If you’ve never owned an iPhone before and just got your hands on an iPad you must be wondering what you should do in case your iPad starts behaving strangely – which seldom happens actually. For some reasons known only to Apple, your device could be slow, unresponsive or apps might even crash which seemed to be working just fine previously. Well in case you are at your wit’s end on how to resolve these issues, then you could try the following tips.

Right after I wrote the post on how iOS4 is running on my iPhone 3GS I had people asking me on how I installed the GM seed version on my iPhone 3GS. In fact its a very simple procedure and almost like restoring your phone. But take note that you will need to backup your data because everything will be wiped out when you restore your iPhone. The best part is that the device UDID is not necessary – so if you have a friend who has a developer’s account go ahead and get yourself the iOS GM seed version on your 3GS right away! Here’s a cool video that I followed to get my iPhone 3GS to be upgraded to iOS4.

I’ve seen numerous tweets on twitter asking help from people on how to open an iTunes account in Malaysia. Pity that Apple doesn’t trust us Malaysians to give us a legal avenue to open an iTunes account and download music legally. Probably they are worried about our notorious history (and present) for piracy and also credit card fraud. But we’re not alone. A lot of countries don’t actually have the iTunes store available and hence will not be able to buy music from the the iTunes store. If you really want to open an iTunes account, there is a way to get around this.

itunes store malaysia takes you to the app store

This is a question a lot of people have actually asked me. Apple has done a great job of marketing their app store and according to some recent reports, there are more than 80,000 apps in the app store. A lot of people have made it big by selling their apps on the app store and this has actually fuelled a lot of interest among those who don’t even own an iPhone. Not only individual developers but even big game developers have started to embrace the Apple app store. Not exactly surprising considering the fact that some have even suggested that the app store is going to be as huge as the internet. As exaggerated as it may sound, the app is HUGE and it is able to reach to millions of customers each day. The keyword here is – convenience. It’s just too easy for any customer to browse the app store, search for some keywords, look at a few apps and decide to download it for a buck! And when there is enough interest the volume of customers who are downloading apps is enough to make a developer rich.

Although its been a while since I figured out how to play an audio file in an iPhone app, it still is a pain in the ass every time I try to make it work on a new app. I still keep doing some trial and errors or refer to the numerous blogs out there helping out fellow iPhone app developers. So I decided to once and for all document the steps that I usually take to play a sound file. Typically the file extensions that are allowed are:

- .caf
- .m4a
- .wav
- .mp3

In my opinion I find the first 3 easier to work with rather than the popular .mp3 format. For some reason there are audio clips in .mp3 format which don’t seem to work. Luckily there are so many .mp3 to .wav converters around which you can use. Or the easiest way will be to use iTunes to convert to AAC format which will assign a .m4a extension for the audio clip. Anyway, here are the steps you need to follow to play an audio file in your iPhone app.

Its been a while since I wrote an actual programming tutorial for iPhone app developers. I’ve been busy developing a few applications for my clients and since I have completed one major project, I am writing this post to share one of my findings. The app is actually a birthday cake application – sort of like a virtual birthday cake. The user basically downloads the app to his iphone, enters his name (or the person to be wished), lights up the virtual candles and blows the candles out. Simple right? Simple yet fun concept. The tricky part was to design the algorithm for the blow detection into the mic. Once the algorithm was developed, the next part was testing it out. The testing on simulator and device is totally different for one obvious reason – you CANNOT blow into the simulator. So I needed to keep changing variable values while switching from simulator to device until I found out how silly the method actually was. There is an easier way to do this. Here’s how I did it.

FINALLY its here – push service for Gmail. It’s really baffling how come Gmail didn’t incorporate this feature for their millions of loyal users. Although Yahoo! was offering push email for quite some time, it seemed that you needed to purchases third party software to enable this feature in Gmail. Although it was widely speculated that it was just a matter of time before Google was going to enable push services on Gmail it wasn’t very clear when exactly! So what exactly is Push Email?

According to WiseGeek

Push email utilizes a mail delivery system with real-time capability to “push” email through to the client as soon as it arrives, rather than requiring the client to poll and collect or pull mail manually. With a push email smartphone, for example, the client’s mailbox is constantly updated with arriving email without user intervention. Smartphones announce new mail arrival with an alert.

In simpler words, what it means is that your mailbox is updated as soon as a mail arrives in the server. You do not have to login to your account to get the email by yourself.

This is a continuation of A roundup of iTunes 9.0 and iPhone OS 3.1 – part 1. In the previous post we saw some of the neat (and not so neat) stuff that comes with iTunes 9.0. So what’s new with iPhone OS 3.1 then? Well before you install iPhone OS 3.1 you will need to download iTunes 9.0. Once you’ve done that then you got to of course download iPhone OS 3.1 (which is a pretty huge file) and this would probably take you quite some time if you’re on Streamyx – how surprising (trying to keep a straight face here).

I had recently completed yet another app for the app store and happily submitted it on itunesconnect waiting for approval within a week. Well it took about 10 days for the iPhone Developer team to reply and they responded that the app was actually rejected due to incorrect rating. This was definitely quite unexpected for me since this was a fairly simple app and of all the reasons I didn’t expect it to be rejected due to an incorrect rating. So what is the rating of an app? When you submit an application on itunesconnect, Apple expects you to rate the application like below:

How many times have you come across promotions on the App Store when a paid app actually becomes free? Its kind of cool for the developer because he uses it as a marketing tool to get more downloads later on. But how do you actually know when the app becomes free on the app store? There is this cool website called Freeappalert which actually notifies you when a paid app becomes free. Its pretty cool and you can take a look at all the apps which just became free on the homepage of the website itself. You could also subscribe to its RSS feed so that you will be notified about any new apps that just became free as well.