For a full list of what iPhone actions do on your GMail, check the Google Mobile help page. Here are some important ones that I wanted to highlight:

• Opening an email on the iPhone will mark it as read on the web
• Trashing an email on the iPhone will archive it on the web
• Moving an email to the Trash folder will move it to the Trash on the web as well
• Delete a message from the Trash folder to delete it permanently from the web

Protip: Note the section at the bottom of the Google Mobile help page that states that you cannot search for messages that have not been synced to your iPhone.

Excited to hear the news, I quickly popped open my “Mail, Calendar, Contacts” settings and turned it on to test it out…

I sent myself a test email from work and within 30 seconds the Mail icon lit up with a new badge. Glorious, glorious push GMail!

To set up your own iPhone or iPod Touch, check out the instructions from Google Sync.

Now, if only Google could implement it’s own free version of “Find My iPhone”…

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.

The fun starts with following a guide on converting your mobi/prc files back to mobi format, but adding some extra contents: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Mobi2Mobi_GUI_Vista/XP.

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!

Happy tweaking…

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:

1. Connect to the iPhone and navigate to the “/var/mobile/Applications/” directory. All of your applications will be listed here, however, using their GUIDs




2. Find the GUID that corresponds to Kindle (hint: it will contain a child directory called “Kindle.app”) and go into it




3. Go into the “Documents” directory, followed by the “eBooks” directory. Your path should look something like this: “/var/mobile/Applications/{GUID}/Documents/eBooks/”




4. 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.

Are you covers not showing up properly? Check out my other Kindle article

BeeJiveIM [$9.99]

BeeJiveIM is an amazing app for chatting on the iPhone. You can sign into most of your favorite chat programs, and continue to stay online even after you closed the app. Then,
if you were to get an IM during that time, BeeJiveIM will send you a push notification. The only downside to this application is the cost. However, $10 really isn’t that much for something you can use every day and get free updates for. If you’re looking for a free alternative to this, try eBuddy. I was impressed with their app as well, but it is missing some of the nice features that BeeJiveIM has (landscape mode, meta names, etc).

Facebook [Free]

Facebook is an addiction, and it doesn’t stop with the iPhone. This application makes it so you can log in and keep up to date with all of your friends. There isn’t much to say about this app, it is what it is.

TweetDeck [Free]

I’ve tried several twitter applications and finally settled on this one. Not only is it an amazing application, but it’s free. It allows you to do all of the general twitter things, including tweeting, mentions, direct messages, replying, trends, and url shortening for images.

Rename [Free]

You won’t find this app in the app store. It’s only available to people who jailbreak their iPhone. And now with the iPhone Dev Team releasing redsn0w, there is no reason why you can’t have this app yourself. It allows you to change the name of any other app you have. You can change “Amazon.com” to “Amazon”, or “What’s On” to “TV Guide”. To some people this may not be a big deal, but I cannot stand seeing “ICanHazCheeseBurger” squished down to try to fit in small space provided.

SBSettings [Free]

This is another app that is only available for jailbroken iPhones. But again, this is one that I really just can’t live without. The app is designed to give you quick access to toggles for services like Phone, SMS, Wifi, etc, so you can easily turn them on and off without digging through menu after menu. Not only does it offer these toggles, but it also offers the ability hide applications that you’re not using (or can’t uninstall). This is particularly useful for apps that come with the iPhone that you don’t need (like the compass, perhaps).

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.

Download here: http://code.google.com/p/gmailpush/

Here is a link to the article: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/13/a-workaround-for-the-gmail-push-workaround/.

Check out the features and specs over at the apple website: http://www.apple.com/iphone/iphone-3g-s. It will be available June 19th!