Just installed iPhone OS 4.0 beta that was released to developers yesterday. It seems to be a great release and delivers on a lot of feature requests. One of the biggest new features was multi-tasking support. Multi-tasking is the ability to switch from one application to another without closing the current application. Basically when you switch apps they are kept running in the background or frozen until you return to them where you can pick up where you left off.
To activate this new multitasking feature in iPhone OS 4, one has to double click the physical Home button (the round button with a icon of a square) to bring up the new app switcher. Now up until now double clicking the home button brought up the iPod controls when music was playing. In this new release the popup iPod controls are nowhere to be found. Here are some other Home button combos:
- Click Home once (from lock screen) – Wake iPod
- Double click Home (from lock screen) – Bring up iPod controls
- Click Home once (from dashboard) – Go to first icon page / search
- Double click Home (from dashboard) – Display the new multi-tasking app switcher
- Hold Home – Voice Control
- Hold Home and press Lock – Take screenshot
- Hold Home and Hold Lock – Restart phone
Goodness knows where the accessibility options have gone which used to be triple click Home.
Now is it me or is by having just two hardware soft buttons (i.e. function determined by software) a bit to much on the sparse side? The fact that there are this many key combinations is slightly worrying. Can anyone remember all of these? It also does not help that Apple changes this combinations in each iPhone OS release.
Maybe it’s time that the next iPhone device has a few extra buttons?
Cameron Gadgets, Operating Systems, Software, iPhone Apple, iPhone, iPhone OS 4
I know that my blog posts so far have been very Mac orientated, so not to break with tradition here’s another Mac related post. A colleague at work who’s a web/graphic designer gave me a link today to very neat program. This program shows a floating preview of incoming mail so that you can determine whether the message requires your immediate attention.
Mail.appetizer is a plug-in for Apple’s Mail and the current version is a beta, but so far a very stable one. There is also a panther version available.
Cameron Operating Systems, Software Mail.app, OS X
I decided that I needed to change the default search provider in Safari from Google-US to Google-UK. I thought that this would be a five second trip to Safari preferences, how wrong was I.
For some strange unknown reason Apple has decided to hard code the search provider (Google US) into the Safari application itself. I found various guides on the internet on how to change the default search provider, but they all required use of the Terminal and the not very easy to use editor Vi. Not forgetting that if you make any mistake when editing, it will render Safari completely useless.
After almost giving up I did one last search on Google and came across an excellent Safari plug-in AcidSearch. This plug-in not only lets you change the default search provider in Safari, it also lets setup multiple search providers which you can search on via a handy drop-down menu.
It seems development on AcidSearch has ceased and no longer works with latest version of Safari. All is not lost though as I have found a worthy replacement. Introducing Inquisitor! Inquisitor does a lot more than just allow you to change the default search engine, it completely enhances the entire search experience.
Website: http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/
Cameron Software Browsers, OS X, Safari
One of the things that you’ve been able to do in IE on the PC for years is run multiple versions along side each other on the same machine. But Mac users wanting to do this with Safari have been out of luck, that is until now.
Today I stumbled upon Multi-Safari which claims to work round this problem. You have to install special packaged versions of Safari which can be download from the site. Each version contains the relevant version of WebKit and the Safari web browser. Installing these special versions of Safari do not overwrite the main WebKit, so you can safely install these without fear of damaging the main Safari installation.
Cameron Software, Web Development Browsers, OS X, Safari