I assume someone may find this trick useful, so its worthwhile passing off, however its a trick that I am likely to never use myself. Anyway, for those who have re-arranged your iPhone icons and wanted to easily bring them back to their first boot placement, you can do so with just a few taps on the screen.
To restore your home screen icons to their default placement, simply go to Settings, General, Reset. Once you get to Reset you will see “Reset Home Screen Layout” just click and they will magically re-arrange back.
In addition, once in the Reset section, you will also have a few more that may be a little more useful such as the “Reset Location Warnings” option.
Of course, what I would find more useful, is a little trick that would allow me to quickly re-arrange my home screen icons to my preferred placement after I update or install any apps.
This latest iPhone trick deals with the dreaded App Store Kill Switch. Of course for lots of people this may or not be an issue, but at least for some and a group that comes to mind would be those who paid for and downloaded the NetShare app, it could be a valuable tool.
I will preface this be saying that its a great trick, possible even better for those that are a little paranoid (myself included) but it does require your iPhone to be jailbroken in order to work.
So, assuming you have a jailbroken iPhone, or are prepared to jailbreak, just download the latest BossPrefs app located in Cydia. Once the BossPrefs apps is downloaded and installed, just run it and choose the option to “Disable Apple App Killswitch.” This will then save any questionable apps that you may have from an early departure.
Its also important to note that one of the nice parts about using BossPrefs to handle this is that you still have the option to easily turn it back on should you change your mind later.
Continuing on with the complaints about the long backup process every time you sync your iPhone, here is yet another little trick that should help to cut that time down a bit, and thankfully this suggestion will not involve turning off the backup process.
Thanks to a nice forum posting over on the HowardForums, you can now cut that sync time down and still be prepared should something unfortunate happen to your iPhone that forces you to have it replaced.
The process is simple and it involves turning off the ability to send diagnostic data to Apple.
With just a few easy steps you should be left with sync times that are much more manageable, of course this will not help if you add a bunch of new media or the first sync after you add some new apps, however regular or routine syncing should be much more pleasant.
After connecting your iPhone to your computer;
* 1. Uncheck the check mark from the “Automatically sync when this iPhone is connected” option in iTunes.
* 2. Unplug your iPhone and then plug it back in
* 3. Once iTunes launches again, right click on its name in the devices menu (on the left) and from menu choose “Reset Warnings”
* 4. Then click Sync in the bottom right hand corner
* 5. You will then receive a pop-up (see image below). Simply uncheck the “Do not ask me again” box
* 6. Now you can go back and re-apply the check to the “Automatically sync” option that you removed in Step #1
One of the simplest hacks prior to iPhone firmware 2.x and iTunes 7.7 was to create free custom ringtones for your iPhone.
A lot does not seem to have changed post iPhone firmware 2.x and iTunes 7.7 based on a step by step guide posted by theAppleBlog.
You check out the details of the ringtone hack after the jump.
This simple ringtone hack was first discovered by a Mac Rumors forums user almost a year back. It is based on the fact that iTunes differentiates a song file and a ringtone by the file extension. While we all know that the song file extension was AAC; the file extension for Ringtones is “M4R”.
So all you need to do is take an m4a file which is DRM free and not more than 30 seconds, rename it to m4r and add it to iTunes.
You can check out this step by step guide (courtesy theAppleBlog) to create free custom ringtones for your iPhone using iTunes:
1. In iTunes, right click on the song you are going to make into a ringer and select “Get Info.”
2. Go to the options tab and go down to the “Start Time” and “Stop Time” check boxes. Check both boxes and input the time you want your ringtone to start/stop. The ringtone has to be 30 seconds or less. Click OK when you’re done.
3. Right click on your newly “clipped” song and select “Convert Selection to AAC.” The song will be re-encoded using the start and stop times determined (If your menu item does not read “Convert Selection to AAC” and reads “Convert Slection to Ṃ″ (or some other format) please go to iTunes > Preferences > Advanced > Importing and change the “Import Using” drop down menu to “AAC Encoder”).
4. After the song is done encoding navigate to your iTunes Music folder, locate your song, and drag it to your desktop. After the song is on your desktop go back to iTunes and delete the clipped version from you iTunes library (It won’t delete it from your desktop, it will only remove it from iTunes).
5. Go back the song on your desktop and right click on your song and chose “Get info.” Go to the name and extension section and change the extension from .цa to .цr (or you can just change the extension right from your desktop)
6. After the extension is changed simply double click on the file to add it to your iTunes library under the ringtones section. Sync your phone with iTunes and you’re done!
Folks at theAppleBlog have tested this method and found it to work with iTunes 7.7.1 and iPhone firmware 2.0.1 so should work with both first generation iPhone and iPhone 3G.
However, this method works only for songs which are DRM free. In case of DRM protected songs you can use this method published by LifeHacker.
