Tag Archives: iphone

getting google contacts into iphone ipad

Computer Aid Posted on by

While setting up google services for a customer who owned an iphone and an ipad, I had some strange problem making google contacts synchronise with the idevices.

Since I have setup countless android devices, I assumed that setting up accounts would be similar, and would also be logical.

It wasn’t!

I thought that setting up the email account would also take care of contacts and calendar.

Here is what you see when setting up an email account on an iphone:

The obvious choice for a google account would be to pick gmail.

But the correct choice, if you also want to synchronise google contacts and google calendar, would be to pick Microsoft exchange instead!

For full instructions on how to setup your google account on an iphone or ipad, take a look at:

iphone ipad google

or: iphone about

syncing many google calendars with iphone ipad

Computer Aid Posted on by

I had a customer that had a few different email accounts, as well as an iphone, ipad, and MS outlook running on a laptop.

She tried to merge everything together (emails, address book, and calendar) using icloud, but couldn’t get it to work, so I decided to sync using googles cloud services (which I have been using successfully for over 2 years!).

All 3 systems had their own little problems.

But in this case, I found it difficult to get the iphone and ipad to synchronise all the shared calendars… the Apple devices only showed the main calendar entries… but none of the other linked calendars.

I re-created the i-device accounts a few times, waited 24 hours, checked the settings, but the iphone and ipad just wouldn’t show the other shared calendars.

Until I discovered this little hint:

After the google account has been setup on the i-device, and has synced at least once…

From the iphone (or ipad), you use the built-in Safari browser to go to:

m.google.com/sync

At that point, sign in to your gmail google account, and select the iphone / ipad to which you want to sync extra calendars, then select the calendars you want to appear on your iphone.

Now when you go into the calendar and take a look at the different calendars available, you will see all the calendars that you selected previously. Now just tick the ones you want to make visible.

I wish there was an easier way to do this…

Remove iphone felt font for notes app

Computer Aid Posted on by

I’ve found the “felt” font in the iphone (and ipod) notes app annoying, as I cannot change it to something more readable like arial.

After a bit of searching around, I found a few solutions.

Most revolve around adding a Chinese or Japanese keyboard, and then switching keyboards every time a new note is created.

An easier way is to delete the felt font completely.

For this, you will need to be able to delve into the iphones folder structure with something like ifile, or using ssh (ie this works best on a jailbroken iphone/ipod).

I have IOS4.01, so all I needed to do was delete (or preferably rename):

/System/Library/Fonts/Cache/MarkerFeltThin.ttf
/System/Library/Fonts/Cache/MarkerFeltWide.ttf

On other IOS versions, you might also need to delete:

/System/Library/Fonts/MarkerFeltThin.ttf
/System/Library/Fonts/MarkerFeltWide.ttf

The default Arial font was smaller than the felt font (which is what I want anyway).

If in doubt, just rename the font files back to their original name.