moving them around your iPhone or iTouch. Just press and hold an icon for a second until they all shake and have the “x” appear in the top left. I love this app as the dock is filled with the apps you use most. The amount of swiping through pages on my iPhone has gone down probably over 90% since I installed this app.
Probably the coolest app I’ve found in quite some time is ProSwitcher – also in the BigBoss repo. The app lets you background other apps in a card layout that you then swipe through. You trigger the cards view by opening the application from home-screen, touching the status bar, or by double tapping the home button. To add an application to the Cards view, you simply have to launch the app. With Activator (which like Backgrounder I think may install with ProSwitcher) you can set individual apps to launch in a multitude of ways. These include
- double tap home button
- short hold of home button
- shaking you iPhone or iTouch
- double tap of sleep button
- short hold of sleep button
- slide in from screen bottom
- icon pinch or spread
- double tap of status bar
- going down, up or up, down with volume buttons

I haven’t noticed any drop in battery even when I have ProSwitcher running 3 or 4 apps at once. Apps do tend to open slower once more than one have been launched. However, remember I’m on a 3G and I doubt this would be an issue on a 3GS and most certainly not on the 4th generation coming in June. Just like Cycorder was a must have jailbroken app that Apple finally added, I’m sure Apple will add something similar to ProSwitcher’s backgrounding capabilities. It’s just a question of when. But why wait?

How to Unrar files for Mac & PC

hirtme — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:32:48 +0000

Thought I’d make a guide about unraring files since some people aren’t sure how to do it. It’s really simple and there is also a step by step video at the end of the guide. To see how to convert files to mp4 see our guide here. So rar files are a way to breakup another file into smaller parts. For example, instead of finding a single link avi movie file that is usually 700 MB you might find seven 100 MB rar links. First, if you are on a PC (Mac guide is just below PC) you will need to download WinRAR here. As you can see its been downloaded over 92 million times. It’s safe and easy to use. Once you’ve installed WinRAR go ahead and make two folders on your desktop and call them rared and unrared. Download all your rar files into the folder titled “rared”. Once they are all in there open WinRAR and select the rared folder. Next, click “extract to” in the top bar and navigate and point the folder on your desktop titled unrared. Hit OK, wait 20 seconds for WinRAR to do its thing and the you should find the avi file in the unrared folder. See video for example. If you are on a Mac its even easier. Macs have UnRarX installed on them so just double click the file with the extension .rar within your rared folder. Twenty seconds later your .avi file will appear in the rared folder. See the video and please consider rating it and subscribing to our channel.

iPhone4idiots App Review – Dr. Suess Storybooks for Children

hirtme — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:58:33 +0000

Oceanhouse Media lowered the price of its six Dr. Seuss storybooks to $0.99 this week to celebrate what would have been the author and illustrator’s 106th birthday. I have to say “Bravo!” These are the best storybooks I have found on the iPhone! Much longer, with more pages and touchable pictures too. While not an authority on the subject, I’ve read more children’s storybooks on the iPhone than most people. I found Little Red Riding Hood and The Boy Who Cried Wolf to be enjoyable for both my kids and daddy. However, after having read both The Cat in the Hat and Dr. Suess ABC, Oceanhouse Media blows these others away. Like all children’s storybooks for the iPhone you have the option of reading the books or having them read to you. These Dr. Suess storybooks are significantly longer. Both have over 25 pages and many of the pages have multiple paragraphs. One effect used that I haven’t seen elsewhere is a “zoom-in”. On many pages when you first turn it the focus is on a certain section of the page. For example, in the picture just below on the right, the book might focus on the bottom right section when you first turn. Thus, you only see the owl at first. However, when you swipe to turn to the next page it zooms out revealing more text and the rest of the picture. This combined with the many pages makes these some of the longest children’s storybooks I’ve come across for your iPhone or iTouch. I spent over 25 minutes with the 5 year old having ABC read to us. The illustrations are excellent of course as you can see in the pictures in this post. What’s also great is that images in the pictures can be tapped and the word will be said. See the picture of the cat above to the left. I had just tapped the ball and red fan and the words are spoken and appear briefly on the screen. This is great for the kids. I had to hold my iPhone out of the reach of my 5 and 3 year olds to goto the next page as they wouldn’t stop tapping the first time we read Cat in the Hat. In Dr. Suess ABC most of the taped worlds are followed by a sound effect as well. So far I’ve had both books read to my and my kids twice. Generally, I’m the one swiping to get to the next page and move the process along as they are enjoying tapping the pictures. So if you are a fan of iPhone or iTouch storybooks for your children, go grab some of these Dr. Suess apps while the sale lasts!

iPhone4idiots App Review – Air Mouse

hirtme — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:56:06 +0000

Air Mouse Pro, R.P.A. Tech $0.99, is a cool little app that transforms your iPhone or iPod Touch into a mouse. What’s great is the app works really well as you’ll see in the video below! Features include touchpad or single finger control, keyboard, left and right mouse buttons, a scroll button and more. Before the app will work you must download “server” software for your Mac or PC here. Don’t worry it’s pretty idiot proof Once you run the “server” software your iPhone connects almost immediately (assuming you have wifi turned on). Now I can see using this app for three main reasons. One, this could be fun to play tricks on the unsuspecting. Just stand behind them and watch them think the mouse is going crazy. Two, you need a backup mouse. In my experience, your bluetooth mouse will run out of batteries (and you may not have any) and occasionally has issues syncing. Thus, having another option is great cause you might be in a hurry. Third, if you are someone who uses your TV as a monitor sometimes this should be your mouse of choice. It’s simple to switch from watching a movie, to checking your email or a spreadsheet. The range on the iPhone Air mouse is great. I’ve been over 20 feet away with no problems. Any more than that and I can’t see the TV/monitor too well. Now I know there are some more sophisticated remote apps like HippoRemote, $4.99, and Remote Jr., $7.99. However, these apps are not only more expensive, but a little trickier to setup and master due to their greater options. Therefore, for the idiots of the world I feel more than comfortable recommending Air Mouse as a solid choice. See how simple it is to operate Air Mouse on your iPhone in this quick video.

Facebook Groups versus Fan Pages

hirtme — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 05:08:05 +0000

I know, not exactly about iPhones, but everyone knows Facebook and Twitter apps are some of the best on your iPhone so they warrant discussion. Anyway, I love Facebook and Twitter, but managing them can be a pain. Here I explain the difference between setting up a Facebook group versus a fan page and getting a user friendly url. I learned the hard way – the idiot way If you use Facebook and like this website,please consider becoming a fan of iPhone4idiots here!OK, so I wanted to create a fan page for iPhone4idiots just to have another outlet to reach out there in addition to our YouTube Channel. So first you have to decide between setting up a group or fan page. This article by mashable explains the differences well and sums it up best, “Groups are great for organizing on a personal level and for smaller scale interaction around a cause. Pages are better for brands, businesses, bands, movies, or celebrities who want to interact with their fans or customers without having them connected to a personal account, and have a need to exceed Facebook’s 5,000 friend cap.” While I doubt I’ll ever hit the 5000 number the other big advantage to a Fan Page is that they are public. That is, you don’t have to login to Facebook to see them. Thus, search engines find them and give you credit for them. That probably doesn’t matter to most of you, but if you are trying to build a website, the more public links the better. Lastly, with a Fan Page you can assign it a username so I thought it would be great to have http://www.facebook.com/iPhone4idiots. Now to do this all you need is 25 fans. To register your username all you have to do is login to facebook and goto http://www.facebook.com/username. Once there you will see the image here above on the left. See the red arrow pointing to Set a username. Well, that wasn’t there and I couldn’t figure it out for a few hours. Idiot! I created a group not a fan page so I started over. Once my fan page had 25 fans the option to give it that username finally appeared. Which brings us to the next annoying part. You can register a username like iPhone4idiots, but wait til you have your fan page setup or it will save to your personal profile. I didn’t do this and had http://www.facebook.com/iPhone4idiots pointing to my personal wall. Luckily you are able to change it, but only once. Thus, I changed my personal username freeing up the username iPhone4idiots which I was able to assign to the fan page! Now once you are setup to monitor the fan page you can find it by logging in, going to your home page and clicking Ads and Pages link seen here on the left. After that, just select Pages between Ads Manager and Help at the top. One last thing. Once you name your fan page you cannot change it. Thus, if say your company changes names you either have to stick with the old name or start a brand new fan page with zero fans and ask everyone to move with you. The iPhone Blog just ran into this very issue.

iPhone Insurance

hirtme — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:57:45 +0000

iPhones are not cheap and given that you take them everywhere, damage from dropping, running over and washing iPhones are common. Most warranties do not cover this and no warranty protects you if your iPhone is stolen. As a result many users have looked for insurance. Google “iPhone insurance” and you get tons of options. Currently the second result in that search is SquareTrade which offers insurance ranging from $60 to $80 annually depending on your iPhone’s model. You’ll also find suggestions to get a personal articles policy with an insurance company or potentially get insurance where you purchase your iPhone (like at Best Buy). The bottom line is with the soon to be 100 million iPhones out in circulation, the options to insure these $400 to $500 dollar items are vast. Personally, I’m not interested in it. While I do drop my iPhone sometimes when I get out of the car because it’s sitting in my lap, that’s why I keep it in a case! Other than that I’m not worried about any harm coming to my baby! BTW, check out this video I made for fun showing some of the ways iPhones get ruined!I love the last comment!

Interesting, a UK company, Supercover Insurance, stated last week that iPhone insurance claims spiked almost 50% around the release of both the iPhone 3G and 3GS. Further, it is suspected half of these claims are fraudulent :O

iPhone Storage – 32GB versus 16GB

hirtme — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:57:43 +0000

Check out my iPhone’s diskspace capacity bar shown at the bottom of iTunes each time you connect. First, I have a 16GB 3G so you can see the total storage space is 14.58 GB. Personally, this is enough and 32GB seems enormous and I have no idea what people are going to be putting on the 64GB 4th geneartion iPhone that will come in June. Let’s look a little closer. The tiny bit of blue at the beginning represents 132 MB of audio. This consists of 28 songs (just under 5MB per song) and I’m sure almost all of you have more songs on your iDevice than I do. I really need to add some of my library and probably will take 3GB of my 5GB of free space to add over 600 more songs. Frankly, that should be enough. I know some people want to have all 5000 songs in their library on their device, but that’s just silly. Next, the purple shows that I have 5.19GB of video. This represents over 21 hours of movies and TV shows I presently have on my iPhone. Again, there really is no reason to have more than this as even if my iPhone had a 100% charge, I couldn’t watch all 21 hours before my battery died. So since you have to recharge anyway, how hard is it to spend another five minutes to add/remove songs or videos? BTW, if it takes you longer than 5 minutes then you are doing something wrong. You can’t even see the 28MB of photos represented in yellow. This corresponds to 50 photos and screen captures I have in my camera roll. Remember, I have a 3G so its 2 megapixel camera takes photos that are not quite as big as a 3GS which has the 3 megapixel camera. Nevertherless, even with hundreds of photos this won’t even use up a 1GB of space and once you get to that point its time to delete some pictures after you move them to your Mac or PC. In green, I have 2.91GB of apps. My guess is very few of you have as many apps on your iPhone as I do. Lastly in orange, I have just under 1GB in other. I’m not 100% sure what all this is, but some of it is anything from saved games, stored files, jailbroken apps or anything else that takes up space and can not be recognized by iTunes. So my point here is that 16GB is really enough and 32GB is surely enough storage space for an iPhone. I definitely wouldn’t pay the extra $100 for the 64GB version coming this June.

Google Buzz – Not For Your iPhone

hirtme — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:41:18 +0000

Last week Google launched Google Buzz, which is their attempt to enter social networking and take on Facebook. Why, well Facebook has somewhere north of 400 million users which is a twice that of Gmail. Just like they are going after Apple and the very profitable smartphone market with Nexus One, Google wants to take on Facebook as well. So what is it? Basically, its Gmail with status updates and photo and link sharing. I’ve been playing around with it for the past week and thought I’d give you my initial thoughts. I know, what does this have to do with the iPhone? Well nothing really other than social networking apps are among the most popular on the iPhone. Whether Facebook or the numerous Twitter apps, they both look great and are so simple to use on your iPhone or iPod Touch that even my mom does it. So how does Google Buzz stack up? Well, the experience on your iPhone is not great. In fact, compared to Twitter apps and Facebook its just plain bad. The biggest problem with Buzz – its not chronological. So if you’re involved in a conversation that gets a lot of comments it keeps popping up to the top your updates. Thus, if you are following just one person that is hugely popular and gets hundreds of comments they are pretty much always on top and your friend’s and family’s post are hard to find. I’m sure Google will fix this or else the Buzz will die faster than a bumble bee on my deck. Buzz also has a Nearby feature which shows you conversations near your GPS location. I like seeing this feature, but the actual map has tiny bubbles that very difficult to tap. IMO, its not nearly as easy to use as the same feature in Tweetie 2 and therefore, not as fun. While it has some problems, Google Buzz has only been out for over a week. If they correct this major issue and tweak some things it has potential. One thing I love is that you can easily integrate Twitter and Facebook into Gmail. I did this a few nights ago and it took less than five minutes. Thus, when you open Gmail you have all three on one page. You don’t have to login to three separate sites! My gut tells me this is a big advantage for Google. I’m not sure how big as personally I rarely login to Facebook or Twitter on my Mac or PC anyway. I use both 95% of the time on my iPhone. Compare this to Buzz which I’m never using on my iPhone (at least until they change the chronological issue). However, since its just a link right under your inbox in Gmail, I have Google Buzz open on my Mac or PC for many hours per day. So tell me what you think about Google Buzz. If you are using it just buzz me at iPhone4idiots

iPhone4idiots App Review – Flowers

hirtme — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:34:42 +0000

Just in time for Valentine’s Day I thought I’d do a review of Flowers, Just2Me $0.99. There is a free version of the app which is the same other than it includes ads and limits you to three downloads and one email per day. When you launch the app you are taken to the first picture which then rotates every few seconds. At anytime you can double tap to pause so you can look at the current picture longer and double tap again to proceed. All pictures can be pinched to zoom. Tapping once brings up the control panel where you can set the photo refresh interval. As seen here on the right, the single tap also gives you three green buttons on the bottom with the options to “thumbs up” a photo, download to your camera roll or email. When you tap the email button a pop-up appears where you can type your name and a message. Now, I think this is great for friends and maybe relatives, but I’m not sure your wife or girlfriend will appreciate eFlowers as opposed to the real thing. At least not on Valentine’s Day. So you’ve been warned. I like to live dangerously so I’m sending my wife these with the line, “Real flowers die in a week, but like my love 4 you, digital ones last forever!” This can be seen as romantic, cheesy or my wife will probably interpert it as my typical B.S. Anyway, after you tap send you exit the app and the Mail app launches. It sends the email with a link that when the recepient opens shows the picture and message in full monitor size. It looks even better there.So if you forget to do something Sunday or some other special day like maybe her birthday, download this app and maybe just maybe get yourself out of the doghouse and into the garage – it’s cold and snowy out there lately.

iPhone4idiots App Review – Breathalyzer 5000

hirtme — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:34:07 +0000

Breathalyzer 5000, Nerdtown $1.99, is one of the many blood alcohol content measuring apps out there. They all are about the same and of course only for fun as none of them really work. This app is the only one of those with voice support. It’s very simple and looks real enough to where you probably can fool a drunk person. Whether or not this will help you get their keys is another matter and depends on the person. When you launch the app you are taken to the screen seen here on the left. You tap “Begin Test” and quickly hand your iPhone to your buddy and the voice simulator speaks, “Being Blowing Now”. A few seconds later it says, “Test Complete” and then “Calculation in Progress”. The result it displays depends on your setup. Hitting the calibrate button takes you to the screen here on the right. You can set the app to display a specific number, random result, inconclusive result and also toggle the automated voice on or off. While I really like the voice support in this app, I can’t see why you should pay $1.99 for this when there are so many free ones that are similar. Frankly, I wouldn’t use this app because I don’t want to trust handing my iPhone to a drunk who might drop it in his or her beer. Also, I really don’t want them breathing their germs and spit all over it as well