There are other features, but hurry if you want to try them. There are only about 150k trials left out of the million trial challenge. Simply tap on the “Try Now FREE” on the opening popup, it will convert your basic Snapture into the full Premium Snapture for the rest of the session.

More info here:

www.snapturelabs.com

Once installed, go to the Library and install the first 4 free lessons and the demo dictionary. The demo contains all the characters in the 4 free lessons, and it allows you to try the handwriting recognition.

Since my Chinese is very poor, sometimes I need to know what a certain character mean, but unless I have it in my computer (where I can look it up digitally), I would have to look it up in a Chinese-English print dictionary. Even then, sometimes it’s hard for me to know which radical to look for, and in the end I just can’t find it or give up.

With this app I can simply copy the character and write it with my finger on my iPhone. Using a finger is not as easy as using a stylus, but I never had any problem with it. It might not look pretty, but it is recognized.

Once the character is found and selected in the bottom bar, a list of results is shown, divided by the number of characters. Chinese words are often a combination of 2+ characters, so these combinations are included in the results.

Finally, you can get the traditional and simplified version of the characters, as well as the various meanings and their pinyin. Pretty much everything you would need to know.

It is also possible to enter the pinyin to get the corresponding characters, or even enter English words. This last option isn’t a true English-Chinese dictionary, but it’s useful most of the time.

The more complex the character is, the more time it will take to find it. I found that at most you’ll wait 5-10 seconds. For simpler characters the results are instantaneous.

I have the full dictionary (20,000+ characters), but there were a few instances in which it couldn’t recognize the character I entered. It could be the stroke order was wrong, or it might be a bug. In one instance I did find the character with pinyin, so it is in the dictionary, but it just couldn’t recognize the handwriting.

The lessons are less useful to me, since I am not a novice user. But from the little I tried, the main focus is the stroke order and position, as well as memorizing the characters. You’ll have to write those characters over and over, in order to commit them to memory, which I think will be useful to many learners. You can also customize lesson settings to better suit your level.

Here are some improvements I’d like to see in the future:

- Improve character recognition speed
- Allow bottom search bar in dictionary to be scrollable, to look for similar characters.
- Improve recognition (some characters are not recognized).
- Remember past searches. Sometimes it’s useful to remember the last few searches.

Overall this is well worth the 4.99 Euro I paid for the full Chinese-English dictionary. I think the interface is very well done, sometimes I just enter characters for fun, which might help with my Chinese. If you’re interested in Chinese, give this a try and let me know what you think.

The first choice would be to buy TV shows or movies from the iTunes Store. They have a fairly good selection of both, but it’s not exhaustive. Unfortunately iTunes Store is not available to me, so I have never purchased any video.

There are a lot of video podcasts available for free download, most of them provide a format compatible with the iPhone. All you have to do is find the correct podcast feed (it’s usually labeled as iPod/iPhone compatible or “small Quicktime”) and paste it into iTunes (Options -> Subscribe). Or even easier, browse the iTunes Podcast Directory from inside iTunes.

Here are some of the video podcasts I am subscribed to: Attack of the Show, Best of YouTube, CNET TV, iFanboy, Tekzilla.

But what if you already have a video file and you want to put that video to your iPhone? First you need to convert that file to the right format using a program. There are many free and commercial programs, I’ve tried a few free ones and they worked fine, however I’ve stumbled upon a wrong aspect ratio problem after conversion.

The only program I found that solved that issue is Any Video Converter free version (Windows). (http://www.any-video-converter.com/products/for_video_free ) This program has more aspect ratio selections than the others, the one that solved my problem was 480X272. It also has many other features, like selecting clips, batch operation, bit rates etc… You can also download a YouTube video and put it on your iPhone. Conversion time is usually not more than half the running time of the video.

Lastly, what if you wanted to rip your DVDs? As always, there are many programs that do the job, the one I use is Handbrake (Windows/Mac/Linux). This is an open source free program that allows you to easily rip any video from your DVD. You can even choose multiple audio tracks and one subtitle language. If your DVD contains a few TV episodes, you can choose them separately and start a batch operation that will rip them all one after the other. Ripping time is about the same as the video running time, so you better do it before you go to sleep.

Now you can make use of that beautiful screen whenever you have some down time.

Once I did that, the touchscreen wasn’t responding anymore, and I couldn’t use it at all. I even tried calling my number, but it didn’t ring. I connected it to my PC, and I could still access it through iPhoneBrowser, which means that the OS was still up, but it just wasn’t usable.

I had to restore my iPhone using iTunes, and unlock/jailbreak it again. This time I used iLiberty+. The GUI has a few more features than ZiPhone, it allows you to select some applications to be installed directly with iLiberty+.

I chose to install Cydia (click here for more info), but I also wanted to install Installer.app which is not available in the iLiberty pack. iLiberty+ allows you to download the Installer.app and you can choose it to be installed during jailbreak. That’s not very intuitive though, and I didn’t know I had to choose it again after downloading it (it should be ticked automatically after download).

Now I have Cydia (including Telesphoreo) and Installer both on my iPhone. Some things are more stable, thanks to the more complete Telesphoreo (BSD Subsystem is too buggy).

There are many ways to do that, here are the ones I tried:

- The easiest way is to send the image as an attachment through email. Every Flickr account has a private email for this purpose. I’ve tried this in the past, but it was not very efficient. Sometimes the email just never arrives, sometimes it takes a long time, which defeats the purpose of upload on the spot.

- There are a few apps that do this: Pushr just uploads all the pics in your camera roll (I couldn’t find a way to choose which photo to upload). uPoze uploads every photo in your camera roll, including new ones you take (this is only useful if you want to automatically upload all photos). iFlickr allows you to choose an image from your camera roll, or to take a new one and upload it. It also allows to enter title, description, tags, permissions. This is the app I’ve been using until recently. But then I found a newer and better app.

- MobileFlickr (Source http://xk72.com/iphone/repos/ ): this is the most comprehensive Flickr app so far. Not only it allows to easily upload photos like iFlickr (including upload status bar/size uploaded), but it also has a nice interface to your Flickr account. You can choose to browse your stream, sets, favorites, groups, tags, and everything for your contacts or anyone else. It can cash thumbnails locally (so you can browse offline), and it allows to browse photos with a coverflow-like interface. I haven’t found any problem with this app, I only wish it allowed to modify my own photos (delete, change title etc..). I think anyone with an iPhone should have this app. Even if you don’t have a Flickr account, get one for free and start photoblogging!!

Flickr also has a mobile version of their site (http://m.flickr.com), and it works ok on the iPhone. It’s not formatted for the iPhone specifically, it looks more like a general WAP site. It also doesn’t allow to edit your photos, for that you’ll have to switch to the normal site. A better site for viewing Flickr photos is iPhlickr (www.chandlerkent.com/iphlickr) which formats the photos very nicely. However MobileFlickr is still a better alternative.

However if you’ve jailbroken your iPhone, some applications will require to transfer other files directly to the iPhone. For example Books, iComic, weDict etc…

Here are a few methods on Windows:

- Through ssh, using scp. This method uses ssh (secure shell) to connect to your iPhone through the wifi and then the ’scp’ command to transfer files wirelessly. To use this method you need to first install OpenSSH on your iPhone, then WinSCP on your Windows. When you want to connect to your iPhone, turn on SSH on your iPhone (you can use BossPrefs), then open WinSCP and enter your iPhone’s IP address, username (root) and password (alpine). Remember to turn SSH off when you’re done.

- FTP: a similar way to transfer files is to use ftp. You will need PureFTP on your iPhone and an ftp client on your computer (I use FileZilla, but you can use WinSCP as well). It’s the same concept as ssh: turn ftp on, connect to your iPhone’s IP, transfer files, turn off ftp.

These two methods are not easy to setup, but once you’ve done it a few times it’ll be easy.

- However, iPhoneBrowser is a much easier and faster method. All you need to do is connect your iPhone to your computer, launch iPhoneBrowser and copy files from/to your iPhone. No need to turn stuff on/off, the transfer is done through your USB, which is much faster than SSH or FTP. This is obviously my preferred method. I have met some problems in the past, where iPhoneBrowser didn’t recognize my iPhone as jailbroken, even though it was jailbroken. To solve this problem add this source “http://iphone.unlock.no” and install the “ZiPhone iBrickr Fix”.

But now there’s a new app called Snapture, which is similar to CameraPro but it’s totally free. Here are some of the features:

- Black & White photos
- Timer
- Fast burst taking 3 photos in a row.
- Different sizes (though it can’t take bigger pictures than the default camera app)
- Digital zoom
- Level Aid
- Auto Rotation turned off

I recently upgraded the app, but I cannot save the settings anymore. Probably a permission issue. But not a big problem. I highly recommend this app, it has replaced the default camera app for me.

Premise: I took more than 100 photos with my iPhone, so I wanted to copy them to my PC and delete them from the iPhone. Instead of deleting them one by one on the iPhone, I decided to do it on Windows.

Problem: I connected the iPhone to my PC, which showed up in “My Computer” as a USB camera. I then opened it with Windows Explorer and deleted all files/images. Once I did that, both the Camera and Photo stopped working, they just crashed at launch.

Solution: Luckily I solved this easily. Photos taken by the iPhone camera are stored here: /var/mobile/Media/DCIM/100APPLE. I found that even though I deleted all the photos, there were still some thumbnail files in that directory, but no corresponding jpg file. I simply removed all files under the directory and it all went back to normal.

This gave me a scare for a day, thinking I’d have to restore the firmware. Luckily it’s all working fine now.

In theory there isn’t a time limit, as long as you iPhone has enough battery and disk space. In practice this app crashes often, so I wouldn’t want to record anything too long and risk losing it at the end.

Unfortunately it is not possible to record phone conversations at the moment, hopefully the developer will find a way to do that in the future. For the moment it’s just a fun app to have to easily record voices. I use it often to record my son learning to talk, he also loves to hear himself back.

- Amazon/Kindle/ebook reader: right now there is the Books app, but it only supports txt and html files. What if Amazon’s new ebook service would integrate with the iPhone? We could buy/download and read ebooks directly from the iPhone!

- Blogging Client: currently I have installed the Wordpress WPhone plugin on my blogs, which allows me to manage my blog from the iPhone, including writing new posts. However a native blogging client would allow me to write a post offline any time, and then post it to my blog once I am near a wifi. Template posts would also be useful.

- Video Player: the video player on the iPhone only supports Quicktime movies, so I have to convert all my video files to that format, which is time-consuming and sometimes frustrating (sometimes the aspect ratio is just wrong). What about a video player that supports divx/xvid files? That way I wouldn’t have to convert them, I’d just copy them over.

- RSS reader: there are already a couple of RSS readers, but my problem is that they don’t sync with an online reader which is necessary since I read my feeds on many different computers.

- VOIP: since Jobs said that they won’t interfere on VOIP usage through wifi, I am sure we will see a VOIP client pretty soon. That’d be amazing for voice calls.

- Record phone conversations: there is now an app that makes voice recordings (VoiceNote), however it cannot record phone conversations. I would find this very useful.

- PlecoDict for iPhone: this is an amazing program for Palm and Windows Mobile. It’s a handwriting recognition software for Chinese characters. If they can port it to the iPhone touch screen I would definitely buy this. I wouldn’t have to wonder “what is that character?”. I think this would improve my poor poor chinese very quickly.