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iPhone

How to not upgrade to iOS5

If you follow me on Twitter, you're probably familiar with my iOS5 installation difficulties. Two days into the process, and I've still not been able to update either my iPad (first generation) or iPhone 4. This is—by far—the most frustrated I've been with any Apple upgrade, ever…and that covers a lot of history!

Simply as a means of venting, and perhaps to save someone else from going through what I've gone through (though note that I haven't yet solved the problem), here's what I've gone through to try to upgrade my iPhone and iPad.

Update: On my 48th attempt, my iPhone 4 successfully updated to iOS5. Now, on to the iPad…

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In search of iPhone golf GPS and/or scoring apps

Macworld logoI'm in the midst of a huge round-up of iPhone golf-specific GPS (range finder) and/or scorecard apps for Macworld. As of now, I've identified 32 of them, but I'm wondering if I've missed any. If you have a second, please check out this list and let me know (via a comment here or via Twitter) if you're aware of any other apps.

Read on for the list (note that some of these may be mis-categorized as I haven't tested all of them yet)...
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Tiger Woods for iPhone has a difficult(y) problem

I'm a big fan of golf, both real and virtual. The best iPhone golf game I've yet found is Tiger Woods PGA Tour, from EA. At $10, it's not cheap, but it is fun. It does, however, suffer from one fairly annoying problem: it's way too easy in its default mode. As an example, here are the final results from a four-round tournament at St. Andrews:

Too easy

Per round, my average score (my player's first name is Wheat) was 15.25 under par, which is simply unbelievable. Look at second place--14 under par for four rounds, or worse than I do for one round! At about 3.5 strokes under par per round, however, the second place score is much more realistic.

So what's the problem? The problem is that TW for the iPhone includes both a caddy and a putt preview feature. Combined, those two features making putting the ball ridiculously easy. Here's how to use those two features together to crush the PGA events in Tiger Woods.
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iPhone wallpaper collection

After updating my iPhone to 1.1.3 (and jailbreaking it, courtesy of ZiPhone), I decided I was bored of my current iPhone wallpapers—I've been using Rob Randtoul's very nice iPhone wallpaper collection, but felt it was time for something new. So this morning, I spent a bit of time trimming some of my pictures down to iPhone size, and found that the end results looked better than I was anticipating. So I thought I'd share the results, in case anyone wants more variety on their iPhone. Click the image at left for a larger view of the collection, and if you'd like to download the wallpapers, well, here's the link:

iPhone Wallpapers [1MB]

To use, just add these to your iPhoto library, then sync to your iPhone. I code my iPhone wallpapers with a unique keyword in iPhoto, create a Smart Album based on that keyword, then sync that smart album to the iPhone. Then use the Wallpaper section of the iPhone's Settings panel to set your wallpaper. (If you have a jailbroken iPhone and you install SummerBoard, you can use your wallpaper as a background behind the iPhone's actual screen, too, and not just the wake-from-sleep screen.)

Many of these aren't really suitable as wallpaper (especially in SummerBoard mode), but some actually work out pretty well.