If you’ve ever taken a screenshot on your iPhone, you know that it can be a bit of a pain to get the highest quality version of the pic on your computer. The simplest way that I found to transfer a screenshot from my iPhone to my Mac is to email it to myself. The big issue is that if you use the standard email mechanism in the Photos app, it converts the original lossless .png file to a lossy .jpg file.

If you’re developing apps and need to verify that something’s exactly as you intended it to be or if you need a high-quality screenshot for promotional purposes, etc, the .jpg file simply doesn’t suffice.

.jpg file (click for full-size)

.jpg file zoomed-in. Truly asstastic.

It’s not the end of the world because if you connect your iPhone to your computer you can import the raw .png files into iPhoto and get lossless quality. But this can be a chore if you need a quick screenshot. This method was pretty much the only way I knew of to get the raw .png file from my phone to my Mac with iPhone OS 2.2 and earlier.

.png file (click for full-size)

.png file zoomed-in. Pixel-perfect!

While playing around with my iPhone 3GS and the new 3.0 OS that comes with it, I realized that the new copy & paste feature can make this process go a lot quicker…

If you tap the Action icon in the toolbar of a photo album (bottom-left icon) you’re now able to tap multiple photos to select them. You’re allowed to select up to 5 photos if you’d like to email them (and again, email does us no good if we want the lossless .png screenshots). But once you go past five, the Share button, where the email function is, becomes disabled. The Copy button, on the other hand, stays enabled.

Now here’s where this starts to get good… if you press Copy and then explicitly go into the Mail app and paste them into a new email, what gets pasted are the original lossless .png files. Very sweet! I got lucky and stumbled upon this recently because I needed to grab six screenshots that I took.

While futzing around with this I also realized that tapping and holding an individual pic pulls up a Copy balloon to make it a snap to copy a single pic file.

Copy & paste on the iPhone has proven to be a pretty big time-saver so far. And this hidden C&P gem in the Photos app has saved me a bunch of time recently. Granted, it’d be nice if emailing pics directly from Photos would preserve the original file but at least there’s this simple workaround.

If you were one of the people who signed-up to be a beta tester of our upcoming app, Convert, I’m happy to announce that beta 1 is available now.

Convert is a unit converter and unit calculator with a very slick and beautiful UI. There are a zillion unit converters on the App Store but we’ve never been satisfied with how any were done so we’ve decided to take a stab at creating one of the “2nd-gen” unit converters ourselves.

Our main design goals for Convert was to have it be extremely easy and quick to use… what’s the point of an app like this if you’re fumbling over the UI? In the end we’re really satisfied with how it turned out.

More info on Convert will be available soon as we approach releasing it. The static screenshot hardly does it justice so I plan to post video of it in action.

To install the beta (this only applies if you were one of the people who commented in the Ars Technica post):

1) download it here

2) drag & drop both the app file and the provisioning profile file into iTunes

3) sync your iPhone or iPod touch

Please report any bugs and provide any feedback on our contact page.

If you’d like to be notified when Convert is released, be sure to sign-up at the bottom of the Convert page.

Many of you have been following along over the past several months about the acquisition of our former app, Where To, by FutureTap. Today, Ortwin Gentz from FutureTap posted about the resolution on it regarding the final transfer of ownership. It’s definitely not the route he would’ve liked to have taken, but he was left with few options. If you’re not familiar with the situation, you can follow the long history by navigating through the chain linked throughout the posts and by checking out our older posts.

Read into this however you wish, but I just want to put the final nail in this coffin by saying that some things never change.

Anyway, I wish Ortwin the best with Where To and I’m really looking forward to the integrated maps feature that he’s working on that’ll soon be available in version 2. It’s great that Apple finally provided this functionality in iPhone OS 3.0.

http://www.futuretap.com/blog/transferring-an-iphone-app-last-episode/

I just got my new iPhone 3GS the other day. I have an iPod touch and always noticed how much zippier it is over the iPhone. With the newest generation of iPhone, I was expecting Apple to boost the speed to be around iPod touch levels. But after a couple of days of tinkering with it, I have to say that I’ve been very pleasantly surprised with how much faster it is over the 3G!

Yesterday, Daniel Pasco, who’s working with us to deliver our upcoming app, plasma, had posted some OpenGL ES speed test results for plasma, both on a new iPhone 3GS and an iPod touch. So I figured I’d take to opportunity now to post a few more concrete details, including a back-to-back video of plasma running on my somewhat obsolete 3G and my shiny, new 3GS (yeah, I got the white one this time, of course).

iPhone - phone service = expensive iPod touch + camera

So Daniel slapped on a big, honkin’ frame rate indicator and I dragged out the video cam…

download full-size

As the video shows, in our OpenGL ES testing, the 3GS is generally close to four times faster than the 3G. Results will vary depending on the application but this is remarkable to say the least.

plasma’s pretty heavy on particle animation and fairly CPU intensive. The current build only uses features of OpenGL ES 1.1 and we’re considering taking advantage of some OpenGL ES 2.0 features for a richer experience on the iPhone 3GS.

As Daniel noted in his article, the graphics processing unit (GPU) in the 3GS is a PowerVR SGX, which seems to offer a very significant advantage over the PowerVR MBX Lite found in previous iPhone/iPod touch hardware. The GPU is likely where we’re gaining much of the improved performance in plasma. Increased RAM and cache sizes are also likely accounting for some of the better performance.

I mentioned this in the video, but it’s worth reiterating here… plasma’s currently unoptimized and the final frame rates on all devices should be significantly higher than what you’re seeing here. The app configuration we setup for the video is pretty rigorous and we wanted to see how the new phone would fare in a situation where we knew the older devices would choke. But when all is said and done and we release the optimized plasma into the wild, it should run very well on all devices.

So if our tests are any indication of what the 3GS is capable of, I’m sure that there’ll soon be some killer 3D apps coming out that’ll be taking advantage of the raw speed and new 3D features of the new iPhone 3GS. I can hardly wait.

If you’d like to stay on top of news and info on plasma, be sure to follow us on Twitter.

What’s new:

• New book: “Pride & Prejudice” (v1.1.1)
• New book: “Treasure Island” (v1.1.2)
• New book: “Dracula”
• New, redrawn application icon

Get it now at the App Store.

Yesterday, I announced that Apple is featuring Classics in their new commercial. Today, I’ve just come to find out that Tipulator is also featured in another of their new commercials (I did mention that the app briefly appeared in the Classics commercial).

Even though Tipulator is no longer a tap tap tap app, this is very exciting to me because it’s the last app that I actually did the programming on myself. I’ve “retired” from programming several times in the past to only come back for “one more little thing” but this time I’m really leaving the future stuff I work on to be programmed by much more capable fingers. Having your app be in a national Apple commercial is a great way to go out at least.

Yeah, I know that tip calculators (and flashlight apps, etc.) have become somewhat of a running joke of the App Store and I’ve made my share of tip calculator jokes myself, but it’s still huge for me to see this happen. Hey, if it’s good enough for the mother-ship to feature, it should be good enough for you to use.

We did know in advance that the Classics commercial would be happening, but the Tipulator one was a complete surprise to us. Too bad I almost never watch TV anymore, so I’ll likely never see it on actual TV, though.

As I mentioned in the other post, we’re curious about where the commercial is airing, so if you happen to catch it, please comment below or @reply us on Twitter on where you’ve seen it.

See the ad on Apple’s website (the Tipulator one is titled “Fix” and the Classics one is titled “Read”).

Apple just put out a new TV commercial and I’m extremely happy to announce that Classics is featured in it!

Moreover, if you look closely, you’ll see that our former app, Tipulator, makes a very brief cameo appearance…

We’re curious about where the commercial is airing, so if you happen to catch it, please comment below or @reply us on Twitter on where you’ve seen it.

See the ad on Apple’s website (the one titled “Read”).

Macworld Expo ’09 was the fourth San Francisco Macworld I’ve attended. Each one was entirely different, both in regard to what went on inside and outside the expo itself. I’ve enjoyed every one of them, but this one will get filed into memory as being my favorite.

On that note, it’s pretty unfortunate that ’09 will be the last “real” one. Sure, IDG (the company that runs it) claims that they’ll keep it going, but like with the Boston Macworld Expo, once Apple jumps ship, they’ll be lucky to squeeze a couple more years out of the show.

This was the first time that I didn’t have a booth to deal with and it was a huge relief to not have to cope with everything associated with exhibiting.

Not that it was pure vacation or anything… we kind of, sort of, somewhat launched a new season of MacHeist and we had a bunch of meetings planned throughout the week. So it was still a pretty busy trip overall.

The Travelers

The crew that went out this time was sort of a hybrid of tap tap tap and MacHeist: me, Scott Meinzer, Phill Ryu, Noël Rosenthal, and Andrew Kaz.

This was Scott’s second expo. Phill’s been out with me on all four trips so far. And Noël and Kaz were expo virgins before this trip.

MacHeist (non-)mission

Right after the keynote, we launched the previously mentioned MacHeist mission. Well, not really a mission, but I won’t say any more than this. Check it out if you’re not familiar with MacHeist. We always give away some great Mac software for free and this time was no exception with the sweet outlining app, Process, being included in the “loot”, among other nifty apps.

Even though the “mission” went off pretty smoothly and we gained a ton of new members (we recently passed the quarter-million mark!), tensions had been building within the team. And as a result, things got a bit ugly before going live, unfortunately.

Thankfully, we’ve all settled-down and we’re all cool with each other now.

MostlyLisa

I had the pleasure to spend time during the week with the beautiful, talented, and zany Lisa Bettany, aka MostlyLisa. Purely coincidence but Lisa bears a striking resemblance to our new MacHeist mission handler.

Seeing how much schwag Lisa managed to collect during the week and the fact that she looted an unnamed Bay Area company for all their Hershey’s Miniatures, I think she has a bright future as some sort of high-tech bag lady.

It was great getting to know her and really interesting hearing about a different side of the tech-world that I’m not used to dealing with. Be sure to catch Lisa on Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech, episode 177 along with LeVar Burton.

Digg visit

We managed to get a tour of the Digg office. I’ve been a big fan of Digg for years and Digg has undoubtedly contributed to the success of both tap tap tap and MacHeist. So it was fantastic to see their home base in-person.

photo by Daniel Burka

After the tour, Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka took us out to lunch at a great Thai restaurant in the neighborhood named Lingba. If you’re ever in the area, you gotta try out their Thai Beef Jerky.

When the meal was over, it was pretty sweet seeing Kevin whip out our former app, Tipulator, on his iPhone to calculate the tip. Kevin and Scott both own white iPhones and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen two white ones in the same location.

Schillernote

I didn’t pay much attention to Mac news during expo week but I’m sure lots has been said about Phil Schiller’s performance for the keynote. Here’s my take… he’s better than Ballmer at least. It’ll be hard, if not impossible to fill Steve Jobs’ shoes in this regard if Steve stays out of the limelight.

photo by Jordan Satok

Unfortunately, “he did ok” or “adequate” simply won’t cut it in the long-term when people have come to expect dazzling performances out of Apple with their trademark keynotes.

My biggest complaint about it? It’s that Phil used that same ugly-ass “Demo” font that Steve’s been using all these years. The feeling I always got when seeing it was like I was in the Museum of Modern Art the whole time, seeing great works of art… then all of a sudden a painting of dogs playing poker appears. Ugh.

photo by Jordan Satok

I seriously doubt that Schiller will continue to be Apple’s front-person for any length of time. But who will be? Your guess is as good as mine… unless your guess is Jonathan Ive… then you’re just plain wrong.

The expo

Not much to say here… the expo itself is always pretty boring and fulla suck. At least I didn’t contribute to the suckage this time since I abstained from exhibiting.

If you haven’t been to a Macworld Expo, it’s basically a giant warehouse of iPod/iPhone skins, cases, and accessories… with a smattering of Mac software and hardware thrown in for good measure. That’s basically it and if you’re efficient, you can get through the whole thing in a couple of hours.

But what’s nice about it from my point of view, at least, is that there are some indie devs who usually exhibit. So it’s nice to visit their booths and talk with friends that you typically only get to see at the expo or WWDC. This especially applies to devs outside the US.

One thing worth pointing out for this year’s expo is that the “alt hall” (this year being Moscone North) had plenty of traffic, unlike past expos where they’ve always been ghost-towns. This somewhat validates exhibiting in a hall that’s not the main South hall since anything not the South was always treated as some sort of bastard-child hall in the past.

I’m guessing that Jim won some sort of bet

As for the future of the expo, as I mentioned earlier,with Apple gone, its days are undeniably numbered. The only way I can see it having a sustainable future is if they piggybacked onto WWDC as I mentioned in the MacHeist forums.

California Academy of Sciences

One word… penguins!

photo by Scott

http://www.calacademy.org

Classics demo at the Apple Store

Apple put out an invitation to have Classics demoed at the San Francisco Apple Store. Kaz did a great job, especially considering this was his first time doing anything like this.

photo by Austin Sarner

The one big hitch was that he had major troubles with the Britney-mic they supplied. I have no clue what the actual issue was but it had something to do with his long hair. But thankfully they had a Sinatra-mic on-hand and once he switched to that, his presentation went pretty smoothly.

Party-time!!!

I remember the first MWSF that we went to three years ago and we hit-up pretty much every party we could find.

But year after year, that dwindled. We’ve thrown our share of parties, too.

This year was the first year I avoided every single party. I didn’t even look through the party list to see what was going on.

It’s not like I felt overly antisocial or anything. I just chose to hang out with small groups of friends every night. I guess it’s the result of 2008 being such a crazy, hectic year and I just haven’t been in the mindset to go out partying. I’m enjoying serenity a lot more than mayhem (it’s been the opposite for me in the past).

me with Chris Pirillo

Along similar lines, I avoided most media contact this time around, as opposed to the past where I sought it out. Cool geek Chris Pirillo did manage to snag an interview with Scott and me while we were walking the expo floor, though.

I’m the one with the limp collar and Scott’s the one with the overstated collar

And no, YouTubers… I’M NOT THE GUY FROM MYTHBUSTERS, DAMMIT!

I guess that this trip ended up being a much needed relaxation period for me. I’ve felt blocked creatively for a while, but I now definitely feel like good ideas are flowing.

The change of pace and different atmosphere surely revitalized me. I kinda feel like Thoreau and the W Hotel is my Walden.

The eats

It’s pretty hard to get a bad meal in San Francisco. Instead of making a boring list of the various places we enjoy eating at, I made an interactive “food map” using Google Maps to help you locate great places to chow-down at if you’re in the area (click the blue markers to get info on a restaurant):

view larger map

And although it’s hard to get a bad meal in SF, it’s not so hard to get bad restaurant graphics as the Pixelobster demonstrates…

photo by Ken Aspeslagh

I had to snap a pic of this place because a name like Educated Palate Restaurant totally gives me hope that I can start a Pretentious Douche Bistro franchise someday.

Moving to San Francisco

this is before it got really steep

If there’s one thing about San Francisco, it’s that everyone seems a bit crazy compared to any other place. I don’t mean that in a bad way at all… people just seem to be themselves and not care what anyone else thinks about them. I like that mentality.

Even when things are hectic, I still find the city to be relaxing overall… there’s a certain laid-back atmosphere that permeates it.

at the Hannspree Showcase

Cartoon Art Museum (I snapped this right before I saw the sign that no pics were allowed)

It’s a very interesting place and I always enjoy visiting, so I’ve decided to move out there. I spent part of the post-expo week finding a place to live and I’m happy to say that I now have a place all lined-up to move into on February 1st.

This was the first time I’d ever purchased a one-way plane ticket to anywhere.

One of the things influencing my decision was the cold. Take a look at these two Weather app screenshots. Then pick one…

Yeah, I thought so.

That’s a difference of 86°!? Eighty. Six. Degrees. OMGondola! (and note that the weathergods were off with their low prediction by 9°)

Semi-hiatus

As you’ve probably noticed, things have somewhat slowed down here. While MacHeist 3 is going on, Scott, Phill, and I are dedicating most of our time to trying to make the best MacHeist ever. And as a result, something has to give.

That something is a lot of the stuff I’m doing with tap tap tap for now. So at the very least, the blogging volume will be pretty low for a while.

But product development hasn’t slowed down, though… our developers are still going in full-force and we’re finally nearing completion of some of our new iPhone apps. So keep an eye out for them… they’ve been in development for a while and we hope they’ll be worth the wait.

Thanks to Noël for donating some of her brain-juice.

Photo credits: The iLife, shakerdesigns, Break

I’m not sure if anyone else has noticed this yet but I haven’t read about it anywhere else so far.

Google search results in Safari on the iPhone are now displayed with Google’s “mobile” layout. This means no more having to stretch or double-tap to be able to see and use your search results.

Note the before and after:

This is a very welcome usability improvement.

I recently announced that Where To was acquired and that we’d be providing details of the deal. So that time has come and Where To is once again for sale… this time by the new owner.

The bidding process

We had many parties interested in acquiring the app. Successful Palm developers… successful Mac developers… iPhone developers who’ve had limited success in the App Store… serial entrepreneurs… one of our biggest competitors… and of course people just wanting to get in on the Gold Rush of 2008™.

My favorite was the kind of person who was looking for a business that wouldn’t take much effort and pretty much be a money-machine. Since I made it perfectly clear in my post about what it’ll take to make a viable business out of Where To, both in terms of ongoing marketing and development efforts, I found the Delete key to be handy in these instances.

In the end, I narrowed it down to 8 qualified final candidates. I contacted each, explaining that they were all being considered as a potential buyer and requested that they submit their bids.

The bigger ones stalled so I was starting to suspect that this could take a lot longer than I was originally expecting it would.

Sophia and I wanted to have this all completed as quickly as possible since tensions were still very high between us. Once our friendship became more complicated and we got to the point where we felt that we wanted to be done with each other, we both thought it was necessary to get this over with quickly and be free of each other.

So as soon as we received an offer from someone which was at or above our minimum valuation, we were prepared to go for it if we felt comfortable with the buyer.

The buyer

That offer came from a person named Ortwin Gentz. Coincidentally, he was once in a similar situation as we found ourselves in. He recently ended up severing his ties with a business he helped start in a split not unlike ours and was looking to start a new business.

Ortwin was one of the founders of equinux, a long-time Mac developer. They’re most known for their iSale app, which was the recipient of not one, but two Apple Design Awards.

Without a doubt, Ortwin was the highest person on my list of potential purchasers. I still care about the app and I didn’t want to see it just fade off into oblivion, especially if it was acquired by a competitor who could potentially kill it.

Because of his past experience, Ortwin clearly understood what it would take to make things work out with Where To. And he seemed prepared to put in the necessary effort to do so.

So when he submitted his bid and explained the level-headed and reasonable assessment for his valuation, I was satisfied and ready to go for it.

Things didn’t go without a hitch, though… we had some delays because of contract issues and ran into some problems being able to transfer the App Store ownership of the app in a timely manner. So for now it’s still being listed under Sophia’s account. We’re expecting the final transfer to happen sometime after the start of the new year.

Where To available again

Ortwin has created a brand named FutureTap for Where To and his future iPhone apps. He enlisted Wolfgang to create a very stylish website and logo that definitely fit the name.

We all decided that in addition to the FutureTap website, it’d make sense to put Where To back up on tap tap tap for a while during the transition period. This can help existing customers find info about it still and can also help from a promotional point of view.

Continued transparency

One thing that I’m happiest about is that Ortwin is very much into being as open as we’ve been with everything. I’ve intentionally not mentioned the purchase price of the app here. I’m sure you’re all curious as to how much it actually sold for and I’ll leave it to Ortwin to deliver on that in his post on the acquisition.

In addition, he plans to provide ongoing details of the whole process. If you’re interested in getting into the iPhone market it’ll be in your best interests to subscribe to his blog or follow him on Twitter. He plans to share his experiences on acquiring Where To and trying to build it into a successful business.

Truly a new beginning

Are we happy with the outcome? Yes.

While I still would’ve preferred to keep control of the app, Sophia and I are now free of each other. I’ve managed to rebuild tap tap tap and I couldn’t be happier with the new team of extremely talented developers I’ve assembled (expect a post on this and an updated About page soon). In addition, Sophia found herself with a new job in the deal as she’ll be continuing to develop new features into Where To.

It was definitely an interesting experience to be involved in the first (public at least) acquisition of an iPhone app. For the remaining details, including the acquisition amount, I’ll pass you off to Ortwin now…

http://www.futuretap.com/blog/how-to-purchase-an-iphone-app/

The iPhone, like the Mac, is extremely simple and intuitive to use. Odds are that you’ve never even cracked open the user manual since the way just about everything works is pretty obvious.

But its simplicity can be a double-edged sword… there are many small “convenience features” that are often hidden away. If Apple exposed them in a more obvious way, it’d take away from the elegance of the device. And its elegance is one of its strongest points.

I’m sure that many of you are “power users” and probably know most of these tips and tricks. But I suspect that a lot of you are more casual iPhone users and will find this list useful. Even our team members that I showed the draft of this post to (people I consider iPhone experts), all picked up at least a tip or two that they weren’t already aware of. So I’ll bet there’s something for everyone here…

1. Scroll to top

Tapping the status bar (the bar at the top with the clock) will make scrollable content scroll to the top. It comes in handy in situations like when you’ve scrolled down a long web page or mail message and you quickly need to get back to the top.

This may be the most convenient, yet hidden feature on the iPhone. I had my phone for months before stumbling upon it (and I didn’t even stumble upon it by playing around with the phone, but by reading the programming documentation on scroll views).

As far as I know, there’s no corresponding way to scroll to the bottom, though.

2. Screenshots

Simultaneously press the Home and Sleep/Wake buttons to take a screenshot of your current screen. You’ll hear a camera shutter sound, your screen will flash white, then the screenshot will appear in the “Saved Photos” library of the Photos app.

3. Saving images in Safari and Mail

Touching an image in Safari or Mail for a couple of seconds will present you with an action sheet which will enable you to save the image. As with taking screenshots, the image will get stored in the “Saved Photos” library of the Photos app.

4. Caps lock

Double-tap the Shift key to lock it.

This one’s actually somewhat intuitive but I was surprised by how many people aren’t aware of it.

Along somewhat similar lines, a handy way of saving a tap when you need to type a capital letter is to touch the Shift key then slide over to the desired key. This behavior also works for the Number key.

5. Extra keys

Do you need to type an umlauted-u (ü) but you’re not using the German keyboard? Touch and hold the U key and you get a set of additional keys to choose from.

This works for several of the alphabetic keys, enabling you access to letters such as éîçåß, etc.

In addition, there are several punctuation keys that behave similarly, so that you can type curly-quotes, etc.

And furthermore, when the keyboard is in “URL-mode”, where the “.com” key is available, touching and holding it pops-up additional options for quickly entering .net, .edu, and .org domains.

6. Lock / shut down / force quit / reset

You’d be surprised to know how many people don’t know how to turn their phone completely off. I’m not talking about “locking” the phone where you simply press the Sleep/Wake button on the top of your phone.

For a while, I was under the false impression that locking the phone was equivalent to putting your Mac to sleep. But when your phone is locked, the screen turns off but the app that’s running at the time continues to run. For instance a relaxation app is able to continue playing sound but save battery power with the screen off. So, locking your phone is actually more like “display sleep” on your Mac (⌃⇧⏏ or Control-Shift-Eject for those of you who can’t read Macroglyphics).

So to ensure that your phone is using as little battery as possible, you’re best off always pressing the Home button before locking so that no app remains running.

To turn your phone completely off, press the Sleep/Wake button for a few seconds then drag the red slider that appears.

When should you turn your phone completely off? The two situation that I usually do this is when I’m almost out of battery and when my phone is acting kind of wonky.

If your battery’s almost dead and you’re nowhere near some way of charging it your best bet is to turn it off if you’re going to need it to make a call or check something on the ‘net (assuming you can forego and incoming calls/SMSs).

And if your phone’s been acting flaky, where apps are starting to get really slow or behave unexpectedly, turning your phone off then back on usually gets things back to normal.

Have you ever been using an app and it’s become very unresponsive or completely frozen? You can force quit it by pressing the Home button for at least six seconds.

And finally, if your phone seems to be completely frozen where attempting to turn it off or force quit the current app does nothing, you can force a reset of your phone by pressing both the Sleep/Wake and Home buttons for at least ten seconds. Note that while Apple technically calls this a “reset”, it’s actually more like a “reboot” and none of your settings will be changed.

7. Home button options

A very underused, yet convenient feature is that you’re able to set the function for double-clicking the Home button. By default, this just brings you to the Home screen, meaning no different function than clicking the Home button once.

But if you go to the Settings app then navigate to General then Home Button, you’ll find a few handy options. I have mine set to go to my Phone Favorites but you can also set it to open the iPod app, or just show the iPod controls when music is playing.

And something I recently noticed after updgrading to the newest iPhone OS is that when you now click the Home button while already on the Home screen, it’ll quickly take you to the first page of apps. This is a great feature if you have your phone filled with apps… and who doesn’t these days?

8. Swipe to delete

In the Mail app and many others that use lists of items, you’re able to quickly delete an item by swiping your finger across the item… sort of emulating crossing something off a list. Doing so exposes a Delete button so that you’re able to confirm your action.

9. Register your Wi-Fi

Skyhook WPS is the service that, via Wi-Fi, enables your iPhone and iPod touch to locate where you are if GPS isn’t available. It generally gets you more accuracy than the cell tower triangulation method. The big issue with this method, though is that if the router that you’re currently connected to isn’t in the Skyhook database, you’re out of luck.

But after a ton of digging I was able to find the web page where you can add your router to its database:

http://www.skyhookwireless.com/howitworks/submit_ap.php

After a few simple steps and an “up to 7 days” waiting period, the router should be available to help you and others get improved location positioning. This helps us all so do your part and register your router, especially if you live outside a major metropolitan area (since Skyhook usually has the big metro areas covered already).

10. AIM mobile options

If you’re like me, you find the AIM app for the iPhone to be pretty useless. AIM (iChat on the Mac) is my main form of communication these days but if I’m not actually online, I don’t want to be seen as being “online”. One thing I find pretty annoying is IMing someone then not getting a response until like half an hour later. This is the nature of the AIM app on the iPhone so I don’t subject others to behavior I don’t like myself.

There’s a much better way of being “connected” to AIM without having to appear as if you’re there. With AIM (the service, not the app), you’re able to setup your account with a service called AIM Mobile Forwarding so that IMs to you when you’re offline get forwarded to your phone as SMS messages. This isn’t something specific to the iPhone but I found it to be most useful once I got my iPhone because of the iChat-like way that the SMS app works.

AIM Mobile Forwarding can be invaluable in emergency situations if someone has your AIM screenname but doesn’t have your phone number. This actually happened to me recently where the macheist.com domain accidentally expired and I was immediately notified while I was on the road… thanks, Cindy! (In my defense, there’s a long story involving a stolen credit card, defunct phone numbers, and some weirdness with an email address.)

When you have AIM Mobile Forwarding setup and you’re offline, here’s how you appear to others in their buddy lists:

If you’d like to set a custom staus, simply change your status to what you desire before you go offline and it’ll remain while you’re offline:

The beauty of this is that it instantly conveys, “don’t bug me unless it’s really important”.

So how do you setup AIM Mobile Forwarding? Simple… if you use iChat, open Preferences and just click the Configure AIM Mobile Forwarding… button in the Accounts tab. This will open a web page where you can enter your info and get it rolling. For those of you who don’t use iChat, the web page is here (warning: will foolishly resize your browser window).

Similar to AIM Mobile Forwarding, you’re also able to send SMS messages to other’s phones right from iChat (or any AIM client). Just use the Send SMS… item from the File menu.

And you can also setup “mobile buddies” so that your buddies who haven’t setup AIM Mobile Forwarding function as if they have. All you have to do is add their mobile phone number as an AIM account, beginning with a “+1”.

And while you’re at it, you may as well add yourself to your buddy list like this. This is very handy for when you’re about to hit the road and you need to send yourself a quick note. It’s definitely one of the easiest ways to to send yourself a note and is a few less steps than sending yourself a note via email.

Post your tips

Hopefully you’ve found many of these tips useful. Feel free to post your “score” for the ones you knew in the comments below. And if you know of any others, or if you can expand on the ones I’ve listed here, please also add them in the comments.

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And if you’ve picked-up some useful tips from this post, digg it!

Congrats to Apple and all the developers for getting the App Store to over 10,000 apps.

View the full mosaic image (hi-rez, suitable for printing):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tap-tap-tap/3074199062/

View the source image:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tap-tap-tap/3073359209/

A big thanks goes out to Arn Kim of MacRumors and AppShopper for getting us all the icons that were used for this.

Read it here.

Or give your eyes a break and listen to the freaky audio version of it.

I’m very happy to announce that we’ve found a buyer for Where To. We just signed the final contract and the app will start its second life shortly.

Sorry for being so vague right now but many more details will soon follow. Stay tuned…