I finally joined the masses and grabbed myself a 32GB iPhone about two weeks ago. Ever since then I have been hunting around for the best apps and downloading a fair few, especially game and utility apps.  I will probably do a round-up post detailing the apps I have soon, offering my recommendations.

However, this blog post is to ask the question - Is there a way of running a diagnostic on my iPhone while at home? The reason I’m asking such a question is due to a recent problem I had with my new phone:

I recently took the phone out of my pocket only to find the device was turned off. This struck me as odd, as not only does the iPhone require a button hold in addition to an on-screen action in order to turn it off, but the battery was also showing a 60% charge around two hours prior to this happening.

After several failed attempts to power up the device I was somewhat concerned. Luckily, I was in Liverpool for the weekend visiting family, and an Apple store was close by. I popped in to seek advice and was told by the stores staff that the new phone “looked fine” and that I should try plugging the device into one of the many charging stations in-store. Having done this, and failing an Apple employee repeated the process in another charger, this time to some success. The device powered up, however it took over 3 minutes to reach the home screen, it had worryingly also lost around 30% of it’s charge.

The helpful Apple staff at the Liverpool One branch suggested that a rogue-app may have been the cause of the problem, adding that if this (currently isolated) issue was to happen again that I come in to have the iPhone checked.

So do any of you guys know of a way to run a diagnostic check on the iPhone, at home? I would like to see if any of my apps are sapping away my battery or causing my phone to crash. Any comments or emails on the issue would be highly appreciated.

As you may know I’m an avid fan of using Gmail’s web interface, despite peoples best efforts to get me using Mac OS-X’s Mail application. One thing I have been envious of for a while is Mail.app’s ability to insert a signature of choice at a click of a button.

Thankfully, there is relatively simple solution to using multiple signatures in Gmail! You may be asking why I would need a magnitude of different email signatures? Simply put I use my Gmail account to send and receive email from over ten email addresses. So for example if I’m replying to a work email, I would like to use a more work orientated signature, including with it my work email address, where as when replying to personal emails I will want to use another signature, possibly with a link to my own site.

How to get it done

• Head over to the Settings page, in your Gmail account. Then open the ‘Labs’ tab,
• Enable the Canned Responses feature. (CTRL or CMD + F to find it quick!)
• Once activated, go and compose a new message.
• In a blank email write out your signature.
• Use the Canned Response menu to save your signature. Giving it a name such as ‘Personal Signature’ is advised.
• Repeat this process for each signature you desire.
• When writing emails, simply select the signature you would like to use from the drop down Canned Responses list.
• Done!

This is something that had been bugging me for a while, so I was pleased to find such a simple solution.

Yesterday a friend pointed me in the direction of Vibealicious’ Notify, a really neat clean alternative to Googles own Notifier. The application is for Mac users only, and all you need is a Gmail account.

Notify works in a very similar way to the official Google Notifier, but has some added touches that sets it apart for me. It has Growl notifications built in, along with support for multiple accounts via a tab interface, and an overall better user experience for quickly getting a glance at whats in your inbox. You can set the the app to check for new mail at a number of set intervals, and I have mine set to check every minute.

Of course a lot of Mac users will opt to use the Apple app ‘Mail’, but for those that just can’t break the habit of using Gmail on the web then Notify is a slick solution to knowing when you’ve got mail. If you give it a go, be sure to let me know your thoughts.

This ain’t no April Fools. WooThemes, the creator’s of fine premium wordpress themes are for one day only offering an additional three free themes when you buy one. So you get four great Wordpress themes for the price of one, and amazing offer, but for only one day!

WooThemes have added a lot of great new themes to their portfolio recently so be sure to check it out when making your choices.

MacHeist are well known within the Mac community for offering amazing deals on a range of third party software for Apple computers, and their most recent offer is no different. The third MacHeist software bundle, once fully unlocked, will offer over $900 of software value, all of which can be yours for an amazing $39 USD.

The latest bundle includes the following software:

• iSale – eBay manager
• Picturesque – Image editor
• SousChef – Cooking assistant
• World Of Goo  – Puzzle game
• Phone View – iPhone history
• Little Snapper – Image sharing
• Acorn – Photo editor
• Kinemac – 3D animation
• WireTap Studio – Recording utility
• BoinxTV – Video production
• The Hit List – Task management
• Espresso – Web development

In addition to all of the above great software, the first 25,000 thousand customers will get Big Bang Board Games too! And to make this deal even more sweeter 25% from every sale goes to charity, and you get to choose which charity see’s your cash. So if you are using a Mac, be sure to check it out.

Google aqquired Feedburner back in July of 2007 and since then the search engine giant have slowly being making changes to the web feed management service. The most recent highly discussed of these changes being the migration of feeds from Feedburner to Google’s own feedburner.google.com.

Google posted an update on their ‘AdSense for Feeds‘ blog on Monday detailing more reasons as to why moving over to Google was important, and why doing it sooner is better. For example, the post details:

“February 28th, if you have not moved your feeds to a Google Account, the traffic to your feeds will not be cut off or terminated, but you will not be able to view or manage your feeds until you have moved to a Google Account” Steve Olechowski and Matt Shobe, on behalf of the AdSense for Feeds/FeedBurner Team

Some people are having difficulties in completing the migration, although personally I had very few troubles. One major problem for many seems to be subscriber counts altering upon moving to Google. Have you transfered your feeds, if not be sure to, and if so, has your subscriber count suffered?

I haven’t blogged about WooThemes in a while, but the wordpress theme club has gone from stength to strength offering free themes, having superb promotions and even giving away premium themes in a magazine here in the UK.

Over Christmas they offered 4 themes for the price of one, and due to it’s deserved success, and to celebrate the new year, they have now recently announced that all future purchases at WooThemes come with a ‘2 for 1′ deal included. Buy any theme, get any them free. This new deal is permanent, and is no doubt a sure fire way to encourage more people to snap up some of their superb premium wordpress themes. Give them a visit today!

I recently came across wirenode.com a service which can take your site and make a mobile friendly version (with a .mobi extension) in minutes. Having a mobile version of your site is becoming more of a necessity, what with the rapid increase in the use of the web on mobile devices.

My experience in using wirenode was incredibly simple, from signing up to having my blog up and running on the service took less than five minutes, and I even had chance to customize the appearance of the page. So it’s very simple and user friendly.

My wirenode mobile site can be found here (http://chrisbrandrick.wirenode.mobi/) , and while it acts as suitable mobile version of my blog I would like to develop something more fuller for the mobile environment down the line, especially for the increasingly popular iPhone platform.

Check out Wirenode here.

Whether you code, design or even write, if you are involved in the creation of websites in any way then ‘A List Apart‘ want to hear from you. It’s time to fill in the annual survey as put out by the site to see how the industry we work in is shaping up and how our trade is practised throughout the world.

It’s a fairly straightforward survey and only takes 10 minutes of your time to complete, and no doubt once the results are published it will make for some interesting reading. You can get to the survey by clicking the image below or just following this link, let us know in the comment form below if you filled it in, and what your thoughts are.

Wordpress today announced that version 2.6 of the popular blogging platform is now available to download, for free of course. This version comes more than a month earlier than expected and is packed with a fair few new features, including a post word count, new media functions, and the ability to view your blog with a different theme before making it live. Check out the below video for the full details:

Pretty cool additions I’m sure you will agree, and I will be upgrading to the new version as soon as I get back from my holiday.  In other news the holiday is going well, and the weather is lovely, I will be sure to update my Flickr with a lot of pictures upon my return, but in the mean time here is a shot of me enjoying the sun: