iOS guides

A piece about buckyballs catches your eye on the ABC web site. As you read it, you find a link to a Wikipedia article about carbon nanotubes. Opening that page, you find yourself clicking on references to buckypaper, nanoflowers, tensegrity spheres and a biography of Buckminster Fuller. Soon, you have half a dozen tabs open in your browser, filled with fascinating information and no time to read any of it. The old solution would have been to bookmark each of those pages in the hope that you’d eventually find time to sit down at your computer and read them.

Within iPod, iPhone and iPad apps, there’s no standard way to adjust your preferences. You'll find them everywhere from a prominent Settings icon within the app to a More sub-menu or something even more obscure. iOS does contain a standard repository of app settings, although use of this Settings app also varies. Then there's a separate place for Location settings too. Here we offer some tips on how to dig out all the settings for your apps.

Your iPhone lets you choose the ringtone that sounds when someone calls you. You can switch between the standard ringtones by tapping Settings —> Sounds —> Ringtone. If you want to have a different ringtone play when someone special calls, select a separate ringtone by locating that person in your Contacts and then tapping Edit —> Ringtone. The phone comes with 25 ringtones and you can purchase more through iTunes. However, Apple’s approach to selling ringtones is, to put it sweetly, ungenerous.

Speech recognition requires heavy lifting in terms of processing power; heavier lifting than our phones can manage on their own. So how is it that an app like Nuance’s Dragon Dictation, available for free in the App Store, can function on the iPhone? The trick is that the software offloads the processing to Nuance’s servers in the cloud. You speak, the software listens, your words are transmitted to the Nuance servers and the deciphered text is returned to your phone’s screen, all in a matter of seconds.

The iPhone has a fairly decent camera and the iPad 2 has, well, a camera. What neither possesses is a really easy way to transfer your latest snaps from your device to your computer. Instead, there are several methods that are pretty clumsy and which usually involve connecting your device and computer via a cable, sidestepping iTunes and then copying the photos manually.

If you like to tweet on the move, there’s certainly no dearth of iPhone Twitter apps to choose from. From simple yet luscious apps such as TwitBird, to complex, multi-account tools like TweetDeck, there are plenty of options. But most of us will need to look no further than Twitter’s own app to accommodate our mobile tweeting needs. Just as Facebook was tardy in developing its own app for the iPhone, so too was Twitter. In fact, the company didn’t even bother developing one.

Keeping contacts synchronised between an iPhone and a single computer, PC or Mac, is a simple process. Apple’s iTunes acts as the intermediary between the two and in most cases, the process is automatic, so you can leave it up to iTunes to do all the work for you. Whenever you connect your phone, your contacts are synced, so whether you update the information on your phone or on your computer, the latest change is reflected on both devices.