Nifty Time-Saving iPhone Tip

Ever get an email on your iPhone, and for whatever reason you would rather call the person than email him back? You can do it in a couple of taps. For example, let's say you get this email on your iPhone.



If the email contains a phone number, like this one does, just touch it. A little window will pop up:


Touch "Call" and you're done. That's pretty easy: the phone number is in the email, you touch it and tap Call. A touch and a tap.

(So... if you want to make it easy for people to call you, add your phone number to your email signature. On an iPhone, you do it in Settings/Mail, Contacts, Calendars/Signature. On a Mac using Mail, it's the Mail menu, then Preferences..., then Signatures. Gmail people: click Settings at the top and look around.)

But... what if the phone number isn't in the email? Do you have to look it up? Of course the answer is "no, not if you finish reading this blog entry." All you have to do is touch the sender's name, up at the top of the message. It's outlined in red here so you know what I'm talking about.



If the sender is in your address book you'll be taken to his contact information, and from there you can touch whichever phone number you want to call him at.



Touch any phone number and it dials. Nice. So that's just a touch and a tap too.

You can scroll down a bit and see the rest of the sender's information, like so:


Touch an address and you'll see it on a map. Touch the web page address and it opens in Safari.

Scroll to the bottom and you find some handy buttons:


All in all, pretty handy stuff, especially if you're using your phone while driving, even though you would never do that. (A great place to never do that is San Jose, CA but if you do you might get to meet my brother, State Traffic Officer Spencer Boyce of the California Highway Patrol.)

Note: if you don't have the sender in your address book, touching the sender's name will take you to a screen where you can put him into it. It sounds like a lot of work but a good address book on the iPhone will pay off over and over for you. So don't cut corners on the address book. Make it as complete as you can.

NBC Olympics Cheer App

Cheering on the Olympians is fun, but you need tools if you want to do it right: cowbells (for Alpine ski racing), Alpenhorns (for ski jumping), irritating airhorns (hopefully never). NBC has thoughtfully provided an iPhone app that plays all of those sounds, and more-- see below.

Here are the standard sounds. All of them play when you tap them (warning: they keep playing! Tap again to turn off), but some of them have special triggers. For example, the cowbell plays when you shake it, and the whistle and Alpenhorn play when you blow into your iPhone's microphone. Fun.


Here are the "Game Sounds." You can hear the puck being hit (Ice Hockey), the starting countdown and wild cheering (Alpine skiing), and people snoring (Cross Country skiing). You can also record your own cheer. That's sort of fun. Play it back when you feel like cheering but don't have the energy.

You can even play the sounds of a Coca-Cola pouring into a glass.

Finally, you can click a link to see video of "Uplifting Moments" on YouTube.


It's not perfect (it stopped playing sounds after my iPhone's timer went off, though a restart of the app fixed that), but for free you are definitely getting your money's worth. I say check it out. Click here to get it from the iTunes Store.

RepairPal iPhone App

I don't know much about cars. When the mechanic says "You need a new alternator" all I can say is "OK... but how much is this going to cost?" At that point, as long as he doesn't say something outrageous I tend to give him the go-ahead. Then I spend the next few weeks wondering how much I overpaid.

Those days are over! RepairPal, a handy and FREE iPhone app, lets you get an idea of what the repair ought to cost, based on your car's make, model, and year. It also takes your location into consideration. Here's an example.

Suppose your car is a Ford Explorer, 1996. Suppose the mechanic tells you it's time for a new alternator and that it will cost you $300. Start up RepairPal, put in your car's info, and then your location, as shown below. Then touch "Get Estimate."


Here you see a range of prices, a little bit higher at the dealers and a little bit less at the independent shops. Now you know enough to evaluate your mechanic's quote.


Scroll down a bit and you get more info... always handy to know more.


Touch the "Find a Shop" button and you get a list of places that ought to be able to handle the job. The one at the top paid to be there-- watch for that. The rest of the shops are sorted with the closest one to you at the top of the list. They even have ratings. How cool is that?


Knowledge is power. In a way, I'm sort of looking forward to having something go wrong with my car so I can pull out my iPhone and turn to RepairPal.

Turns out that RepairPal has a website too, so if you're not an iPhone user you can still use the service (which is free).

Tip of the Day: Address Book "Smart Groups"

If there’s one feature of Apple’s Address Book that is overlooked by almost everyone it’s Smart Groups. The regular kind of Group is handy, and you should read up on them (try going to the Help menu in Address Book and looking for “Groups”). In a nutshell, you add people to a Group manually, by dragging them from the “All” group. Easy enough. But not as easy (and not as cool) as Smart Groups.

A Smart Group fills itself automatically, exactly like a Smart Playlist in iTunes or a Smart Album in iPhoto. (Don’t know about those things? Send me a note and I’ll blog on it.)

Here’s an example. Suppose I wanted to be able to quickly find all of my contacts who either live or work in Texas. I could go through my entire list of contacts and drag them to a Group, but that wouldn’t be much fun (and when I added a new contact I’d have to remember to drag that person to the Texas Group). Much better is to make a Smart Group that does the work for me.

Step One is to make a new blank Smart Group. You can Option-click the “+” at the bottom left of the Address Book window, or you can go to File/New Smart Group...

Step Two is to choose a name for the Smart Group, and also to choose criteria. Many Smart Groups have just one criterion but in this case, I need to check two criteria because I don’t know how the State on a person’s address book card will be entered. Note that I chose “any” and not “all” for my matching criteria. In other cases, it would be better to match “all.”

Here’s what it looks like.



If you decide to modify your Smart Group down the road you don’t have to start over. Click once on the Smart Group that you want to modify (you could have several), then choose “Edit Smart Group...” from the Edit menu. Or just Control-click on the Smart Group and choose “Edit Smart Group...” from the pop-up menu.

The beautiful thing is that the Smart Group is always up to date. Add some people to the Address Book and the ones with Texas as their states will show up in the Texas Smart Group. This is really handy and you ought to give it a whirl.

Google Translate, now even easier

Every use Google Translate? It's really handy. I know there are other options but there are things about Google Translate that are hard to beat. Have a look by clicking here. Better yet, have a look by Control-clicking here, and then choosing "Open Link in New Window." That way, you can play around with Google Translate and read all about it here, with the windows side-by-side.

The first thing that I especially like about Google Translate is that it translates what you type as you type it. Try it. I don't know how they do it, but it works very nicely for me (Safari 4.0.4, Mac OS X 10.6.2). Here's a picture of the finished sentence, translated, but know that it was translating away as I entered my lunch request. Very cool. And of course there are plenty of choices for the "Translate from" and "Translate to" languages.

The second thing that I especially like about Google Translate is it can translate an entire webpage. All you do is type the website address into the box, where I typed in my "I would like a cheeseburger" sentence. If you are looking at a website and you get the notion to translate it, you could (1) select the URL, (2) copy the URL, (3) switch to Google Translate, (4) paste the copied URL into the box, and (5) click the Translate button. Or you could do it all in one step, if you do some one-time set-up. Obviously you want to do it in one step, so read on and I'll show you how.

In Google Translate, click where it says "Tools and Resources" at the left. Or click this link. Ignore all of that complicated-looking stuff at the top and scroll down until you see something that looks like the following picture.

Choose a language that you want to translate into. Click and hold on the blue underlined text for that language. If you let go you will get a friendly reminder from Google:

Do what it says: click and hold on a blue underlined language and drag it to your browser's toolbar. While you're dragging it looks like this:



When you let go you'll get a chance to name it. I used the name suggested by Google:

When you're done it looks like this (minus the red oval). That little button will be there forever, or until you take it off.



That's it for the setting up. Now for the fun part! Go to a web page, any web page. Let it load up. Click the button you made. If you happen to go to the same web page that I did, you will change this...

into this!

I don't know about you but I think it's amazing.

Bonus: notice that Google's put some controls at the top of the translated page. That means you can EASILY switch to another language, without starting over. Give it a whirl and let me know what you think. You can even tell me in Spanish.

WiFi Problem Solved via SMC Reset

Every so often I run into a problem that just doesn't make sense. I ran into one like that today. A MacBook Pro could not connect to the wireless network, even though it worked fine yesterday and as far as anyone could tell, nothing had changed. The network was visible under the Airport menu, and other devices (an iPad, an iPhone, and my own MacBook Pro) were able to connect. But the other MacBook Pro-- the one that connected to the WiFi yesterday-- asked for a password every time we tried to join the network, and even though we knew the network's password it never was accepted. The error message said "Connection timed out."

Rather mysterious. It worked yesterday, but not today. And other devices connected to the network just fine.

Here's what I tried.

1. Restarted the MacBook Pro (no good)
2. Turned the WiFi off on the MacBook Pro and then back on again (no good)
3. Restarted the Airport base station-- actually a Time Capsule (no good)
4. Checked that the Time Capsule wasn't restricting connections (it wasn't)
5. Updated the Time Capsule's firmware to 7.6.4 from 7.6.1 (no good)
6. Tried entering the wrong password to see whether I could get a different error message (I could not)

I was rather stumped, but I was getting closer. At least I was eliminating possibilities.

Sometimes in a case like this the problem involves the Keychain (where the computer's passwords are stored). What happens is the password, which is supposed to be supplied automatically, somehow gets corrupted (or maybe the password's been entered twice, once right and once wrong, and the Mac supplies the wrong one, by mistake). In that case, what we do is go to the Keychain Access application, find the key (or keys) that store the password for this particular network, and then delete it (them)-- and then, with a clean slate, try to join the network one more time and very carefully type in the correct password. That's what I did-- but it didn't solve the problem. So now I was even more stumped.

Keep in mind that the connection to a network is not a "user" property. Network connections belong to the machine, not to any particular user. Switching to another user on the same Mac wouldn't have accomplished anything.

All of this led me to realize that the problem was in the MacBook Pro itself-- not in the Time Capsule, not in the user, not in the Keychain. I figured the Airport card inside the MacBook Pro needed to be reset somehow. The question was "how." The answer was "by resetting the SMC." Now all you need to know is, what's an SMC, and how do you reset it.

SMC = System Management Controller. It's a subsystem inside modern Macs that, when malfunctioning, can make a lot of things break, including Airport wireless networking. (If your Mac's USB devices aren't recognized, or the fans seems to run overly fast, or the Mac doesn't wake up reliably, that might be an SMC issue also.) The SMC's settings are stored in non-volatile RAM, which means they're stored on chips inside the Mac, not in a file in the Preferences folder the way many other settings are stored. Different machines require different reset procedures (see this link to Apple's website), but this one needed only this:

Shut down MacBook Pro. Press Shift, Control, and Option on the left-hand side of the keyboard while simultaneously pressing the power button. (Nothing will happen.) Let go of everything-- the keyboard, and the power button-- all at once, then press the power button by itself one more time. Voilá, the SMC's reset.

And guess what: after the SMC reset the MacBook Pro joined the network just fine, as if nothing had ever happened. A happy ending.

(You might think "I'll just reset the SMC as my first trouble-shooting step and save a lot of time." I wouldn't do it that way. The SMC controls a lot of different things so there are lots of different settings in it. I blasted them out and got a nice, new, factory-condition set of settings-- solving the immediate problem, but changing a lot of other settings that I didn't really want to change. Nothing serious, just lots of little things, and no data loss or anything like that. Still, resetting the SMC is an all-or-nothing thing-- you can't reset just one part of it-- and it could be inconvenient to the user to have so many settings changed at once.)

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Built-in Siri Tip Sheet

iPhone 4S users: if you have trouble remembering what Siri can do for you, try bringing up Siri's built-in tip sheet. I don't know why it took me so long to find it but you know me-- as soon as I find something, I write it up so you can know too.

All you do is start Siri by pressing and holding the Home button. You'll hear the two beeps, indicating that Siri's listening. If you look at the screen you'll see, to the right of "What can I help you with?", a tiny gray-on-gray lower-case "i" in a circle. Here's what it looks like (big red arrow added by me):


Tap that little gray-on-gray "i" in the circle and you get this:


Scroll down to reveal more:


And more.


That's cool already. But wait, there's more! If you touch an item in the list, you get a bunch of related examples. Here's what you get when you touch "Call Jason."


Here's what you get when you touch "How many calories in a bagel?" (Note: there are a LOT of examples in that category-- scroll down to see them all.)


Super stuff, and it's built right in, available where and when you need it.

By the way, there are 207 calories in a bagel.

Retailmenot.com: Money-Saving Website

Ever buy something online, and right at the end you see a little box that says "Enter your promotional code here"? Ever wonder how you're supposed to get those codes? I get them from Retailmenot.com. Retailmenot.com provides discount codes for use on other websites (and printable coupons for use in stores, and news about special offers). I've made checking with Retailmenot.com a habit-- every time I'm about to buy something online, I open another browser window (File/New Window, or Command-N) and see if Retailmenot can help me save some money. A lot of the time they can.

It's an easy website to figure out. Here's what it looks like (note: it's better on a Mac than on an iPhone):



You can search for a store-- here's what happens when you start typing "Jcpenney":


Rather handy. When you see the store you're interested in you can click on it and boom, you're shown a list of discounts and special offers for that store. Here's part of what that looks like (it's a long list).



Retailmenot is pretty clever. They'll show you deals for other stores and online merchants that are similar to the one you've chosen. And sometimes they just come out of the blue with a great idea. Here's one they recently showed me from Amazon:



Who knew? That's a great deal. Thanks, Retailmenot.com!

iPhone app of the week: eReader

Surely you’ve heard of the Kindle, the electronic book-reading device from Amazon. It can hold thousands of books in its memory and you can download new ones through the air. That’s the good news.

Here’s the bad news: it costs $359, the screen isn’t color, and it’s another thing to carry around (and it’s not small).

Enter eReader, the iPhone app that turns your iPhone (or iPod Touch) into a Kindle-beating device for the low low price of ZERO. Yes, zero. Nice. You can download many books for free from www.manybooks.net. You do it right on the iPhone, from within the eReader program. (I’m reading “The Return of Sherlock Holmes” on my iPhone and didn’t pay a dime.)

By the way, eReader automatically saves your place when you go to do something else, like check your email or make a phone call. If you’re partway through several books eReader remembers your place in each. Really neat.

If that’s enough to sell you on it, click here and get eReader, for free, from the iTunes Store. If you’re not sold yet, here are some pictures that will help you see it my way.

Here’s the opening screen. Notice it’s in COLOR.




Here’s what eReader’s “Parchment” color scheme looks like. Very readable. That’s from The Return of Sherlock Holmes. (You swipe from right to left to turn the page-- no need to click a special button or anything.)




A tap on the screen brings up the options and controls. They go away with another tap.




Here are some of the settings.



eReader lets you focus on reading, not on the device you’re using and not on how much that device cost you. Apart from the opening screen there aren’t a lot of pictures so even though it’s in color that’s somewhat wasted since you can’t see illustrations. But, for the money, and the convenience, eReader’s a great addition to your iPhone. I really, really like it.

AT&T's Mark the Spot app

AT&T might not have the best phone and data services (might not?), but at least they're giving us an easy way to let them know when and where we experience problems. The idea is, when something goes wrong-- dropped call, no service, slow internet, etc.-- you fire up AT&T's Mark the Spot app and tell them all about it. Seems like a good idea.

You can get Mark the Spot from the iTunes Store for free. Here's a link to save you time. And here's a picture of the app's opening screen.


They haven't thought of everything, but they do realize that if you're having technical issues with AT&T's services it's quite likely that sending them a note right then isn't going to be possible. They handle that by dropping a little pin onto a map, marking the spot (get it?) and when you finally get service again the note and the map and the pin get sent. That's kind of a clever way to do it.


Complaining about AT&T's service seems to be the "in" thing these days but it's a lot more fun when you complain to the right people, and with Mark the Spot it's really convenient. If you're having issues with AT&T's service this is the app for you.

Don't Fall for this Phishing Scam

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iPhone Photo of the Week

Taken February 9th, 2010, 5:30 PM, after the rain in Los Angeles. No special lens, no special tricks, just a steady hand. Remember, the iPhone takes a picture when you take your finger OFF of the camera button, not when you touch it, so put your finger on it and hold... and when you are ready to take the picture, gently take your finger away. Obviously, it works for me.

There's a tiny strip of white at the end of the street, on the mountains. That's the Hollywood sign.

VIDEO Tip: Safari Bookmarks

Back by popular demand, it's VIDEO. A picture is worth a thousand words, so a movie should be worth even more. Let's test that theory out.

A couple of weeks ago we had a contest about Safari Bookmarks and cool ways to make them. Nine-year old Zach won it with the first tip in this video. The second tip is provided at no additional charge, though Zach probably already knows all about it.

Have a look. Click the picture below to start the show.





NOTE: the first tip in this video also works in Firefox. The second one does not. Use Safari.

Macworld Expo Report

I'm back from Macworld Expo. I spent about a day and a half there, plenty of time to see all of the exhibits once and many of them twice.

The show was much, MUCH smaller than last year. We knew in advance that Apple wouldn't be there, but we were all wondering how many others wouldn't be there. The answer: about half of the vendors from last year stayed home.

Off the top of my head, here's a list of big companies that WEREN'T at Macworld this year:

• Canon
• Epson
• Adobe
• Quark
• FileMaker
• Intuit
• Google
• Logitech

Quite a list of heavy-hitters. Even so, the show was a lot of fun, and there was still plenty to see. I plan on attending next year and I encourage you to do the same. Dates for next year are already set: January 25th through 29th, 2011. Click here to add the dates to your iCal calendar. (Really, please click it. It's my first click-and-add-it-to-iCal link.)

Here is a short list of things that caught my eye at Macworld. Check 'em out.

iPhone apps

• Business Card Reader, $1.99 (Macworld Expo special-- regularly $5.99). Take a picture of a business card using your iPhone and the program reads the information and adds it to your Contacts on the iPhone. Since you're surely synching your iPhone with your Mac that means the contact will be on your Mac too. Very neat. I bought it and it works. It's not always perfect but it's always good enough to be pretty helpful.
• Grocery Pal, free. Tell it your zip code and it gives you all of the specials for the stores around you. Limit it to just the stores you like if you want to. Add items to your shopping list for each store and do price comparisons across all of your stores. Search for items easily. By the way, blueberries are 2 baskets for $3 at Ralphs this week.
• Square-- not yet available, but boy oh boy does this look good. It lets you accept credit cards as payment even if you don't have a merchant account. The Square people will take some small percentage of the transaction, currently estimated at 2.99%. No yearly fee, no per-transaction fee, no muss no fuss. This will be great for when you go out to dinner with friends-- you could pay the restaurant with your credit card, and your friends can pay you with theirs. Neat. The app will cost 99 cents and the scanner thingy will be free.

Mac stuff

• TopazLabs Photoshop bundle, $129 (Macworld Expo special-- slightly higher now). This amazing set of tools, which also works in iPhoto, lets you do incredible things to your photos. Some of the tools help you to rescue badly exposed or backlit photos, others help you to take the noise out of noisy jpegs, others let you have a great time experimenting. Get a 30-day trial and go to town.

Click here to see a slide show of some pictures I fixed up last night with Topaz in about two seconds. Look for the navigation (next, previous, home) at the top.

I still have a lot of Macworld paperwork and notes to go through so I may be adding to this list.