Upgrading to Mac Lion means letting go of those useful little utilities that only run using the old PowerPC emulation.

Free Ruler, a utility that pops a ruler over the top of your screen has been one of those ever-so-useful little Mac applications for ages now. But released in 2003, it isn’t ready for Lion, so it seems I need to move on.

Also in the same category is Colour Selector by Telcontar, an app with an eye dropper to get the colour part of your screen. I realise there are probably lots of apps that can do this, but Colour Selector has been easy and dependable for years.

PixelStick

While I’ll miss the useful yellow bars of Free Ruler, PixelStick shows a lot of promise. And solving two problems at once – finding the size of things and the colour – that is very handy indeed.

Edit: The Short Version
Richard nailed this in his very concise comment:
“To turn the phone back on, hold down both the home button and the power button until the “silver apple” start up screen appears.”

Feel free to read the original post and comments below … but if you just want to get your iPhone working again, that tip should do the trick.

Original post follows

Over the weekend my iPhone stopped working. It simply wouldn’t respond to the on/off button, or do anything if I plugged it in to charge. Kind of like this report of an iPhone that won’t turn on.

I dropped in to the local Apple store and one of the geniuses was able to identify the problem.

What had happened was this. Every time you tap one of the icons on your iPhone (and this could be a built in such as Contacts or a third party App such as WordPress), your iPhone will load it using the iPhone’s capability. That means the application will stay running until you manually quit it. You won’t notice this has happened unless you double tap the Home button to see the list of multitasking apps (surprise!).

Each running app uses memory. And if you have too many apps running at once, your iPhone might play dead, just like mine did.

To fix it, you have to shut down the apps that are open. To shut down open apps:

• double tap your Home button to see the list of open apps
• tap and hold on one of the app icons until the red minus icons appear above each app
• tap the red minus to turn off the app

I’ve used multitasking operating systems for (too) many years, but I was caught out by this. I just open apps from the Home page each time, so I’m not sure I get much benefit from this kind of multitasking.

I couldn’t find any way to turn off multitasking. And it doesn’t seem there is an easy way to see how much memory your iPhone is using.

So it sounds like you have to remember to go through your multitasking bar every so often and clean them out. Of course they’ll spring back to life again next time you use them. But at least you won’t run out of memory and have your iPhone play dead.

One final note: while my iPhone was playing dead, I couldn’t get it to respond to on/off or a charge cord. I’m not sure what the genius did to get it to switch on in the first place so we could turn off the apps.

I use an Apple 24″ iMac.

It is an excellent computer for many reasons, the best Mac I’ve ever used.

But there are two problems – one big and one little. The iMac 24″ screen is just too bright, even on the very lowest setting. And if you have a light source behind you (such as a window), you can get reflections from the glossy screen.

It seems that more than a few people are reporting eye strain using this model. Some think it is the glare, but personally I put it down to the brightness of the screen.

There are several free Mac applications you can use to reduce the brightness of your screen:

• Shades – once installed use Alt+ or Alt- to adjust the brightness of your screen (my favourite)
• DarkAdapted – designed for astronomers and others who need to keep their eyes adapated to night vision while using a computer
• Brightness Control

I’ve also ordered an anti-glare film – there are a few to choose from:

• RadTech ClearCal Anti-Glare
• Photodon Anti-Glare

I’m not sure the anti-glare film is required, figured since I have a window behind me it isn’t a bad idea. But fixing the brightness is the big one.