How to Create Contact-Specific Vibrations and Enable LED Notifications in iOS 5 [Ios 5]

By Adam Pash Oct 18, 2011 11:00 AM 28,801 27

iOS 5's snazzy new notification center offers a great way to keep tabs on your phone's various beeps and buzzes, but iOS 5 also packs a couple of interesting under-the-hood notification features you may not have known about: custom vibration notifications and LED alerts.

Wired's Gadget Lab runs through a handful of "hidden" features that didn't make the marquee during Apple's iOS 5 launch, like its awesome new text expansion feature, system-wide word definitions (highlight a word and tap Define), private browsing in Safari (buried inconveniently in Settings > Safari > Private Browsing), app-by-app usage reports (Settings > General > Usage), and so on. If you'd like to customize your notifications a touch more, then you might want to take a look at the custom vibration and LED flash options.

If your phone spends most of the day in your pocket, on vibrate, contact-specific vibration patterns allow you to identify who's calling without taking the phone out of your pocket.

To create and enable a contact-specific vibration, you first need to make sure custom vibrations are enabled in Settings > General > Accessibility > Custom Vibrations. Then just fire up your Phone app, select a contact, tap Edit > vibration > Create New Vibration. Tap out your custom cadence (I started with the always-original "Shave and a haircut"), then tap Stop when you're done. You can test your rhythm by replaying the pattern, then save and name it. Piece of cake.

If you feel like you've created a vibratory masterpiece, you can set it as your phone's default vibration in Settings > Sounds > Vibration. (Note that you can also record new patterns here as well.)

Android users: Check out previously mentioned WhoIsIt for a handy companion app for creating contact-specific custom notifications.

A lot of phones allow you to flash an LED for a more visual alert. To enable LED notifications in iOS 5, you've got to dig down into the Accessibility menu in Settings > General > Accessibility, then enable LED Flash for Alerts. There's a pretty big catch to this one, though: It only works when your phone is in silent mode (that is, vibration turned off in Settings > Sounds and the vibrate/silence hardware switch toggled on.

You should also keep in mind that it's not a persistent flash; as far as I can tell, it emanates one showy series of flashes and then goes away.

iOS 5: Exploring 7 Hidden New Features | Wired

You can contact Adam Pash, the author of this post, on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook.

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Chrono Slider Provides a Super Fast Way to Create AppleScript-able Alarms on Your Mac [Mac Downloads]

Chrono Slider is essentially an alarm clock with what, at first, seems like one of the most bizarre interfaces you'll ever come across. Once you get to know it, however, it turns out to be a really fast way of adding alarms and reminders that can even control aspects of your computer when they go off.

As you can see in the screenshot above, activating Chrono Slider breaks your screen into various segments. Click up at the top will cancel out. Clicking in the middle will set an alarm that goes off after a specific amount of time passes from the current time. The farther you mouse is to the left, the shorter that period will be. Moving to the right will elongate it, letting you set a range anywhere from one second to 24 hours. Heading down to the bottom of the screen will let you set an alarm for a specific time of day. Once you've clicked and chosen your time, you'll slide from left to right to select a preset alarm label. It'll be white if you're just going to see a message displayed, and it'll be blue if it runs an AppleScript (e.g. pauses or plays iTunes, or puts the computer to sleep). You're not limited to the preset options, of course. You can go into Chrono Slider's preferences to edit them. Once you've found the one you want, just click and the alarm is set.

This may seem like an in-depth process because of this long description, but once you know how it works you can set an alarm in a matter of seconds. Chrono Slider is actually a really clever app and definitely worth a look.

Chrono Slider ($2) | Mac App Store via One Thing Well

You can follow Adam Dachis, the author of this post, on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook.  Twitter's the best way to contact him, too. Related Stories

Stop Windows From Adding the Word "Shortcut" to Every Shortcut You Create [Registry Tweak]

By Whitson Gordon Oct 17, 2011 7:30 AM 2,650 4

When you create a new shortcut in Windows, it annoyingly adds the word "Shortcut" to the end of the file. A very simple registry tweak can turn off this behavior.

This tweak's actually been around for awhile, but we never knew about it. All you need to do is hit the Start button, type regedit in the search box, start up regedit.exe, and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer. Click on the Explorer folder and you should see a registry key called "link" in the right-hand pane. Double click on it and change its value from 1e 00 00 00 to 00 00 00 00. Then, restart Windows Explorer or log off your machine. When you come back, all your newly-created shorcuts should have the same name as their original program, saving you quite a bit of tedious typing.

If you don't want to edit the registry manually, hit the link for a downloadable, two-click version. And be sure to check out our other favorite registry hacks for powering up Windows.

Remove "Shortcut" Text From New Shortcuts in Windows 7 or Vista | How-To Geek via How-To Geek

You can contact Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
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