Battle of the Photo Fix Apps

One weakness of any camera is that exposure isn't flawless. To get some shots looking really good you have to doctor them. iPhone's camera in the new 3Gs is pretty solid, but you still have those times you'd like to get the exposure right. If you want to email these photos directly from your iPhone, you need to be able to fix these on the fly. This post examines some of the quick fix apps for the iPhone that allow you to improve exposure before emailing a photo on it's way. While there are a lot of apps that do this, these are simple apps dedicated fixing photos typically with the push of a button, like iPhoto's enhance button. Most work by automatically lightening the mid-tones without burning out the highlights, adjusting contrast, saturating colors, sharpening and modifying color, or some combination of these filters.

This photo really gives these apps a workout. Watch the faces closely. Both are in shadow with uneven lighting, but the lighting is very different on each. Only parts of each image are underexposed so the test goes well beyond just lightening the images.


Jade You don't even have to press a button and it modifies the photo. There's a slider to tweak the filter. Jade can handle some very dark images well, but can leave skin looking mechanically enhanced on these images.


BetterPix This correction app has a Flash button and slider to fix exposure and as well as a Focus button and slider. The effects of this filter can be a little more subtle. The Focus filter can come in handy.



PerfectlyClr has a patented filter. It corrects when you load the photo. It also has a five slider tweaking set to monkey with the image and well as a FixDark button that does some extra work on the deep gray tones.


iFlashReady has three buttons: Flash, More Flash and High Flash. It also can turn images sepia as well as black and white. This is the only app without a slider to control the filter. The three settings seem to be well chosen.


You can judge the results for yourself:

Jade

BetterPix

iFlashReady

PerfectlyClr

PerfectlyClr FixDark Mode

My Conclusion All apps performed well on some photos. PerfectlyClr and iFlashReady have much stronger filters for lightening and taming tones than Jade or BetterPix. Both PerfectlyClr's FixDark button and iFlashReady's More Flash button do a solid job without making this image look unreal. PerfectlyClr can work a little harder but I think iFlashReady's More Flash button maintains a little more natural look. A downfall of PerfectlyClr is that gives you a shrunken final product with a maximum picture size of 800x600.

App: TonePad Pro

Hmmm. The Tenori-On $1,200 or TonePad Pro 99¢,. Which will I go for? For those not familiar with the Tenori-On, it's a visual musical instrument developed by Japanese artist Toshio Iwai with Yamaha. The basic premise is the "keyboard" is a 16x16 grid of LED buttons that light up when you play. Vertically the buttons control pitch and horizontally they control a 16-note sequencer. It sounds rather complex, but this is an amazingly intuitive way to play music. TonePad Pro simply and elegantly brings this concept to the iPhone.

You program the instrument as opposed to play it. By tapping the screen to turn the dots on or off you can create complex harmonics of up to 16 tones. The resulting composition plays short sinewave bursts with an echo that's mapped on the screen as it plays. Those with some musical theory behind them will immediately be able to map out complex melodies that would require up to four hands on the piano. For those who want to take the Zen approach, simply draw on your screen and you create some very rich patterns. There are some unique controls that allows you to shift up or down an octave, turn patterns on their side or randomly shuffle the dots.

These compositions can be shared with other TonePad users directly from your iPhones or emailed as ringtones and synced back to your iPhone. You can also play your compositions back into a computer or amp via the headphone out on your iPhone.

The ad-ridden free version does everything except create ringtones, so you can try before you buy and even import your compositions into TonePad Pro if you upgrade. While the Ternori-On has a few more features...okay a lot more features, TonePad Pro has a little more bang for the buck. Literally, the buck.

App: MobileMe iDisk

MobileMe has now been seamlessly extended to your iPhone. There are already apps costing up to $10 that do this and some do a little more. But this is free, reliable and or course, Maclike.

For the most part, this app will work just like the MobileMe does when you access it remotely by desktop Safari. The iDisk file system boots quickly and even caches files for offline viewing. There are some folders that are noticeably missing: Backup, Library, Sites, Software and Web. To view these, just turn on System files in Settings.

You can view and play all the standard files that your iPhone supports, including Office, iWork, PDF, RTF, RTFD, TXT, HTML and QuickTime compatible audio and video. With the example of an RTFD file, you can view it, copy photos out of it for emailing, copy text out of it for adding to Notes, share it by sending an email link and delete it. Files you have viewed are cached and show up under the Recents tab for offline viewing.

MobileMe's sharing features are supported. When you share a file, you can set the link to expire or password protect it. Shared files even have their own tab for easy finding and sending. While zipped files, disk images and others are not viewable on your iPhone, you can send links to them.

Another feature which is exclusive to the MobileMe iDisk app is the ability to access other MobileMe users' Public folders. It will even search your addressbook and find other MM users. If you work or play in a Mac environment, this gives quick access to MM users public folders across the world.

Interestingly, the trees seems to upload faster than they do on desktop Safari. This adds yet another strength to MobileMe and is a nice implementation by Apple.

Apps: Done is how todo should be done.

Done (by Chilli X) is an elegant todo app is what a task manager for iPhone should be: simply useful. If you've tried others and are sick of the tacky graphics and the myriad of confusing screens, Done is easy on the eyes, simple to use and fits the most entries on the screen of any todo app I've tried. There are priorities and due dates available, but they're not required and don't get in the way for users who just want to enter something on the list and not have to overly think it.

The Sort function rocks. Shake your iPhone and completed items drop of the bottom of the list. If you've added priorities and due dates, the important and pertinent items will rise to the top of the list.

Another innovative feature is SnapShot. Tap the list button at the bottom center and your top six events are dumped as an image onto your camera roll. You can then assign this image as wallpaper. It's slightly inconvenient, but Apple has not allowed third party apps to assign wallpaper yet. You don't even needed to wake your iPhone to see the list. Just tap the Home button, view your list and the iPhone goes back to sleep in a few seconds.

In addition to using Done as a second mind for personal todo items, I use it as both a project management tool for work and a grocery list. For projects, I use the notes field to track hours and where the project stands. For groceries I keep a list of items, uncheck what I need and then shake the phone. The unchecked items rise to the top to the list.

Done also has a unique delete feature. Just turn the phone sideways and a giant button appears. Tap it and all checked items are deleted.

You can see individual lists or all your entries together. Done color categorizes entries, so if you want to view all items it's easy to tell what list they're from. All settings for Done are accessed from within the app so you don't have to go to systems settings to make a change.

Done is simple, flexible and looks like Apple made it. There's another version of done, so make sure you buy the one by Chilli X. It's worth the dollar.

App: Photo Sketch Lets You Skip Art Lessons

Surprisingly the iPhone is rapidly becoming a powerful portable photo-manipulation platform. As the quality has improved to a focusing 3-megapixel camera in the 3Gs, almost 900 photo apps are now available, most of which have functions to change images right on your iPhone.

Photo Sketch turns a photo into a black and white charcoal drawing. Choose a photo, pinch to zoom, and set the parameters if needed. That's it. Photo Sketch goes to work. You can set the number of tones to 1, 3, 7 or 15 and the paper as grainy or smooth. I have noticed that some photos look better with less tones and some with more, so it's recommended that you try a few. I'd recommend 7 and 3 or 15 and 3.

The really powerful feature is image size. Even if your image was a tiny area of an image to start with, you can save renderings up to 2048 x 2048 in size. This allows you to make a high-quality 4-meg piece of art work from even tiny icons. Unfortunately iPhone's email will restrict the image to 800 x 800 for mailing, but the full size image will be saved in your camera roll for transferring to your computer.

One of the current limitations is that the app has no ability to adjust the exposure of the image you're rendering from for the best look. A little adjustment in an app like Free Photo Filters (actually one of the nicest apps for adjusting image exposure) will allow you to both control images for the correct lightness and sharpen blurry blowups for sketching. Slightly overexposed shots can look best.

This app meets the main criteria for being iPhonish: one easy-to-use screen. While not a must have for everyone, this is a fun app that shows off the powerful photo tool the iPhone has become.

Quit Applications

When you exit an application, it's still running in the background. If an app snags, you can force quit it without having to reset the iPhone. To force quit an application:

• Make sure you're in the app.
• Hold the Sleep button on top until the Power Off switch appears.
• Hold the Home button for about 8 seconds.

App: Tumble

Social networking is branching out an an amazing rate. In the blogosphere many of the lengthy blog have been replaced by micro-blogs. A micro-blog is designed for short posts that often contain media like links, photos, movies and audio. More of a "Hey look what I saw" type post without a lot of need for more than a quick quip. Tumblr is a strong contender for this market. It's free and so simple to set up, yet hackable for those who like to tinker. And typically the screen area is smaller and fonts are larger than traditional blogs, so Tumlblogs display great on an iPhone in Safari.

There are currently four apps designed for posting to Tumblr directly from your iPhone. I like Tumble. It's free and allows for fast blogging and posting. The interface is extremely logical and simple. The opening screen gives you five options to post: text, quote, url, photo or the contents of a Tumblr chat. Tap one, a dedicated editor opens and your press the post button. Even simpler than posting through Tumblr itself. Once you've set your Tumblr username and password in Tumble for posting you won't have to fool with them again.

Currently there's no interface to see your posts or modify old posts. But this is simple enough to do through Safari. Save your Tumblr site or dashboard on your home screen next to Tumble and you'll have easy access to check out your posts. Here is my Tumblog of poems and drawings made on my iPhone with the Sketches app.

I like the simplicty and speed of Tumble so much, I kind of hope they don't integrate more complex features. Tumble had pretty near flawless fuction, so why mess with a good thing?

Tips

• Tumble is capable of sending html code. It's cumbersome to type tags so you probably won't do much of it. I tested emphasis and links.

App: BlogPress

For those who blog with Blogger, the only option for iPhone has been blogging by mail. This is not a bad option since you can also send photos to your blog as well as text. Now BlogPress allows more blogging flexibility:

• Edit older posts
• HTML formatting
• Post to multiple blogs including Blogger, MSN Live Spaces, WorsPress, Movable Type and TypePad
• Picasa photo loading

Cool. Does it work? This entry was created with it.

However there are issues. It is not really a WYSIWYG rich text editor as claimed. I think this is more a result of the developer's poor command of English. You can insert an image in the middle of your text. If you want rich text, or links you'll need to code them yourself. And s editing old posts is far from WYSIWYG: You need a basic knowledge of HTML to read as well as not screw up posts.

The app is a little pricey at $10. I hope the developer will grow it. If he can't make a real WYSIWYG editor (not a simple feat) then he needs to make some sort of HTML tagging feature or the posting abilities will remain what you can already do with free blogging by mail. The photos can't be resized from full screen and there are currently some rendering issues with the text field not showing type.

While overpriced the app is decent enough in what it really does that serious bloggers will probably be happy with the added function.

Pausing an App While Loading

Apps for your iPhone can be huge. Edge and 3G have a download limit of 10 megs, which can take a while. If you need to pause the download to do something else at a faster speed:

• Go to the Home screen where the app is loading. It will say "Loading" below it.
• Tap the icon and it will show as "Paused".
• When ready to start loading, tap the icon again.

App: Jade Fixes Photos

iPhoto's camera is one of the better available on a phone, but there are no controls: you can't adjust for backlighting or underexposure. You take what you get. And if shooting conditions are less than ideal, the results may not be what you want. Jade is the app I have been waiting for. There are a few other image editing apps already available for the iPhone. But I wanted one that's really simple and can quickly and accurately clean up some of the issues we face with iPhone cameras: underexposure, washed out colors, lackluster contrast, haze from the lens coating wearing off. This is it.

Jade automatically corrects for these and does a decent job. You open it and select a photo. Jade goes to work and makes the correction. It works better at this than iPhoto's Enhance button, which is more than I was hoping for in an iPhone app. The Filter slider position will vary based on what Jade has done. You can slide it more if you like. In very underexposed images, sliding right will lighten the image more. Press the Save button when done. You get a 640 x 480 emailable or Web-postable image.

The app has not had good reviews at the App Store. I think people don't get it. They're expecting PhotoShop, or even worse: they're expecting miracles. If you have worked with something as simple as iPhoto, you know that improving an image is a real art that typically requires time and finessing, yet often leaves you with only a better image, not a great one. I'm seeing Jade get sensible results without even touching the slider. To compare, just tap the screen to see the original. You may still get a lousy image, but then you may have still had a lousy image after PhotoShopping. Some images are just not fixable. I suggest you do a side by side comparison with your desktop image editing app. I think you'll find Jade holds it's own.

Jade is especially adept at lightening dark photos without blowing out highlights. When photos are a little washed out or hazy, Jade can add a nice snap. The advantage is that you can do all this with a photo you've just taken with your iPhone camera and email it without being near your computer. And Jade is no simple piece of software. It's available http://jade.datamind.biz/ for iPhoto and Aperture as well.

Negs? There seems to be some bizarre texture sometimes added in formerly underexposed areas. I hope this is addressed in an update soon.

App: Face Melter

Face Melter is a great example of how a developer can take control of some of the powerful technology that's built into the iPhone's OSX and let you control it with a very simple interface. This liquid art app by Nico Becherer uses some of the built in features of Apple's Core Image. (Core Image is an invisible image engine built into OSX, just waiting for developers to toy with.)

Use of Face Melter is simple: Smudge with your finger and unpinch or pinch to magnify or demagnify an area. The Back button is a liquid undo that allows you to unsmudge with our finger. This can be useful for restoring the edges of the canvas if you've pulled them too far in. To unmelting the image: just shake your iPhone like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can use images from your albums, camera roll or call up the camera and shoot from inside the app.

Face Melter is $2. If you (God forbid) hand your iPhone over to your kids for entertainment, this one is probably more entertaining than any game. Even the really young get the hang of this quickly and love abusing the faces of loved ones. But I cringe at the thought of a tot shaking a little too hard and an iPhone flying out a pediatrician's office window.

While powerful, Face Melter has its limitations. It's designed to warp your Contact images and limits output to screen size. I'd like to see it work with the 2 megapixel camera-size images that the iPhone produces. The shake feature is a little cumbersome at the moment. It takes about the same amount of time as pressing the undo button and unsmudging the entire image.

For the price, this is a very cool little app.

Tip:

• Fill the screen with faces when taking pictures that you're planning on using with Face Melter or Contacts.
• The effect looks cooler when you put people against a plain background as in the example photo. You won't get a melted background, just a melted face.
  
• Use a Pogo Stylus for better control.
  

App: Facebook

If you've been using the Facebook web app on your iPhone, you can now download the Facebook app for your iPhone. Those using the Web app will find the native Facebook app to be much faster, full-featured and more stable. If you're addicted to Facebook, this is a necessity and it's free. The Facebook app is a real winner and really getting much easier to use than the Web version of Facebook on your desktop.

App Review: Checklist

I think that people who create To Do apps are not unorganized people. How many of these things have you seen that require a phd in organization just to use? There are due dates and priorities and categories. And their weird thing is that they look a mess on the screen and force you to weed through data. I just want to press a button to open the app and see my To Dos. That's how unorganized people work.

I'm convinced that Rhys Cox, the developer of Checklist, is one of us. I'm betting he has a foot-high pile of papers on his desk and this month's unpaid bill for net access is at the bottom somewhere. Rhys has created a stupidly simple To Do list for the rest of us. No frills, just function. Checklist has one scrollable screen, so when you open it, you see your checklist. You don't get a screen full of lists you need to choose from first. Or minor things are were due a week ago cluttering the top of your list forcing you to scroll to get to the important stuff.

The function of Checklist is simple. You'll see the first nine items on your list. This appears to be the most of any To Do or Tasklist app for iPhone. To see more, flick up to scroll. When done with the item, you have two choices: Tap the checkbox to check it off, or delete it by swiping right. Want to change the order of the list? Tap the Edit button, put your finger on the list icon on the right of an item and drag the item where you want it.

Checklist is free. And it's as convenient as it gets for those of us so unorganized that we're currently wearing the wrong sock on the right foot and no sock on the left.

Tips
I type a "w" and a double space before work-related entries to distinguish them. Minimal screen space wasted and a very quick to do.

App: Recorder

We have Jeff Hawkins of Palm to to thank for the philosophy behind our smart phones. The rules at Palm have always been: one function apps, just the controls you need on screen and minimal taps to work the app. Apple encourages iPhone developers to think with a similar set of philosophies which gives us extremely easy to use apps.

A fine example of an app like this is Recorder by Retronyms. They're only charging a buck for this very useful piece of software. For those who have been waiting for a dictaphone, it's here. There are a few others out there as well. I have tried the free ones which seem clumbsy and most of the other apps you have to pay for were quite a bit more expensive or cumbersome.

What makes this one great it that you open the app there's a big fat record button at the bottom of the screen ready to tap. Why the bottom? You turn your recorder upside down to use it since that's where the mic is. Tap the button to start recording and tap it again to stop. All recordings are titled "Memo" so there's no text screens to okay or to have to type in just to jot a quick note. This is a problem on some of the other recorder apps.

Playback is also simple. Just tap the title in the list and it will play through your iPhone's speaker. There is a pause button for playback. You can also drag the timeline cursor back a little or drag it to the end to stop it. And if you tap the memo title again while it's playing, it starts from the the top. To delete simply swipe right on the title and tap the Delete button.

Tap the blue arrow button on the right of a memo and you can retitle it as well as email it. There are restrictions in your iPhone's email that won't allow an application to add attachments except for images, so Retronyms came up with a clever solution: the file is sent to a Web server and an email is generated with a link to it. The files are standard AIFF files that Mac will play just fine and PC should play with little trouble. The latest version offers wifi downloads of your recordings. Just type the link shown in Recorder in any Web browser.

That's pretty much it. Recorder does just what you need it to, nothing more or less. No cumbersome useless features to get in your way. The recording quality is about what you'd expect in a pocket recorder. Not great, but fine for your voice. This gives you plenty of recording time. If you put your iPhone on the podium you'll be able to record one single recording until your iPhone runs out of space, but it will run out of power before that. Recorder will lay down well over 100 hours on most iPhones, even if you have a lot of tunes on there. And do be careful: Recorder keeps recording after your iPhone goes to sleep. Not saying it's a great espionage tool that you can innocently lay on a desk and clandestinely record a conversation when it appears that your iPhone is off but...

Not sure it was the developer's decision or just the way the iPhone is built, but it appears the mic is EQed so it just picks up voice and cuts way down on background noise.

Tip: Do short dictations, maybe a sentence or two. These are very easy to jot down, navigate through and erase.

Update 9/8/09: Recorder now records outgoing phone calls. This service costs a few cents a minute. Nice addition for anyone who does interviews by phone. Note that law states that you must tell the party you're recording immediately when they answer the phone.

Taking Screenshots

Hidden in the iPhone's OS 2.0 is a screenshot utility. It's easy to use: Hold the Home button and the Sleep button at the same time and release. Your screen will flash when the screenshot takes. It's saved as a nice sharp PNG file in our camera roll and will be transferred the next time you sync.

App Review: Sketches

Late Night Software's Sketches app was the first and still best drawing app for the iPhone. Sketches sells for $5 and is worth every penny. Just draw with your finger. Finger too big? There's a zoom tool that helps. There are 24 pen colors plus eraser and a variable size pen. The slower you draw the smoother the line is. To undo tap the Undo button on the left or just shake your iPhone like an Etch-a-Sketch to undo all. There is also a Revert to Saved feature if you hold down the undo button.

There's a library of backgrounds and basic clip art you can use. You can import images from your photo albums and draw over top of them or use the camera while in the app. You also can take a screenshot of a web page or map (it can find your location) that you can mark up. If you double tap the screen, the controls go away and you can work full screen. And the Index is a cork board of thumbnails that you tap on to call up your image. As a matter of fact, the user guide is a series of images on your cork board. Check them out thoroughly before deleting so you don't miss any features. You can also reinstall these from Home/Settings/Sketches.

One of the coolest features that really shows off the power of the touch screen is shapes. Unpinch to draw the shape and size it. Without lifting your fingers, move them to place it or move them in a circular motion and you can turn most shapes. Pen size and color determines the shapes boundaries. And there are three fonts for the text field. Text can be placed, sized, and rotated as you like. You can export to Twitter, Web (view from any browser), email or an iPhone Album. Once in an iPhone Album it's available for as a contact photo, wallpaper, or to send to a MobileMe album. Examples of some of my stetches are on tumblr.

With 2.0's new ability to save images from email and Safari, you have even more options for images to draw on while mobile. Sketches is what an iPhone app should be.

Tips:

• If you use a basic drawing a lot, save it as an image and call it up when needed. For instance, I created a drawing of a ukulele fretboard that I keep in an album and can call up quickly to draw chord tabs on top of.
• I regularly post screenshots to the Web from my iPhone but they're big fat PNG files. Open them in Sketches and export them to an album and they're saved as leaner JPEGs.
• If you do a drawing without a photo for a background, Sketches orients it to portrait. I created a clean white image with the horizontal orientation tag. When I use it as a plain background and export, I get the drawing in Landscape mode for Web posting from my iPhone.
• Since the background is interchangeable at any time, you can trace over a photo of someone and then change the photo to a white background for easier portrait drawing.
• Save regularly when you're at a stage you are happy with. You can experiment and Revert to Saved by holding the Redo button.
  
• Change Pen size before changing the color. You won't have to call the pen window up twice.

Trouble: General

Any Issue For just about any issue, restart your iPhone by holding both the Home and Sleep button (top right) together for about 7 seconds. Ignore the prompt. The Apple logo will appear letting you know your iPhone has restarted. Your data is safe. This is equivalent to restarting your desktop computer. If this doesn't work, try restoring. After you have connected your iPhone to your desktop, wait for the sync to finish. Click on the Sync button. Let it finish again. Click on the Restore button.

App Frozen Hold the Home button for about 6 seconds. This force-quits the app.

General Slugishness Like OSX, your iPhone can run many apps at once. For that matter, it's running all the apps you've started up since your last reset. You can exit apps you're not using by holding down the Home button while in that app. This will improve both speed and battery life. To turn off all apps at once, hold the Home and the Sleep button on the top right of your iPhone for about 10 seconds.

Bookmarklet Apps

Bookmarklets are tiny one-function javascript apps that run in Safari. But the cool thing is that the function can pertain to the current page. One of the most useful for iPhone users is the Find In This Page bookmarklet from LifeClever. Since iPhone's Safari has no find feature, this does the trick by highlighting all occurences of the word you entered in yellow. Another Bookmarklet that Web developers will find useful is Abe Fettig's View Source that will show you the source code of the page you're on. There are hundreds of bookmarklets available by googling. Some work and some don't.

But here's the rub: You'll need to install them in your desktop Safari. You just Control click on the link to the bookmarklet and Add Link to Bookmarks. When you sync, they'll move to your iPhone.

The Invisible Apps

When you go to your Home screen on your iPhone there's a paltry offering of four apps and 13 widgets that don't even fill up the whole screen. But there's a lot of function built into the iPhone, and some of it may not be obvious at first:

Document Viewer This app (or apps) views a huge number of file formats including HTML, word, excel, pdf, plain text, jpeg, png, gif, and tiff that come in email attachments.

Quicktime Media Player Plays audio and video in most standard formats except Windows Media Player.

Photo Viewer Not just for images taken with iPhone's camera. You can add a huge photo library to your iPhone and view it.

SMS Despite only being 160 characters long, an SMS can some really advanced stuff. It depends on who you're sending to. Much of what SMS can do is duplicated by email and Safari on your iPhone. But alerts, news, email, Google searches can be sent. Money can be transferred by SMS. There's a lot more. As the iPhone has no native instant messaging app, SMS is still it for texting. And the iPhone interface that lists your messages as threads rocks.

Phone Books Both the Google search in Safari and Maps work like white and yellow pages. Maps is a phonebook with a sallelite view.

Traffic Reporter In certain cities the Maps app shows live expressway traffic in the zoomed out view. Where I live he have had a public service traffic network for many years. Google ties into it for very accurate info.

Where The Heck Am I? In Maps press the Locate button on the bottom left. This scans for cell towers and wifi hotspots and check them against a database. Accuracy depends on populations density. In rural areas it can be as far off as 25 miles. I love in urbia and mine is accurate to 25 ft. from my my apartment.

WiFinder Home>Settings>WiFi. Or just keep your phone on. It automatically alerts you when WiFi is within range.

Web Apps There are hundreds of free Web apps that work in Safari.

Alarm Clock It's on the main screen of the Clock widget.

Timer With Alarm Cook with this one. It's on the main screen of the Clock widget.

Stopwatch Again, it's on the main screen of the Clock widget.

World Clock Ditto.

Celsius Current Temperature Converter Open Weather, click the i button and push the Celsius button.

ATT Browsers The ability to check phone stats is slightly hidden. Home>Settings>Usage shows some. Home>Settings>Phone>ATT Services shows the rest. You can also manage your account online here.

Link Detective Links may not be what they seem. That link from PayPal may say there's trouble with your account, but it could be that it's not really PayPal. Hold a link and the real address pops up. Very useful for spotting spoof emails, illegit phone numbers and bogus Web connections in mail and on Web pages. If you don't want to connect, just slide your finger off the link.

HTML Debugger This is a nice little addition for those looking to debug Websites or iPhone Web apps. Home>Settings>Safari>Developer>Debug Console ON. When you use Safari the debugger will also run. You can check for all errors or HTML, CSS and Javscript errors separately.

Javascript Bookmarklet Editor and Corrector Not pretty, but it works. If you're adept at writing Javascript bookmarklets to add functions to iPhone's Safari, you can create them in the URL editor of Safari. Bookmark any page on the Web and retitle it as your bookmarklet. Press on the url and hold delete until the url goes away. Type javascript: and start coding. Strangely enough the url editor will correct with escaped characters for you. If you type # it will be replaced with %23. And if you accidentally hit the delete button at the end of the line, just press the Bookmarks button and go back in. The editor won't allow a blank address to be saved.

Flashlight This uses the about: URI scheme to give you a blank white page in Safari. Save any Web address as a bookmark and edit it. Retitle it Flashlight and change the URL to about:. Call up the bookmark when you need a little extra light.

iPod Well, it's not hidden, but often overlooked for all it can do: not just music, but also video, audiobooks and podcasts. It's a capable media center.