iPhone

My iOS 9 wishlist

March 1, 2015

A few minutes ago I realized my iOS 9 wish list has grown to 3 items.

  • f.lux functionality built-in to the operating system. It makes my computers so very nice to use.
  • PGP key support in mail and the OS. S/Mime is great but support isn't everywhere and it would be nice to have both
  • Notification sets. Being able to group a set of notification preferences. Do not disturb is handy but it's the nuclear option. Sometimes, or everyday, I would like to have different "work-day" and "off-hours" notification settings. As a bonus for my colleagues this would man my phone could buzz a lot less while we are on conference calls.

Quick address book tips

November 16, 2011


In the recent conversion to iCloud I ended up with a few hundred spare contacts on the trusty iPhone. Those who have tried the old fashion method of correcting this problem know how much fun it is to go into each of several contacts and delete them. WIth hundreds the fun grows into outright pain.

If you have an Exchange account setup on your phone that you're not using there is a quick fix. Go into Settings > Mail, Contacts and Calendar > and then to your exchange account. Set the Exchange account to sync contacts and you'll be prompted to delete local contacts. Once it does the work for you then turn contact sync back off and you're good to go.

What isn't clear is that this won't delete your contacts syncing with other accounts. It only deletes those contacts that are local to just your phone. This also only seems to work with Exchange accounts.

Another long time frustration with Mobile Me and now iCloud and address book sync has been what to do with those old addresses.

A day with iTunes Match

November 15, 2011

Overall iTunes Match has been worth it. There are some very interesting anomalies.

In some cases Match fails to match songs on an album for inexplicable reasons. Several albums of early 80's genres were matched for all but one song. Though the album had been ripped and encoded in a single shot something prevented these songs from being matched.

An even more interesting case is this album of Franz Danzi Concertos:
iTunes Match screenshot

Note that Match found 6 of the 7 tracks and uploaded just one. However this album is not available in the US iTunes Music Store (not sure if it's available elsewhere). The third track is available as a part of another collection but the other tracks are not available. Yet with Match I can (and have on another computer) update these tracks to a better encoded version of the tracks.

Getting iPhone mail working from outside Mail.app on iOS4

July 24, 2010

This past week has been rather quiet but not in the way I'd hoped. Normally when I'm on the road as I was this week I'd get a series of photos and videos of the various things going on at home. While FaceTime is great and we had some great calls the videos and photos weren't coming.

As it turns out this isn't some issue with a lack of good intentions. In fact my wife was certain she'd sent them. Indeed there on her iPhone was an outbox full of messages to family members waiting for the last week to be sent.

It also turns out that she's far from alone in having these . And before feels the need to post videos of other phones failing in the same way, yes there are other phones having similar problems that aren't running iOS4 or made by Apple.

At the same time my phone is having no issues sending photos and videos from the photo gallery. So I started to compare the differences between the two phones.

Apple won't return stolen iPhone hoopla

January 4, 2010

stolen_phone.jpg
Late last week Consumerist ran a report about a stolen iPhone that was being sent back to Apple for repair. The report comes from the owner of the phone who laments the lack of assistance from Apple.

In running the story the Consumerist writer opines:

Also, if there's anything to learn from this it might be that you should follow through with filing a police report if you're ever robbed, as that might give you the leverage you need to get a company to help you. Possibly not with Apple, though.

However this is quite a stretch. The whole problem here stems from the original author's failure to file a police report. This is explained in the original letter:

Incorrect time on iPhone

August 10, 2009

There's an epidemic of incorrect time on the iPhone. Well maybe not quite epidemic but it seems I'm not the only one who has seen it. What is particularly odd is that the time, when incorrect is off by two hours. The report on the other site was around Mammoth Lakes on US 395.

On this trip I've noticed it in a couple of spots. First off in the border regions of Nevada and Oregon while southbound on US 95. In this region there is a time difference between the Mountain and Pacific time zones. The same, however, cannot be said for Mammoth Lakes.

Then it happened in Wells, Nevada. The signal here, too, is flighty. A certain testament to regions of the country where iPhone sales will skyrocket when Verizon gets their hands on it. While it was happening today I found that if I turned on Data Roaming the time would be correct. Turn it off and it was back to being the current time plus 2 hours. Even with data roaming enabled when we walked across the street for dinner we were once again two hours in the future.

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