InfoFork.com

I’m going to start an iPhone Q & A series, where I post some of the questions readers send me by email. Today’s question:

Kathy writes:

is there any way to make iphone ring longer?

Answer:

Even if your iPhone ringtone is 30 seconds long, your iPhone rings for only 20 seconds by default. To get your iPhone to ring for 30 seconds, instead of the standard 20-second ring, follow the steps below:

1. Dial *#61# and touch Call.

   

2. Jot down the phone number displayed on the screen. This is where your voicemail calls are directed to (as shown in the screenshot below).

   

3. Dial **61*(THE NUMBER YOU WROTE DOWN)**30# and press Call.

Your iPhone should now ring longer — that is, for the full 30-second duration of your ringtone. To verify that your voicemails are still being sent to the correct place, repeat step 1 and check that the phone number matches.

Have a question? Click to email me.

As stated in the title, WildEyes! now supports language localization. Thanks to sosiphone.com for the French translation.

Right now it is only limited to French, so if you would like to contribute by translating it to other languages, do contact me. Thanks.

WildEyes! is available in Cydia. Download it via modmyi repository (with English description) or sosiphone repository (French description).

In his post on eWeek titled The iPhone Has Replaced My Home PC, Cameron Sturdevant writes:

Will a generation that has grown up with high-powered smartphones but is confronted with either unemployment or low-wage jobs make a choice between a smartphone with a healthy dose of data plan and cable/DSL-based broadband Internet access?

Cameron claims that he would abandon his PC in favor of his iPhone except for one thing: “Netflix. I am completely addicted to the ‘watch instantly’ feature that allows me to view a movie on-demand.” Is that all?

Yes, the iPhone can replace your home computer for plenty of tasks like email, browsing and multimedia, but there are some things you still need a computer for.

Here are 7 things your computer can do that your iPhone can’t:

1. Word processing. Yes, you could type out long documents on your iPhone’s touchscreen keypad, but you would sure lose a lot of time.
2. Copy & paste. Besides a few primitive workarounds, you can’t copy & paste on the iPhone, a much-needed feature that’s reason enough not to get rid of your computer.
3. Open more than 8 tabs. If you’re like me, you open a lot of tabs when you’re browsing. If you’re doing research, this can be especially helpful for improving productivity. You can’t, however, open more than 8 windows in iPhone’s Safari app. Even if you could, iPhone’s Safari crashes pretty easily, so it’s not very reliable for heavy browsing.
4. Undo. Ever hold the backspace key on your iPhone for too long, accidentally erasing a whole paragraph of text? Or have you deleted something unintentionally? Unlike your computer, the iPhone has no Undo function that provides a safety net against these kinds of mistakes.
5. Edit multimedia. If you like to edit your photos in Photoshop, or you make movies with Final Cut, then getting rid of your home computer is a bad idea. You can’t edit multimedia on your iPhone.
6. Render Flash & Java. Ever go looking for some info on your iPhone, only to realize the website you need is made with Flash or Java and you can’t access it on your iPhone? You need a computer (or another phone) to run Flash and Java.
7. Support plugins & add-ons. You can enhance a lot of software to suit your needs with plugins and extensions, like iTunes plugins, Firefox Add-Ons and Greasemonkey scripts. While you can improve your iPhone in general with apps from the App Store, you can’t improve any of iPhone’s apps themselves with plugins.

Yes, the iPhone could be improved to eventually include these features, but for the time being, they are my reasons for not ditching my computer in favor of my iPhone.

What do you think?

Could you see yourself abandoning your home computer and just using your iPhone instead? Let us know in the comments why you think the iPhone could or could not replace your home computer.

In the previous post, I forgot to annouce a beta feature in WildEyes! 2.20, which is the attachment of files to email. The feature depends on the mailto: attachment plugin available in Cydia. Since I forgot this feature, I also forgot to inform modmyi admin about it, so you will need to update your WildEyes! to 2.20-2 to be able to send file as attachment.

This function is still a beta function because not all files can be attached. I have not figured out why, so if you think you observed a repeatable pattern, please do inform me about it.

You can also download WildEyes! from sosiphone.com (French website). A French version for WildEyes! is currently under development.

As mentioned in the title, this version adds support to read JSON file format. Only JSON files with extension .json is supported. 

The joke was made the day he was born (possibly even before then, I’m not sure). So I might as well post up a picture about it..