Pips ‘N’ Peelings

Make a contact (perhaps First Name iPhone, Last Name Dictionary so you remember) and put in the company field all the words you don’t want auto-corrected.

That’s it.

I think it is daft that we have to go to such lengths, but fab that there is a work around. I have sent so many SMS, tweets, and social network messages with gaffs in them thanks to the iPhone auto-correct feature. It is a godsend when typing quickly on the phone as it catches most of the miss-types fairly intelligently, but its when it has corrected something you meant to type that it gets infuriating.

Thanks to a fairly cryptic tweet from @goobimama of Smoking Apples. ‘Ducking He’ll’. I’m a bit slow.

Have just installed a plug-in from bravenewcode.com that makes wordpress blogs appear a little more neatly on the iPhone screen, and allows installation of a custom button for the iPhone home screen that links directly to the blog. It was a quick and easy install.

Thanks to Joshua at Macgasm for the tip.

You can write emails in landscape format using the wider keyboard with EasyWriter. For a limited time it is free on iTunes so go get!

Anything that makes it easier to write emails is a must.

I love the way you can add a website bookmark as an icon on the homescreen of the iPhone. It appears as an icon from the website when you chose the option when adding a bookmark in Safari.

So for instance going to the BBC iPlayer site and adding the bookmark from there adds an iPlayer icon to your screen and takes you straight there next time. This makes firing up a favourite website so much more immediate.

Forced by a broadband fault to max out my iPhone usage… I will be really happy to be corrected about anything in what follows.

Although email is able to receive some attachments it doesn’t seem able to send them.

I can’t resend an email. I had made a typo in the address (not one of my contacts) and it had bounced back so I wanted to send again to the right address. This would have been easy with cut n paste. Instead I had to forward it and I didn’t like the fact that it indicated the forwarding with a blue line in the margin.

I have experimented with Writingpad because it allows me to write a generic email and then pass that to the email app and make modifications before sending. Then I go back to Writingpad to send again making further modifications as necessary. This does work well except it is really impossible to type in a URL because it insists on putting a space after every full point.

When reading PDFs links don’t seem to work. I have a 200 page PDF to go through and I only seem to be able to scroll.

I really miss handwriting recognition. I can write very quickly on my SE p990i and it makes very few mistakes whereas typing on this iPhone is laborious.

No caps lock.

The screen rotation in safari is really good but I need it in email!

Some really basic mobile phone functionality is missing:
MMS - I have to go to O2 in Safari to get the message!
Bluetooth - only good if you want to use a headset, not if you want send anything.
Video - guess there’s an app somewhere that does it, but not ‘out of the box’

Trying to collect email or surf the net with the iPhone without 3G here in the UK is hideous. I am going to have to try to find someone’s open network because while I wait for BT to repair my line I can’t do a thing. Well, there are some things that work well given the narrow bandwidth here in Wantage, Oxon:
1) The App Store (installing new software takes a while but it does work)
2) The wordpress app on the iPhone I am using now
3) Unbelievably the Google maps app
4) The linkedin app

But please O2 sort out 3G coverage in Oxfordshire!

Because I can. Something else I couldn’t do with iWeb as far as I know. There seem to be so many plug-ins available too, that extend the powers of the blog; making automatic search engine optimization and google sitemap updating possible for a start.

But for anyone used to iWeb the graphical flexibility of it is dreadful. Not saying you couldn’t knock up a graphically rich blog, just that at the moment I can’t. I will have to look into this further.

Meanwhile, this is being typed live on my iPhone. I am going to blog about the iphone here a lot. But for now let’s just say that it is marvelous (understating it) but that the on screen keyboard is not working for me yet. I hesitate to say it is rubbish, as it’s auto correct feature is very intelligent - it has to be - as there would otherwise be mistakes in every word. The two thumb method relies on this entirely. But compared to that on my SE 990i which is a hardware keyboard, it is slow and actually quite uncomfortable.