iPhone Survival Guide

I’m a first generation iPhone veteran and iPhone developer, and these are my hard-earned tips for you new 3GS users.

Keyboard Tips

• Moving the cursor: hold your finger then drag the cursor to move it. You’ll get a magnifying glass effect so you can see it more clearly
• Copy and paste: hold the cursor similar to the above, then release it. A pop up menu will display copy and paste options. You can even make a bounding box to copy ranges of text
• Correcting mistakes: when you’re new to iPhone typing you’re going to keep hitting the wrong keys. Try leaving your finger on a key and dragging to the correct one before you release it. Also try getting used to trusting the iPhone’s suggestion, they’re generally accurate! Press space to accept a suggestion, or touch the suggestion to ignore it
• .?123: You can tap and release “.?123”, or hold it and drag to punctuation. Holding it will cause it to flip back to “ABC”
• Currency: Hold down your punctuation currency key to get a list of other currencies (I see £, but holding it shows dollar, yen, etc.)
• Domains: When typing in a domain (web site address), you’ll see .com in the keyboard. Hold it to see other common TLDs

Headphones

• The standard headphones contain a mic so you can use the iPhone hands-free
• The mic bit (the weird white thing) let’s you skip tracks by pressing it twice. Once pauses, three clicks goes back
• Pushing it once will let you answer a call or hang up
• The new headphones also have volume controls
• Removing any type of headphone will pause, which is great for when you arrive at work in the morning (have you ever forgot to pause your iPod and left it playing all day?)

Safari

• Tap and hold a link to bring up a menu: open, open in new page, copy
• Double tap white space at the top or bottom of a page to quickly move up or down. I prefer swiping up and down to quickly scroll: the speed you swipe affects how far it scrolls
• Double tap images to zoom in

Syncing

• Be aware that syncing can be slow. This is because iTunes will occasionally backup your iPhone. Factor this in to when you sync: generally syncing will be fast, but if you’ve got a train to catch you can guarantee it’ll do a full sync and backup
• Make an iPhone playlist. My 8GB obviously couldn’t store all my music. Therefore, I prefer copying specific music and videos onto my iPhone. I have a playlist with my desert island discs, as well as new purchases and new podcasts
• You can sync Yahoo! and Google contacts/calendars/etc with iPhones. Google syncing kind of… messed up my contacts, because of the way Gmail seems to add everyone ever to my contact list. I prefer just syncing with my Mac’s Address Book and iCal, which is standard behaviour

Apps

• If you’ve got an Apple TV or Airport speakers, get the Remote app. It’s like living in Star Trek
• There’s loads of interesting games, but keep an eye out for original iPhone games that don’t have crazy on-screen joystick interfaces: Flight Control, Peggle