Monthly Archives: February 2011

Get Notified by Boxcar

Apple added push notifications to iOS in June 2009 when iOS 3.0 was introduced. It does an excellent job of allowing applications to send you notifications while preserving battery life. It does however have a few shortcomings which will likely be improved upon in future Apple releases. Today, you can improve on notifications with Boxcar.

Blackberry users give a few reasons why their devices are superior to an iPhone. One of those is the email notification on the device. Apple’s push email is helpful and it will show a number of messages on the mail icon. It doesn’t however work for all email services or provide as good a visual or audible cue.

An example of a service that doesn’t provide good notification for me is email from our company Exchange Server 2003. While newer versions of Exchange provide good support with the iPhone, 2003 has its limits. I am able to use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to gain access to the email. This however requires you to login and check even if there is nothing there that you care about. Boxcar can help.

continue reading…

Lyrics in iTunes

I have always enjoyed having lyrics for my music. Unfortunately, lyrics don’t automatically come with song downloads or from ripped CD’s. Having lyrics on an iPod has worked from my original iPod Video all the way up to today’s iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad. Lyrics on these current iOS devices is very useful since you can just tap on the screen when in portrait view and then scroll down while the song is playing. But how do you get the lyrics on to the device?

iTunes Info

iTunes stores all kinds of additional information about the songs and other media in your library. You can easily edit the information yourself by right-clicking on the track and choosing Get Info. You can get to the same information by going to the File menu and choosing Get Info or use the keyboard shortcut Cmd-I on a Mac or Ctrl-I on Windows.

continue reading…