From time to time an app on your IOS device may crash and become un-responsive. Just like on your computer, sometimes apps need to be closed and shut down, then completely restarted to become active again.
To do this on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, quickly double click the home button.
This will push whatever you are looking at on your device upwards, and the multi tasking menu will appear. This is also how you can open another app and use it without closing the one you already have open. The ones you have used most recently will be in the first group of four icons that appear, and you can scroll/drag left and right through them to find the one you want to close if it isn’t on the first screen. Once you have found the icon for the app you want to close, put your finger on it, and leave your finger on it, and all of the apps will start wiggling and dancing (Like they do when you want to re-arrange them. The difference here is that they will now have a red circle with a white minus sign, as opposed to the black circle with the “X”. The red minus means close, the black X means delete).
Now all you have to do is press the red circle with the minus sign in it to close the app completely. Once it is closed, press the home button once to stop the apps dancing, and you can now restart the app by opening it like you normally would.
Closing out of apps completely that you are not using can also aid in preserving battery life, and help speed things as well, as apps are no longer in an open state using up resources while they lay in waiting!
Heytell is a great little app. For me, it’s like a phone call, a walkie talkie, and a answering machine all rolled into one. But if you have a few contacts, and use the app regularly, it wont be long before your conversation window is full up, and you can search the app until your blue in the face and you won’t find a “delete” or “Clear” option anywhere!
Thankfully, it is REALLY EASY to clear recent conversations!
All you gotta do is swipe your finger left to right on them! Just pick the conversation you want to clear, swipe your finger left to right on it as shown below,
And look what comes up!
A delete button!
All you gotta do now is press delete, and your window will be free and clear, and ready for your next conversation!
Easy when you know how huh! This method also works in other apps to, so don’t be afraid to drag your finger across something, you never know what will pop up!
At least three times a week my phone will ring between 11pm and 4am, repeatedly. When I answer it, there is someone there, who (with a very strong Asian accent) asks for what sounds to me like “Allan”. I have responded pleasantly saying “wrong number’, “not Allan’s phone”, “sorry, you have the wrong number” etc etc etc, to no avail. I hang up and 5 minutes later, the phone rings again…..”Allan…Allan…”……
Your probably saying “Just Turn The Ringer Off”, which is what I do when my wife is at home, but her job requires her to spend on average 1 or 2 weeks a month away from home. When she is away, I really like to leave the phone on so if there is a problem, and she needs me, she can reach me. Not unreasonable.
I set about finding a “Blocking App” in the Apple App Store, and I must say, I was really disappointed not only at the amount of fake apps that are available for purchase, but the fact that Apple has allowed them to be made available for purchase in their store.
After further investigation it seems that Apple doesn’t allow access to the particular part of the iPhones software that would need to be accessed in order to intercept and block an unwanted call…
If you choose to Jailbreak your phone, you have options, but for the 95% of people who use their iPhone as it came, anything you purchase from the App store to block an unwanted number is going to disappoint you!
In short, at this point in time, I can only offer a “Workaround” – A way to deal with the situation. And as my mystery caller shows me no respect, I will now return the favor and publish their number on this site – please call them at 3am!
My mystery caller phones me from two different numbers. They will try two or three times from one number, and then switch lines and try a few more times from another number. To begin handling this problem I created a contact for my unwanted caller with both of the numbers, and called it “Spammer”,
Now that I have created a contact for my phone spammer, I needed a way to silence them! The best I could come up with was a “Non Ring Tone”. A ring tone that doesn’t make any sound. After a bit of searching (and finding fake files, popups, porn links etc) I did find a silent ring tone. To make your life easier, here it is:
Once you have downloaded the zip file, extract it so you have the “SilentRing.m4r” in front of you, then open iTunes and connect your phone. On the top left side of the iTunes window, select “Tones”. Once you have Tones open, drag and drop the SilentRing.m4r file into the open field window.
Once the silent ring tone has copied into iTunes, you can now drag it from the iTunes window to your connected iPhone. When you drag the “SilentRing” file over your iPhone in the device menu, I have noticed that all categories seem to highlight/illuminate (in my case a blue color). It doesn’t seem to matter where you drop the ring tone file, it is automatically copied to the right place on your phone.
After dropping the ring tone file, you will need to click the “Sync” button in the bottom right corner of the window to make your changes stick. You may also have to click “Apply” if a pop up window appears.
Once you have successfully copied your new ringtone to your iPhone you can then choose to apply it to your unwanted caller only, that way when they ring at 2am, you don’t hear it, but if your loved one calls with an emergency, your phone will ring normally. To do this, select your unwanted caller/spammer from your contacts, open their information window, and in the top left corner select edit.
A new window will open with more details. As you will see, the ringtone will be set to your phone’s default ringtone.
This is where you can assign different ringtones to different callers. Now that you have a “Silent” ring tone on your phone, it is just a matter of changing this from “Default” to “SilentRing”.
Once you have made your changes (I changed the text message tone to silent as well), click “Done” in the top right hand corner, and your all set. Next time they call, you wont hear a thing! Your phone may still vibrate though, so it might pay you to disable that feature as well if your a light sleeper.
Almost all of us were, and are still using Windows based computers, even though we have locked ourselves firmly into the Apple world by buying iPhones and iPads. I am sure you have noticed (Like I Have) there are definitely some issues that arise by being “Multi Platform”. Slowly but surely, the software writers of the world are delivering apps that allow your iPhone and Windows 7 Laptop to co-exist a little more seamlessly.
For over a decade now, all of the home video I have, all of my DVD backups, TV programs I have recorded, in other words, my entire video collection is in AVI format. My movies are in DIVX format (I bought Dr DIVX years ago to rip my DVD’s and have stuck with it), and everything else is in XVID. That’s just the way it has ALWAYS been! And I sure as heck aren’t going to convert them all to Quicktime, I’ll be dead before it finishes re-encoding.
Enter Buzz Player, or in my case, Buzz Player HD for iPad. Buzz Player is an app for your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad (Even iPhone 3GS) that will allow you to create folders, copy movie files to your device, and play them seamlessly without the need for jail breaking your device! And my favorite part, it will even stream from your network shares!
To get started watching AVI files on your iPad/iPod Touch/iPhone, download the correct version of Buzz Player for your device from the iTunes app store, and in my opinion, the nominal fee of $2.99 for this app is ridiculously low for the functionality it provides.
Once it is installed and open, you can start creating and organizing folders for your local media (media that is physically on your device), or if your like me, your gonna want to start watching stuff from Desktop and your Media Server. To watch stuff from other devices (In my case, my Western Digital WDTV Live Hub) click the icon that says “SMB/FTP”. This will query your home network and display a list of all devices that are set up to serve media on your home network. It also tells you the protocol they are using to serve.
I noticed that some devices appear more than once, and I expect that is because they broadcast different services that they are able to provide. I selected my WDTV’s Samba feed, and was asked to input credentials.
As my network shares are not password protected within my own home network, I used “Guest” as my username, and left the password blank, and was able to connect easily. I tried to click “Connect As Guest” but that didnt work. I guess my WDTV needed to have at least the username of Guest. If your shares are password protected, this is the place to enter them to gain access. Don’t worry, Buzz Player can remember your devices and logins if you want it to, so you only have to do it once. Just remember to add it to your source list before you disconnect.
Once you have connected, you can see a list of all of the available drives/folders/files being shared.
Now, Its just a matter of selecting the file you want to watch from the appropriate directory, and selecting it. What comes next is pretty cool! Buzz Player asks you if you want to copy the file to your device, or if you want to watch it from a stream! YEAH BABY!
In my case, Im happy to watch the stream, so when you click play, it spends a few seconds buffering the file, and then starts to play your video!
As you can see from the above screen cap, I’m streaming Family Guy “Death Has A Shadow.AVI” over Samba, and watching it flawlessly on my iPad!
Buzz Player supports: .mpv, .mov, .mp4, .m4v, .3gp .avi, .divx, .dat, .vcd, .wmv, .bin, .iso, .vob, .mkv, .rmvb, .ogg, .flv, .swf, .rm, .ts, .nsv, .ram, .vfw, .mpg, .mpeg, .m1v, .m2v, .dv3, .gp, .mqv, .ogm, .ogv, .asf, .dvr-ms, .m2t, .m2ts, .rec, .bik, .dv as well as many audio codecs.
**HINT** – If your playback is choppy and/or breaks during playback, CHECK YOUR NETWORK!!!!!! I’ve seen a lot of people slagging this app because they cant stream a 2GB 720HD video over their 802.11g networks! VIDEO FILES ARE HUGE! Your network might not be capable of streaming it in real time, so COPY it to your device, and then watch it uninterrupted.
Over time I have sent a lot of email from my iPhone, and it seems like iOS4/5 remembers every one of them fondly. As soon as I start typing an address it offers me a list of all of those email addresses that I sent one email to 3 years ago, instead of the one I want, and use regularly. In this post I am going to show you how I cleared that list on my phone.
As you would expect, you need to download a third party app and hack into the bowls of your phone to do this. And if you do decide to do this, you do so at your own risk ok!
I found a program called iBackUpBot, which lets you modify a number of aspects of your iOS4/5 device. Its not a free program, but there is enough functionality in the trial version so you can clear your recent emails list though. There is a Windows and a Mac version, so the procedure will work on both systems. Download and install.
Once you have downloaded, plug your phone in, and open iTunes. The first thing you need to do is make a back up, because its the back up files you will be working on. To force a back up, Right click on your device in the iTunes side bar and select “Back Up” from the context menu.
Once the back up is complete, you can close out of iTunes, but leave your phone connected. Now open up iBackUpBot. You will need to select the back up file you just created (by device name, date and time) and click it. It will then start analyzing your back up file. Once it has finished analyzing you will see a whole bunch of entries appear on the right. Dont worry about these, as we wont be using them for this procedure. The next step is to select “Plug In” from the menu, and then select “Recent Email Addresses”.
You will be confronted with a window that prompts you to purchase the program, you can click the cancel button to make it go away. Once it disappears, a window called “Recent Email Address Viewer” will pop up and you will see the list of recent email addresses stored in your phones memory. You can now go through the list and delete the ones you don’t want to see any more, and keep the ones you do. Just click on the offending address then hit your delete key. Once your finished, click the “Close Database” icon to save your changes and close out the window.
Now it’s time to reload your modified file back to your phone. Click the “Restore Backup To iPhone” button to begin. You will have to click OK/Accept in a dialogue box, and it will take a little while, so be patient.
Once everything is finished, you can close iBackUpBot, disconnect your phone and try it out!
My iPhone/iTunes has been bugging me for a while now about how my phone is running out of memory, and it won’t let me load more music, or take new photographs or video. My first instinct was that I should clean house, and move some photos or songs off it, and whilst it was plugged in to my Mac I noticed something interesting in the storage capacity stats window:
1.03 GB of Other? I would much rather have an extra GB of music and photos than a GB of “Other”! So, I did a little bit of research and it looks to me that “other” is stuff like contacts, calendars and emails etc, so no joy to be had there, but it is also log files, history, cache, and other gunk that is meaningless to most users. There were also reports in the Apple forums that you can reclaim “some” of that space with a full system restore. So I thought I would give it a try!
I started by making a full backup of my phone. Once my iPhone was plugged in to my computer, and it showed up in iTunes, I right clicked on it and selected “Backup” from the menu. It took a few minutes to copy everything over.
Once that was all done, I went to the “Summary” window and clicked the “Restore” button.
After clicking the usual procession of Ok’s, Yes Please’s, and I Understand’s, it set about completely wiping my iPhone.
Once it had erased the memory, it began uploading the 4.3.5 software installation, powered on and off a few times, and then I got asked if I wanted to restore my phone from the back up I created, or if I wanted to start my phone from fresh again. I clicked “Restore from Back Up” so it would reinstall my apps, contacts, music etc etc and off it went again It did take some time to completely erase, and re-install the software and my files and info (about 15-20 minutes), but it was well worth it!
My iPhone went from 1.03GB of “Other” down to 0.24GB of “Other”! That’s nearly 800KB of “Other” that can now be used for photos and music!
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From time to time an app on your IOS device may crash and become un-responsive. Just like on your computer, sometimes apps need to be closed and shut down, then completely restarted to become active again.
This will push whatever you are looking at on your device upwards, and the multi tasking menu will appear. This is also how you can open another app and use it without closing the one you already have open. The ones you have used most recently will be in the first group of four icons that appear, and you can scroll/drag left and right through them to find the one you want to close if it isn’t on the first screen. Once you have found the icon for the app you want to close, put your finger on it, and leave your finger on it, and all of the apps will start wiggling and dancing (Like they do when you want to re-arrange them. The difference here is that they will now have a red circle with a white minus sign, as opposed to the black circle with the “X”. The red minus means close, the black X means delete).
Now all you have to do is press the red circle with the minus sign in it to close the app completely. Once it is closed, press the home button once to stop the apps dancing, and you can now restart the app by opening it like you normally would.
