I recently upgraded my main PC, and as part of that I also had to transfer my music, photos and documents from the old machine to the new one. I used the trick here to rebuild my iTunes library on the new machine, as this allowed me to keep my ratings and playlists. This went off without a hitch. Great.

Then I plugged my iPhone in. Bad idea.

Without any warnings or confirmations it started to sync, which seemed fine as I now had a complete library of music, so I let it be. All my personal data, such as contacts and emails, lives in the cloud or on servers I have access to. Once the sync was finished I was shown a message that informed me that some of my apps were not authorised on the new machine. I fired up the iPhone, and to my dismay most of my apps had been deleted, with only a few exceptions.

The problem was that I had not yet signed into iTunes and authorised the new PC, which is quite an easy mistake to make. A warning before wiping everything would have been nice, thanks Apple. I had a look on the interwebs for a while, however this did not yield any great solutions for getting my precious apps back. The best solution was to manually go through my purchase history and re-purchase all the apps. Let me assure you this is boring, so I gave up after re-purchasing about 5 apps.

In the meantime, I decided to clean out my music folder. It was then I struck the goldmine of my old apps. iTunes saves all the downloaded apps in a directory with the extension .ipa. In my case this directory was D:\Users\Brad\Music\iTunes\Mobile Applications. For most people it will be in your My Music folder, then iTunes\Mobile Applications.

Simply click each .ipl and the app will be added back to iTunes. One sync and you should be golden.

Apple, iPhone, iTunes Hide

Since I now catch the train to work instead of riding my Ducati or bicycle I have a bit of extra time in the mornings and nights. I had thought about reading on the trip but so far I have a better toy – iPhone gaming. Maybe a Kindle for Christmas will peak my enthusiasm for reading, so I’ll wait for that.

In the meantime I’ve become addicted to the Doom port for the iPhone. This has only happened in the last couple of days after a recommendation from a colleague. My previous addictive game was GeoDefence Swarm, which I would highly recommend, although that will have to take a back seat to Doom for the time being.

I’ve played quite a lot of Doom in my time, although almost all of it was either single player with God mode on, or Deathmatches with guys from school over our 14.4kbps modems (the good old days of init strings). The iPhone port has actually got me playing the single player game properly for the first time ever – 16 years after it’s initial release.

Doom iPhone - Enhanced controls while screen is on

Doom iPhone - Markers highlighted with flash

Perhaps the biggest issue with the game is the control system, the touch screen is quite hard to use at first. After playing most of episode 1 (8 levels) I have added something that is quite useful. The biggest problem with the control system is not the responsiveness, it is the lack of any markings on the screen that help your fingers back to the centre points of each control area. I experimented with Blu-Tack, and while it worked ok my fingers would get caught up if I applied to much pressure. It would also obstruct the screen when not playing Doom.

I went to my local phone mobile phone store and picked up a cheap iPhone screen protector for £3. These generally come with cut out sections for the ear piece and the home button. These two parts are actually almost the perfect shape for each of the control areas when using the “Ultimate” control scheme – the left area requires a rectangular shape, while the right requires a circular disk. Placing these in the correct area results in subtle raised ridges that enhance the controls considerably.

The great thing about this solution is there is no chance of damaging the phone, and then when your bored of Doom simply peel off the stickers. If you are worried about the stickers coming off prematurely simply place the full screen protector over the top, which will firmly hold them in place without effecting much else. For such a cheap price so far this is working well, hopefully it will help me get through the Shores of Hell

doom, iPhone Hide