One of the biggest comments on the recent SimCity announcement for the iPhone, other than being able to locate the SimCity International (link goes to the U.K. iTunes store) version of the game, was complaints that the game was crashing for some people.

This is not a new issue for graphically intense games for the iPhone and one of the solutions for solving this is very easy: Before playing your new game, reboot the iPhone.

Here's how to do it.

Update: As has been pointed out in the comments, a normal shutdown/startup process, or "soft reboot," should work fine: simply hold the power button down for 3 seconds and slide to power down. The "hard reboot" described here should only be used if your iPhone isn't responding to touches or the Home button -- it is not intended as regular maintenance. Thanks to all for the feedback.

[If your phone ever becomes completely unresponsive, you may need to do the 'hard reboot process described next -- but remember this is the equivalent of pulling out the power cord on your computer.] Hold down the Home and the Sleep/Wake buttons until your screen goes black, as shown at right. After a few seconds, you should see a sliding bar for powering off the phone. Ignore it and keep pressing those buttons. After about 20 seconds or so, the screen will go completely black and the silver Apple logo appears.

Once your phone goes through the rebooting process, launch your game. You shouldn't have any further problems with it. One word of warning: Rebooting the iPhone does drain your battery somewhat, so if you're pretty low on power you may find yourself unable to use the phone until after you're recharged it.

I saw this tip posted on the App Store when I was purchasing Scrabble at the end of November and followed the advice and didn't have a single problem with Scrabble on my 1st generation iPhone. I repeated it with SimCity and, again, I'm not having any issues playing the game.

If that doesn't solve your issues, check out this list of iPhone troubleshooting tips.

Brandon sent us a great tip that I should have known was in Safari, but that I hadn't found yet. For you paranoids out there, the Safari 3 beta offers an easy way to clean up every single thing you've ever done, including the history, passwords, cookies, and even favicons and Autofill text. Under the Edit menu, there's a "Reset Safari" option which reveals a checklist that lets you hit the reset button on your browser. Firefox users like myself will notice that this was "gently lifted" from the Clear Private Data function under FF's Tools menu.

And it's not just for paranoid browsers out there-- the blogging engine here at TUAW, Blogsmith, is a great program but sometimes hiccups when the cache gets overwritten or pushed out of sync. When it does, the Reset options let me flush the cache in just a few clicks without losing any of my browser windows. If you ever run across a browser-based application that's not doing what you want, this is definitely an alternative to try before actually restarting the browser.

I'm starting to think there is some sort of bad luck attached to my iTunes Store account, as tonight I experienced the third iTunes Store song that completely locked up an iPod - only this time it was my iPhone. While listening to 'Again with the Subtleties' from the Yppah album You Are Beautiful At All Times (US iTunes link) in my iPhone's iPod app, the phone completely locked up at the end of the track with an almost-faded out display. What was worse, the iPhone became completely unresponsive - the display wouldn't accept any of my taps, and even the external buttons were ignored. Momentarily wishing I could simply yank the battery to cut the power and reset the phone, I realized Apple must have some sort of a contingency in place for lock-ups like these.

Fortunately, I was right: The iPhone troubleshooting section of Apple's main iPhone support site contains a walkthrough for situations like this, complete with instructions on how to restart the phone, force quit a frozen app or reset the phone in cases like mine where it has completely locked up. Here are these steps in a nutshell:

• Restart your iPhone: Most people probably already know how to do this, but just in case, you can simply hold the sleep/wake button on the top for a few seconds to bring up a red slider at the top of the display which allows you to power off the phone.
• Quit a frozen iPhone app: I know it's a crazy thought, but it is entirely possible that Apple's wondrous iPhone apps can lock up from time to time. In this case, simply hold the Home button when in the app for about 6 seconds to kill the app. You should be able to jump back into the app without restarting the phone itself.
• Reset your iPhone: Note that this is not Restoring your iPhone; that's the button in iTunes that wipes the iPhone and all your information on it. Resetting an iPhone is nothing more than a hard reset or a forced reboot - you're simply cutting the power and making it reboot. To do this, hold the sleep/wake button and Home buttons simultaneously for a few seconds; the display will quickly wipe itself and you should see the black background and white Apple logo, signifying a reset well done.

Fortunately, that reset fixed my problem and I'm jamming again with my iPhone as I write this. Still, you can be sure that I'll ping iTunes support to find out what's going on with these files, as this is the third one I've downloaded from the iTS that's caused an iPod to stop dead in its tracks. Anyone else experience something like this? You know where to sound off.

.Mac Sync Services leave much to be desired in the management department - Apple provides no UI for removing them once you no longer use an application, and you don't have many options for troubleshooting when things go south.

Until now.

A user named kohlmannj at the indispensable macosxhints figured out how to use an app at the ADC site that can actually remove 3rd party sync items and reset your .Mac syncing to a 'never synced before' status. The hint is actually very simple to implement, but be sure to read the entire post to understand exactly what you're getting yourself into. In summary: this tool and hint will set your .Mac Sync Services back to square 1, meaning that 3rd party items will get removed (though your data in those apps will remain unscathed), and the next time you sync (I recommend performing one manually) you'll be asked all those 'brand new Mac' questions like "you are about to sync your calendars for the first time, do you want to merge, replace, etc."

Soon after you perform this reset, your 3rd party .Mac-aware apps *should* ping Sync Services to get on the list again, and I can personally say this worked for Yojimbo, but not Trasmit - yet. Ultimately, this might be a bit like using a sledgehammer to strike a nail, but it works - which is better than Apple's former solution of 'nothing.'

I'd bet that many of us are familiar with the scenario that Don Foy describes at Macsimum News: You're listening to your iPod when it inexplicably freezes up. No amount of button pushing will get it to do anything. Or, you plug it into your Mac and nothing happens. It doesn't show up on the desktop and iTunes does not see it. How do you remedy the situation? As Don suggests, remember the five R's:

• Reset your iPod Find out how to reset your model here.
  
• Retry with a different port. Perhaps the iPod itself isn't to blame?
• Restart your computer
• Reinstall the iPod software and iTunes
• Restore your iPod Caution: This wipes everything!

This should have your little friend happy and healthy again in no time. Now, wasn't that easy?

As I was using my one month old PowerBook yesterday, I was alarmed to see the charging light on the power adapter randomly shift between orange and green. I came up empty handed after some googling and searching Apple's Support pages, so I started plugging the adapter into other outlets in the apartment. No go; my adapter was still putting on its own little glowstick show for me. I then decided to look up Apple's support document detailing the procedure for resetting a PowerBook's PMU (Power Management Unit), which brings me to the first lesson I learned: Apple changed the PMU reset procedure for the most recent 15" and 17" Dual Layer SD PowerBooks, so definitely check it out if you go down this same road.

Unfortunately, a PMU reset still didn't solve my dilemma. Getting nervous, I finally decided to take advantage of Apple's insulting "90 days of complementary support" to see if they could bail me out. Fortunately, after some troubleshooting, I learned my second lesson of the day: PowerBook and iBook adapters, if left plugged into a wall for too long, might need to actually be reset. This can easily be done by unplugging both of an adapter's ends for at least 60 seconds. We didn't delve into the inner workings of these power adapters for an explanation, but I've kept one plugged into a specific outlet in my apartment for probably at least a month or two, and I guess that might be just enough to make a power adapter a little confused in the head. So kids, remember: don't be like me. Keep your power adapter happy and light-show free by unplugging it from time to time.