iPhone Tips #4

Uploading photos to the Web:

Although we do not have a photo uploading tool from a 3rd party on the iPhone like we do on the Mac, many web 2.0 photo sharing services provides other methods of uploads.One of the most popular sites for this is Flickr.com. Flickr grants its users a special e-mail that will receive and post your image. Log into Flickr and go here to  search for your special e-mail address.Here is a cheat sheet to provide  more detail to your uploaded image

subject line = title

body = description

tags = in the email’s body or subject put “tags:” followed by the tags as you would normally add them to a flickr photo.

limiting who can see your photos = in the prefix (just before the “@”) of your special flickr email, add “+friends” for friends only, add “+family” for family only, “+ff” for friends and family, and lastly, “+private” to make the images only visible to you.

Of course, this isn’t specific to iPhone, so this method can be used to post your flickr photos and should work ok.

IM on iPhone:

iPhone so far is email and SMS texting only; no native iChat client yet. However, there may be a few ways to get around that limitation.

IM over SMS: Ichat on the mac gives you the potential to send SMS messages and to have a 2-way communication in that manner, using the phone number of the person you’d like to message with, launch iChat  on your mac, in the file menu, select “new chat with person..” There will be a chat window you are going to receive with a drop down box with Aim preselected, there will be an area that will allow you to add a person’s address. Here you will also be able to add a perons’s phone number,  always make sure that you use the prefix “+1″ before you enter the number. For example, if the person’s number is (347) 443-6535, then you’d put in a +1 before entering the number in the txt field.

After you do that and send your first message, AIM will notify you that the message has been sent through their SMS gateway, but shortly thereafter, the mobile user (or hopefully iPhone user) will be able to reply to you directly.

I’m still testing this on my own Nokia cell phone, but I believe you can initiate a message from the mobile as well. To do this, create a text message and in the address put “265060” and in the body of your message, type out the username with a colon and then the rest of your message. So, if the name of the user you want to send to is “iloveiphone24”, then start out the body of the message with “iloveiphone24:”, without the quotes.

Remember, if you’re an iPhone subscriber, the default plan “only” gives you 200 messages a month, so you might consider using this sparingly.

IM over the Web: There may yet be some web-based alternatives for IM. The issue really comes down to how the web-app is enabled. For the iPhone, it has to be basic, unfortunately, and that means no Flash or Java (javascript is okay). For the moment, that knocks out “ebuddy” (though they say Safari support is coming soon—hopefully that means the iPhone too).

Since I don’t have an iPhone in hand, I’ve tried to setup the next best thing—my Mac with Safari Beta 3, with all plugins and Java disabled (javascript still enabled). Here were the two IM over the Web services I tried:

“Meebo functioned just fine, and appears only to need java-script enabled. This fantastic web-app gives you access to AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, and MSN Live Messenger. It’s all text based, no voice or anything super advanced. Granted, formatted for a MacBook’s resolution, I had no problems. We’ll see how things look on the iPhone, but some comments on the Meebo Blog suggest that those lucky few with an iPhone already are have used the service and it works fine.

AIM Express from AOL worked fine on my Mac but didn’t function with javascript turned off, so hopefully that’s a good sign for future iPhone users that it will function just fine. Again, very basic access to AIM, but if you need it in a pinch, it’s likely AIM Express will do the job on the iPhone.