IPhone Cafe

iPhone Cafe posts are written using WordPress  (an Open Source weblog application) but are displayed using WordPress or Apple’s iPhone.  WordPress content doesn’t display exactly the same on the iPhone’s Safari browser as it does in an IE browser. However, you can compensate for the differences between displays. 

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Here are some tips to consider when writing posts for iPhone Cafe and remembering that the text needs to render within both WordPress and the iPhone. First thing, the iPhone display has trouble with vertical spacing.  Fix this by inserted indented text or symbols.  For instance:

• Separate paragraphs useing three centered asterisks
• Use indents for pictures
• Use indents for code samples.

I use three centered  asteriks as paragraph separators. These look okay within WordPress and on the iPhone.

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As a final step before closing out a new post, remember to review the post using iPhone’s Safari browser and make sure everything looks okay on the iPhone.

The email client on my iPhone is configured to use Yahoo email and my Yahoo email account is configured with SpamGuard enabled. SpamGuard works great when viewing emails through a web browser logged into Yahoo. However, all that spam appears on the email client buit into my iPhone.  I was thinking it would be cool if the Yahoo SpamGuard filter worked with my iPhone, but apparently not.

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I found a posting titled “iPhone Email Spam - Dealing with it Using IMAP” which describes how to filter spam if the iPhone is configured for gmail.  Not sure if the approach also works with Yahoo mail.

Basic iPhone troubleshooting steps from Apple.

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1. The phone doesn’t appear in iTunes and won’t sync

• Check the phone battery. It may need recharging. 
• Try a different USB port on your computer.
• Or, turn the phone off and turn it on again. Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button on top of iPhone for a few seconds until a red slider appears, and then slide the slider. Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the Apple logo appears.
• Or, restart your computer and reconnect iPhone to your computer.
• If none of these steps works, download and install (or reinstall) the latest version of iTunes from www.apple.com/itunes.

2. The phone won’t make or receive calls, send or receive text messages, or access email or the web

• Check the cell signal indicator in the status bar at the top of the screen. If there are no bars, or if it says “No service,” try moving to a different location. If indoors, try going outdoors or move closer to a window.
• Check to make sure you’re in an area with network coverage. Go to your carrier’s website to see network coverage areas.
• Make sure airplane mode isn’t on. 
• You may need to turn airplane mode on, wait 15 seconds, then turn airplane mode off again.
• Make sure to include an area code for every phone number in your contacts list that you use to send or receive text messages.
• Turn the phone off and turn it on again.
• There may be an issue with your wireless service. In this case, call your carrier’s technical support.
• If none of these steps work, restore the iPhone software. See this document or see “Updating and Restoring iPhone Software” in the iPhone User’s Guide. 

3. The phone won’t turn on, or the display freezes or doesn’t respond

• Press and hold the Home button below the screen for at least six seconds, until the application you were using quits.
• If that doesn’t work, turn iPhone off and turn it on again. Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button on top of iPhone for a few seconds until a red slider appears, and then slide the slider. Then press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the Apple logo appears.
• If that doesn’t work, reset iPhone. Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button at the same time for at least ten seconds, until the Apple logo appears.
• If iPhone continues to freeze or not respond after you reset it
  Reset iPhone settings. From the Home screen choose Settings > General > Reset > Reset All Settings. All your preferences are reset, but no data or media is deleted.
• If that doesn’t work, restore the iPhone software. See document 305744 “Updating and Restoring iPhone Software.”

My Apple iPhone was delivered in a nifty little black box with the words “iPhone 8GB” printed on the side in reflective silver. So cool. Inside the box was the iPhone, a recharger, a set of earphone speakers, and a “getting started” guide.

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The “getting started” guide was five pages long but didn’t contain much in the way of details and  I needed to know more; much, much, more about my new toy.

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So, I went to Barnes and Noble because they usually have a good selection of computer books.

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However, after a few minutes looking through the mobile phone section at Barnes and Noble  I realized that there aren’t many usefull books about Apples iPhone.

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I finally settled on ”iPhone the Missing Manual” from David Pogue at O’Reilly. I guess the book is  okay, but I can’t really recommend it. I’ve been a major O’Reilly fan for many, many years. Some of my most dog-eared books came from O’Reilly (Programming Perl, Perl Cookbook; MySQL Cookbook, Google Hacks, oh yea); however, the Missing iPhone Manual isn’t up to O’Reilly’s usual standard (IMHO); but maybe it’s intended for a different audience. 

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What do I want in a User Guide for Apple’s iPhone?

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For example, I need to move phone telephone number contacts from my old cell to my new Apple iPhone and I need to disable iPhones autocorrect without violating my warrenty. I didn’t find a manual at Barnes and Noble to solve either of these mysteries.  I’ll keep on looking, but answers to these questions might only be found on-line.

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Oh…. by the way, Apple provides a user guide for the iPhone. It’s availible from Apple in PDF format. Here’s the link………

iPhone User Guide

I got a great question about the blank screen people find on their iPhone when they are rearranging icons on their home screen, and wanted to discuss it here.  The iPhone has seven (I think) screens that can be filled with shortcuts to web applications.  Using the Safari web search function on your iPhone, go to www.apple.com/webapps.  There you will see an extensive list of web applications.  Click on one that sounds interesting to try it out.  For instance, I am addicted to a web app game called iPipes. 

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To add an iPipes icon/shortcut to my home screen, I would first bring up the application on my phone.  At the bottom of the screen, there is the menu of icons (back and forward buttons, a plus sign, a book icon, and the pages icon).  Tap on the  plus sign and it will ask you if you want to add a bookmark, add to the home screen, mail a link to the page, or cancel.  Choose the “Add to Home Screen” button, and it will add the icon to your home screen.  

March 18 2008 - This is part one of a multi-part post about moving telephone contacts from a Motorola Rokker to the Apple iPhone using a SIM card reader to pull names and numbers from the cell phone.  This post describes installation of a Dekart SIM card reader on a Windows XP computer. The procedure here should work with any mobile phone using standard SIM cards to hold names and numbers.  It moves names and numbers from the old cell phone to the new iPhone. If your old cell contains more than 20 or 30 phone numbers, the procedure may be worth a look.

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This post uses Dekart SIM Card Reader and Dekart SIM Manager 2.1 to copy names and numbers from Rokker’s SIM card to the local PC.

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The Dekart card reader was ordered along with Dekart’s SIM manager v 2.1. After the card reader arrived, Dekart’s USB driver and their SIM Manager application were downloaded from Dekart’s web site.  As noted on their HowTo page, be sure to download a USB driver for card readers sold after November 2006. Install the USB driver and the SIM Manager before plugging the card reader into the USB port.

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On the Rokker, removing the SIM means pulling out the battery to expose the SIM card and a memory chip. The SIM card is larger than the memory chip. The picture shows the empty SIM card holder.

After downloading the USB driver and the SIM manager software, Windows Explorer showed the following icons. SIMReader2 is the USB driver. SIMManager_en is the user interface.

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While installing the USB driver, the following message appeared.

Clicking Continue Anyway finished the driver install and the system has been stable since the install (about 4 weeks ago).

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With the USB driver and the SIM manager installed, the SIM card is placed into the reader which is plugged into a USB port.  

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To read the SIM, select SIM –> Read Sim from the main menu of Sim manager.

After a bit, the navigator window displays a message like “Dekart Smart Card Reader 0″. Right click on “Dekart Smart Card Reader 0″ and select Read SIM from the pop up menu.

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Names and numbers from the SIM card should be displayed.

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As shown above, SIM Manager’s Read SIM option copies names and numbers from the SIM card. Next, the Save As option writes contact data to a file on the local PC.  Opening the file in a text editor shows names and phone numbers in the following format:

[6F3A]
n1=Eastman.Jake
t1=12065641865
n2=Brown.beth.c
t2=12065876430
n3=Mann.mark.wrk
t3=12123888893

To summarize, the steps presented in this post are:

1. Order the SIM card reader and software from Deckart
2. Retain the email containing the license code for the SIM Manager software. It will be needed when the card is delivered.
3. Download USB Driver software from Deckart
4. Download SIM Manager software from Deckart. Be sure to choose the driver for card readers sold after November 2006.
5. Install the USB Driver and the SIM Manager software
6. Copy/Paste the license code into the Sim Manager.
7. Remove SIM card from the mobile phone and plug into Dekart’s card reader
8. Plug the card reader into a USB port
9. Run SIM Manager
10. Select  SIM –> Read Sim
11. Right click on “Dekart Smart Card Reader 0″ and select “Read SIM”. Names and numbers from the SIM card are displayed.
12. Select File –> Save As and pick a location and file name.  The new file will have a .phn extention.

The next post will move names and numbers to a Google spreadsheet in preparation for synching with iTunes and the iPhone. 

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In case you were wondering, this post isn’t intended to endorse Dekart’s SIM card reader.  There may be other readers which perform the same function and maybe cost less and maybe provide more features.  I don’t know.  I wasn’t sure that Dekart’s reader was compatible with the SIM card in my Motorola.  However, since the reader and software cost less than $40, I figured it was worth a try. After installing the card and it’s software and seeing names and phone numbers from my Rokker sitting in a text file on my PC, I knew the card reader was doing it’s job. That’s when I wrote this post.

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I’m not exactly sure how to get names and numbers from the .phn file into the iPhone. However, it shouldn’t be too hard. It would be possible to manually copy/paste contacts from the .phn file into an Excel or Google spreadsheet and then export to .csv and then import into Yahoo Address book. For SIM cards with more than 20 or so contacts, manual copy/pasting could be tedious so a small Perl script might be in order to replace manual copy/pasting.  If you don’t have Perl, it can be downloaded from ActiveState. The standard downloaded distribution is all that’s needed.

You can easily rearrange the icons on your home screen to suit your needs.  Simply tap and hold on any icon until all the icons on the screen start quivering.  Little circles will appear right above the quick bar at the bottom–these circles tell you how many screens you currently have available.  The one that is white tells you which screen you’re on.  Once the icons are quivering, you can switch them around by dragging them across the screen.  You cannot, however, drop an icon into an empty slot.

This is probably a no-brainer, but I thought I’d throw it out there…

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My office building doesn’t get cell phone reception, and with my old phones, I’d power the phone all the way down so as to keep it from draining the battery while it looked for a signal.  With the iPhone, I figured all I needed to do to power off the phone was click the little black button on the top right edge of the phone–it turns the screen off, and I assumed that meant it was powered off (a high school teacher used to tell us in class, “Whenever you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.”  I guess she was right about that…).  Unfortunately, I’ve been going to turn on my phone and discovering the battery drained down, so I knew I wasn’t turning it off.  I would normally turn to the phone manual in cases like this, but since the iPhone manual is nothing more than a elaborately drawn game of Pictionary, I’ve not been able to turn to it for guidance with any of my iPhone issues.  

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I finally broke down last night and called my dad, who knows all about technology, and explained my problem.  I’m pretty sure he thought I was totally lame for not being able to figure this out on my own–I could tell from the exaggerated patience he used to walk me through the process, like he would if I didn’t understand English or something.  Regardless, I finally know how it works and am passing it along for the benefit of anyone as inept as I apparently am.  To completely power down the iPhone, press and hold the black button on the top right edge of the phone.  After a few seconds, the screen will fade to black, and a red slide bar will appear at the top of the screen.  Slide the bar to the right to power off, or touch the “cancel” button at the bottom to return to your phone’s desktop.

When navigating the web, you can zoom in on the webpage by double tapping the screen.  To zoom back out, double tap again.

While posting Generalized IPhone Contact Import, it occured to me that some iPhone owners may not have Microsoft Excel installed on their computer. Since Google’s free spreadsheet has the same file export capabilities as Excel, I thought it would be good to present another procedure for importing contacts to the iPhone.  Microsoft Excel isn’t used here.

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The import method presented here uses Google spreadsheet instead of Excel. The overall contact data flow is:

(1) Old Phone –> (2) plain file on your hard drive –>
(3) Google spreadsheet –> (4) CSV file on your hard drive –>
(5) Yahoo Address Book –> (6) Itunes/Iphone

There are lots of steps in this procedure some of which (step 5 below in particular) require manual copy/pasting of data. So, this method may not be worth the effort unless more than 20 or so contacts need to be moved. Also, since I’m not good with mobile phone SIM cards I don’t have specifics on moving contacts from SIM card to PC or Mac. However, I believe it can be done and have provided a Google search page for help.  March 17 Note: See Move Contacts - Rokker to iPhone - Part 1 for specific steps to copy names and numbers from a Motorola SIM card to the MAC or PC.

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The Google spreadsheet in step 4 contains three test contacts whose names are Jeff Z_Dilbert, Jim Z_Kirk, and Rick Z_Deckard.  The last name of these test contacts begin with the letter Z to make it easy to remove them from the iPhone. This means you can test the import process any number of times using Jeff, Jim, and Rick by performing steps 6 - 12.  Once things seem to be working okay, perform all 12 steps. 

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Follow these steps to import iPhone contacts:

1. Sign up for a Google account or use an existing account.
2. Sign up for a Yahoo account or use an existing account.
3. Export contacts from your old mobile phone to a file on your PC or Mac.  See this Google search page for pointers on how to do this.
4. Create a copy of the Google spreadsheet Yahoo_CSV_Import. Don’t change the column header names.  If Google Docs won’t allow you make a copy, send me a note and I’ll share the spreadsheet with you.
5. Manually copy and paste contact info from the file created in step 3 to the Yahoo_CSV_Import spreadsheet created in step 4.
6. Once all contacts are entered, save contact information from Yahoo_CSV_Import using comma separated values (CSV) format.  To do this select File->Export->CSV from the Google Spreadsheet menu. This copies contact data from the Google spreadsheet into a second browser window. 
7. Copy/paste contact data from the second window to a plain vanilla text editor like notepad or textpad and save to a folder on the local hard drive using any filename that ends in .csv. Make a note of the folder and the filename.
8. Login to your Yahoo account, go to the Address book by clicking the Contacts tab and select Import/Export. 
9. Go to the Import section and find a drop-down list box titled: “Choose a program to import contacts from:“. Select Microsoft Outlook (.CSV) File from the drop down and then use the Browse button to specify the location of the Excel CSV file containing your contact information.  This file was created in step 7. Don’t be fooled by the word “Microsoft” in the name of the list box option. Files in CSV format can be loaded into products from any software vendor.
10. When the Excel CSV file from step 7 is located, Click Import Now. This should copy rows from the .csv file to your Yahoo address book. (Before doing this step, make sure the Yahoo account doesn’t contain outdated addresses)
11. Now, run ITunes and connect your IPhone to the computer.  Within Itunes, click the Info tab, find the Contacts section and locate the Sync Contact with: checkbox.  Click this checkbox, and then select Yahoo Address Book from the associated dropdown.  Click Configure and enter your Yahoo ID and Password. Then, Click the Sync button located in the lower right corner of the Info page. Re-enter your Yahoo ID and Password if prompted. The iPhone will sync in a few seconds.
12. With the iPhone still connected to the computer, and click the Phone icon and then click Contacts. Verify the iPhone contact list now contains names and phone numbers from the Yahoo_CSV_Import spreadsheet.

Screen Snapshots

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