If you’ve read my previous article on setting up GMail on the iPhone, you are now using GMail with Google Sync. However, you might not be aware that Google Sync handles your actions on the iPhone differently than might be expected. For instance, clicking the trash button doesn’t mean that the email is getting deleted. So take a few minutes and get acquainted with what’s really happening with your email. I have provided a couple of important tips below, as well as a link to the site explaining it all.
Today is a good day for iPhone owners, who happen to use Google religiously. It has been an incredibly long time coming, but we no longer need my GMailPush application. We no longer need GPush, or any other work around trying to get GMail on the iPhone with Push. Why you ask? Because today Google released an update to Google Sync that allows GMail to sync on the iPhone.
Excited to hear the news, I quickly popped open my “Mail, Calendar, Contacts” settings and turned it on to test it out…
If you followed my last guide, you were able to upload your already-paid-for books to your iPhone and use the Kindle app to view them. If your situation was anything like my own, you probably had a problem with the book covers not being displayed correctly. In my case, whatever book I uploaded first was the book cover that Kindle used for every other book.
This was completely unacceptable for me, so I figured out how to fix it once and for all. Unfortunately, it involved more tools and more uploading.
In order to figure out how this worked, I downloaded a free Kindle book: The Art of War. I saw that the book was placed in the same directory as all of my other books, but it added a file to the LibraryCovers directory as well. The name was ominous, it didn’t really mean anything to me. That was until I used some mobi tools (described later) and learned that the name of the file in the LibraryCover directory was a property inside of the book. Specifically, the ASIN property.
Now that I knew how to specify a cover file, all I had to do was convert all of my books to add this new property and then upload the new books and cover files to the iPhone.
Using this guide, I was able to add a keyword/filename to the ASIN property (in the exth property section). After uploading the book to the eBooks directory and the cover to the LibraryCovers directory, I was in business!
If you are anything like me, you were very pleased with the Kindle app for the iPhone but became very sad when you found out that the only way for you to get books for it was to buy them through the Amazon Kindle store. Well, after taking the red pill, I found out that this is not entirely true! Here is what I found:
If you are going to want to use your own ebooks on the iPhone, you will need a jailbroken iPhone with OpenSSH running. If you do not know what any of that means, you may want to start by researching redsn0w, Cydia, and OpenSSH.
Next, you are going to want to convert your ebooks to the format that Kindle knows how to read: MOBI. You can do this by using a free application called Mobipocket Creator (there are other tools that can do this, but this is the one I used).
After converting your ebooks to PRC or MOBI files, you will have to put them on your iPhone using WinSCP (or some other SSH program). Here are the steps to do that:
Connect to the iPhone and navigate to the “/var/mobile/Applications/” directory. All of your applications will be listed here, however, using their GUIDs
Find the GUID that corresponds to Kindle (hint: it will contain a child directory called “Kindle.app”) and go into it
Go into the “Documents” directory, followed by the “eBooks” directory. Your path should look something like this: “/var/mobile/Applications/{GUID}/Documents/eBooks/”
Upload your new mobi (or prc) files to this directory
Now, when you open up Kindle on your iPhone you will see all of your new ebooks.
I remember when I got my first iPod Touch, and later the iPhone — I was anxious to dive into the thousands of apps floating around, but I had no idea where to start. Now that I’ve had some time to fool around with them, I’m here to write about my top 5 apps. If you just received your own iPhone, these are the apps I’d recommend you get:
I put out an update to GMailPush that handles any errors it receives. Previously, it would see an error and stop checking for mail. Now an option exists to tell it whether or not it should stop checking for mail. It will also log the error and a stack trace.
If you’re receiving a lot of errors, feel free to send them to me on the GMailPush code page. Every once in a while I’d run into a null reference error when sending pop commands, so I did some more null checking in the function. I think it was occurring because of network interruption, but we’ll see if any of you experience the same thing.
I sent a tip to the writers at TechCrunch to inform them of GMailPush. I figured their readers might get some use out of it. It wasn’t particularly well-received, but hopefully someone is now using it.
I’m excited to announce my first Google Code submission. It is a desktop application that checks your GMail account for new emails. When it finds some, it sends an sms/email to your AT&T phone number to notify you. This was created because GMail does not offer push notification on the iPhone. Here is the link: http://code.google.com/p/gmailpush/
If you’ve read my previous article on setting up GMail on the iPhone, you are now using GMail with Google Sync. However, you might not be aware that Google Sync handles your actions on the iPhone differently than might be expected. For instance, clicking the trash button doesn’t mean that the email is getting deleted. So take a few minutes and get acquainted with what’s really happening with your email. I have provided a couple of important tips below, as well as a link to the site explaining it all.
