iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

How to Lock the Keyboard on a Mac

Locking the keyboard but nothing else on your Mac requires a third-party app; but in most cases, you don't actually need this. Whether you want to lock the keyboard on a Mac to clean it, or you have young kids, or a mischievous pet that likes to lay across your keyboard, the easiest way to protect against unwanted changes or entries in text fields is to simply lock your Mac screen.

Protect your iPad for years to come!

(Sponsored Post) By Austin Durr on Mon, 12/04/2023

Zugu iPad cases are considered the very best in their class for good reason. But even the most careful iPad owners will notice dust and dirt accumulating during regular use. Zugu's specially formulated wipes and soft microfiber cloth will keep your iPad feeling and looking sparkly clean. Learn more about Zugu's specially formulated wipes and how you can protect your iPad for years to come!

(Beware: highly technical article! If you aren't a programmer and/or don't want to see how my backup / restore algorithm works, step right to the last two chapters, starting with "Important note for 3G S users"!)

I've made a lot of pretty advanced resolution tests today to find out the effective (real) resolution of my iPhone 4 and 3G S hacks and enhancements.

For this, I've used the well-known ISO 12233 resolution chart available HERE for printing / ordering. Please read THIS (additional info in THIS / THIS / THIS article) in order to be able to correctly understand how the frame grabs should be evaluated.
Having dug deep into the configuration files and the video “hacking” of the iPhone 3G S (see my yesterday's post HERE [beware, it's quite technical and mostly meant for advanced users / programmers]; I'll also very soon post a full all-in-one 3G S article for beginners), I've found the „1080p” settings I've used there applicable to the iPhone 4 too – in addition to the default (here: true HD with full frame rate, near field-of-view and bad low-light performance) and the full sensor (high-resolution video with great low-light performance and, on the iPhone 4, greatly widened field-of-view but severely reduced frame rate).

I've just uploaded version 1.4 of my free(!), open-source(!) iPhone 3G S video recorder enhancer tool to Cydia. As usual, add the repository „http://www.winmobiletech.com/cy” or „http://winmobiletech.com/cy” to your Cydia client and download the new version from my repository. When the development is finally finished, I'll make the two programs be available in traditional Cydia repositories so that you don't need to access it from my private repository.

Main changes in this version:

(Note that this article, as with most of my stuff, shows you not only how the camera can be reconfigured, but also shows you - how you can play back a YouTube video frame-by-frame; - how you can create and upload packages to your Cydia [an alternative to Apple's AppStore] repository and, last but definitely not least, gives you a full source-level explanation of the entire app that I've written to quickly switch between the different iPhone4 camera configurations. No one has released anything similar for the iPhone 4 or the iPhone 3GS [for which I'll also release a very similar utility in a few days] before!)

In my ongoing series on novel uses of the iPhone and iPad camera, here's yet another: an app that lets you take a picture of a leaf and then gives you information about what type of tree it as. Leafsnap (free) returns the likely species name, as well high-resolution photographs of and information about the tree's leaves, flowers, fruit, seeds, and bark. The app was funded by a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation and was developed by the Smithsonian Institution, University of Maryland, and Columbia University.

Otarine.  Latrine.  Ratline.  Taurine.  Reliant.  What do all of these words have in common (besides being seven letters long)?  Well, if you are a fan of the latest craze of crossword puzzle games, then these are all words you are going to want to commit to memory.  Most of you are probably familiar with the classic board game, Scrabble.   Up to four players can participate in a game, which starts with an assortment of lettered tiles being distributed to each player.   The tiles are each assigned a number value, which denotes the number of points you will receive for using it to form a word.  Earn point

I'm always amazed by all the novel uses of the camera on iOS devices — from taking your pulse to helping those who are colorblind determine colors — and wrote an article about that in a recent issue of the magazine. And I just received a press release for another. CaMeasure lets you use your camera to measure size or distance. It does this in one of two ways. For smaller objects such as furniture, the app asks you to put an object of known size, such as a sheet of paper or a credit card, by the object.

Haunted Manor HD Review

By Mike Riley

Big Fish Games is rapidly becoming the Infocom of the object hunting puzzle adventure iOS gaming arena. Their latest interactive story, Haunted Manor HD, places gamers in a typical Victorian-style haunted house scenario, learning clues about the ghosts occupying the house as the various hunt and peck puzzles are solved. How does Haunted Manor compare to other Big Fish titles? Read on to find out.

Haunted Manor HD follows the simple story of Stan Riddle who is inexplicably trapped in an elegant, spooky mansion filled with a cornucopia of objects. Consisting of over 90 tasks spanning 18 different locations throughout the mansion, players eventually re-assemble pieces of a broken mirror to reach the story's resolution.

I rarely used the Shuffle feature in iTunes or on my iOS devices because I didn't think there was a way to exclude the songs I didn't want to hear. Then I discovered the "Skip When Shuffling" tag. Here's how you exclude songs from Shuffle:

  1. Select the tracks you want to exclude in the list view.
  2. Open the Items Information dialog box (Command-I on the Mac; Control-I on the PC).
  3. Click on the "Skip when Shuffling" checkbox and hit "OK." (No more "Clair De Lune" sandwiched between "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Sunday, Bloody Sunday.")

Review it and change the genre associated with a specific album or song by following these steps. In this example, I'm changing the genre of the Bob Dylan album, "Christmas In the Heart" from "Holiday" to "Folk" (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4: Use the "Genre" drop-down to change genres for multiple albums.

Pages