When Apple introduced the long awaited ‘cut, copy & paste’ feature to the iPhone, it seemed straight forward enough to use – tap the text area to activate the selection popup, choose your selection method, move the ‘grab points’ to select the text and use the relevant popup to select cut/copy/paste. Simple enough. I’ve never felt the need to know any more than that, so I’ve never bothered looking any further into how cut/copy/paste on the iPhone works. However, I just accidentally stumbled upon a shortcut. This isn’t even documented in the iPhone manual anyway – I checked.

Just double-tap where you want your selection to start, then without releasing your finger, drag to the end of your selection and you can cut out the first couple of steps. Handy.

First, a little background as to how I acquired the case. There has been a lot of publicity regarding the signal attenuation problems with Apple’s new iPhone 4 handset. In my humble opinion, it has been blown way out of proportion, mostly by people who don’t even own an iPhone 4. To be totally honest with you, I have experienced the so-called ‘death grip’. At my desk in the office where I work, I’ve always had a low signal. 3G is a distant dream, and a middling 2G signal is pretty much the best I can hope for. When I bought my iPhone 4, holding it in my left hand facing me (note: I only hold it like this when texting or emailing), the signal bars would indeed begin to decrease, and after a few seconds the signal would disappear completely leaving me with ‘No Service’. At home, however, where I have a strong 3G signal, I could never replicate the problem. I suppose what I’m trying to say is: Yes, it was a real problem, but not one demanding as much attention as it did. I suppose it comes with the territory for Apple. They have a tendency to generate huge amounts of hype around their product releases that even the slightest of problems will be met with huge amounts of negative feedback.

To address this negative feedback, Apple launched the iPhone 4 Case Program. This program provided those who experienced the signal attenuation problem with a free case. Either an Apple iPhone 4 Bumper, or a third-party case from a given selection. Evidently, I opted for the incase Snap Case Clear.

As nice as Apple’s bumpers are, the ‘naked’ iPhone 4 really is a beautiful piece of design work, and it seemed a shame to cover it up. The clear hardshell case allows all of the iPhone 4′s glass and stainless steel components to remain in full view, whilst providing a reasonable amount of protection. Precisely what I was looking for.

I’ll dive straight in with a few photos of the case attached to the iPhone. The case clips onto the iPhone without much fuss, and without any adhesives. Removing the case isn’t as easy as some of the clip-on cases I’ve seen, which I personally prefer as I’d rather the phone stayed in the case than inadvertently pop out.

The case comes packaged in a fairly nondescript, yet more than adequate box, but what did catch my eye is the ‘Stand included’ badge on the front. This wasn’t listed as a feature when I selected the case, but is actually a very nice addition. Its just a small piece of transparent plastic, which looks like a lop-sided W from a side profile.

All of the edges that touch the iPhone/case are rounded so it’s unlikely to cause any damage. You place the iPhone 4 into the stand on it’s side (landscape) and its nicely angled for watching videos. Turn the stand around, and the iPhone is tilted at a steeper angle. Particularly handy for me as I quite often travel by train watching videos on my iPhone. Note: This stand has clearly not been designed to hold the phone in portrait, and I wouldn’t advise it using it this way. It does work, but it is certainly not stable.

The box also lists a feature called a ‘Flash Ring’. Essentially, this is a black ring around the rear camera hole to stop the light from the flash from causing glare by reflecting on the case.

Pros:
Slim & lightweight
Transparent
Hardshell construction (doesnt ‘catch’ in your pocket)
Unobstructed accessory ports
Desktop landscape stand included

Cons:
Top & bottom of iPhone unprotected
Incompatible with official Apple Docks*
High-Gloss coating provides little grip
Perceived lack of drop protection – i.e. hard shell = low impact absorption

*It does fit in an Apple Universal Dock without any dock adapters, but this may potentially cause stress on the dock connector.

For me, the pros are definitely more important than the cons, given the alternative cases currently available. If you’re worried about the phone receiving significant damage from being dropped, then this style of case probably isn’t for you. You would be more suited to a more fully enclosed case. Incidentally, I also use my SENA Ultraslim iPhone leather pouch from my old iPhone 3G for additional protection. It fits perfectly fine with the Snap Case attached. You could, of course, opt to protect the screen from scratches by applying a screen protection film, but you’d then lose the oleophobic properties of the iPhone 4′s bare screen. I prefer mine without.

Rob's Rating: ★★★★☆ 

As I wrote in an earlier post, my iMac recently had a well overdue reinstall of everything. Whilst this is good news for the most part, it does cause problems with things like iTunes. I was particularly concerned about losing my iPhone backups. I needed to get my iTunes library back to how it used to be, including all my preferences, iPhone applications and backups. How do you do this though? The only bit of information Apple provide on their website is how to migrate your data from an old mac to a new mac, when you have both machines available. What if your old mac is your new mac? I didnt want to restore a Time Machine backup, as I wanted to ensure this was a fresh start, and not be bringing a load of stuff over that I wanted rid of. The migration assistant was of no use either.

Google wasn’t much help initially, but I did eventually come across this gem.

Whilst, like Apple, that article does discuss the process of copying from one physical machine to another, the process described works just as well when copying from a backup. In my case, I backed up the entire hard drive contents of my iMac using SuperDuper! before I wiped the iMac clean. So I had every file I’d ever need, including old system files.

A friend of mine recently bought a new MacBook Pro, and asked me how he could transfer his iTunes stuff to it from his G4 iMac. As he was not familiar with the Terminal, or Unix/Linux commands, I gave him an expanded version of the above article. If you’re in the same boat, here is the full process he followed to ‘restore’ iTunes:

Notes:
The backup drive (or in this case, a target-disk-mode iMac) is referenced here as /Volumes/BACKUP. You will need to substitute this in the paths below with the location of your backup.
To make things as clear as possible, I’ve used blue to show source paths (where your backups are), and orange for destination paths (on your new Mac).
The commands as displayed below may span several lines, but they are all entered on one line in Terminal, followed by Enter/Return.

• Close iTunes if it is currently running, and ensure your iPhone/iPod is not connected to your Mac.
• Open the ‘Terminal’ application. The following commands all need to be performed at the command line in Terminal.
• Copy your iTunes folder from your backup to its new location (this could take a while, be patient!):

cp -R /Volumes/BACKUP/Users/rob/Music/iTunes /Users/rob/Music/

• Followed by your iPhone/iPod backups (the double quotes are important here):

cp -R “/Volumes/BACKUP/Users/rob/Library/Application Support/MobileSync” “/Users/rob/Library/Application Support/“

• Then your iTunes configuration files:

cp /Volumes/BACKUP/Users/rob/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes* /Users/rob/Library/Preferences/

• Open iTunes on your new Mac, and verify that all looks as it once did. Your Applications and Ringtones should also be showing (if applicable).
• Connect your iPhone/iPod and synchronise.

Many thanks to Major at RackerHacker.com for the original article which this information is based on.

Updated 22/06/2009

As with most of the rest of the Worlds iPhone owners, I updated my iPhone 3G to the long-awaited OS 3.0 on Wednesday 17th June 2009. Surprisingly, it seemed to take far less time to complete than any of the other software updates I’ve applied to my iPhones. As to be expected from what we already knew though, most of the new features are subtle ones. The most obvious is the Messages app, which has replaced the old SMS app. Other than that, theres nothing remarkably obvious to differentiate it from 2.2.1. Not that thats a bad thing.

I’ve been reading about the 100+ new features, both known and hidden, but I wanted to note down the ones I’ve experienced which I particularly like or dislike. I’ll keep adding to this list as time goes on.

The Good

• SMS Previews can be turned off, regardless of whether you have a passcode lock set or not.
  
• Messages that fail to send get added to the conversation, but are marked with an exclamation, which you tap to resend.
• No more waiting for a message to finish sending before starting another
• You can turn off the multiple message alert sound (this would have been more useful in 2.2.1, as ive become used to it now!)
• MMS (needs no explanation!)
• Spotlight search
• Copy & Paste (Going to take some getting used to though. It pops up a lot when you dont want it)
• The call log has little icons to indicate outgoing or incoming calls
• ‘lol’ no longer autocorrects to ‘LOL’ (that was highly irritating)
• ‘fir’ will most often (but not always) autocorrect to ‘for’ (this was so annoying previously. I rarely want to type ‘fir’, but often type it by mistake when typing ‘for’)
• CalDAV support. I can now sync my Google calendar directly to my iPhone, and it updates in the background.

The Bad (IMHO)

• No Battery % meter on non 3G S phones. Why?
• Still cant watch Movies in portrait
• Still cant assign custom message alert tones
• After sending a message, the keyboard stays on screen (why doesnt it disappear if you tap in the conversation area?)

The Ugly (Things that work, but could be better)

• Messages speech bubbles are unnecessarily narrow(er) – I’ve discovered that this does not occur with iPhone 2G handsets.
• Messages icon doesnt look right with a blank speech bubble

After adding my Hotmail account to my iPhone, I dug into the settings to find out what the server details are. These should then be able to be used with any POP client:

Incoming Server

Server: pop3.live.com
Username: user@hotmail.com
Password: your hotmail password
Use SSL, port 995

If the option is available, ensure ‘delete messages from server’ is disabled.

Outgoing Server

Server: smtp.live.com
Username: user@hotmail.com
Password: your hotmail password
Use SSL, port 587

Adding your account on the iPhone is simple enough – Just go into your email settings, add a new account of type ‘other’, fill in your credentials and the POP server settings will be configured automatically.

Maybe I’ve just become used to GMail’s IMAP access, but the Hotmail offering, whilst welcome, is a bit lacking. For example, you only get your main Inbox, so any folders you have set up are inaccessible. Also, it’s painfully slow, even over O2′s 3G. I haven’t tried it on WiFi yet so your mileage may vary.

Of course, this should work with any POP client, and the lack of folder support may be an iPhone limitation. However, I’ve not experienced this before with other POP accounts. I’ll be checking it later on my desktop client to see how it fares there.

So, I was pretty pleased to find (thanks to someone on twitter – I forget their name, sorry!) a way around this. In the iPhone settings app, select ‘General’ -> ‘Network’ -> ‘Cellular Data Network’, and change the Username from ‘vertigo’ to ‘bypass’. Suddenly everything becomes much clearer. Not the best examples, but here’s an original:

BBC Weather Image (Before)

…..Now without the compression:

BBC Weather Image (After)

EDIT 17/05/2009: I’ve been reading reports over the last few days that this doesnt work anymore. Leave me a comment if this is or isn’t working for you.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php