Mobility Digest » Tips & Tricks

Long Press Icons In Ice Cream Sandwich to Get Descriptions

David K — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:46:19 +0000

In Ice Cream Sandwich Google introduced new icons to unclutter and streamline the interface. Only problem is that people don’t know what they mean and that means it would be counterproductive. Well they’ve given some advice:

In Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, we’ve added several new icons to make using your Android device faster and easier. If you ever wonder what an icon means, you can long-press the icon and the name of it will appear. For instance, when viewing a message in the Gmail app, long-press on the sealed envelope. The icon will appear against a blue background and the description ‘Mark unread’ will show on the screen. You can use this trick in other Google apps, such as Calendar, Talk, and Maps in Android 4.0.

That helps.

How To Play Cut The Rope in IE on a Windows Phone

David K — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:42:02 +0000

Cut the Rope is a great puzzler, but it’s one that is not available for Windows Phones. During CES they released an HTML5 version specifically geared for IE. It (slowly) loads on Windows Phones but the drag gesture is not supported so you can’t play it. That is unless you go to options and change the settings to ‘click to cut’ and bam – you have Cut the Rope for free on a Windows Phone.

Just go to http://www.cuttherope.ie/ on your phone to start. You can’t get the extra 7 levels you can get on the desktop version but it’s a start.

via Daniel Richardson

How to get rid Newsstand on your iPhone [sorta]

Doug Smith — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:50:33 +0000

I will be the first to admit that I have massive smartphone OCD. I can stand for scratches to be on my phones and it drives me crazy to have apps, widgets, and other crap spread out all over the desktop. I have a lot of apps that I use and they are all housed in a folder on the second screen. Each folder labeled and in alphabetical order. But since downloading iOS 5, one thing has thrown a monkey wrench in my organized folder arrangement and that is Newsstand. Newsstand, as it turns out is actually a folder itself so it is not possible to move it into another folder. Delete it you say? No ah ah. Apple has seen fit to make this folder a permanent resident of your device. Since I really don’t care about magazine subscriptions and hate the fact Apple is “making” me have something I don’t want, I went looking for an unjailbroken option.

The first option upon searching for a cure for this unwanted resident was to restrict it using the Restrictions options in the Settings. There is no option for Newsstand in the Restrictions page so off to Google more methods. As it turns out there is no way to delete it as I mentioned above, but there is skillful little way to hide it in another folder. Wait, I said earlier that wasn’t possible. Technically it isn’t by dropping it right into a pre existing folder, but what is possible is to sneak it into a folder during the process of the iPhone generating a new folder by combining two apps together.

In my case I had a couple apps sitting next to the Newsstand app. Family Feud with Friends and the Kindle app. So what you do is create a folder with these two by dragging one on top the other and while the folder is being created you must QUICKLY drag the Newsstand app on this folder during the generation of it. Make sense? Well, don’t sweat it if it doesn’t happen on the first try, some people have had to try it multiple times. I got lucky and nailed it the first time.

One other thing you all need to know about. If you manage to get the Newsstand app into the folder, if you tap it while inside of the folder it will reset your phone. There had to be some kind of downside right? Make sure you unload the other apps in the folder and get your Newsstand app onto the desktop before using it again or be prepared to wait while your iPhone resets.

[via itworld]

How to get Siri to Tweet and post to Facebook [workaround]

Doug Smith — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 05:38:50 +0000

I have just been reading on several websites their Siri reviews and it seems everyone agrees just how cool Siri is, but there are some limitations to it. I have not had much time since getting my iPhone 4S to really test it out as I had to head immediately out of the country on business, however our own iPhone guru iChris has just found a workaround to get Siri to Tweet as well as post to Facebook.

Check out the instructions below as Chris runs us through them and give it a try!

I just made an account on Posterous.com <http://Posterous.com>
Then I linked my twitter account in Autopost settings
Then I made a contact on my phone called Tweeter
"Send an email to Tweeter"
what would you like it to say?
"[content]"
ready to send?
"Change the Subject"
What would you like the subject to be?
"[subject]"
Ready to send?
"yes".
Can also auto post to Facebook and other places in the same way.
enjoy.
(the last tweet I just did, Siri asked for the subject first… weird.)

Thanks Chris and please drop a comment if this worked for you and any other hot tips and tricks!

Nothing like a Good Rebuild to Inspire

Jim Szymanski — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 22:53:42 +0000

While my Mango update was relatively painless (Mango, Mango Beta cleanup & HTC Firmware) last night, it’s what I had to do later that kept me up to the wee hours, although I did get to bed before the birds woke, which is always a priority (more like a challenge). You see, back when I installed the first Mango beta, the (licensed) developer unlock status on my phone ceased. Something to do with Vista 64 bit machines and an incompatibility, that was never addressed by Microsoft (too many other things going on I guess). So while I have enjoyed Mango (beta) goodness the past few months I lost the ability to side load apps, not that there were really any to side load anyway. Aside from that, I sample a bunch of applications which always leave some residue behind, so figured it was a good time for a fresh start. Settings/System/About/Reset Your Phone/Yes/Yes again, and it was done.

Having hard reset my Surround four times since last November (3 planned, 1 not) I have pretty much got everything down to a science. One Note list of all my currently installed apps & games-check. Another One Note folder with lists for; Start Screen tiles, Speed Dial favorites, favorite radio stations, preferred RSS feeds, favorite web addresses, system settings, particular app preferences, etc.-check, check and check again. Backup data for all the apps that let you backup-done.

Even if I had a backup file for my device I would not have used it as I wanted my registry and folders to be uncluttered and clean. And honestly, I don’t need a backup for my photos, music and video. That’s what Zune sync is for. Nor do I need to backup my apps because they are all (well most) sitting in Marketplace. But those pesky settings, not to mention the data that we all treasure, gone forever, again.

I might have my version numbers mixed up, but I believe the first time I went through this pain was upgrading from Word 2.0 to Office 95. Remembering, and then finding all of the icons I had previously setup in my toolbars was an unnecessary PITA. Sure, I am oversimplifying, but why can’t every app have a config file that gets saved, and restored after you have migrated to a new version or complete a reinstall? Would not take up much space and could occur automatically in the background. Would be a great selling point for migrating customers to new hardware (or rebuilding after that failed hard drive). Install your apps, and all your preferences can be easily moved to your new machine. I will openly admit that I am using Quicken 2004 to manage my accounts. Think I purchased 2008, but it is still in the wrapped package. After the 2004 install, the thought of figuring out how to get the toolbars setup just right on four different Quicken files was not worth it. One of those, “it just works things”. Call it lazy, but I call it making better use of my precious time.

Anyway, back on topic. After my earlier reset experiences, and without a viable backup solution for WP, I have tried to find data intense apps that provide their own backup solution and things went rather well last night. Not complaining, but none of my 135 apps and 30+ games auto-installed. Maybe it’s a new Mango thing. Not sure. In the past I wound up with a handful (maybe 20% of all my downloaded apps) of previously deleted apps or trial versions of eventually purchased apps. So while installing every app, one by one, was tedious it was probably easier to manage, although it still took several hours to install, enter credentials, setup, etc. But once you are finished, it all seems worth it, sort of.

Here is a list of apps where I was able to store data in the cloud and then retrieve. Might come in handy for your next hard reset or as you migrate to a new WP device.

CleverToDo – Although there have been comments about how this app is not as “pretty” as some of the other WP offerings, it works for me. Before my reset I logged on to my Dropbox account through the app and backed up my 20 something tasks. Your credentials are not stored within the app, so I needed to login again to restore my data, but it went as smooth as silk.

I’m a WP7 – Didn’t have to do anything here. The app “remembered” me, just as if it was a built-in application, like Zune Pass or Xbox Live. I believe it uses your Xbox Gamer Tag in your credentials. Sweet.

Notesly+ – This app has a Dropbox backup function which works nicely. Made sure I synced before the reset and everything was restored after entering my credentials. Great for short notes and lists that you can sync across multiple devices.

Pocket Files & Drop Notes – Not really backing up here, but both of these apps connect with Dropbox, providing access to your cloud files. Drop Notes specifically links to TXT files, while Pocket Files manages everything. Now that SkyDrive has become more accessible through the Office Hub, these apps may become less relevant, but still easier to navigate and create links to files.

Expiry Date Pro – While this app has got to have the ugliest live tile ever (probably about 5×5 pixels) it just works, and backs up too. Used for keeping track of expiration dates for; licenses, software registrations, Zune Pass, etc. Actually I forgot to look at the app before my reset and expected that I would need to track down the dozen entries I have made. But after opening I realized that the app did have a backup solution (when questioned, I think the dev said they use Azure or something like that). Although my backup was from June, nothing new had been added, so I was pleasantly surprised.

SkyWallet – The best electronic wallet app available for WP, period. After your reset, login with your SkyDrive ID and a few seconds later all of you precious password info is back on your phone. Brilliant. Make sure to sync before you reset, just in case you entered something recently.

And the not so good solutions.

Car Log – This app tracks your gas mileage/repair costs and has an option to export your data via email and then import back into the app via CSV. But the setup stinks, taking me a good 30+ minutes to restore about 40 lines of entries. The export is a comma delimited mess appended to the body of an email. You need to copy that into a TXT file and then import that into a formatted CSV, making sure to get everything perfect. Then you have to drop that file into your public Dropbox folder, create a public link (long link only, short links don’t work) for the file and then finally type the link into the app several times before the import will actually work. The app will overwrite your entry with a default example after each failure, so this was not fun at about 3:00am. But it was the best car log solution, after testing about a dozen alternatives a few months back.

Working Time – I work different hours every day, so needed something to log my hours along with space to record what projects I work on. While the app has a solution to export your data to a comma delimited file via email, no way to import the info, so basically useless. Guess I could format the CSV file and sync with my phone, but not quite the same thing. Still looking for a better solution.

There you have it. Maybe someday I will grow tired of all this app stuff and go stock, or Microsoft will integrate so much into the OS, that there will no longer be a need for any apps. Don’t think I am going to be around that long, but it’s a nice thought.

P.S. Btw, WP Developer Registration for my phone worked on the first try. Finally.

Go get your mangoes by force!

Matt Anderson — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:45:28 +0000

Sitting around with a proverbial thumb up your ass instead of mangoes? Yeah, I was too. This gradual roll out business can be bypassed using a little bit of force. If you haven’t received your OTA update notification then all you need to do, assuming your phone is actually in an update roll-out (so if you have a DVP or something similar this doesn’t work), then cram your USB cable into the respective slots on your phone and PC and it should fire up Zune as usual. From here hit up your settings menu in the top right. Once you’re in settings you’ll see a category for phone up top. Click that. This will go to another settings menu and should have an update category on the left hand side. Click that and then you’ll see a button that says check for updates. Mash that bitch and hold on for your dose of awesome, which consequently can take like an hour or two depending on how much data you have already on your phone.

Samsung Galaxy S II contact lookup gets a cool tweak

Doug Smith — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:33:30 +0000

If you are waiting on the Samsung Galaxy S II to come out then here is another quick little video about how Samsung has tweaked the contacts lookup options. First, like in all contacts scrolling you can one finger gesture from letter a through z to quickly navigate through what could be a very long list of contacts like I have. But here is where Samsung added some extra navigation gestures. Say you were looking up Doug and landed on the “d”. now instead of slowing down and scrolling down, you can without lifting your finger up, move to the left and it will then carry the second letter in the “d” category. So you will be able to see all the “d a” first and scroll past to get to my name which would be “d o”.

Another cool little tweak is that once you locate the contact you want to call, you have some more gesture options. By swiping to the left or to the right on the contact, you can either opt to call or to text them without having to enter into the contacts information. Very small little tweaks but definitely time savers.

So here is Jo and Nick again from Samsung demonstrating:

Got a HP TouchPad? Here’s what to do first

David K — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 17:18:16 +0000

If you were lucky enough to have ordered one of those $99 HP Touchpads in the fire sale last week, chances are it has arrived in the mail and you’ve eagerly unboxed it only to find it’s not quite the tablet experience you were hoping for. Out of the box, the Touchpad just doesn’t feel a snappy as its Android and almighty iPad competition and you may be coming down with a case buyer’s remorse. But fret no longer as HP has embraced the homebrew development community and there are now many tweaks you can easily do to get your hundred bucks worth and make your Touchpad perform like tablet it was meant to be. David K. from Mobility Digest has asked me to write up a mini guide to help those in need with their Touchpad woes.

First and foremost, we need to get you updated. The first update for webOS on the touchpad, version 3.0.2, has been released from HP containing a lot of fixing up of the Touchpad’s speed issues. To update your Touchpad to this release, open the Launcher (the Home/Arrow button in the bottom right corner), then tap Settings, and System Updates. It should do a quick check and notify you that you have a system update available. The download is large and it takes a bit of time for the device to install the update, but be patient and let it do its thing because this is an important step and many of the other tweaks will require this be to be done first. When this is complete, the Device Info on the Settings tab in the Launcher should now say you are running HP webOS 3.0.2.

Now that you are up to date, let’s get preware installed on your touchpad. Preware, in a sense, is like cydia on an iOS device. Unlike rooting and jailbreaking, installing preware and custom kernels will not void your warranty. HP is very supportive of its customers modifying the software on the device to better suit their needs. First thing you will need to do to get preware installed on your Touchpad is put the device in developer mode. This is pretty simple to do, just tap the “Just type…” bar and enter either webos20090606 or updownupdownleftrightleftrightbastart (I chose this one because it put the biggest grin on my face) and you should see a developer mode icon, hit it! When it asks you for a password, do not enter one, just hit submit. I have read that putting in a password could require you to have to restore the device to factory defaults, so don’t do it! Next step is downloading WebOS Quick Install which we will use to install preware on the Touchpad. You can download it from http://forums.precentral.net/canuck-coding/274461-webos-quick-install-v4-2-3-a.html#post2850874 . Once you have that downloaded, connect your Touchpad to your computer using the USB cable provided, select cancel when it asks you if you want to mount as a USB drive, and run WebOSQuickInstall-4.2.3.jar. This will start by installing the Novacom drivers for your computer to communicate with your Touchpad. Once this is complete you should see your Touchpad listed as the connected device. The next step is to hit the globe icon on the right of the dialog box. Once that has fully loaded, on the Applications tab, do a search for “preware”. Click Install and there you have it, preware should be installed and visible in the launcher. You can now open it, but there are a few more things need to be done before we can start installing things in preware. We need to add our feeds by hitting the menu (top left corner where it says “Preware” and has a down triangle) and hitting Manage Feeds. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you will see a section for adding new feeds.

Add the following 3 feeds:
Name: webos-testing-all
URL: http://ipk.preware.org/feeds/webos-internals/testing/all
Name: webos-testing-armv7
URL: http://ipk.preware.org/feeds/webos-internals/testing/armv7
Name: webos-kernels-testing
URL: http://ipkg.preware.org/feeds/webos-kernels/testing/3.0.2
These are all compressed so leave the check set to Yes. Scroll back to the top of the page and hit the back button. Now hit the menu again and select Update Feeds. Great! Preware is now installed and the hard part is now over.

What now? Disable all that logging! WebOS has a tendency to log everything. This has a profound effect on the Touchpad’s performance. Let’s start out with HP’s own log collecting settings. Start by opening Phone & Video Calls from the launcher and select the Dialpad tab. Dial ##LOGS# (##5647#) and hit the green button below. This should launch the Collect Logs settings. Tap Clear Logs and OK. Then tap Change Logging Levels… and then Set Logging to Minimal and OK. You can now close this. At this point you should see a dramatic improvement in speed on your touchpad. But unfortunately there is still a lot of logging and debugging happening in the background that we need to take care of. To do this, open up preware and search for these 3 packages: EOM Overlord Monitoring, Muffle System Logging, and Remove Dropped Packet Logging. You will need to install these and do a restart, after which your Touchpad should be running like it was meant to.

Pretty good, but can we do more? Oh yeah! Let’s overclock! That’s always fun. Overclocking changes the processor’s stock clock speed to one that is faster, meaning better performance. You may be hesitant to do this at first but the truth is, the processor in the Touchpad was designed to run at 1.5 GHz, which is what the white 64 GB At&t 4g version of the Touchpad is clocked to. So as a minimum, you can install the UrberKernel and selecting the OndemandTcl 1512 profile in Govnah. But I recommend going to 1.7 GHz. To do this, find 2 packages in preware, Govnah and WarthogKernel. After installing these you will need to restart your system. After you have rebooted, you should now be using the Warthog Kernel and be able to overclock your Touchpad. Start by opening Govnah from the Launcher. Then tap on Profile and Advanced Settings and then tap CPU Frequency. I set the governor to ondemand, the minimum frequency to 192 MHz, and the maximum frequency to 1.728 GHz. Hit Apply Settings. I change my I/O Scheduler from cfg to bfq. It’s something small to increase performance. After this you can close Govnah. There are also the F4 and F15C kernels which now both let you overclock to 1.9 GHz. I have found these both to be pretty unstable, most of the time causing the other core to turn off leaving you with half a processor, and don’t recommend them. But if you are adventurous, feel free to give them a try! A few other tweaks I recommend installing from preware are Unthrottle Download Manager, Ad Blocker, Increase Touch Sensitivity And Smoothness 10, and Private Browsing.

One more thing I want to talk about is watching video on the Touchpad. The tablet is very capable of playing mp4 video files, just like any other Android tablet or iPad. However, if you are like me, many of your movies are in other formats, like DivX. Some people recommend just downloading TouchPlayer from preware and being on your way. However TouchPlayer sadly isn’t very good at playing any of my videos. So what do I recommend? KalemSoft Media Player. There is a version of this in preware but it’s a broken version and will crash very hard when you try to open it. So to install it, download the ipk from http://www.kalemsoft.com/site/demos/com.kalemsoft.ksmplayera_0.3.7_tp.ipk and install it using that WebOS Quick Install program we downloaded earlier. Once installed, you should be able to run it from the Launcher and play a variety of different video formats. But what about Hulu? The Touchpad used to have a small knowing as the Hulu tablet as it could play Hulu out of the box from the web browser. On other tablets you would have to resort to paying for Hulu Plus. However after the firesale, Hulu started blocking video playback to the Touchpad’s browser. How? Hulu reads the version information on both the browser and flash player to make sure you are using a desktop computer. The Touchpad’s browser already reports as a desktop browser but the flash player reports as a mobile version, recently blocked by Hulu. In order to fix this, we need a version of flash player that reports back as desktop, but this is really easy to do. Just download Hulu Fix in preware and you are now able to watch Hulu videos.

You should now have a very capable tablet. Speedy and capable of some things other tablets can’t do. Go and use it to its full capability! Browse the web, watch some shows, downloads some apps, video chat with friends, all on your brand new tablet.

Thanks to Jon Temple!

Jailbreak tweak Delete Word asks: Why didn’t Apple think of that?

Doug Smith — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:06:55 +0000

While there is not a lot of tweaking you can do to your iOS device out of the box, there is a TON of tweaks you can do once you Jailbreak your device. Got questions on Jailbreaking? Check out our resources first: Here, Here and Here. Okay so say you have a Jailbroken iPhone and you are tired of deleting whole words and sentences one letter at a time. Sort of need a sentence or word nuke feature right? Well check this out, there is a Cydia app called Delete Word that does just that!

All you have to do is simply hold down the shift button and hit delete and it will quickly delete one word at a time instead of like I said earlier, painstaking deleting one letter at a time. This is an excellent little tweak which makes me wonder why on Earth couldn’t Apple think of that?

Big thanks to iSam for making this tweak and to all the developers out there making our mobile experience that much more enjoyable and productive! You guys rock! Head on over to Cydia and grab it for the low low cost of free.

iPodTouchHelping has made a cool video demonstrating the tweak as well that you can check out here:

[read]

Windows Phone Keyboard Tips & Tricks

Jim Szymanski — Sun, 01 May 2011 20:30:28 +0000

1800PocketPC put together an article highlighting some of the effort that went into creating the Windows Phone soft keyboard. Aside from all the work that was done researching key presses and user habits, there are a bunch of little Easter eggs that you may or may not know about. I know, your custom keyboard is better, but guess what, this is what Microsoft thinks you should use, so for now get used to it and take advantage of some of these time saving tips. Here are a few:

- Double-tap Space at the end of a sentence to add a period and capitalize the start of the next sentence.

- Tap & hold various keys to reveal hidden menus. The period key is especially handy with – ! : ? . tucked inside.

-You will find a bunch of accented characters inside of: E – Y – U – I –O – A – S – C – N – M

- And try these Number/Symbol keys for more stuff: ! ‘ “ ? – ( ) % $ 1 2 3 0. Or with shift try: – + = | < > ^

- Typing @ \ or ‘ on the Numeric/Symbol keyboard will return you to the Alpha keyboard

- Boost your speed: Tap/hold the Shift or Numbers/Symbols key, slide your finger to the character you want, and then release. Saves you a tap. And better yet, when you tap the Numbers key and slide/select, the kb returns to alpha view, so no toggling.

- In the suggestion bar, tap “+” to teach the phone a new word.

- To undo auto-correction: tap the word, then tap the first candidate (the original word) in the suggestion bar.

- When entering an address, tap and hold .com to view other extensions, like .org or ,net.

You can read the entire article here. Or see other tips here

Thanks 1800PocketPC for the tip.