You probably connected your iPhone or iPod touch to your computer when you first bought it to get your music. Have you connected it since then to synchronize it with your computer? If you haven’t, you should.
Syncing your iPhone with your computer will do three key things. It’ll update the apps, music, videos, podcasts, photos, etc. on your iPhone based on whatever you have on your computer. This may be all that you expected would happen. But, it will also backup your iPhone so that if you lose your iPhone (or replace it for any other reason) you can load the new one with a backup and get everything back as it was. It’s really seamless and will appear magical the first time you setup a new device from a backup. The other benefit syncing will give you is that iTunes will periodically check to make sure the system software on your phone is the latest and greatest version. iTunes will prompt you to download and install the newest version of the OS if your phone isn’t up-to-date. You’ll get new features and/or fixes for issues when your OS is updated.
These are three great benefits to regularly syncing your device with iTunes. Do it at least monthly. You’ll want that backup one day in the future!
Taco Loco is an app that finds mobile taco vendors near you. Taco Loco locates taquerías without a permanent address such as trucks, carts, and stands – they often have the most authentic flavors. Simply fire up the app on your iPhone or iPod touch, and you’ll immediately see nearby taco trucks on the map.
If you haven’t already downloaded Tweetie 2 for your iPhone, you really need to. The second version of Tweetie brought with it a seriously refreshed user interface and reworked code behind the scenes. It brought all of the features you may have wanted from other Twitter apps (like being able to see previously refreshed tweets without a network connection as Twitterrific does) to the blissful Tweetie user experience. But, Atebits stepped it up a notch and made Tweetie fully persistent. Almost no matter what you were doing when you quit Tweetie, when you restart it later you’ll be at the same screen as if you never left.
Tweetie 2.1 just hit the App Store and has added support for native re-tweets, geolocation (on a per tweet basis), and lists. The best Twitter client just got better.
There is an iPhone worm that is making the news this week. One thing that may not be obvious in some of the stories is that the iPhones that are vulnerable have been hacked by their owners or “jailbroken” as it’s commonly referred to by people in the community. People may benefit from hacking their iPhones by being able to run apps that Apple hasn’t approved, installing interface modifications, or pirating App Store applications. But, there are also consequences such as instability, reduced battery life, and now the threat of worms attacking your phone and copying your personal data. You can read more about this in iPhone security problems bring new risks at Computerworld.
You can run iPhone applications that weren’t downloaded from the iTunes App Store. This is referred to as ad hoc installation and is usually something you would do at the request of a developer for testing purposes of the app.
You’ll need to supply the developer of the app with an identifier for your device so that they can give it permission to run the application. They will then send you two files that are required to run the app: a provisioning profile and the application itself. You can either use the Ad Hoc Helper app to send your Unique Device Identifier (UDID) to the developer or follow these steps:
- Connect your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad to your computer.
- Open iTunes if it isn’t already.
- Select your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad from the Devices section of the list on the left side of the iTunes window.
- Select the Summary tab.
- Click on the Serial Number field to the right of the large icon of your device. It will change to an Identifier field.
- Press Command-C (Macintosh) or Control-C (Windows) to copy the identifier to your clipboard.
- Paste the identifier into a message to the developer by using Command-V (Macintosh) or Control-V (Windows).
Once you’ve received both files from the developer, follow these steps to install an app that is distributed in an ad hoc fashion instead of via the App Store.
- Connect your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad to your computer.
- Drag the provisioning profile file to iTunes (it has a
.mobileprovision extension). You won’t receive any feedback from iTunes that this was successful.
- Decompress (or unzip) the Zip file containing the app. You’ll use the app file contained inside the Zip for the next step.
- Drag the application file (it has a
.app extension) to iTunes.
- Sync your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. If the app does not appear on your device, make sure it is one of the checked apps on your device’s Applications tab in iTunes before syncing.
