Expendable Words » iPhone

iPhone Tip: Enabling WiFi in Airplane Mode

Doug — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:41:58 +0000

I’ve decided to leave my laptop at home for an upcoming trip to Europe, so I’ll be using my iPhone for Internet acesss. I looked at AT&T’s international data plans, but none of them look apealling, so I’ll be sticking with WiFi.

To make sure I’m not charged roaming fees I’m going to keep my phone in airplane mode, but the problem is that automatically disables WiFi.

Well, as it turns out, the workaround is painfully simple… just turn it back on (duh). The WiFi slider automatically toggles to off when you enable airplane mode, but you can turn it back on without disabling it.

On a side note, I wrote this entire post on the subway using Wordpress for iPhone in offline mode. Pretty cool, huh?

iTunes Hanging on Syncing Bookmarks

Doug — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:28:43 +0000

This morning, iTunes started hanging at “Syncing Bookmarks” when syncing my iPhone. Several tries yielded the same results, even when I left it syncing for over an hour. A quick Google search led me to this iPhone Atlas page which said you could fix the problem by deleting ~/Library/Application Support/iSync and ~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices but warned that you may end up with duplicate data.

Instead of deleting them, I just moved them to my Desktop so I could restore them if necessary, then tried to sync again. That fixed the problem and I didn’t notice any duplicates either on my computer or the phone. After the successful sync I checked ~/Library/Application Support again and noticed that iSync had been recreated, but SyncServices was not. So I dropped my original SyncServices back in and everything still works fine.

To summarize, it seems that the problem can be solved by deleting ~/Library/Application Support/iSync, then letting the iTunes sync recreate it.

iPhone Webapps Directory

Doug — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:14:33 +0000

I’m sure this has been brought up many times before, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why the iPhone webapps directory (which is bookmarked by default on all iPhones) isn’t an iPhone optimized page. Not only is it non-optimized, it’s more difficult to navigate than most. Apple is (or was) encouraging developers to iPhone optimize apps, so it just seems obvious that they would do the same for their own.

On that topic, the iPhone 2.0 API and the new App Store have kind of overshadowed the web app directory. As a new iPhone owner, I just checked it out for the first time. It contains some good stuff; you may want to check it out if you haven’t already. Just remember to do it on your desktop.