Become an iPhone  super-user with these 20+ handy, but not necessarily well known tips.    They may enhance your user experience or make you an even more savvy pro.

I complied these tricks from iSmashphone.com.  A big thanks to them for spelling these out.  I’m sure at least a few will be invaluable tools for beginners and experts.

1. Scroll to Top of Page

In any application, Safari included, you can automatically scroll to the top of the page by tapping on the “top bar”, which has the time, service bars, and battery. In Safari, this not only brings you to the top of the page, but also brings up the URL bar.

2.  Domain Resolution

When typing a URL in Safari, you don’t have to type the “www” or the “.com”.For instance, for www.cnn.com just type “cnn” in the URL box. Note: Your search engine must be set to Google, not Yahoo.

3.   Domain Suffix (On firmware 2.0 only)

Hold down the “.com” key for “.net, .edu, .org” keys. Note: Slide your finger from .com to .net/.edu/.org, rather than lifting and pressing.

4.   Press and Hold for Alternate Characters

Hold a letter for a popup of various versions of the character (i.e. to type España with the “ñ” simply hold “n” and simply slide/release to the appropriate character).

5.   Click and Hold URL’s

In Safari, hold a link to see the URL and site name.

6.   Soft Reset

Press and hold the Home button and the Sleep button to restart your iPhone. A white light will flash, the screen will shut off and then turn back on. Keep holding until the screen turns back on.

7.   Take a Screenshot

To take a screenshot, hold the home button and click the sleep button. The screen will flash white and the screenshot will be stored in your camera roll.

8.   Set Parental Controls

You can enable certain restrictions or parental controls on your iPhone. You can block explicit lyrics, Safari, YouTube, iTunes, or the App Store. Just go to Settings, General, Restrictions.

9.   Save any image from Safari

To save any image from the web to your camera roll, simply press and hold the image. A menu will appear asking “Save Image” or “Cancel”. Once the image is in your camera roll, you can set it as your wallpaper.

10.  Fast Forward/Rewind Music and Video

Press and hold the skip forward/back arrows to fast forward or rewind rather than skip tracks. Also, press on the album art to manually FF/rewind.

11.   Delete Emails

You can do both “bulk deletes” and “individual deletes” when browsing email. To do a bulk delete, simply click Edit, check off the desired emails, and then choose delete or move. To delete a single email, simply “cross it out” by swiping your finger across the email, then press delete.

12.   Double tap space bar for a period

When typing on your iPhone, double tapping the space bar at the end of a sentence automatically enters a period followed by a space. No need to press “123″ to get to the numbers and symbols page where the period typically resides. I use this trick daily and it heavily increases my typing speed (especially when texting).

13.  Tap the bottom corner to navigate home screens

When on your home screen, try tapping the bottom right/left corner to switch between pages instead of swiping your finger across the screen.

14.   Take out your SIM card during backup and sync

We’ve all experienced it. You’re backing up and syncing your iPhone, and the hour long back up is nearly complete. Then all of a sudden you get a phone call, and the whole back up/sync is null and void.

To avoid this happening, simply start the backup/sync, then pull out your SIM card. Do not worry, this does not damage your phone at all. Put it back in once everything is complete. This way, your backup won’t get interrupted.

This tip is also useful if you need to make a phone call while your iPhone is backing up/syncing. Since unlocking your phone cancels the process, just take out your SIM card, pop it in your old cell phone, and call away.

15.   Move “dock” icons

You’d be surprised how often this tip is overlooked. The 4 icons located on the grey bar at the bottom of your iPhone – Phone, Mail, iPod, Safari – are movable, just like the rest of the icons. Just press and hold the icons, then drag them while they are shaking. Press the home button when you’re done. You can put any 4 icons on your dock.

16.   Automatically capitalize and add apostrophes

The iPhone automatically capitalizes certain words (“I” when you type “i”). It also automatically adds apostrophes (“I’m” when you type “Im”).

17.   Double tap a column on Safari to fit-to-page

When browsing the Internet on your iPhone’s Safari browser, double tap any column, word, or picture to fit it’s width to your iPhone’s screen. This is extremely useful for reading blogs.

The first screenshot is the page when it firsts load. The second screenshot is the page once the main text was double tapped.

18.   Manually select the icon image for a bookmarked webpage

This one’s a little more confusing. When you are browsing a website on your iPhone’s Safari browser and want to add its icon to your home screen, press the plus sign and select “Add to Home Screen”.

The image in the icon, however, is a screenshot of the page you were on. So if you want the icon to look a specific way, zoom in on a particular item on the page. Whether you want the website’s logo, or some picture on the page, simply zoom in on that part of the page before you press “Add to Home Screen”.

Note:  This doesn’t work with all websites. Popular sites like Google have special icons for the iPhone’s home screen.

• Go to your website of choice.
• Zoom in on your favorite part.
• Press the + sign and choose Add to Home Screen.
• Name the bookmark appropriately (Digg – Apple).

Now that exact part of the webpage is displayed in your icon.

19.   Your iPhone’s headphones have a multi-function button!

You’d be surprised how many people don’t know that the iPhone’s native headphones have a button on the microphone.
Just squeeze the microphone together, and the button gets pressed.

The buttons functions:

In call…

• Press once to answer a call
• Press twice to send the call to voicemail
• Press once to hang up a call

In call while second call coming in…

• click once to hold current call and switch to new call
• hold for 2 secs and release to ignore new call

Out of call…

• Press once to activate iPod and play song
• Press once to pause song
• Press twice to skip to next song

20.  Double Tap Home Button Tricks

Double tapping the home button has several useful functions:

• There is a common misconception that you must press the “Sleep/Wake” button to bring your iPhone out of sleep mode. You can press either your home button or your sleep/wake button to wake your sleeping iPhone and bring up the “Slide to unlock” screen.

• You can assign several functions to “double-clicking” your Home button.  Simply go to Settings -> General -> Home Button.  From the menu, you can choose whether double clicking your iPhone takes you to your “Favorite” contacts, or brings up iPod controls. While phone favorites is convenient, setting it to iPod mode allows you to start music no matter what else you’re doing.  In other words, it brings up iPod controls (play, pause, skip, volume) over whatever other application you are running (Safari included).  Setting iPod Controls to “On” means that if you already have music playing, double clicking the Home button will bring up iPod controls even if you have the Home Button set to “phone favorites”.

• Double clicking the home button from the “Slide to unlock” screen will always bring up iPod controls, right over the “Slide to unlock” screen. You can control your iPod without even unlocking your phone!

There’s been a lot of talk about Windows 7 since it’s launch, most everything has been positive (which certainly wasn’t the case after Windows Vista launched).  In this tough economic client people are asking themselves, “Why should I upgrade and what benefits will I see if you do?”  I’ve been running Windows 7 since August with their Release Candidate and installed the full version as soon as Technet offered it and I’ve found many improvements over previous versions.

(Be warned, this is a long post.  I wanted to get as much information in as possible.  The short story is if you’re getting a new computer definitely get it with Windows 7, if your computer is less than 2 or 3 years old I would recommend the upgrade).

Mainstream support for Windows XP is ending soon

Let’s face it, Windows XP was released in 2001 and although Microsoft has been pretty good about fixing bugs and releasing updates we all knew that at some point they would stop supporting XP just like they did with 2000, ME , 98, 95, etc.; however, Windows XP has had the distinction of being the most widely used operating system for such a long time I think many of us assumed it would last forever.  Unfortunately all things must come to an end and Microsoft’s mainstream support for Windows XP ends in April 2010, unless they release another Service Pack before then (we haven’t heard anything a 4th service pack, though).

Critical security patches will be released through 2014, but no new functionality will be added nor will any bugs get squashed.  It’s time to move to their newer operating system to get full support.

Faster boot

There’s been a bit of controversy over Microsoft’s claim that Windows 7 boots faster than previous versions.  A fresh install of Windows 7 does boot much faster than Vista or even XP, although some people have noticed it slowing down over time.  Of course if you have dozens of programs that start when you turn on your computer that is going to slow you down.  I’ve found that Windows 7, unlike Vista or XP, is actually usable once you get to the desktop.  I’m not sure how they did it but the boot time from pushing the power button until you can actually do work has significantly reduced and that just makes the system feel faster.

Beyond that, sleep and hibernate modes both work faster and more reliably, with my computer coming out of sleep in seconds.  I only reboot when there is an update that needs it, but I’ve found that even after several months of use it still boots quickly.

Aero Peek

Aero Peek is a really handy feature.  Just hover your mouse over your taskbar and a live snapshot of all the active programs pop up, from there you can click on the snapshot and that will bring that window to the front.

If you hover your mouse pointer over one of the snapshots all other windows will temporally become transparent (you can see below the outline of the other two Firefox windows around the center one), highlighting the windows you are looking for and allowing you to easily find it.

Aero Snap

Another great addition is Aero Snap.  Aero Snap allows you to grab an open window and instantly re-size it so it takes up the left side, right side, or all of your screen.  Just click and hold in the title bar (about the menus) and drag the window to the far left, right or top of the screen and it will “snap” into place.  If you click and hold and drag the window out of that position it will remember it’s last size as well. You can also “snap” the window into location by using keyboard shortcuts.  Holding down the windows key and pressing the left arrow on the keyboard snaps the window to the left side of the screen, right arrow to the right, etc.  It’s really a time saver when working on a computer with one monitor, but the shortcuts are even useful when working with multiple monitors (you can move a window from one screen to the other using the windows and left and right keys).

Keyboard shortcuts

We’ve covered them before, but Windows 7 added a bunch of new shortcuts that can save you time, effort and mouse clicks when trying to get things done.

To see Microsoft’s list click here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Keyboard-shortcuts

Check out of other blog posts on them here: http://nyctechguys.com/tech-blog/2009/10/windows-7-is-now-available/ and here: http://nyctechguys.com/tech-blog/2009/07/useful-keyboard-shortcuts-in-windows/

Great backup service

Windows 7 comes with a really useful backup utility built in.  As long as you have an extra hard drive (external or internal) you can configure Windows 7 to make snapshot and incremental backups of your computer.  What this means is that your computer will make a copy of everything on your system and then at regular intervals make backups of anything that has changed.  What is really great is that it saves the backup as a drive image meaning that you can actually boot off your backup!!  Also, if your system dies you can restore from your backup and retain all your files, programs, settings and preferences.  Your computer will be exactly as it was before you had to recover!

Windows Search

The newest Windows Search is built into Windows 7 and has become really useful.  By default it indexes everything on your computer (email, files, etc), but also indexes all programs, control panel settings and other hidden options making it much easier to find whatever it is you are looking for.  Simply click on the start button (or press the windows key) and then start typing.  For instance, if I want to run Word, I can click the start button and start typing “word”.  Before I even get to the third letter in the name Windows Search has already found it and I can hit enter and start working.

Better memory usage and support for more than 4 GB of RAM

Windows XP (unless you were one of the very few people that ran the 64 bit edition) only supports a maximum of around 4GB of RAM.  Windows Vista 64 addressed more, but had many other issues related to RAM.  Windows 7 64 bit can support up to 196GB of RAM, although there aren’t any motherboards in the consumer market that can do that currently.  I have 12GB in my system and have never run out of RAM, no matter how many programs I have open.  Of course if you run Windows 7 32 bit you will run into the same 4GB limit as on Windows XP or Vista 32, however there really is no reason to run the 32 bit version unless you install Windows 7 on an old system that doesn’t support a 64 bit Operating System.

You can check the compatibility of your system for free using a tool on Microsoft’s site here http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/en-us/default.aspx

Themes and personalization

Themes aren’t my cup of tea, but they can make your otherwise bland computer much more interesting looking and sounding if you are into that kind of thing.

The default themes that come with Windows 7 range between beautiful scenery and somewhat bizarre cartoon characters.  One thing that is really nice with Windows 7 is the built in ability to set a group of photos as your background and have them run as a slideshow.  Many vendors have also started coming out with themes (as well as small developers) and you can find many, many different styles of themes to give your computer the look and feel that’s right for you.

You can check out a nice sized gallery of themes at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/downloads/personalize

UAC vastly improved

If you used a computer with Vista, you know one of the most annoying things about (and most often disabled) was Microsoft’s User Access Controls or UAC.  It’s that popup that asks if you want to allow your computer to do something you’ve likely done many times in the past (or legitimately when installing a new program, changing system settings, etc).  UAC was implemented to help keep your computer safe, however it was so annoying that most people disable it within the first week of owning their computer or just mindlessly hit yes whenever it pops up, totally negating its benefits.

Windows 7 still has UAC, but by default it is much more under wraps and only really asks for permission when you’re running a program as administrator, installing new software or making changes to the system settings; all good things.

XP Virtual Machine

A really cool feature that Microsoft added to Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate is the Windows XP Mode.  It allows you (after a download or two) to run a copy of Windows XP within a virtual machine and install any software that won’t work with Windows 7 (to date I’ve found very few programs from the last 5+ years that won’t run under Windows 7).  Sure, a program ran within a virtual machine will run a little slower than one ran natively, but if your company uses a custom application that is business critical and they don’t plan to upgrade it anytime soon, Windows XP Mode is a perfect concession.

When it comes down to it Windows 7 actually *is* good.

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/registry.htm

Generally if you like to tweak with your services and/or registry , you can sometimes forget to set them back. Or if things really go off kilter , you can just set them right back. Of course you are making backups of anything you change first …right? Generally I have used it when a computer has been hit by a Trojan. The new ones will disable as much as possible , creating havoc  for any administrator to get the system back up and running. I am also of the mindset that formatting is not necessary …..most of the time.

What is the registry-

The windows registry is a database that stores configuration settings for the windows. Services that run in windows can be configured in the registry. The files that are on the previously mentioned site are .reg files in a zip file. All you have to do is double click on the .reg file to import it into the registry proper.

I thin that the website has a slew of useful information and worth the read, check them out!

iPhone Explorer is a free application that enables you to copy files to and from your iPhone or iPod Touch.  You can transfer photos, music and other media to right your computer.  You can also use it as a flash drive transporting files or using it as a storage device.

Here is what the makers say:

Printing anything from a browser – articles, receipts, directions, etc – can be frustrating because what you want gets printed along with  banner ads, page titles, and single lines of footer text, i.e. lots of paper and ink waste.  Now, without a lot of trouble, you can select exactly what you want to print using a Bookmarklet called PrintWhatYouLike.   You have the option to select different parts of a page to print, creating tidy and specific print results.

Bookmarklets are great because there is nothing to install, download or configure.  Simply drag the application into your Bookmark Toolbar.   When you are on the page you want to print, click on the Bookmarklet.  A user menu appears in the left column of your browser providing selection options.

Try it out!

The vulnerability was used in the cyber attacks against Google, yahoo and others over the last couple weeks. If you’re running any versions of Internet Explorer please install any updates from Windows Update that are pending on your system or grab the update manually from Microsoft’s site.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-002 – Critical

Adobe Reader is notorious for eating up computer resources.  If you are looking for a free, light and quick PDF reader try Foxit.  We have been using it for a while now and prefer it to Adobe Reader or CutePDF.  Here is what their website has to say about why it works so well:

• Incredibly small: The download size of Foxit Reader is just a fraction of Acrobat Reader 20 M size.
• Breezing-fast: When you run Foxit Reader, it launches instantly without any delay. You are not forced to view an annoying splash window displaying company logo, author names, etc.
• Annotation tool: Have you ever wished to annotate (or comment on) a PDF document when you are reading it? Foxit Reader allows you to draw graphics, highlight text, type text and make notes on a PDF document and then print out or save the annotated document.
• Text converter: You may convert the whole PDF document into a simple text file.
• High security and privacy: Foxit Reader highly respects the security and privacy of users and will never connect to the Internet without users’ permission. While other PDF readers often silently connect to the Internet in the background. Foxit PDF Reader does not contain any spyware.

You can try it for free here.  Let us know what you think.

BlackBerrys have a lot of settings hidden in the OS. Here are some of the most popular BlackBerry Tips for any user.

1. Switch the signal bars to decibels – If you want a more precise measurement of your wireless signal, just hold down the ALT button while typing N M L L. The meter on the main screen will change to a number. Do these steps again to change it back.
2. Give the audio a boost – Many people say that the ringtone or music isn’t loud enough on the BlackBerry. Go to Menu > Options > Audio Boost > On.
3. Enable separate app for SMS text messages – Don’t like your email crammed in with text messages? Separate them by going to Messages > Menu > Options > SMS and Email Inboxes > Separate.
4. Quick period – At the end of a sentence, press the Space key twice and a period will be typed automatically.
5. Switch to another program – Hold the ALT key and press Escape. Continue to hold ALT and select the program you want to switch to.
6. Send your PIN – Need to send somebody your PIN so you can communicate with them? Just type MYPIN in an email or text message and the text will change to your actual pin number.
7. Start in Safe Mode – Install an app that screwed things up? Start in Safe Mode so you can get rid of it. Remove and reinsert the battery, then when the light goes off while starting, press and hold the Escape button until the main screen loads.
8. Add more callers – Press Menu while on a call and select Add Participant if you wish to add more people to the call.
9. Reboot – ALT + CAPS + Delete reboots the device.
10. Change ring tone – Don’t like the default ring tone? Change it under Menu > Profiles > Advanced > (Active profile) > Phone > Ring Tone.

post by Oztech

image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/hmk/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0