Tech Blog

Category: iPhone

Tiny Photoshop makes huge impact

Adobe today announced that its Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone application has been downloaded over 1 million times from Apple's App Store, a milestone reached in less than one week of availability.

Additionally, the application has held the No. 1 position for all "Top Free" applications as well as the "Top Free" application in the Photography category for 10 consecutive days.

If you haven't tried it, and you own an iPhone, it's definitely a 'must have' app. And you can't beat the price.

The app acts as a sort of replacement for the iPhone's built-in camera. You can shoot then immediately any of a handful of one-touch filters to brighten, color-correct, or color-style pictures directly on your iPhone. Sure, it's only a shadow of what the real Photoshop can do, but it's handy for quick fixes, especially when you're shooting and sending pictures on the fly, or applying them as wallpaper.

With a free Photoshop.com account, consumers have access to their entire Photoshop.com image collection directly from their phone, and edited photos can be shared through Photoshop.com or using the iPhone's native sharing features.

For more information, please visit: http://mobile.photoshop.com/iphone.

Category: iPhone

Apple updates iPhone to fix issues. We hope.

The jury is still out on Apple's 3.1.2 update to the iPhone operating system. Many users on the 159-page-long Apple message board thread created after 3.1 screwed up their phones, say they've found success. But there are a few who seem happy because their phone only went into 'coma mode' once since the update.

How sad.

Perusing the thread, you'll find stories from folks whose phones have gone to sleep -- and stayed there -- at inopportune times or, worse, without them having a clue. Like the Australian fellow who never received the call from his wife that his son was being transported to the hospital for an emergency surgery.

Throughout it all, for the last few weeks, Apple has been absolutely silent until this week's update. If I didn't like the iPhone so much, that arrogance -- the kind of thing Justin Long seems to accuse Microsoft of in those commercial, ironically enough -- would drive me to another phone.

I've not tried the 3.1.2 update myself yet. I'm doing some things this weekend that require my phone to work (my old one was replaced at the Apple store with one still equipped with the highly functional 3.0.1 OS -- and it works just fine.

Anybody else give it a go yet? If so, what do you think?

Category: iPhone

Thanks, Apple. My iPhone is now nearly useless

Got an iPhone? Got the 3.1 update? Then you might have troubles. I do.

My expensive cell phone from the fine folks at "It Just Works" Headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., has become as unreliable as -- well -- as the folks in Cupertino would have us believe Windows PCs are. And I'm not alone.

I found a 30-page thread less than a week old on Apple's own message boards in which they refer to it as iPhone "coma mode" -- so called because the phones go to "sleep," but never wake up. Under normal operation, the iPhone blanks its screen after a short period of non-use. If you have any sense of security (or if, like me, you use the phone's Mail app to sync up to your corporate e-mail servers), the phone takes the extra step of locking itself as a predetermined interval of 1 or 5 or 10 or 15 minutes. Pushing the phone's home button is supposed to re-awaken the screen, allowing you to enter your four digit code to unlock it.

But, for a lot of us, that just hasn't worked since we updated our phones from the 3.01 system to 3.1. Instead, we find a phone that just does nothing. I can't tell if it's on or off and no combination of keys will revive it except for one: holding the home and lock buttons down for 10 seconds and forcing a reboot.

I followed this procedure four times Monday after picking up a lifeless iPhone. Then, on Tuesday, after believing I might have solved the problem by turning off all push notifications for third-party apps, I discovered the next glitch: My phone mysteriously went from a nearly fully charged state to nearly dead while sitting unused over the course of about two hours (reminder: notifications were off, so it should have been using less battery, not more).

A search of forums suggested one problem contributing to Coma Mode might stem from that aforementioned predetermined passcode interval. A number of iPhone owners, like me, kept their phones set so they didn't fully lock until a full hour had passed. But the 3.1 update, for reasons I don't know or understand, changed the maximum interval to 15 minutes. Some have theorized that those of us who previously had our phones set to 60 might have a bug stuck in the matrix with the new 15 minute max.

Others are suggesting bad apps as the root cause.

I'm not sure, but I've noted anecdotally that a) my phone didn't misbehave at all during travel on Monday while it spent a good portion of time in Flight Mode. Of course, I also made one other change as a test: I disabled all notifications by third party apps. My personal theory is that there's a bug in there somewhere; that one of the apps is crashing while trying to update itself automatically in the background while the phone is 'asleep,' causing a crash and an unresponsive device.

Anybody else experiencing this? Or have any ideas? So far, Apple seems mum. Of course they rarely admit when they've screwed up, preferring to quietly issue another update and hoping John Hodgman doesn't notice.