Tall Poppy Digital » tips for iPhone

Find your lost or stolen mac or iPhone

Lisa — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 02:00:25 +0000

Macs and iPhones are, like everything from Apple, rather nice pieces of kit. Despite the naysayers, the doom-mongers who go on about how they will one day be as inundated with viruses as PCs are today, they still help rather than hinder you when you’re trying to do work. A friend once pointed out the following:

PCs are good if you’re a computer tech. Macs are good if you want to get work done

But what happens if you lose (or have stolen) your precious hardware?

Orbicule software offers some rather good software to help you find stolen macs or iphones.

They also offer the Found iphone app, which works with the underdover app (if installed) or on its own. Read about Found on the Orbicule website.

Alternatively, there’s always Apple’s MobileMe which has the Back to My Mac feature, which will help you get your precious things back.

At $119AU it’s somewhat more expensive than the above mentioned software, but does offer a whole lot more: syncing all your important data and giving you 10GB of off-side backup storage for two.

Try out MobileMe for 60 days free of charge on the MobileMe website.

iPhone icons

Lisa — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:29:08 +0000

If you own an iPhone you might have noticed that if you add a website to the home screen, some appear with neat icons and some just display a representation of the page you were on.

It’s actually rather simple to get a neat icon for your website to appear on the iPhone, and it looks great for potential customers too!

All you need to do is create an image in your favourite image editing programme, say Photoshop, Gimp, Image editor or whatever you happen to use.

You create it to the following dimensions:

width: 45px

height: 45px

Then you save it as a Portable Network Graphic (PNG) with the following name:

apple-touch-icon.png

Once you’ve done that, upload the file with FTP or any other file transfer programme to the root folder of your website. This will be called something like html or your website name.

And that’s it! When someone chooses to add your website to the home screen (in the Safari browser, click the + and select Add to Home Screen), there will be your neat icon waiting there for them! You don’t have to do anything but create your icon, the iPhone makes the corners curved and gives it the 3d effect!

Tweetdeck – keep up-to-date

Lisa — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:18:33 +0000

TweetDeck by TweetDeck inc is a neat Mac app (there’s a Windows and a Linux version, too) for keeping your Twitter, Facebook and even MySpace account up-to-date without having to continually log-in.

It’s downloadable from the tweetdeck homepage.

The nice thing about it is that it’s relatively small and lightweight; so your mac won’t pop a cog when it starts-up like many applications.

It’s got a multi-panel view for viewing your statuses in all your accounts (twitter, facebook and myspace) and you can set it up to post your tweets to each of these accounts automatically.

Best of all, it’s free!

Oh, and there’s a tweetdeck application for the iPhone too. That way you can get an application on both your iPhone and main computer that looks and works the same.