The iPhones Home Screen is a thing of beauty, it looks great and is easy to use serving its purpose very well, but what else can it do. Well with a bit of imagination, the iPhone SDK and little but of know how you can use it as a canvas, literally.

I divided up the Mona Lisa into 20 squares and created 20 blank iPhone apps, saving one part of the image as the icon for each corresponding app.

Removing the app name below each icon was achieved by editing the “Bundle display name” in the application’s info.plist, I added a simple “!” to do this.

You may optionally remove the gloss and rounded corner effect added by default by ctrl clicking the info.plist file within xcode, opening it as a source code file and adding the following.

<key>UIPrerenderedIcon</key>

Inserting this key along with a blank app icon can be used to create blank spaces on your home screen.

Please send me your creations in a pre paid envelope to the usual address.

Imagine the fun you could have if as if by magic, you could make any text you want, appear on your friends phone!

Well by using a service usually reserved for network operators, now you can!

Flash SMS Messages (also known as Operator/Carrier Messages) are generally used to alert users how much credit they have remaining or occasionally for promotional purposes by a users network but with a little bit of know how, anyone can make use of this.

There are many ways of sending them including an app for Symbian devices and Clickatell’s online SMS gateway but by far the easiest is using a hidden command within the iPhone SMS app.

Simply write *go immediately followed by the message you wish to send, without a space between the command and message.
Such as *goHello World.

All that left for you to do is come up with some witty messages to send to your (now ex) friends.

Pop over to my gallery for some more examples.

(Sidenote: Flash SMS messages can be send to most mobile phones, not just the iPhone, also it may not work in all regions outside Europe)

Over the last few days iv moved the back end of my blog from RapidWeaver’s native blogging system over to WordPress. Now while it may look the same to the casual eye, if your a regular you will have to do a couple of things.

Firstly you will have to re-subscribe to the new RSS feed by clicking “RSS Feed” on the left hand side of clicking here.

Secondly if you wish to comment on posts you will need to re-register by clicking here.

The switch to WordPress will allow me to blog from pretty much anywhere, weather Im at my Mac or not.

Tom

At the carcass of Zavvi’s former flagship store, a sign of new life.
Could it really be?

iPod Earbuds are smaller in Asia than those sold in the Western market
due to the smaller average Ear size in the East.

So for the first in this short series of Apps I couldn’t live without is NewsGator.
So what is NewsGator? Simply said it’s synchronized news feeds, doing for RSS what IMAP did for email.
News posts arrive on the server and are available for viewing via a very nice web based interface accessible from any computer.
Now there are several other services available which do just that, Google’s Reader being one of the most popular but where NewsGator comes into its own is that it has the ability to sync with its own Desktop and Mobile clients, which are available for Mac, Windows, iPhone & Java based handsets. So say for example I wake up in the morning and check my RSS feeds on NewsGators Mac client but only make my way through a few items before I have to head to work. So I get on the train and open up the iPhone client, which after automatically synchronizing displays the news items which I didn’t have time to read at home. By the time the train pulls in Iv read through all the feeds and put the iPhone away. Later on during the day I check online via the web based client at work and it shows me all the new news items since I got off the train.
Without NewsGator I would constantly be swamped with posts Iv already read or be faced with a mountain of new posts every time I get home.
Best of all its all free!

Tom

So out of sheer boredom today I plugged my SlingBox into my Virgin Media coaxial lead and told it to tune in using the onboard analogue cable tuner (Virgin supposedly shut down analogue cable some time ago). Besides the subscription free channels, static and audio I found this!

A Windows PC somewhere on the Virgin Media grid broadcasting various information for what I can only guess is for technicians.

What do you make of it?