Juicing up the iPhone

I’m sadly besotted with my iPhone 3G. It’s an indecently seductive gadget which, when coupled with some of the gems available through the App Store, revolutionises computing on the move. It’s transformed me from someone who used a mobile phone, oh, half a dozen times a week, into someone who whips out the little critter given even the tiniest of openings.

But I’m not blind to its failings. I’m aghast at the lack of multimedia messaging support and absence of video; stunned by the omission of cut and paste; and frustrated by the hermetically sealed battery which limits mobile roaming time.

Fortunately, I’ve found a way to deal with one of these three: enter the Mophie Juice Pack.

Mophie’s Juick Pack

The Juice Pack is an extra battery disguised as an iPhone case. Slip the iPhone into a charged Juice Pack and you double the battery life of the phone while protecting the phone from hard knocks.

Since I received mine, I’ve stopped anxiously watching as my iPhone’s battery indicator slipped rapidly into the danger zone. Instead, I spend the whole day phoning, downloading apps and using data services without a worry. The “doubles the battery life” claim is certainly true.

Charging up

The Juice Pack comes with a mini USB cable you can plug into any computer for charging. It takes a bit under three hours to charge completely from empty and if you leave the iPhone in the Juice Pack they’ll charge at the same time. Four blue LEDs on the back of the Juice Pack indicate how much of a charge it has. When it’s not plugged in the LEDs remain dark, but you can press a little button beside the LEDs to get an instant indication of how much charge you have left.

Tip: If you’re on the road without your computer, take along a USB power adapter. These let you plug one or more USB devices directly into a power outlet for charging.  For international travellers, the Lenmar Travel Adapter is a really nice option. It lets you charge four devices concurrently and includes international adapters so you can plug the unit into any style of power outlet. Belkin also makes USB power adapters. Handy little things.

In use, the iPhone drains the Juice Pack first, and only then starts using up its own charge. That means you can slip off the Juice Pack once it’s drained, leaving the slim iPhone in your pocket.

Small enough, but not svelte

The Juice Pack’s size is it’s main drawback. While it fits the iPhone snugly and adds only a quarter of an inch to its length and a few millimetres to its width, it doubles its depth. The Juice Pack has a soft grip that feels great in the hand and it’s not what you’d call clunky, but it certainly detracts from the iPhone’s lithe lines.

The Juice Pack also doesn’t include any front protection for your iPhone. I use it in conjunction with a non-glare screen protector from Power Support and haven’t had any problems despite a few drops.

One small design flaw

The Juice Pack has one largely cosmetic design flaw. It has a rubber inset along either side. These insets are glued in and are clearly meant to remain attached. But the glue is not very effective. Within a few weeks of use I found the insets were starting to pull away.

At first I poked them back in, but gradually they became more and more detached and made the Juice Pack uncomfortable to hold. So I decided to pull them out instead of stuffing them back in.

Well, the glue may not be effective, but it’s exceedingly sticky. Having pulled out the insets, there was no way to clean off the glue. I tried various methods, but couldn’t get rid of the very tacky residue. I contemplated re-glueing the inserts, but in the end I decided on another approach.

I had on hand some fluorescent green mailing labels which nicely matched the Juice Pack’s colourful innards. I cut out the mailing labels and stuck them into the craters left by the insets.

The result is a Juice Pack that feels a little different but is still very comfortable in my hand and that looks just fine.

I thoroughly recommend the Juice Pack, and it gets a “certified” sticker from Apple so there are no compatibility problems. It’ll set you back a hundred bucks and it’s well worth it. You can buy it directly from Mophie.

Tip: Use Firefox Smart Keyword Search on Amazon

I love Amazon. I’ve been a customer since the first month the store went live. But there are some aspects of its site design which drive me bats.

For example, I used to be able to go to www.amazon.com, type a search phrase in the box and have a list of matching books displayed. That was in the days when Amazon was nothing but a book store. These days, searches default to searching everything - books, gardening tools, music, toys, groceries, and so on. To narrow the search, you must first select a store from the drop-down list and then type the search phrase.

I could, of course, bookmark the Amazon Book Store instead of the main Amazon front page and use it as my starting point, but I like the front page. I want it and I want to be able to search books as the default.

Amazon could easily fix this by letting customers select a default search option, but I don’t see this happening any time soon. After all, it only took the company almost half a decade to add some basic commonsense to Wishlist organisation; it’s unlikely that search options are high on the list of site improvements heading our way.

More aggravating still is the omission of several ‘stores’ from the search list. For example, you won’t find the classical music store on the drop-down list. If you select Music from the drop-down list and type in a search phrase, the results are pulled from both the classical and non-classical stores. And yet, if you navigate directly to the Music store, you’ll find there are separate searches available for classical and non-classical discs. Using the classical-specific search makes it far easier to find what you’re after. A number of other stores, such as the camera shop, are also omitted from the front-page search list.

Firefox to the rescue

Fortunately, we don’t have to wait for Amazon to improve its search. Instead, we can use Firefox to roll our own search engines.

One of Firefox’s most delightful features is a thing called Smart Keyword Search. Smart Keyword Search lets you perform site-specific searches directly from the Firefox location bar (aka address box). You can create a Smart Keyword Search for any site that has its own search box and, when it comes to Amazon, you can create separate Smart Keywords for each Amazon ‘store’.

So, for example, you can create a Smart Keyword for the Amazon Book store, one for the Amazon Music store and yet another for the Amazon Classical Music store. If you’re into software or apparel or toys, you can create your own searches for those stores, too.

Here’s how:

1. Visit the site you want to search and navigate to the page containing the appropriate search box.
2. Right-click in the search box and choose Add A Keyword For This Search from the pop-up menu.
3. Fill in the Add Bookmark dialog box, providing a descriptive name and a short keyword. It doesn’t really matter where you store the keyword within your bookmarks, although I find it handy to create a separate Keywords folder and put them all in there. That way, I can easily check what keywords I’ve created.
4. Once you click OK, you can start using your keyword immediately. Simply type the keyword followed by your search phrase in Firefox’s location bar and press Enter. You’ll be taken to the results page on the site.

Custom searches

If you want to make your own keywords for Amazon, all you have to do is select the appropriate store from the drop-down list and then right-click in the search box to create a keyword. For those stores not listed on the front page, use the Shop All Departments links to navigate to the appropriate store, select the correct sub-search from the drop-down list and then create your keyword.

I now have half a dozen Amazon searches I can perform any time without first visiting Amazon.com: ab for books; amus for classical music; apop for general music; amusi for musical instruments; and asnap for the camera shop. I can also search the whole of Amazon by simply typing as followed by the search phrase.

You can take this trick and apply it to any search service you like.

Omitting page numbers in Microsoft Word

How do you omit the page number on the final page of a Word document?

I was asked this recently by someone who is using Lulu.com’s self-publishing service. Lulu had asked her to resubmit her book with a completely blank final page – no page number, nothing. Finding the solution to this seemingly simple request proved to be frustrating.

In fact, the solution is simple, but not entirely obvious.

Omitting first page numbers

Word certainly makes it easy to omit the page number on the first page of a document. For example, to begin numbering a document on page 2 using Word 2003:

1. Click on the first page of your document and then click Insert Menu -> Page Numbers to display the Page Numbers dialog box.
2. Select the positioning for your page numbers.
3. Uncheck ‘Show number on first page’.
4. If you’d like to display ‘1’ on page two (that is, you want to start the actual page numbering count on the second page), click Format and set the value of the Start At box to 0.

Here’s how to do the same thing in Word 2007:

1. Click the Insert tab and in the Header & Footer section click Page Number.
2. Click Top of Page, Bottom of Page or Page Margins to select a location for the numbering and select a numbering format from the gallery.
3. On the Design tab, check Different First Page.
4. To start the page numbering count on the second page, on the Design tab click Page Number -> Format Page Numbers and set the Start At control to 0.

An alternative method is to create a different first page header/footer in your document: simply use the ‘Different first page’ option in the Page Setup dialog (in Word 2003, it’s File -> Page Setup -> Layout tab -> Different first page; in Word 2007 it’s Page Layout tab -> Page Setup -> Layout tab -> Different First page).

Omitting last page numbers

Although things are not quite so obvious when you want to change the header or footer on the last page, it’s still easy to do and there are a number of ways to do it. The easiest methods involve creating the final page in a separate section.

Method 1: De-link the final section.

If you’re using Word 2003:

1. Create your document as usual with page numbering in your header or footer.
2. Go to the end of the last page containing text in your document.
3. Click Insert Menu -> Break.
4. In the Break dialog box, select Next Page in the Section break section and click OK. This will add a section break and a new page with the same page numbering format as the preceding pages.
5. Double-click in the Header or Footer. You should see the words ‘Same as previous’ above the header/footer.
6. Click the Link to Previous button on the Header and Footer toolbar. The ‘Same as previous’ message will vanish and you can now delete the contents of the Header/Footer and doing so will affect only the last page.

If you’re using Word 2007:

1. Create your document as usual with page numbering in your header or footer.
2. Go to the end of the last page containing text in your document.
3. Click Page Layout -> Breaks and, under Section Breaks, click Next Page.
4. Double-click in the Header or Footer. You should see the words ‘Same as previous’ above the header/footer.
5. Click the Link to Previous button on the Header and Footer toolbar, then edit the page header/footer as needed.

Method 2: Use a different ‘first’ page on the final section.

In Word 2003, follow steps 1 – 4 in the de-linking instructions above to add a single-page section at the end of your document. Then:

1. Click File Menu -> Page Setup -> Layout tab.
2. Check the ‘Different first page’ box.
3. In the Apply To drop-down box, select ‘This section’ and click OK.

If you’re using Word 2007, follow steps 1 – 3 in the de-linking instructions above and then:

1. Click Page Layout and click the Page Setup button (the arrow at the right of the Page Setup section).
2. On the Layout tab in the Page Setup dialog box, click ‘Different first page’. Make sure ‘This section’ is displayed in the Apply To box and click OK.

That’s not so hard, and it should be apparent that you can use similar techniques to add multiple sections to a document, each with its own page numbering format.