The Mighty Mouse has an awful default button mapping. First off, both right and left button are assigned to left-click (primary). Secondly, for some inexplicable reason, clicking the scroll wheel brings up Dashboard. Third, I find the scrolling to be much to slow for my needs.

To fix these problems and any other issues you have with the button layout, open System Preferences and click on Keyboard & Mouse. Then fiddle with the button-mapping as much as you like. Currently, I have it setup so that clicking the scroll wheel brings up the Command+Tab application switcher, and clicking the right half of the mouse brings up the secondary click (right click) menu. I also sped up the scrolling and tracking.

Another possibility is for you to create your own scripts to be assigned to the buttons. Some possibilities include Dictionary lookup and search in Spotlight/Quicksilver

The Associated Press recently launched an iPhone-friendly web application containing all their news articles in an attractive and convenient format. They join many other web sites to create Mobile Safari editions of their services, and offer some excellent features.

To access the Associated Press iPhone view, visit apnews.com from your iPhone or iPod Touch. The site features categorized headlines, a powerful search tool, local news, categories, and intelligent customization settings. The site fits the iPhone user interface excellently and is probably the best implementation I have seen for a news application.

Gizmodo recently posted out that keyboard localization and accents in SMS messages can lead to bloodbaths, so I figured it would be useful to point out how easy it is to put accents over letters on the iPhone; maybe it will save some lives.

The default view when the iPhone keyboard pops up on your screen shows a QWERTY keyboard, a shift key, a space bar, a delete key, a return key, and a button at the bottom-left that sends you off to find more symbols to type. All these buttons, yet there are no dedicated ones for accents. However, typing accents is quite possible. To add an accent to a letter, hold your finger over any key that permits accents and wait about one second. The button expands and a menu pops up above it with keys for any possible accents! Now just drag your finger to the accent you are looking for and let go, and the accented letter will appear.

To insert accents over capital letters, do the exact same thing except press the shift key before entering the accented letter.

Furthermore, This feature does not only apply to letters, but also to some symbols. In the “.?123″ symbols and numbers view, exclamation points and question marks can be flipped upside down by using this trick.

Inserting accented characters is a really well thought-out feature of the iPhone keyboard and should actually be expanded. For example, Apple could add “sub-keys” to the number keys on the numbers and symbols page of the keyboard that correspond to the symbols inserted when one holds shift and presses on them on a standard QWERTY keyboard on their computer.

Although this would be less useful on an iPod Touch which does not have the iPhone’s SMS capabilities, I assume it is available on iPod Touches as well. If anyone could confirm this in the comments, that would be great!

The iPhone’s video sub-application (it is technically part of the iPod application) contains everything you’d expect from a solid video player. By tapping on the screen, you get a pop-up on the bottom and top of the screen that allows you to pause, play, fast-forward, or rewind the video, to adjust the volume, to change how far into the video you are, to adjust the aspect ratio, and to close the video. These are really the standard features that just about every video player has (except maybe the the aspect ratio), but there are some more lesser known tricks hidden within the video player.

One of these features is the ability to play a video forward in slow motion. To do this, pause the video and then press down on and hold onto the fast-forward button. This will play the video in slow motion, and even includes the slowed down sound. Oddly, I could not find any way to play a video in slow motion in reverse.

Like most non-phone-related iPhone features, I assume this works on the iPod Touch, but if anyone could confirm that, it would be great.

Of course the one night I leave my car unlocked, some punk kid steals my iPod. I call the police to file a report and they ask for a serial number. “It’s on the back of the iPod, I didn’t write it down,” I tell the officer.

No matter what I say, he wants a serial number. I tell him I’ll call him back when I can find it. So off I go to find the box it came in. Since I have two iPod’s, it only makes sense with the kind of day I’m having that I can only find the serial number to the iPod that wasn’t stolen. Back to square one.

Ok, enough of my complaining, you just want to find your serial number! Here are a few quick and easy steps to find the serial number to your lost or stole iPod.

The information we need is located in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iPod.plist

To open that file we can use a plist editor or just use the Terminal. If you’ve never used Terminal, beware of commands that begin with “sudo”. Other than that, have fun.

The command to pull out our serial numbers is:

defaults read com.apple.iPod | grep Serial

This will read the plist and display just the serial numbers. Pretty slick ‘eh?

Check out our other iPod Tips.

A couple weeks ago, my iPhone firmware somehow got corrupted and iTunes instructed me to restore it in order for it to work again. I took iTunes’ advice and restored the iPhone, but my iPhone still didn’t seem to work. It entered a strange mode where all I could see was a black screen with the Apple logo and a spinning “loading” circle.

A few days later, I went to the Apple Store and discovered that my iPhone’s problem was actually pretty obvious. Each time I restored the iPhone, iTunes asked me if I wanted to retrieve my data from a backup, and I agreed. The problem with this is that iTunes actually backed up the corrupted version on the iPhone, so each time I restored from the backup, I re-corrupted the iPhone!

I find it perfectly logical that Apple would offer to restore my iPhone, but I do not find it very logical that Apple wouldn’t warn me before backing up a corrupted iPhone.

I have always found the little button and microphone included on my iPhone headphones a really useful and thoughtful feature. I’ve always known that while listening to music the button could be used for pausing and playing the music, and pressing the button with a call coming in would answer the phone. However, while using my iPhone’s iPod feature more than ever while on “vacation” in Israel this week, I discovered even more use from the little button.

While listening to music, pressing the little headphone button two times in rapid succession skips to the next track!

I admit that this tip is very basic and many of you probably know about it already, but it definitely boosted my “iPod productivity” significantly ever since I started using it.

I think that this feature should work on all recent iPods, but I don’t believe any other ones come with the same button or even a similar one. (Please correct me if I’m wrong about that.)

I have no clue why this functionality is not already native to the iPhone. It’s a feature that users have been asking… no, begging for since day one, much like this feature from Leopard, except this time, Apple hasn’t listened (keep sending those emails, they’ll cave in eventually)

Thankfully, someone has and they’ve gone and developed iCopy, a webapp that enables copy and paste for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Hit the jump for videos on how to use it…

Continue Reading This Article…

One of the major draws of the iPhone/iPod Touch is its flick and scroll touchscreen capabilities. I have often wondered, “Why can’t Apple release this for our computers with a simple software/firmware update?”. Apple still has not provided us with such a solution, but Marc Moini has.

Smart Scroll is a great application that makes inertial scrolling possible on any mac computer (10.4 +) After you install the program, you can scroll much faster because it makes it so that you scroll “with momentum” using either a mouse or touchpad. I could spend all day attempting to explain what I mean, but this video from jkontherun does a much better job.

While this is a neat program, it does cost $19. I would gladly pay that fee for such a cool application; except for the fact that unlike the iPhone, you cannot stop the scrolling by placing a finger on the screen (or in this case, touch pad). For this reason, Mr. Moini does not have my money yet, but he is aware of the desire for this feature and is presumably working on it (as is evident from the Most Requested Fixes section).

Not everyone wants this type of functionality and even fewer will pay for it. If you can’t decide whether this app is for you, there is a fully functional demo version available.

[Product Page: Smart Scroll] via [jkontherun]

This is for those of you (like me) who tend to scratch disc media. To do this, you need a copy of Leopard, an external hard drive or old iPod (more than 6.4 GB) and Disk Utility (you have this, don’t worry).

First, insert the Leopard install DVD. Then open Disk utility. Click “Mac OS X Install DVD” from the box on the left. Then click “New Image” and let it do its thing (this could take a few hours).

In the end, you should have a file that looks like this:

Next, take your Hard Drive/iPod, and format it with Disk Utility. To do this, click on the hard drive, then go to the Erase tab and select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” if it is not already preselected. Then all you need to do is click Erase and confirm you wish to do so

Afterwards, make sure you have your external drive highlighted and then click the Restore tab. Then for “Source” drag in “Mac OS X Install DVD.dmg” and make sure that the destination is still the external hard drive. When all this is confirmed, hit Restore.

Now you’re essentially done if all you wanted to do was back up your copy of Leopard. If you wish to install Leopard, open System Preferences -> Startup Disk, and select the drive you just restored Leopard onto. Then just restart your computer, and follow the installer’s instructions.