There are some rather large applications available for iOS devices (iPhones, iPads, and the iPod touch). You may know that larger applications won't download nukes you're connected via WiFi, however, what do you do if you need to leave your WiFi coverage in the midst of a download? Just tap the app's icon and that'll pause the download. You can tell the download is paused because it says so right under the app's icon (see the image to the right).
Tap it again to resume when you're once again embraced by the welcoming arms of WiFi.
One of my favorite iPhone tricks has to be assigning the camera app to launch whenever you double click on the home button. Sadly, if you’re running iOS 4, Apple’s latest and greatest operating system for i-Devices, this trick no longer works. Double clicking the home button now brings up an application switcher, allowing you to scroll through all the recently launched apps on your iPhone (as seen to the right).
Don’t despair, Apple giveth when they taketh away, though. You can now create folders of apps on your iPhone. Just press down on an app’s icon until it wiggles. Then drag that icon onto another icon you want to group together and a folder is created. You can drag in up to 12 apps into one folder, and you can even name that folder whatever you want.
Back to our camera conundrum, though: can I still get easy access to the camera? I could just put it in my iPhone’s Dock (that’s the row of four icons at the bottom of your iPhone’s screen), but I don’t use the camera enough to devote one of those four coveted spots to it alone. I do, however, have a few apps that I use quite frequently.
I bet you can see where this is going: create a folder with your most used apps and put that into the Dock. As you can see I created a folder named ‘Favs’ that includes Twitter, the Camera, We Rule, and TaskPaper. Now tweeting, snapping a pic, wasting some time, or getting stuff done are all a tap away.
Each folder can hold up to 12 apps, and the Dock itself can hold 4 icons (either singular apps or folders) so you could cram up to 48 apps into your Dock if you like. I have found that 4 is the number that I can manage without being overwhelmed, but your mileage may vary.
Google's free email service, Gmail, is quite popular. If you're a long time Gmail user you'll recall that Google wanted to reinvent email by giving folks what seemed like unlimited space for their email accounts. All that space meant you would never need to delete an email message again. In fact, at the beginning there was no easy way to delete an email from your Gmail account, the only thing you could do is Archive messages (which removed them from your inbox, but they would still show up in searches and the like).
Gmail users who updated their iPhones, and iPod touches, to the latest version of the iPhone operating system (called iOS now) might be experiencing a little dejavu. By default you can't delete messages from your Gmail account on your iPhone/iPod touch running iOS 4. Luckily, you can revert back to the old deleting behaviour pretty easily.
iOS Gmail default
Here you can see my Gmail account with the iOS 4 default setting. Swiping an email message reveals an 'Archive' button (which used to be a delete button). As Jacqui at Ars points out in her great iOS 4 review you can move an email message to the Trash folder manually... but that is far too many steps.
Launch the Settings app
To turn off message archiving just tap on the Sattings app and select "Mail, Contacts, Calendars." This will list all the email account you have on your iPhone under the 'Account' section. Tap on your Gmail account.
Turn off Archive Messages
This is what your Gmail account settings should look like (roughly). Tap on the On/Off switch next to "Archive Messages." Now you can delete emails like a mad man.
Deleting like the good old days
And there is the familiar Delete button we know and love. If you decide you rather liked Archiving messages just pop back into your Gmail settings on your iPhone and toggle "Archive Messages" to On.
