techtips

Apple Snow Leopard Freezing Installs

2010-02-18T06:59:00.000-08:00

I have been having an annoying problem with my 27" iMac for a couple of weeks now. Every time I tried to install a 3rd party application it would hang or freeze on "Preparing" install. I tried Apple support and also wasted time digging through the web. What was the cause of this annoying problem? The iPhone Simulator. I have found that if you have the iPhone Simulator running in the background, 3rd party installs will fail every single time. Quit the Simulator and all the sudden installs work again.

How to take screenshots on an iphone

2008-07-21T13:05:00.000-07:00

While typing up my last post I found this little trick. You can take screenshot on an iphone by going to the page you want a shot of, and simply press the top on/off button and the home button at the same time. The screen will flash white and it will stick the screenshot in in your photos under: camera roll.

How to create, and set ringtones for the iphone

2008-07-16T17:07:00.000-07:00

People have been asking how to create ringtones for the iphone so here is a quick tutorial.

What you need:

An Apple computer with Garage band
An unprotected mp3 or AAC file
An iphone

Start itunes and find a song that would make a great ringtone.
Start up garage band and create a standard project (to simplify things place itunes and garage band side by side.)
In itunes click the song you want to convert and drag it into the project area of garage band.
Next click on the share drop down and click send ringtone to itunes. A popup will appear telling you that that the ringtone length needs to be adjusted.
Hit Adjust and a nice little bar will appear above the song. Adjust the bar to the part of the song that you want to be your ringtone. You can adjust the length of the slider but the ringtones cant be longer than 30 seconds. When your happy with your selection click on share, then send ringtone to itunes.
In itunes the ringtone appears under the ringtone tab on the left side bar. To sync the new ringtones click on your phone, then go to the ringtones tab near the top. You can either sync all ringtones or pick the ones you want.
Once the Phone is done syncing the files are on the phone ready to go, there are 2 ways to change your ringtone. The first is in settings under sounds.
The second way to change a ringtone is on a contact to contact basis, so that every contact can have a different ringtone.

How to burn iso CD's and DVD's in Apple OS X

2008-05-20T07:53:00.000-07:00

I came across this little trick today trying to make a bootable Linux disk. The feature to burn and open iso images is built into OS X. All you need to do is open the disk utility (found in utilities oddly enough) then drag the iso image over to the left column. Shown here:

Once the image is in the side bar you can either click burn up at the top, or click open to use the iso on the computer as if it were its own drive.