Notes Supports Links

Fascinating to open a note and see a link. Even more fascinating is what the link is. "place overnight and gave it 24." Turns out that my iPhone thinks this is an address and opens the location of a nearby hotel in Maps. Other links supported are the standard: email, urls and phone numbers. Put these in your notes and they're tappable and call up email, the browser or dial the number in question. So now you can type a list of links and click on them.

Saving Images

You can save any image you can view in Safari or Mail to your camera roll. This will be synced to your computer with your other camera images the next time you sync your iPhone:

• Tap and hold on the image.
• Tap the Save Image button.

The image can be emailed, added to a contact, used as wallpaper or added to your MobileMe gallery.

FreeFi Tips

I'm delighted to see the FreeFi movement continue to grow as more businesses discover how profitable it can be and local governments find out what a great service it is to locals and visitors. Many cities can get free or discounted WiFi but even for businesses, a $100 router and $50-a-month cable connection can dramatically increase business. If FreeFi generates 10 $5 tabs a month it pays for itself. Beyond that, it's profit a business wouldn't have had otherwise.

Connecting at these places is another story. With some it's just a matter of letting your iPhone find the connection and choosing it. Others require a login. This is not to make your life inconvenient but usually to assure that usage is limited to customers and not people in the lost or next door. It speeds up your WiFi usage so it's a good thing. Usually the place that requires your email address will give you the option to opt out of promotional emails.

Some places offer paid service. While the idea is entirely fair, rates may not be so inquire before fork over your credit card.

Here's standard procedure to connect:

• Usually your iPhone will find WiFi for you. You can also go to Home>Settings>WiFi to manually start the process.
• If no lock is shown and the signal is strong you can usually just connect by tapping the router on the list.
• If there's a lock and you know it's the router of the place you're standing in, ask. They may just hand you a passcode.
• Some routers, whether locked or not, may have a login screen. If you're in email you'll be connected but will just get the spinning hyphen and no action. Open Safari and most likely you'll get the login page. Some login pages are not visible on the iPhone. Back when Caribou was iPhone friendly you could call an 800 number and connect. (Don't bother with Caribou anymore. Too many hoops to jump through.) If you're having problems ask at the desk about how to connect. If the place is a national chain they may have a support site you can connect to by Edge. They will be much more knowledgeable than the employees.

Always thank places for the use of their FreeFi by making a purchase, even it's it's a cup of tea or a bottle of water. Those who treat FreeFi as a right and are crass enough to use it without playing along will ruin it for everybody.

Maps: Your Other Search Engine

Maps uses the power of Google in a convenient package for some useful searches. Instead of just returning information, it returns geography. You can search the following:

• Zip Codes
• Addresses
• Intersections
• Businesses, like burgers spokane
• Places like mt rushmore
• GPS coordinates
• Airport codes
• Sometimes even works like white pages.

At the moment WiFi search isn't useful. It's easier to search a city and business that you know has free WiFi, like Dayton Panera. When you get a hit, tap the blue arrow. This gives you a tappable link to the Web site in Safari, directions plotting, an option add a Maps Bookmark for easy call up by the Bookmark button, the option to add the address to a contact.

Creating a Google Doc

Though Google Docs are not fully functional with iPhone, you can create them from a standard email message. On a desktop browser, those you share with can open them, edit them and download them in various file formats. From your desktop, sign up for Google Docs, log in and press the Upload button. At the bottom of the screen you'll see a lengthy email address. Copy and paste this in your Contacts and sync it with your iPhone. Anything you email to this address becomes a Google doc. The Subject is the title of the doc and the body becomes the content.

A cool feature is that you can add emphasis to your doc with standard html tags in your email:
For italic use <i>emphasized text</i>
For bold use <b>emphasized text</b>
For links use <a href="http://iphonesmarts.com/">shown text</a>
For email links use <a href="mailto:me@myselfandi.com">shown text</a>
These are the basics. Many other html tags also work.

View your docs online at Google Mobile. This becomes a convenient place online to store any doc that you commonly need to view.

Home Screen Photo Link

Want of photo of your loved one(s) on your Home screen? (It makes them think you care.) If you have Web space you can create a Web clip for your desktop that turns the image into a thumbnail.

• Copy the image to your Web space
• Open it in Safari
• Tap +
• Tap Add to Home Screen

Now when you tap the icon of your loved one on your Home screen it will call up the full image in Safari. One caveat: if the site already has it's own Web icon, like some photo sites, you may get theirs instead of the screenshot of your image. A personal Web space, like .Mac, will only have a Web clip icon if you've installed it yourself.

You can also create a custom icon for of any image in your .Mac Web gallery. Just go to the photo on your iPhone and add it to your Home screen. When you tap the icon you'll be taken to that specific image in your gallery.

Make Sites iPhone Friendly w/ Web Clips

Web clips allow you to bookmark sites with an icon on your Home screen. This is very useful for those who use their iPhone for a dozen sites they regularly visit, since 16 will fit on their own page of your Home Screen. While this in itself is cool, the best function of these is that you can zoom in on a portion of a page. When you launch your Web clip from the Home screen it's pre-zoomed so you don't have to resize the page to read it. This trick works extremely well with Apple's discussion sites. If you zoom in on the top of the list of posts, they're legible without having to manually zoom or tap each time you go to the page. When you page back to this page, they remain zoomed in.

• Go to a site you want to clip in your iPhone's Safari.
  
• Tap or pinch to zoom in on the area you want to focus on.
  
• Press the + button.
  
• Choose Add to Home Screen.

It's convenient to create a second Home screen of Web clip icons so your top 16 sites are quickly accessible. Hold a newly-created web clip until it wiggles and drag it off the right side of the screen to the second page. Press the Home button when done.

Put Photos Back on iPhone 

Want all the shots you took on your iPhone back on your iPhone? If you create a Smart Album in iPhoto with the criteria of Camera Model is iPhone and set the album to sync to your iPhone in iTunes, all your iPhone images will be sent back to your iPhone in the Photo Library. Once set, it happens automatically. The 3Gs has it's own camera model, so you'll need to add it separately and set the Match to Any.

These photos are optimized to iPhone screen size of 480 by 320 to conserve space. It will save space and speed scrolling and rendering over leaving them on your Camera Roll. Smart Albums are also self policing, so if you delete a photo in iPhoto that's part of the Smart Album, it will vanish from your iPhone too.

Most of the art and photo processing apps export their work by sending it to the Camera Roll. All Camera Roll images start with "IMG_". Provided you don't have another camera that uses this numbering prefix, this will selectively export every image that has been in your camera roll back to your iPhone. This also imports any images that you saved from Mail or Safari on your iPhone

Faster Googling w/ Edge or 3G

While searching with Google on Safari over Wifi is blazingingly fast, the experience over Edge or 3G takes a lot longer. When you're switching between pages a lot, like when Google searching, that 20 seconds or more between pages can really be frustrating. Fortunately Google has made this process much faster by offering a special mobile site that strips out unnecessary code, so the pages run much faster. It also formats content for your mobile phone. It looks so nice, you might find yourself using this all the time instead of the standard Google search built into Safari.

• Go to http://google.com/m
• Press the Settings button and enable Format Web Pages For Your Phone.
• Press Save.
• Bookmark this page.

It's a good idea to put this at the top of your bookmarks list. This method uses a proxy server that strips when seem to be unnecessary HTML. Occasionally it strips out stuff you really need. For those instances you may have to do things the old fashioned way.

Effective Googling

Google has become such a fundamental part of our lives that we take it for granted. But for most of us, many of its powerful features are seldom tapped. And more search super powers are being added to all the time. The cool thing is that Google is so integrated into your iPhone that you can improve your search vocabulary without leaving this page.

Try a few. If your address bar is not showing across the top of this page, tap the time at the top. Now tap the address bar. Your Google search bar will pop up. Let's start with the weather. Type (or tap the link for convenience sake):

weather 10001

You can use your zip code or city. I just used the zip of Jessica Alba's high-power NY attorney. When it's raining there I have the satisfaction of knowing that he can't have the top down on the Porshe convertible she's unfortunately financing for him. If you want to search Google Images, try:

image: rocky squirrel

I give Rocky as an example to deter you from searching out scantily-clad images of Jessica Alba. (Hasn't that poor woman suffered enough?) Leave her alone.

If you wanted to search a specific site put:

site:usatoday.com hillary clinton

before your search words. This will search out only usatoday.com. Or if you want to look up a word, one method is:

define zygote

If the word zygote brings up bad memories of your childhood at Manticore, feel free to replace it. Google has some remarkable genetically-enhanced super powers. Try this:

10 miles to kilometers

Yup. Google is a converter and calculator. You also can search out specific filetypes:

filetype:pdf irs 1040

before your search words will net you only pdfs that match your search. There are a lot of other features. Google Guide has an incomplete list. For more, Google:

'google syntax'

Anything in quotes or apostrophes will limit the search to that specific term. And narrowing is search is simple on Google too. Just put minus in front of a word you'd like to exclude. This can eliminating an element from the the logical returns. So if you want to find pages that mention Picasso but not Pablo use:

picasso -pablo

Google can do a lot more. The Google team is ecouraged to add new abilities that are experimental and not offically documented. Just try logical search and see what happens.

Speeding Up Safari

Safari over WiFi generally runs fairly fast. Over 3G it can be 40% and over Edge, it's about 80% slower. For fastest data movement with either, make sure you're optimizing your connection.

• Keep your hand away from the antenna. That's the black area at the bottom of your iPhone. It blocks the signal. While the gear on the top left of Safari is spining, try holding your iPhone by the top edge.
• Make sure you're not near large metal objects, like stainless steel tables or dividers. These can sap the signal.
• If on WiFi (that's when the fan appears at the top left of your screen) sit near the WiFi router. A stronger signal will improve reception. Wander around until the fan has all three bars in blue.
• If on Edge or 3G sit near the window or go outside. Some buildings have so much metal in them they block cell signals. Try to get a five-bar phone signal.

Emailing Safari Pages

Safari makes it surprisingly easy to email a link to the current page:

• Tap the + button.
• Tap Mail Link to this Page
• Address your email
• Press Send.

The subject of the email is the title of the page and the body content is the link. The iPhoneSmarts site uses a very old-fashioned (and fast) system of links and anchors for navigation. If you arrived at a tip via the blue and gray bars, the links you send by email contain the anchor marker and will take the viewer directly to the tip when they click on the link in any browser.

Syncing Bookmarks

You can sync bookmarks between desktop Safari and iPhone Safari. I use entirely different bookmarks on each, so this seems to make no sense at first, cluttering up your iPhone will bookmarks you'll never use. But the real value is that most of us do more browsing on the desktop and if you find an iPhone site you can bookmark it easily. If you want to use bookmarklets, this is an absolute necessity for smoothly getting bookmarklets to your iPhone. To Sync bookmarks, plug in your iPhone and go to iTunes>iPhone in your Library list>Info>check Sync Safari Bookmarks. If you fail to do this when you first get the iPhone, you might erase some bookmarks later on either the iPhone or desktop.

Navigating Safari

To move around on a Web page with iPhone's Safari takes some getting used to. But once you have the hang of it, it will seem more natural than using a desktop browser.

• Flick to scroll up, down, left or right. Hold to stop a scroll.
• Double tap to zoom in on a column or photo.
• Double tap to zoom out.
• Tap a link to go to it. Be careful not to tap links inadvertently.
• To view a link, hold on it. If you don't want to go there, just slide your finger off it.
• Single tapping on a text field zooms in and calls up the keyboard.
• Flick carefully in a small text field to scroll through the text you've typed.
• You can also pinch to zoom in and out.
• Tap the top of the screen to go to the top of the page and the address bar.
• When viewing a long column, scroll with two fingers to lock vertical scrolling.
• Some links call up the page in a new window. To close out a window, tap the double page icon at the bottom right and press the x at the top of the page. To move between pages in the Page View mode flick right or left.
• Scroll a long text field by using the two-finger scroll.
• To open a new page without exiting the current page, tap the double page icon on the bottom right and tap the New Page button.

Bookmarking w/ Contacts

Your Contacts application, whether on Mac or PC, allows you to enter URLs. If this isn't an option when you edit a contact, you probably just need to enable it in Preferences or Options. In Contacts on your iPhone, these become active links you can click on and open pages in Safari. Sometimes these are easier to find using Contacts since Contacts are alphabetical.