Desktop Notes » iphone

iOS Tip – Load Remote Images

eric — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 22:44:36 +0000

Quick tip, if you have iOS3/iOS4 on your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad, you can disable loading remote images in emails by going into Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and flipping the “Load Remote Images” option to Off. By default, it is set to On.

Why would you want to do this since Apple has deemed it good to enable it by default? Well spammers can embed tracking in the image URL’s. When Mail loads the images, the spammers will know that the email address they sent to is valid, which of course leads to more spam. That’s why on the desktop Mail.app and Outlook by default have this disabled. Why Apple choose to enable this by default on the iDevice is strange.

UITableView Background in a Standard UIView

eric — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:25:30 +0000

While exploring the CoreDataBooks sample iPhone app, I came upon the EditingViewController which I noticed had the same grey/white bar background as does a UITableView has when it’s in grouped style. After fiddling with the Background property for some time, I eventually figured out how to set the Background to the same background pattern.

1. Open the Inspector window for UIView and click Background.

2. Select “Color Palettes” (middle icon) and in the Palette drop down, select “iPhone SDK”.

3. In the options, select “groupTableViewBackgroundColor” and you’re done!

Your view should now have the same bar pattern as a grouped table view!

Skype on iPhone

eric — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:50:08 +0000

My initial reactions to using Skype on the iPhone:

The sound quality is about the same as using the AT&T 3G network. Not as clear as Skype is on the desktop. Better than using Skype through Fring. I was hoping for desktop sound quality, but oh well.
Not being able to run programs in the background, Skype will only work when the program is activated. Therefore it can’t work as an alternate phone line.
Chat is saved on the Skype server. If you lookup your chat history on your desktop Skype, the chat through the iPhone will be there as well.
There’s no shortcuts for smileys on iPhone Skype. You’ll just have to remember the shortcuts to use your favorite emoticons.
There’s no sound effect to notify you of new chat messages. You’ll just have to look at the screen to see the chat count. This isn’t so bad since you have to keep Skype open anyways to chat, but kind of annoying this behavior forces you to check your screen every few seconds if you’re engaged in a chat with a buddy.

Oh well, not bad for version 1. Hopefully with iPhone 3.0 and updates, Skype on iPhone will become even better soon!