How to catch an iPhone thief

An old article, but a good one. What I don't get though is why the police weren't interested? His iPhone had been stolen and he knew who had stolen it.

Natively, iTunes is capable of playing five types of audio file; MP3, AIFF, WAV, AAC and Apple Lossless. There are plenty of applications available that convert sound files encoded in other formats into iTunes-friendly tracks. For example, NCH Software's Switch is available for Intel and PowerPC Macs and is free for non-commercial use. The also-free X Lossless Decoder (XLD) boasts drag-and-drop simplicity and can convert your files into a variety of formats without losing metadata such as track numbers or album art. But there are ways of importing FLAC and Ogg files without re-encoding them at all.

To play FLAC files in iTunes, you need to download an application called Fluke. It's free (but you can make a voluntary donation), and is currently in version 0.1. Fluke installs new components for QuickTime, allowing multimedia applications that use the QuickTime framework to play FLAC files. After installing, you just restart iTunes and you can import FLAC tracks without converting them; just follow the instructions on the Fluke website. Fluke requires OS X 10.4 or above.

Unfortunately, FLAC tracks added to iTunes using Fluke lose some of their metadata, such as album art, but perhaps support for this will be added later. An already-available beta release of Fluke 0.2 ‘supports track numbers, is much faster and smarter, and will soon have a few neat new features,’ but this version no longer supports Tiger, and a little more work is needed before it's ready for a full release. An uninstaller is supplied with this beta version, which can also be used to uninstall Version 0.1 (quit out of iTunes before uninstalling).

To natively play Ogg Vorbis files, you must download a QuickTime component from Xiph.org. It works with Intel or PPC Macs, QuickTime 7 or above, and OS X 10.3.9 or 10.4 and later. Installation is a manual task, but a simple one. You just drag the components bundle into your Components folder, as instructed in the ReadMe file downloaded with XiphQT. With the new component installed, you can import your Ogg files into iTunes in the usual way. To uninstall XiphQT, simply drag it into the trash and empty.

I'm delighted with the new version of the TomTom satnav app for the iPhone. Not only does it integrate Google Local Search – utterly awesome in itself, given that satnavs' own POI databases tend to be woefully outdated and incomplete compared to Google – but it also does live traffic data.

(TomTom's live traffic service is exceptionally good. It aggregates data on accidents not just from the same official sources that others use, but adds in much more precise, more granular information from other TomTom users, cell phone movements and more.)

You pay for the 'HD Traffic', to be sure, but what I particularly like is that you can choose from a range of subscription options. A year costs £37.99 – potentially terrific value if you travel a lot – but for me, who drives only infrequently, I love that I can pay just 59p for a day of access to HD traffic.

That's a small price to pay in order that, when my wife and I are driving up to Scotland from Bath to visit friends, my iPhone will automatically reroute me round the inevitable traffic blackspots around Birmingham, and it's great that I don't have to shell out forty quid for a feature I'll use only infrequently.

We were really excited to discover that when Apple announced the April 3 release date for the iPad in the US it also put up some more details up about how iWork will work on the iPad, as our sister title Mac|Life reports.

As we hoped for, Pages will have the ability to open Microsoft Word documents from an email you receive on the iPad, and also to save out and email documents in Word format. While we'd love it if everybody used Pages, when it comes to submitting copy as a journalist, you know you need the ability to submit in Word format.

Similarly Keynote on the iPad has the ability to open PowerPoint files and, you guessed it, Numbers will be able to work with Excel files.

All in all, we think iWork on the iPad is shaping up nicely to become the iPad's "killer app". What do you think?

Blogs and features that attempt to list the ‘best’ iPhone and iPod touch applications frequently provoke debates that generate more heat than light. ‘Is this one really better than that one?’ ‘If you selected App A, you can’t have tried App B.’ ‘What were you thinking leaving out this app?’ It’s all very pointless, and gets us precisely nowhere. So for this blog, I’m going to talk about the five iPhone applications I use the most. They might not be the best, and they might not be to your tastes, but they’re the ones I personally find most useful.

The applications are offered in no particular order, and prices offered are correct at the time of writing.  

Internet Radio Box (59p)
Internet Radio Box was discounted for what was meant to be a short-term offer, but it sold so well, they kept its 59p price point. It’s an amazing app that lets you listen to radio streams from all over the world, using a WiFi or 3G internet connection. You can save your favourite stations, and its user-friendly interface organises broadcasts according to both country of origin and genre, making it fun to explore new stations as well as listen to your saved favourites. If you already have a speaker dock, you can turn it into an internet radio for the price of a can of pop.

eBay Mobile (Free)
Do you want to check your eBay auctions on the move, using your iPhone or iPod touch? You could log on through Safari, of course, but this free application makes the task so much easier. It’s brilliantly put together, taking full advantage of the iPhone’s capabilities but keeping things optimised for the small screen. You can search for auctions, make bids, check your messages and even leave feedback. It’s much easier than eBaying on an iPhone web browser.

TVCatchup (Free)
Strictly speaking, this is a website rather than an application, but as you probably know, you can turn a site into a front-page app by accessing the page through Safari, pressing the ‘+’ button and selecting ‘Add to Home Screen’. TVCatchup lets you stream TV broadcasts over the internet. Over 50 channels are catered for, around half of which are also iPhone-optimised. Go to www.tvcatchup.com and sign up for a free account to watch internet TV on your Mac, then point your iPhone’s browser at http://iphone.tvcatchup.com for streaming tellie on the move. It works so well on the home page, you’ll soon forget it’s a website and not an app.

Air Video (£1.79)
It’s the easy way to stream video from your computer to your iPhone or iPod touch. With the free Air Video server software running on your Mac, you can use the iPhone application to stream videos stored on the hard drive. If it’s not encoded in an iPhone-friendly format, Air Video can convert it on the fly as it plays. You can select the folders you want to share with Air Video, stream from your iTunes playlists and queue videos for conversion to iPhone format for later viewing, which is useful if your Mac isn’t fast enough to handle on-the-fly conversions. It’s a great way of watching videos on your iPhone or iPod touch without transferring them to the device.

National Lottery – Lotto (Free)
I know, I know – it’s a tax on stupidity. Yet I still play it, albeit just a couple of quid a week. The National Lottery app is a quick and easy way of checking whether the last Lotto draw has made you a millionaire. You can check the latest lottery results, enter your ticket’s six numbers and check them against the last few results and randomly select six numbers to use for the next draw, though I’m not sure why you’d want to when the machine that prints your lottery tickets can do this automatically (just tick the Lucky Dip box). I’ve no idea why anyone needs a results archive going back to the very first draw in 1994 either, but as a quick-and-easy method of checking your numbers against this week’s winning numbers, it’s great.

• So much for my most-used apps. What are yours? If there’s an app you use a lot, write a comment and tell us about it.