If your iPhone was connected to an Exchange server for email, contact or calendar synchronization prior to your upgrade to the 3.0 software, you may have run into the same problem that was bugging me for a day or so: the timeout on the passcode lock gets set to "Immediate," forcing you to enter the code almost every time you pick up the phone. Secure, sure, but very annoying. Going to the usual settings location to adjust the timeout shows no choices other than the insta-lock; what to do?

A thread on the Apple discussions boards points to the answer. Since the ActiveSync link to the Exchange server controls some security policies on the phone, you need to refresh those controls; the easiest way to do that, short of deleting and recreating the Exchange account, is to turn off all three sync modes and the Push setting. Once that's done, you can go back to the passcode lock screen and disable the lock or adjust the timeout. Put your sync settings back the way they were and your changes to the passcode config should remain in place.

While this is an annoying quirk, it's not all gripes and grimaces in the Exchange support department. At long last, users of Exchange calendars can send meeting invitations (hallelujah!); Exchange 2007 users can even view the reply status of attendees. Users can specify additional mail folders for sync, and Exchange 2007 users can search server-side mail from their devices.

For a full rundown on the enterprise-friendly features of iPhone OS 3.0, check out the Enterprise Integration guide via Apple's enterprise features page.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

Have you ever needed more room on your screen? Or have you ever needed a way to organize all the stuff you are working on with your Mac? Mac OS 10.5, aka Leopard, debuted a feature called Spaces: a way of creating extra screens on your Mac. Think of them as virtual workspaces, where you can easily drop application windows to reduce clutter or simply focus on one thing at a time.

To activate Spaces, go to System Preferences > Exposé and Spaces > Spaces. From there you can enable from 2-16 "spaces" (virtual screens) and you can fine-tune application behaviors. For example, I have Skitch set to appear in Every Space, which simply means it'll appear in whatever space I happen to be working in when I open Skitch. Normally switching to an application will take you back to the space you left it in (you can turn this off in the preferences).

The really awesome thing about Spaces: it's like Exposé on steroids. If you're used to hitting a key and seeing all open windows, now you'll be able to hit a key and see all windows in all the Spaces you have open -- thus expanding your screen real estate considerably. Plus, you can use the two together. Hit a key to see all Spaces, then hit your Exposé key to see all the windows in every Space. You can also easily drag windows to another space either in the zoomed out view or just by pulling a window to the edge of the screen (depending on which space you wish to travel to). It's hard to explain, so watch the video to see what I mean.

Note that there are some apps (Microsoft Word 2008 in particular) that don't play well with Spaces, so your mileage may vary.

Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 section.

I finally updated my iPhone to 2.2.1 today, and after a reboot I got the screen that says it needs to verify or authenticate the SIM card. Unfortunately, that failed because, while I do have a SIM card in there, I do not have AT&T service -- and I had the cell radio turned off. My iPhone is never used as a phone (I don't have T-Mobile in my area, so even unlocking it would be useless). I wound up restoring the iPhone, which took a couple of hours, but apparently there's a better way.

Danny Goodman on the Apple Discussion boards posts this "2.2.1 Upgrade and SIM Error (and Solution)" tip. My advice? Always turn off Airplane Mode before applying a firmware update. The phone wants to access the radio hardware during the upgrade, it seems, and disabling the cell radio makes this impossible. Thus, I was locked out of my phone for several hours today. As luck would have it, I stumbled upon this tip about 5 minutes after I started the restore process.

Have you ever been listening your iTunes library and wondered why a song played more than one time? Duplicate songs in your library can be very annoying, and waste precious space on your hard drive. In this TUAW Tip, I'm going to show you how to get rid of duplicates using a built-in feature in iTunes.

In iTunes, click the "Music" category under the Library section from the selector on the left. You should now see all of the music items that are in your iTunes library. Now click File > Show Duplicates. Any duplicate songs that are in your library will show up, and you will be able to delete the ones that you don't want any longer. To hide the duplicate song list, click the "Show All" button at the bottom of the window (or click File > Show All). You can use this same method for Music, Videos, and TV Shows. It will also work in any playlist.

Using the built-in iTunes feature is nice, but it can be very time consuming -- especially if you have thousands of songs, videos, or TV shows. In this case, you can use an application like iDupe (which costs $8US). iDupe gives you a ton of options for deleting duplicate songs in iTunes.

Do you know another way to delete duplicate iTunes songs? Know of another application to delete duplicates? Tell us in the comments!


Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 and TUAW Tips sections!

Remember the days when getting a ringtone up on the iPhone was about as hard as, say, fixing the economy? There were all kinds of programs you had to mess around with, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, and most of the time, it just wasn't worth the trouble. Cut ahead a year from those days of yore to right now, and look at this -- all you need to get a ringtone of almost any song you want is iTunes itself.

If you want to do anything more fancy, you'll need GarageBand (and you've got it anyway, so follow Steven's guide if you'd rather do that), but as CNET shows, iTunes will let you choose the start and stop times of a song, and converting to AAC from mp3 will let you cut it down to just those times. Pull it out of iTunes, rename the extension, drag it back into iTunes (making sure to delete the version that's already in there), and voila, custom ringtone.

Note, however, that it doesn't work for music with DRM on it, but it does work for music you rip from a CD. One favor to ask, though: don't really put Young Jeezy on your ringtone -- those 'tones are obnoxious. How about a little Miles Davis instead?

Do you find yourself constantly copying/pasting text from other applications into a new Mail message? If you do, then you'll enjoy this tip.

Instead of copying and pasting, just highlight the next you want to appear in a new Mail message. Drag and drop the text on top of the Mail icon in the Dock. A new message will be created with the text you just dropped on it in the body. Just type in a subject and address and send it off ... easy as 1, 2, 3.


Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 section today!

Macenstein posted a strange little tip earlier this week for getting Apple's official apps off of your iPhone (I personally never use the Stocks app, and really don't need it taking up space around the apps I do use). But his method isn't so much a tip as an exploit -- basically, Apple has a secret 10th "page" of Application icons, and Macenstein's method is to put so many apps onto your iPhone that the official ones get squeezed off screen.

It works, though installing 144 apps on your phone might be more trouble than it's worth. And the change isn't even permanent -- restarting or syncing the iPhone will bring the apps back on screen (provided you make room on them -- you could just leave 144 apps up if you wanted, and presumably they'd stay out of the picture).

It's too bad that Apple has never really provided a tool to organize the iPhone's app screen quickly -- stacks have long been suggested as a way to get more icons on there, but it'd be nice to even have an iTunes-based tool to get all those icons in the right places. Until then, you can always fill up all your screens and kick any icons you don't want off of there.

Many iPhone users use a Bluetooth headset on their phones. However, they may not know that you can use the same headset to listen to their Visual Voicemail.

To listen to your voicemail through your headset, just navigate to Phone > Voicemail. Once there, click the "Audio" button in the top right -- you will be presented with some options. If you have your headset paired with your iPhone, you will see a headset option along with the iPhone and Speaker Phone options.

Clicking any one of these will immediately transfer the audio to the output specified.

Thanks for the tip, Brandon!

Want more iPhone tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's iPhone 101 section today!

I'm not sure that I quite agree with this in the wider scheme of things, but these examples are hard to argue with -- apparently it's easier and faster to just misspell words on your iPhone than to take the time to type them out in full. "We're," for example, is usually six hits on the iPhone's keyboard -- four for the letters, and one to shift to punctuation and another to punch in the apostrophe. But if you type "Weree," just five hits, Apple's little corrector will fix it for you, and you can keep on writing.

Normally, the little corrections made by the iPhone are more frustrating than anything else, but in this case, it could be a benefit -- as long as you remember to misspell all the words with apostrophes while typing. Hopefully, any habits incurred while trying to save time on the iPhone won't translate into anything else you happen to write -- weree not responsible for any mistakes that might get made.

[via MacBytes]

I use Boot Camp pretty regularly, and one thing that always annoyed me about booting back into the world of the living the Mac was that my clock was always eight hours behind (I live in the Pacific time zone). Windows likes to set the system clock to my local time of GMT –8. Mac OS X, on the other hand, likes to keep the hardware clock at GMT, and set it "softly" using the operating system software. There are some hairy registry fixes for the Windows behavior, but they're unsupported.

While manually setting my clock back for the eleventy billionth time, I noticed that just opening and closing the Date & Time preference pane sets the clock automatically. Of course, I had to be connected to the Internet, and have the "set date & time automatically" checkbox selected.

Sensing an opportunity to make my life easier, I wrote myself an AppleScript that simply opens the Date & Time preference pane, leaves it open for a few seconds, and then closes it. I saved it as an application, and set it to run at startup.

That way, by the time my computer is finished booting, the clock is right, and I didn't have to even think about it.

After the jump, some code and instructions on how to do this yourself.

Over at Mac OS X Hints I recently ran into this doozy of a hint that I somehow missed on its first go around. Basically the idea is to capitalize on a great new feature in Leopard's help. You can get to any menu item without your mouse by activating the help menu with the keyboard shortcut ? + ? (i.e. ? + shift + /). Then type the name of the menu command you want and scroll down to it with the arrow keys. That command's menu will automatically drop down with the item highlighted, hit enter and you're done! If you're a keyboard maven this is a really easy way to get to your menu items (though you can also activate the menubar from the keyboard with ?F2).

Thanks Brandon!

You probably thought exactly the same thing I did when I first saw Piet Jonas' tip: the iPhone as a digital picture frame? That's a pretty darn expensive digital picture frame. And his tip is pretty simple-- all he suggests is to turn off the AutoLock feature on the iPhone, thus leaving the screen on to display a slideshow. At first glance, it's not that big a deal.

But the more I thought about it, the more genius it was. I've been pining after a Nabaztag lately, and an always-on iPhone just sitting there on the charging dock could serve exactly the same purpose-- you could have it spit out the time, constantly updated stock info, or even watch your email come in. With Piet's suggestion of webcams, the iPhone could work as a little monitor right there on your desk. And if Apple ever gets this rumored RSS reader off the ground, you could watch RSS headlines fly by on that screen. When you think of all the things you could display on an iPhone sitting in the dock, it's not a bad picture frame at all.

Any other ideas of constantly updated information you could put on your always-on iPhone?

Leopard may be just around the corner but we're not ignoring you readers who aren't ready to upgrade. Here's a quick tip for those of you who plan on staying in Tiger land. Sometimes you want to view pictures by previewing them directly in Finder. To automatically view the largest possible preview, just double-tap the column resizing handle at the bottom right of the preview image. This automatically maximizes the picture without affecting your other columns.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but personally I'd nominate frustration instead. Lots of the time, the things you need to do, or think you need to do (get more exercise, pay your taxes) get pushed off or procrastinated into irrelevancy, but the things that frustrate you -- even if they're below the radar -- will drive you to the point of saying "I'm going to fix this @!#*& problem no matter what it takes!" Inventions motivated by frustration tend to be quick hacks that provide at least a momentary sense of achievement, if nothing more.

If I wasn't deeply frustrated with the QuickTime Pro feature that lets you quickly email a movie, but only if you use Mail.app as your email client, I wouldn't have spent the time and energy to whomp up this Applescript. Entourage users can throw it into the Entourage script menu, or stash it in a quick-run location or under a hotkey if you want. All it does is export the frontmost movie from QuickTime Player (standard or Pro), then it encloses the exported file in a new Entourage email. Nothing too fancy, minimal error checking, and it will not respect odd/widescreen aspect ratios... but it does seem to work. If you are recording quick video clips with your iSight and emailing them off, or doing mini-screencasts, this may be something that finds a home on your machine. Download it here.

Please note that the script is placed in the public domain, in readable form, and is provided with NO WARRANTY WHATSOEVER. Use at your own risk. Any ill consequences to you, your computer, your videos, your sanity or your interactions with friends & family who are now bombarded with your video snippets are your own problem and in no way the responsibility of me, TUAW, Weblogs, Inc. or AOL. In case of a water landing, your seat cushion serves as a flotation device. Exits are under the lighted signs. Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for it makes them soggy and hard to light.

Sometimes even the best intentions of developers can't account for user preference, and after speaking with many other Mac users, this certainly seems to be the case with OS X's habitual tendency to preserve the formatting of text copied to the clipboard. For example:

I copy text from OmniWeb:

Pasted text before running the trigger:

Pasted text after running the trigger:


Quicksilver maven Dan Dickinson has figured out a sneaky way to strip out this formatting, and has turned the method into a handy Trigger. The trick works by pasting the contents of the clipboard into a terminal shell (where it loses all formatting), and then re-copying the text to the clipboard. For the trigger to work, you must have the Terminal Plugin installed. A full how-to is available on Dan's website.