Marianne Schultz

the musings of a geeky girl

Musings of a geeky girl. About | Contact

Social

iTunes, App Store, iBookstore, and Mac App Store

Categories

Programming in the middle of nowhere

by 1 Comment

I’m in western Georgia about an hour outside of Atlanta learning iOS programming from Big Nerd Ranch. This picture was taken this morning as I took a walk before class started (with my iPhone 4S and edited using the Camera+ app).

The class is being held at Historic Banning Mills and it’s a very peaceful setting. AT&T coverage here is dismal, unfortunately, so my iPhone is less useful than usual, ironically (considering why I’m here to begin with). The remoteness of the selected location is intended to help attendees focus and it’s an effective tactic.

I’ll post more about my experiences here in the future but given the intensity of this training, I probably won’t be posting much this week. If anything, expect more pictures of trees for the rest of this week. And possibly some of squirrels. With luck, there will be no pictures of bears.

iOS 5 and iPhone 4S tips and tricks

by 9 Comments

Since iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S were released last week, there have been several tips and tricks posted all over the web that I’ve found useful and I wanted to put these all in one place so you could benefit from them too without having to search high and low to find them yourself.

  • Have Siri pronounce your name correctly or call you something else entirely, via TiPB. As I mentioned in this week’s podcast, I have Siri call me “Mistress” (other alternatives I had in mind were too long or, um, not entirely family-friendly for use in public).
  • Use Siri to tweet, via Mashable.
  • Define contact relationships for Siri (so you can just say “Call Mom” or “Text my husband” and the like), via TiPB.
  • Disable Siri when your iPhone is locked to prevent others from using it if it’s lost or stolen, via Business Insider. This is a setting enabled by default and is a potential security issue since anyone could get your personal information by asking Siri “What is my contact information?” or other similar questions even when your iPhone is passcode-locked.
  • Change your iMessage caller ID to hide your phone number, via Cult of Mac.
  • Enable emoji in iOS 5, via 9to5Mac. Yay! You don’t have to use a 3rd-party app to enable emoji anymore!
  • Creating different lists in the Reminders app, via TiPB. The neat thing about this feature is that you can then use Siri to add to these lists. For example, I’ve created a list titled “Shopping” in Reminders and I can just tell Siri, “Please add milk to my Shopping list” and she’ll do it. This makes Reminders far more useful for me beyond reminding me about tasks at specific times and locations.
  • A list of Siri commands to add punctuation, special spacing and characters and more to text you dictate, at Crush Apps. You can also download this list to carry around with you if you have the Paperless app (link opens iTunes), which is one of my favorites for keeping lists.

If you’ve come across any other tips you’d like to share, post them in the comments!

What we have here is a failure to communicate

by Leave a Comment

I posted a review of Push 4.0, an iOS push notification app, this week at AppShopper. What I didn’t mention in that review is what drove me to find it to begin with, which was ultimately a lack of support and responsiveness from the first push notification app I’d tried, Boxcar.

Granted, there aren’t many push notification apps in the App Store right now and Boxcar is arguably the most popular one. But Boxcar stopped working for the most important RSS feeds I like to stay on top of and nothing in their troubleshooting tips helped, so I turned to their support forum. I found another user with the same problem and posted in his thread here to add my voice. That was back in May. Fast forward to July and there was still no update from Boxcar though others had chimed in to say they have the same problem.

I even pinged Boxcar on Twitter a couple of times and received no response there either.

[Read more…]

Verified by MonsterInsights