Tax day has finally come to pass and Friday is now upon us. That means we deliver another batch of glorious iPhone tips submitted by you, the totally awesome readers of Touchtip. This week we have some fantastic tips you won’t want to miss. Got an iPod touch you want to turn into and iPhone? We got that (no, seriously). Are you a couch potato looking for a good TV guide that you can read on your iPhone without getting off the Lazyboy? We got that, too. We also have a few clever ways to use your iPhone camera, a creative method to sync notes from your device to your Mac, and how to access iPhone-only web sites from your desktop. And finally, coverflow enthusiasts learn how to find missing album art for your music collection. So don’t wait, read on and impart some iPhone wisdom upon yourselves. Or, if you have a handy tip you think we’d like, please share it with Touchtip. Now, on to the tips.
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We gotta hand it to Justin Michael for creating a cut-and-paste code snippet that turns Backpack into a must-have app for the iPhone and iPod touch. Adding value to Backpack is not an easy thing to do because its creators, 37signals, have already thought of almost everything to make its collaboration and productivity tool very useful. However, they overlooked users who want to access Backpack from mobile Safari, and that’s where Justin’s iBackpack comes in. You simply paste a snippet of code into a Backpack divider to create a new layout that is optimized for the iPhone and iPod touch. Like Backpack, the code snippet is also free. And if you aren’t already familiar with the award-winning Backpack, go sign up for a free account and give it test drive on your desktop web browser. If you like it as much as we do, drop in the iBackpack tweak and you’re good to go on mobile Safari.
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Whoa, we didn’t see this one coming. Sphere, software that connects contextually relevant content to your content, has been acquired by AOL for a rumored $25 million. Sphere was originally a search engine for finding content on blogs but then morphed into an engine to discover contextually related content with clients like the Time, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, and many others. AOL has taken this new technology and created a very nice search utility specifically tailored for the iPhone and iPod touch. The interface blends the iPhone’s mulit-touch surface with AJAX to deliver a user experience that allows the richness of the web to shine on mobile Safari. This new search tool has features you won’t find in Google or any of the major search engines. If you’re tired of Google or just want to check out a new way to find good stuff on the web using your iPhone, then check out this surprisingly great search utility from AOL. Who’da thunk? Learn more after the jump.
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We know, we know… the words “great” and “iPhone photography” really don’t belong in the same title, but this new, free utility from Snapture actually does help you take better pictures with your iPhone. Snapture contains several tweaks that improve the photo-taking experience on the iPhone. Some of the features are so obvious you have to wonder how Apple overlooked them to begin with. Snapture is a free download, but it does require a jailbroken iPhone. You can find it in the Installer.app under Utilities. Snapture is one of those “a taste of what’s to come” native apps that hint at some of the great iPhone applications that will be available in the Apple App Store this June. Read on to find out more about Snapture’s handy features for the iPhone camera.
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There is no shortage of web video sites out there that are either trying to ride in the wake of YouTube’s success, or offer something that YouTube doesn’t have. Hulu is probably the best new web video site to be released lately featuring high quality video produced by the big television and movie studios instead of the user-generated type at YouTube. However, Hulu’s Flash video format doesn’t work on the iPhone, which is why we were delighted to discover Modern Feed yesterday. Modern Feed is a directory of web videos, all of which have either met or surpassed the quality criteria set by the staff of Modern Feed. The site’s human-powered filter ensures that all the videos are not only good quality, but also are hosted on responsive servers. Modern Feed doesn’t host the actual videos, they merely provide an easy way to find them. And part of the Modern Feed directory is devoted exclusively to web videos that are compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch.
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Remember when it was okay to copy music without feeling like a felon? In fact, it was practically encouraged. How else do you explain the proliferation of the dual cassette tape deck? The very same device that became the catalyst from which a new art form sprung, the mix tape. Creating a good mix tape was like being a DJ, you had to choose just the right songs and put them in a certain order to evoke emotions for the moment. And a great mix tape creator knew that the right tape at the right time could control the entire vibe of a party. Maybe you weren’t old enough to buy the beer, but you could make or break the party because you were the king of mix tapes. Today, the spirit of the mix tape is born again at Muxtape, a free web site to create iPhone-friendly virtual mix tapes and share them with others. Read on to find out how to create your own mix tape and post and share them here at Touchtip.
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Travelers, listen up, if you own an iPhone or iPod touch and do any kind of traveling whatsoever, you absolutely need to use Tripit. This must-have travel tool is free, and now that it’s optimized for mobile users there is no excuse not to at least give it a try. Tripit is one of those rare tools that is so easy to use that it’s almost transparent when setting up your travel plans, but then it delivers an incredibly valuable view of your itinerary that you will come to depend on during your entire trip. Your Tripit itinerary is a lot more like a personlized travel guide than just a list of what-where-when for your trip. Tripit offers advice and tips for you based on your location and plans, like nearby restaurants, events, and attractions. And Tripit’s new mobile site also supports its “Closeness” feature which is a location-based alert system to let you know when your travel plans overlap with your friends plans. This adds a social networking aspect to a service that was already great to begin with. Read on and learn how to start using Tripit to plan your next trip.
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This week’s Friday iPhone tip roundup includes some great advice sent in by the readers of Touchtip. Our post last week about the invites to the EverNote beta was very popular and we still have a few left to give out, just let us know if you want one. Our Playboy post wasn’t so popular, at least not with some of our female readers who felt left out. Honestly, we’d be happy to write up an equivalent post for the ladies, but we can’t find an iPhone app from Playgirl or Chippendales. If you have a suggestion, please share it with us.

Our readers’ tips this week include a very cool way to use your iPhone to send notes to Jott which then get converted to text and sent to your EverNote account. We also find out how to avoid huge roaming charges when using the iPhone outside the U.S., reverse lookup telephone numbers with geolocation, accessing your desktop computer with iPhone or the touch, customizing the icons in the Music app, and how to use an iTunes setting to increase the volume on your mobile device. Read on to get all the details.
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