Time-lapse photography is a technique in which each film frame is captured at a variable rate much slower than it will be played back. When these clips are replayed at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapsing. Time-lapse photography is the opposite of high speed photography, where a higher number of frames are captured than is typical.

But how do you start making your own time-lapse? Even if you don’t own a Mac with a built in webcam, you can start by making your own time-lapses from your built-in screen. There are a number of great pieces of software available- so lets look at the required setup before we explore the software options.

You must have this basic hardware setup:

*A static camera: preferably a mounted camera or camcorder via steady tripod or otherwise rested on a non-moving object- but can just be your built in iSight.
*Power supply: both the camera and computer will need a consistent power source, especially over a long period of time.
*Good lighting: especially if you are shooting inside, it is important that the lighting stay consistent throughout the time-lapse- otherwise it may end up looking like a rave party with constantly changing lighting.

Once that is ready to go, explore some software options for capturing your time-lapse:

Gawker- Gawker is a free, open source alternative to iMovie or iStopMotion developed by Phil Piwonka. Not only can it take a time-lapse from your iSight or other attached camera, but also from your built in display. That isn’t where Gawkers features end, either. Utilizing Bonjour, you can share your camera and let others to record from your video stream. Multiple steams can even be created from up to four locations side by side. Get Gawker here!

iStopMotion-While a little pricey at $49, iStopMotion, developed by Boinx is a wonderful piece of software that will let you do more than just create a time-lapse and offers a great deal of control of your time-lapses. Download it here.

iMovie 6- In iMovie 6, which was available for free until iLife ’09 was released, offers a basic Time-Lapse function. You can start recording if you click on the Camera icon and choose Time-Lapse from the sub menu. In the box that appears, simply enable the time-lapse feature, and enter the rate at which you want iMovie to capture video frames- which will require a bit of forethought. If you want one frame per second you would enter 30 (since there are approximately 30 frames per second) and from there you can do the math. Note: if you do not have iMovie ’06 installed already, you are out of luck unless you happen to have an old CD laying around- Apple has discontinued software and both iMovie ’08 and ’09 do not have time-lapse capturing support.

Make your own Time-Lapse- By taking a steady clip that was shot in real time and speeding it up significantly, you can essentially create a time-lapse similar to the ones using specialized software.

Once you have setup your hardware and made your software choice, you can start creating time-lapses like these! Also worth noting, an awesome screensaver titled TimeLapse Screen Saver can continuously create a time-lapse from a camera, developed by Oriol Ferrer Mesià. Download the screensaver here.

Otherwise, have fun creating your own time-lapses, and feel free to share them with fellow readers of The iLife.

BrightKite, a social network aiming to create a community based on the places people frequent was founded in Devner only last year. It entered a private beta period for almost about eleven months, and recently opened it’s doors to the public earlier this month. So if you don’t have an account- get one now and read on to get started using BrightKite!

First thing is first, you need to get an account from BrightKite.com. The process is simple, but I’ll walk you through the first steps:

After you’ve entered all your account information, you can click next and be prompted with the next steps.

By selecting your default privacy settings, you can control how much information you share and who else can see it. At any given time you can still toggle back between the modes, so this step isn’t crucial. To get the most out of BrightKite, I recommend using the “Public” setting- but beware that it will let others see where you have checked in.

The next step will be to check in for the first time. While this isn’t required, you’ll want to check in at some point anyway- so why not? Simply enter a location where you are, which can be detailed as a street address or as vague as a zip code- or just a business address and press “Check In”.

After that you will be displayed with “What’s Happening” in your area- which can either be populated with other BrightKite users activity around you, or empty because there is not enough activity. Above is the main web interface- which can seem a little confusing at first.

Broken into three parts, it’s rather trivial. The left most column is where all the action lies, where you click to Check In, have BrightKite guess your location (using nearby Wi-Fi hotspots) see What’s Happening around you, in the BrightKite universe, with only your friends. You can also see comments on your activity, mentions from other BrightKite users, visited places or your placemarks (places you bookmarked).

The next two columns can change based on what you mode your in. For example, if you’ve selected the What’s Happening? The main view is focused only on things going on around you, comments or mentions to you, the entire BrightKite universe or just your friends. If you selected Visted Places, you’ll see a list of all the places you’ve checked into.

With this information, you’ll be able to get started using BrightKite. In the next article in this series, we will explore new ways of checking into BrightKite from mobile devices such as iPhone, iPod touch or just a simple cell phone. We have to thank Brady Becker, BrightKite founder, for helping me write this tutorial!

Looking to sign up for yet another social network?!? In a crowed field of social networks, a Denver startup BrightKite aims to bring social networking down to the real world. While social networking has gone undeniably mainstream, with over 120 million active Facebook users and 3.2 million Twitter accounts, BrightKite’s network differs in an interesting way- bridging the real world to the internet. For those familiar with the iPhone application Twinkle, BrightKite borrows a few location concepts from Twinkle and builds a social network around them.

On BrightKite, users may post about what is going on at a given location via a Photo or Note. Users can also “Check In” and show other users their current location. On your computer or iPhone, BrightKite can utilize location based services such as Skyhook (a Wi-Fi location service) or GPS to automatically approximate your current location. Additionally you have the option to manually input your location through a specific address business name or a preset “Placemark” (a bookmarked location).

After Checking In on BrightKite through a web browser, you will see a map of your current location and a list of other BrightKite users who have recently checked in around you. Once you have added friends, you will also see their activity in your Placestream. You can then explore what your friends or other people are doing in more detail, view photos or notes they posted and even browse individual user profiles. The same applies if you are accessing BrightKite from one of the many supported mobile devices.

If you consider your location to be sensitive information (which you probably should), BrightKite makes it simple to hide anything you don’t want others to see by allowing your information to be displayed either publically or privately. Beyond that, you can set many levels of privacy and accuracies that can even extend to your friends on an individual basis.

With the native BrightKite iPhone application, you can do virtually anything the full BrightKite website can, and on an iPhone 3G, the GPS hardware makes posting your location downright awesome. The application is very attractive, easy to use and doesn’t compromise any functionality.

In summary, BrightKite’s unique offerings make it a noteworthy social network, although it probably won’t replace Twitter or Facebook. While BrightKite is still currently in beta, if you go to their website and enter your email address, you can get an invite within about 24 hours (usually less).

Twitter is the ubiquitous part social network part micro-blogging service that has approximately three million accounts and over five million hits a month. For some it has become an essential part of the internet including the average consumer to the hundreds of companies and high profile celebrities who use the service. Twitter users have a myriad of options to update or view their Twitter feed starting with the Twitter website (Twitter.com).

On Twitter.com, you can see an overview of recent tweets, sort @Replies, view and send direct messages to other users or only view tweets from your favorites. While this is everything the Twitter service has to offer, there are a number of advantages of using a dedicated Twitter client. Below are my two recommendations for Twitter clients.

If you can get past the $14.95 price tag, Twitterific by the Iconfactory is by far the best client I have used hands down. The design is very clean and simple- utilizing the Apple “Heads Up Display” style of menu. On the bottom of the display you can visit your Twitter homepage, adjust Twitterific settings or manually refresh your feed. And if you have Growl installed, it will automatically display new tweets when they come in. Twitterific is not only the cleanest and simplest Twitter client, but under the hood is very powerful. Within the settings pane you can adjust for any configuration you like. It is worth the $14.95 if you enjoy Twitter and great Mac software.

If the idea of paying for your Twitter client is hard to grasp, there are a number of free options to consider. Syrinx is the next best client, developed by MRR Software. Like Twitterific, it offers a simple interface for viewing the latest tweets or updating your Twitter status and also can interface with Growl.

If you’re on a Mac and you use Twitter regularly, you should definitely download a Twitter client that fits your needs. Not only will it save you time, unnecessary refreshes and a tab in your browser but you will get updates as they come in- not whenever you happen to check Twitter.com. Look for more ways of keeping in touch with your Twitter friends in further additions to this series.

µTorrent is a free, light weight BitTorrent client maintained by BitTorrent Inc., who also maintains the BitTorrent Protocol. A study in PC World has shown that µTorrent is the number 2 peer to peer (P2P) client and the number 1 BitTorrent client.

This article will focus around using µTorrent for a beginner on a Windows system, although there is now a beta version of µTorrent for OS X.

Look for full setup instructions after the Jump.

First off, after you install µTorrent form their website (www.utorrent.com), µTorrent will ask you to for some basic information like your connection speed and a open port for your incoming connections. See the below screen cast:

Now let’s get a (legal) torrent to practice downloading with. I’m going to download the latest version of the Linux operating system, Unbuntu from their website.

After you click “OK” µTorrent will automatically begin to download the torrent, and will present you with a wealth of information regarding the progress of your download. Let’s take a look at the most important functions:

1. Delete selected torrent from list, this will not delete what you have downloaded
2. Start downloading a torrent on the torrent list
3. Pause downloading a torrent
4. Stop downloading a torrent
5. Increase a torrents priority in your download queue
6. Decrease a torrents priority in your download queue
7. The name of your torrent and a icon representing its status:
   • means the torrent job is downloading without issue
   • means the torrent job is waiting to be downloaded (queued)
     
   • means the torrent job was downloading, but there is a error
     
   • means the torrent job is finished downloading and is now uploading without issue
     
   • means the torrent job is finished downloading and is now waiting to be uploaded (queued)
     
   • means the torrent job is finished downloading and is now uploading, but there is a error
     
   • means the torrent job is paused
     
   • means the torrent job is stopped, but hasn’t finished downloading
     
   • means the torrent job is stopped, and has finished downloading
     
   • means the torrent job has a critical error
     
8. It’s priority in your download queue
9. The size of your download
10. Total percent downloaded, it’s also a progress bar that will fill up with blue in correlation with the percentage downloaded

11. Current status of the torrent; most often you will see:
    • Downloading: the torrent job is currently downloading.
    • Finished: the torrent job has been stopped after it has been completely downloaded
    • Paused: the torrent job is paused, but not stopped
    • Queued: the torrent job is waiting for another torrent job to finish downloading before starting.
    • Queued Seed: the torrent job is waiting for another torrent job to finish uploading before starting.
    • Seeding: the torrent job is finished downloading, and is currently uploading.
    • Stopped: the torrent job is stopped (not transferring, and not connected to any peers).
12. Number of people uploading the file (Seeders). The first number is the number of people you are connected to. The second number is the number of people in total who are seeders.
13. Number of people who are also downloading the file (Peers or Leachers). The first number is the number of people you are connected to. The second number is the number of people in total who are peers.
14. How fast you are downloading the torrent
15. How fast you are uploading the torrent

Remember, with BitTorrent, your download speed is limited by how much you share. You will start sharing as soon as you have parts of the file that other peers want. After you are finished downloading, you will begin to seed the file. You should always try to upload as much as you downloaded.


16. How much data you have uploaded from the job
17. How much longer until you will have the complete download
18. Your upload / download ratio, you should always strive to get this to at least 1.00 before you stop seeding the torrent.
19. The number of copies of the torrent available. If this is less than 1.0, its will be impossible to get the full download. The higher this number, the faster you will be able to download.
20. This is a user set variable. Each torrent can have 1 label, which you can set when you first start downloading a torrent, or by right clicking where the label would be and saying “New Label…” This has no effect on the download speed; it is only to help you organize your torrents.
21. This is your current network status and has three icons:
    • means everything is fine, and you are receiving incoming connections. Go on and download!
    • means no incoming connections have been received yet. If you see this for more than a minute, you probably forwarded your incoming port wrong.
    • means µTorrent wasn’t able to use the listening port. Generally, this means a firewall is blocking the port, but it’s also possible that another application is using this port, in which case µTorrent will inform you that there is a listening error.
22. Download statistics: Total download speed and the total amount of data downloaded this session

23. Date and time the torrent was added into µTorrent
24. Date and time the torrent finished downloading. Since this torrent still hasn’t finished, the field is blank.
25. Upload statistics: Total upload speed and the total amount of data uploaded this session

You can sort your torrent list by any of the fields by clicking on them.

After your torrent is finished downloading (and you should wait long enough so you can upload the files until your ratio is at least 1.00) you can stop the torrent. You can also access the files after the download is complete even while they are uploading. They are saved to the default download location (Win XP & earlier: My Documents > Downloads (the folder will be created automatically) Vista & Mac OS X: The downloads folder in your user folder)

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for the next part of Introduction to BitTorrent coming soon. Feel free to leave any questions in the comments below or Contact Us via email or IM.

Well, now you don’t have to. The easiest solution to this problem would be to hook up an exchange server to your iPhone so that it stays in sync, but unless you’re an enterprise user, you probably don’t have access to one. It’s not worth setting one up and, if you’re a Google user, you want your info synced there, not your work place. That is no longer a problem, thanks to a free service called Nuevasync. Nuevasync creates an exchange account running only the mobile protocol, and can sync your contacts and calendar with Google.

I originally found out about Nuevasync from a Lifehacker article offering Nuevasync as a Mobile Me alternative. I use Nuevasync with my iPod Touch, so no matter where I am or how I want to look at my data, I have access to it. It also makes it easier to enter a lot of data onto your calendar, and lets you easily import from web sources. Just add it to your Google Calendar and in about 5 seconds, it will show up on your iPhone (as long as you have service or Wi-Fi). This is especially helpful if you use shared calendars in a group setting, such as a family calendar or a group project calendar, by using Nuevasync you will always know that you have the most up to date version. The only catch is that currently, Nuevasync can only sync calendars that you have edit permissions for (there is a tool to help you figure out which ones those are, the link is after the jump) and they get merged all in to one calendar on your iPhone (they stay separated on Google Calendar).

Nuevasync was started in November 2007. Amazingly its creators David Boreham and Thomas Lackey never expected the high volume of users Nuevasync receives now. The original Nuevasync was designed as a Windows Mobile sync solution using Google Calendar and Plaxo (an online address book and social networking service) as data sources, but now Google Contacts as well as the other two are supported. Once Apple announced that they would be introducing Exchange server support with the 2.0 firmware upgrade, they got a beta copy of the firmware and began testing using an iPod Touch. They only expected a few iPhone users to be trying the service. Two days after the launch of the iPhone upgrade, Nuevasync’s servers were heavily hit, their user count had doubled. After that, Nuevasync began to drastically scale their code to support the new workload. Because of this, most of the planed new features had to be delayed. The two most requested new features are the ability to select which Google calendars are synced (including public calendar syncing) and for multiple calendar support. Both of these features are currently in development and is expected to be ready for testing within the next fe
w weeks. After that, the next feature to be released will be push email support from Gmail.

Probably the biggest reason people don’t currently use Nuevasync is that when you add an exchange server, all of your calendar and contact data on your iPhone gets erased, but the easiest way to avoid this is to sync your iPhone with Google via iTunes. I’ll walk you through the entire process to show you how you can have over the air syncing, without losing any of your data. Take a look after the Jump!

Setting up Nuevasync

The first thing you really want to do is sync your current data back to Google. Open up iTunes, plug in your iPhone (or iPod touch) and click on your device and go to the “info tab” and check the sync contacts (make sure you say “Google Contacts” and enter your account info!) and sync calendar tab.

Agree to the Google Terms of Service, and enter your Google Account Info. Then Upload your calendar info to the cloud using either the Google Calendar Sync Tool for windows or Spanning Sync for the Mac, or manually importing the events using an ICal file and then importing them on Google Calendar.

Now go to the Nuevasync website at www.nuevasync.com. Click “Signup”.

Fill in the account information and hit “submit”.

Go and check the email you put in and verify it. Now go back to the homepage and click “Login”

Enter your account info and click “Sign in”

Now, click on “change” next to “calendar”

Select “Google”, click “Change”. Then click the “Click to configure your service…” link. Enter Your Google ID with the @gmail.com or @yourdomain.com if you’re a Google Apps Customer, and click “Request Account Access”. You will then be redirected to Google and asked which account you want Nuevasync to access, choose and click “Continue”. On the next page click “Grant Access”. You should now get a message saying your changes have been saved. Click “Continue”.

There should now be a green dot all the way across from “calendar” on the right.
If you did not get a green dot go to this page. It will help you solve any configuration problems and tell you which of your calendars Nuevasync can use.

Now let’s sync contacts. Click Change next to contacts.

Select “Google” (you can also sync with Plaxo if you use that service), click “Change”. Then click the “Click to configure your service…” link. Enter Your Google ID with the @gmail.com or @yourdomain.com if you’re a Google Apps Customer and click “Request Account Access”. You will be then redirected to Google and asked which account you want Nuevasync to access, choose and click “Continue”. On the next page click “Grant Access”. You should now get a message saying your changes have been saved. Click “Continue”.

There should now be a green dot all the way across form Contacts on the right.

If you did not get a green dot go to this page. It will help you solve any configuration problems. It’s the same help page I mentioned above.

Before we move on to configuring the iPhone, it’s important to note that you can use this page to see which of your calendars can be synced and also help solve any configuration problems.

Now we’re done with the online configuration, let’s move on to the iPhone.
If you’re not sure what values to enter in the following fields, Nuevasync can generate the recommended settings for you, and give you their text based setup instructions at this page.

Go to the “Settings” menu then touch the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” button

Choose “Add Account…”

Choose “Microsoft Exchange”

Enter the Email, Username, and Password you set up at the Nuevasync site. Be sure to leave the Domain Field blank. Also add a Description, the default is the Email you entered in the email field, but I prefer “Nuevasync”. On the Nuevasync site they say “it is important that the e-mail address you enter when configuring the synchronization settings on your device matches the one you provided to sign up for Nuevasync.” I also found out that if you enter the wrong email address, then your events will show up as un-editable invitations.

Touch “Next”

A warning will pop up about the security certificate at “yourdomain.com” (Normally “gmail.com” or “yourdomain.com”, but I used my theiLife.com email address for the tutorial) Just so you know why this box pops up, on their website Nuevasync says “When you enter your e-mail address to sync, your device may warn you about a certificate being invalid. This is particularly likely if you use a Gmail address. It isn’t referring to our certificate or our service, so don’t be concerned. It is part of Apple’s auto-configuration feature as it tries to guess the appropriate server name based on your info. Our SSL certificate is valid and secure.”

Touch “Accept”.

The Server Box will appear. Enter www.nuevasync.com

Now, turn the “Mail” switch off. Nuevasync does not support push Mail yet, but they hope to in the near future. They suggest setting up IMAP for now. Nuevasync also says “turn off any other category you do not wish to sync. For example, if you want to sync only your calendar, make sure “Mail” and “Contacts” are both turned off. If you want to sync contacts and calendar, you should only turn off “Mail”, but if you are reading this article, you’re probably going to want to sync both. Touch “Save”.

Now the setup is complete. Nuevasync should show up as an account in the “Mail, Contacts, Calendar” page.

Go to the Home screen and touch Contacts. Your iPhone should immediately begin to sync with Nuevasync / Google. This first sync may take up to a minute, because it has to download all of your information. Future syncs will only take a few seconds. Afterwards, all of your contacts should appear. Go back to your home screen and repeat the process for your calendar. Again, the first sync may take up to a minute because it has to download all of your information. Future syncs will only take a few seconds.

That’s it! Now wherever you go with your iPhone or iPod Touch, you will always have your up-to-date Google Calendar and Contacts!

If you ever need to verify that your data was synced or the last time it was synced, you can use this page to look at your sync status. If there has been some error in syncing (Like Google not responding with your calendar events) then the problem will be displayed on that page.

Special thanks go out to David Boreham, one of the creators of Nuevasync, for providing information for the article. You can read Nuevasync’s blog at http://nuevasync.blogspot.com/ where you can keep up with the latest news about Nuevasync, including new features and scheduled maintenance.

BitTorrent was developed by programmer Bram Cohen, who designed the protocol in April 2001. To this day, BitTorrent traffic makes up a significant, yet exactly unknown percentage of Internet traffic. BitTorrent works by transferring many small pieces of a larger file from many sources to later make one larger file, versus sequentially downloading a file from one source such as a HTTP transfer.

In order to transfer files using BitTorrent you need to get a .torrent file and open it with a BitTorrent client. The client will then connect you to a tracker, which will provide a list of peers for your client to connect with. You can get .torrent files from a number of places around the internet, some which are legal and some that infringe on copyrights. This part is up to you (remember, Google is your friend).

AAs for a BitTorrent client, there are a handful of BitTorrent clients for OS X that work great. However, by far the most feature rich, fast and user friendly is Transmission. Transmission is 100 percent free, open source program.

Once you have your torrent file in Transmission, the last thing you will need to do is forward ports. From within Transmission, you go into Preferences, and click on the Network tab. Remember the port number Transmission displays (or change it). To obtain your full potential of speeds, you will need to open a port from the Internet directly to your computer. This will require you to enter the configuration page of your router and forward the port or enable NAT-PMP or UPnP (to let Transmission do the work). Configuring your router will vary by the manufacturer, so check out this site for a guide to your router.

This is a beginners guide to starting to use BitTorrent on OS X. Look for more parts coming soon, in more detail.

Once you have MobileMe synchronized with your computers and mobile devices, you can make changes online at Me.com and your other computers or devices will be automatically updated. This means that virtually anywhere you have access to the internet, regardless of what computer or mobile device you may (or may not) have access to; you can make changes to and access your data.

For those who have become accustomed to using iCal, the Me.com calendar carries over almost every feature- with the exception of an alarm function to the web. This powerful web application is based on the latest Web 2.0 technologies, and allows for a near desktop application replication.

To create a new calendar appointment, simply click on the calendar at the appropriate time, much like you would in iCal. The familiar event bubble will pop up corresponding to what color calendar you’re in. You can then enter text for the name of the event, drag it to correctly represent the time or double click on it to see even more options. If necessary, you can even drag the appointment across your calendar to change the date.

The MobileMe application even allows for Keyboard Shortcuts, for example, if you would like to delete an event, you simply press the delete key.

To create a new To-Do, press Control and “K” and your To-Do list will appear with a new event.

Read more after the jump!

To jump to today, press Control and “T” and Today will be highlighted in whatever view- “Today; Day; Week or Month”– you might be in.

Control “G” will bring up a Go to Date window which will allow you to jump to a specified date.

Pressing Control and “I” will bring up the selected Calendar Information.

Finally, you can get to preferences by pressing Control and “,”.

Note that as time progresses, this bar moves down through the calendar view.

Look for more detail about the Me.com application suite coming soon. For now, if you are looking for how to setup syncing your devices and computers with MobileMe check out last week’s article. As always, if you have any questions about MobileMe or anything, feel free to contact us here.

AppStore, apart of the iPhone OS 2.0

Apple claimed a catalogue of over 500 applications on the App Store’s July 11th launch. Just a week later, this has grown to over 700 applications- with many developers anxiously waiting for their applications (or updates) to get updated.

For those who have updated to the new firmware 2.0, you probably have found a number of applications you are really enjoying. However, the more you explore, the more pleased you might get. There are really hundreds of awesome applications on the App Store- some of which you may not know about. Here are a couple of ways to keep on top of the App Store- from the latest additions, hottest applications and updates to current applications.

Chris Pirillo recently created a Slinkset based application, that is a social news site for iPhone applications like Digg. You can find the most popular applications, voted on by users, and comments about each application. This is a great forum to be introduced into new applications, and read comments that are actually relevant (unlike a typical iTunes review).

MacRumors editor Arnold Kim has created a website, dubbed Touch Arcade, which provides extensive coverage of iPhone games. This is a high quality site for those looking just for iPhone gaming coverage.

PinchMedia offers RSS feeds from the App Store in four categories: Top Paid, Top Free, Updated and New Apps. You can subscribe to these feeds in your favorite RSS browser to watch as new updates and applications roll in; and stay on top of the most popular applications.

There are many apps to be discovered, and loads added each day. It is up to you to stay on top of them!

The 2.0 firmware adds a large number of fixes, refinements and additions to the iPhone platform. Free for existing iPhone owners and a $9.95 upgrade for iPod Touch owners, 2.0 adds the App Store as well as Microsoft Exchange support and many other enterprise level features. Below are some lesser known additions to the iPhone OS 2.0 firmware:

If you are entering a URL in Safari, for example, you’re probably aware of the .com button. In the new 2.0 firmware, if you would like to type in .edu, .net or .org, if you hold down the .com button and you are presented with “.net, .edu, .org and .com” as an option.

Like QuickTime movies, the new Safari version found on iPhone OS 2.0 allows you to see embedded YouTube videos. If you click on an embedded YouTube video, the video launches in the YouTube application.

If you see an image you would like to save while in Safari or Mail, if you tap and hold down the image, a prompt will ask if you would like to save the photo. Your saved photos can be found the Camera Roll as well.

If you want to take a screenshot from your iPhone or iPod Touch, hold down the home button and click the Sleep/Wake button at the top and the screen will flash. Whatever was displayed on your screen will be added to your Camera Roll.

If you want to jump to the top of a page in Safari, or your Inbox in Mail, simply tap the Menu bar (where the time and battery information is displayed) and it will jump to the top.

Continue reading after the jump for more new features!

Scientific Calculator:

If you launch the Calculator application in the iPhone 2.0 firmware and turn the iPhone horizontally, it will switch into a Scientific calculator!

Email Attachment Support:

PDF, Word and Excel documents were viewable as attachments prior to iPhone 2.0. Now Apple has added support for PowerPoint, Pages, Keynote and Numbers documents in the 2.0 Operating System.

Bulk Move and Delete:

Bulk Delete and Move have been added to the Mail application. This makes moving mails to a folder or deleting multiple emails at once simple.

Contact Searching:

If you’ve got lots of contacts, iPhone OS 2.0 finally adds a search functionality.

These are just a few tips for those running iPhone OS 2.0. If you know of any other, please feel free to contact us or leave it in the comments below!

For those of you who subscribed to .Mac, or recently purchased a MobileMe account, you may be already taking advantage of the new powerful “Push” syncing across your many devices. Incase your aren’t, or you don’t already have MobileMe, this is a brief tutorial to setup your different devices to sync with each other.

Mac:

Make sure you are running 10.5.4, go into System Preferences and under “Internet and Sharing”, the first thing you should see is MobileMe. If it still says .Mac, don’t worry- as long as you are connected to the Internet, click on the .Mac preference pane- you should get a message that looks like this:

It should bring you to Software Update, and were you can download the “Mac OS X Update For MobileMe”. Once you have the MobileMe preference pane, you can begin Syncing your Mac to the MobileMe servers. Simply enter your login information, and in a few moments your data will be pulled into System Preferences. Tab over to the “Sync” pane and check the items you would like to sync up to MobileMe. Also, pay close attention to the “Synchronize with MobileMe:” setting.

Apple has falsely advertised MobileMe as being a complete push solution for the Mac. This is not entirely true- while MobileMe does push to the Web and iPhone/iPod Touch devices, new information isn’t pushed to the Mac or PC. Rather, it is automatically pulled every 15 minutes if you have the “Synchronize with MobileMe:” set to Automatic. Once you have successfully synced with MobileMe from your Mac, you are ready to move onto other devices.

Hit the jump to see how to sync with the PC and iPhone/iPod Touch.

PC:

Before you can sync from MobileMe with your PC, you’re going to need to update to iTunes 7.7. After updating you should see the “MobileMe Preferences” pane in your Control Panel. Inside, it may resemble the System Preferences pane in your Mac. Once you enter your account information and sign in, you will see three tabs appear; “Account”, “Sync” and “iDisk”. In the Sync tab, check the “Sync with MobileMe” checkbox, select Automatic and indicate what you want to sync and press the “Sync Now” button. Once that is finished, when you launch Microsoft Outlook, Safari or other program of your choice, you should see the information has arrived!

iPhone/iPod Touch:

Once you have uploaded data to the MobileMe servers from either your Mac or PC (or both), you are ready to begin actually receiving push updates to either your iPhone or iPod Touch. To do this, simply navigate to Settings from your home screen, tap on “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” and then, “Add Account”. Enter your login information and switch on the updates you want pushed to your device. To optimize battery life to your liking (for either the good or bad) go back to Settings and tap on “Fetch New Data”. By default Push is on and fetch is Manual- this will provide the best battery life while still getting updates. If you would like to always have the latest information, you might want to change it to 1 hour or less or turn it off altogether.

Now, you should have your Mac, PC and iPhone or iPod Touch in sync with each other via MobileMe. As you probably know, you can always login and change or check this information through your favorite web browser at Me.com. This requires no configuration as it reflects what is on the MobileMe servers already.

More about MobileMe and new iPhone OS 2.0 coming soon. For now, you can check out our top five iPhone OS 2.0 applications here.

Getting ready to replace your iPhone this Friday with a new 3G model? Well, this article explains how to replace an original iPhone with an iPhone 3G using the same carrier. If you follow these steps to backup your original iPhone first, and then restore the backup to your iPhone 3G, your saved SMS messages, email accounts, photos, notes, and other personal settings will be present on your iPhone 3G.

To replace an original iPhone with an iPhone 3G, follow these steps:

1. Purchase iPhone 3G from an Apple Store or from a carrier. In the US, iPhone 3G includes a SIM and your original iPhone’s SIM is not needed. Your original iPhone account information will be transferred to iPhone 3G’s included SIM when you purchase iPhone 3G. To dispose of your original iPhone SIM, contact your carrier. In other countries where the original iPhone was sold, you can use your original iPhone’s SIM with iPhone 3G. Contact your carrier for additional information.

6. Verify that your saved SMS messages, email accounts and passwords, photos, notes, and other personal settings are present on your iPhone 3G.

If saved SMS messages, email accounts and passwords, photos, notes, or other personal settings are not present on your new iPhone 3G, the restore from backup may not have been successful. In that case, verify your original iPhone is properly backed up (see step 3), then use iTunes to restore iPhone OS on iPhone 3G and continue following these instructions at step 4.
To erase your original iPhone so someone else can use it, tap Settings > General > Reset > Erase all contents and settings on your original iPhone.

An example of a screenshot.

A screenshot is a digital picture of the contents of your screen. You can use screenshots in a seemingly endless number of situations from proof, to create a receipt or document something funny found on the internet or your computer. In Mac OS X, all screenshots are taken in the PNG (Portable Network Graphic) format by default, which is a high quality picture format, and usually are about 150~200KB large- but depend on the size of the image.

Information about a Screenshot.

If you want to change the format which OS X saves the screenshots, you can change it by copying and pasting the following terminal command:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type image_format
killall SystemUIServer

Change image_format with your choice of:
jpg
tiff
pdf
png
bmp
pict

An example of two screenshots.

Whenever you take a screenshot, it will appear on the desktop under the name “Picture 1″ and will numerically increase (Picture 2, 3) as you take more screenshots (or have existing ones on the desktop).

There are four basic keyboard shortcuts to taking a screenshot in OS X:
Command (Apple) + Shift + 3 = Screenshot of your entire screen
Command (Apple) + Shift + 4 = Screenshot of a user selected area
Command (Apple) + Control + Shift + 3 = Screenshot of your entire screen, copied to clipboard
Command (Apple) + Control + Shift + 4 = Screenshot of a user selected area, copied to clipboard

While the screenshot of your entire screen (Command + Shift + 3) is useful, there are far more options for manipulating your screenshot using Command + Shift + 4; so the rest of the article will focus on the latter.

The cross found by Command + Shift + 4

When you press Command + Shift + 4, your cursor will disappear for something that looks like a cross. You can drag it around the subject you want by clicking and dragging so that when you let go of your mouse button, it will take a screenshot of the selected area.

When selecting an area with Command + Shift + 4:
You can press the space bar and the cross will disappear for a camera that will automatically select the contents of a window.
You can hold down Option key to scale the selection area.
You can hold down Shift to only expand the selection box horizontally or vertically.
You can press space after making a selection to move around the selection box.

If you haven’t taken a screenshot before, I hope you can now refrain from taking a physical picture of your screen. Enjoy the new tricks, impress your friends and teach them how to take better screenshots!

Teach your Apple Remote new tricks!

If you have purchased a laptop since 2005, there is a very good chance it has a ‘SMS’ or Sudden Motion Sensor. This is basically an accelerometer which detects any sudden movement and will stop spinning the hard drive if enough movement is detected to protect it from being damaged in the fall, thus saving your data. Since the introduction of the Sudden Motion Sensor, developers have found clever ways to implement the accelerometer in their applications. Among the most useful is iAlertU.

iAlertU is an alarm system for your Mac. When motion is detected, the alarm is triggered, and it will even capture images from your iSight of the perpetrator. You can use your Apple Remote to enable or disable the alarm, and it will chirp like a car! iAlertU is free, and available for download from SourceForge.

If you of are the more curious type, you might have already discovered that within a lot of Apple applications, you can use the remote. If you haven’t, for example, in QuickTime player, you can use the pause, forward, backward and volume up/down buttons to control a movie playing. In Keynote, you can advance a slide with the remote. In iPhoto, you can advance a photo with the next button on the remote. Maybe you get the idea.

A couple less intuitive secrets about the remote:

You can put any Mac with an IR receiver, docked iPod (with IR receiver) or AppleTV to sleep by pressing and holding the Play/Pause button. Pressing any button on the remote will then wake up the device.

Holding down the Menu button on the remote during startup of an Intel Mac will bring you to the Startup Manager (also accessible by holding the Option key). Also in this menu, you can eject a CD or DVD by pressing the volume up (+) button on the remote.

While RemoteBuddy is probebly the most robust and feature filled, you can also check out SofaControl, Mira and iRed Lite.

Hopefully now, you will give your remote a second look, and hopefully put it to use better- be happy if you got it for free!

Also, as a side note, I highly recommend anyone with a Mac with an IR Receiver goes into the Security Preference pane and disable the receiver, so only paired remotes will work with your computer. This prevents anyone else with a Apple Remote bringing you into Front Row, or whatever you have your remote doing.

When Time Machine keeps writing backups of everything you do and all you are doing is writing huge failed movie files how do find the files on your Time Machine disk to clean house?

The answer for this is quite simple. At first you might think that deleting a file from Time Machine is redundant, but when you have multiple copies of files that are very large- your disk space is precious! When you enter Time Machine, simply highlight the file (or folder) you want to delete from backups and click on the Gear menu item. An option “Delete file from all backups” will be present, and this is what you want! To prevent it happening in future backups, you may want to go into the Time Machine System Preferences pane and click on the Options. From there, you can specify what you don’t want Time Machine to backup. Be it your Final Cut project file, or Movies folder.

Is there a way of telling TimeMachine to only go to work at night?

Apple does not provide a solution to this issue, but you can use TimeMachineScheduler, which will allow you to specify a 1-12 hour period for backups and a slew of other options for customizing Time Machine backups. This should do the trick.

If you or someone you know have any questions for theiLife, feel free to Contact Us!

At some point, we have all wanted to move our email accounts and mails over to another computer. Unfortunately, Mail doesn’t make it very easy to do but, it is possible. You can watch the screencast here or continue reading after the jump.

Step 1:
Log into the user who you would like to take the mail account information from. Navigate from the users home directory to their Library folder. Scroll down until you see a folder entitled ‘Mail‘. Take the folder called ‘Mail‘ and transfer it somewhere that you can access from within the other user, or other computer.

Step 2:
Again, navigate to the users home directory, open the Library folder and locate a folder entitled “Preferences”. Find the two preferences entitled ‘com.apple.mail.plist‘ and ‘com.apple.mail.searchhistory.plist‘ and copy them to the same location as your ‘Mail‘ folder.

Step 3:
Log into the user who you are transferring the Mail data to. Download and open batCHmod (or use the Terminal) and change the permissions of the three files (Mail, com.apple.Mail.plist, com.apple.Mail.searchhistory.plist) to reflect the new owner.

Step 4:
Replace ‘Mail‘ to ‘User Home Directory>Library>‘ and the two ‘.plist files to ‘User Home Directory>Library>Preferences‘ folder.

Step 5:
Launch Mail! That is it, you are done. If you are having any problems, consult the video to watch me do it. Otherwise, feel free to contact me!

For reference, some subjects we are currently considering are:

-iPhone Unlocking
-Terminal and Mac OS
-Pro Apps (ie moving from iMovie to Final Cut)

Help us help you! Thanks!!

Heres what to do next (in order of importance): 

1) Get a case! Now that Apple doesn’t ship those nice little cases with their latest iPods, it is crutial that you get your shiny new iPod in a case ASAP! Don’t think so?! Look at my friends brand new iPod Classic, which is now 2 weeks old, above, as he didn’t feel the need to purchase a case. Those very fine scratches on the screen were caused by a Sharpie, and the back (which isn’t pictured) is marred by scratches and a large ding just from being in his pocket.

2) Tag your library! Ranking very high amongst my pet peeves, a poorly tagged library is not conducive to a true Apple experience. The interface becomes just as useful as any other competitors  similar “MP3 player”. Having things correctly tagged not only makes it easy to find ‘that song you want to hear’ but also saves space, assuming you get rid of all your duplicates (View>Show Duplicates)! You don’t have to go insane, but a little work in iTunes goes a long way.

 3) Get Album Artwork! The new iPod interface is based around album artwork… keep it pretty!  Adding Album Artwork is as simple as iTunes>Advanced>Get Album Artwork (if your iTunes Music Library is properally tagged) or through a number of Shareware apps such as Album Art Thingy for OS X or iTunes Art Importer for Windows. Don’t let your iPod put that little music note instead of Album Art!

4) Get AppleCare! AppleCare is an invaluable resource to an iPod owner. For when it makes that clicky sound after dropping it randomly or when your headphones stop working after the dog chews it you can find yourself saving money fast. Overnight shipping and English native Customer Support is always great, too!

5) Loose the buds! As cool and convenient as the included iPod earbuds are, they destroy your hearing… which is always bad – what you say? If you refuse to get rid of them, or are an audiophile and need those E2c’s then see the next rule.

6) Use the Volume Limit! Don’t get me wrong, I love my music loud too. But I have since learned when it crosses the line, particularly for your ears. If you are too poor to afford a new set of headphones or cant live without those E2c’s, then use the Volume Limiter. Your ears will thank you.

7) Content! Now if I had a dollar for every unused gigabyte on every iPod in the world… Load up that new iPod with your favorite movie, TV Show(s), photos or podcasts! Say what? Yeah, the iPod Nano can do video, too! Convert videos with QuickTime or VLC -both are Mac/Windows compatible and fairly straightforward. 

 8)Charge it correctly! Another commonly overlooked mistake with any portable electronic device- don’t charge it overnight! You will kill that battery in a year (or less)! Always cycle your battery (fully charge it, and then fully kill it [repeat]) and never, ever, leave it charging overnight. Charge it during the day, and take it off the charger when it’s done. Your effort will pay off.

9)Save your battery! Turn down the brightness (Settings>Brightness). Also turn the backlight timer to 2 Seconds (Settings>Backlight Timer)! You will find that your battery lasts longer! Wow!

10) Accessorize!! Be you! Get a case that stands out. Get the TV Cable so you can watch that movie absolutely free (always download legally ). Enjoy your new iPod.