QuickMath is a new tweak that allows you to do simple math functions within iOS search. If you’re a Mac user you’re probably already use to this kind of functionality within Spotlight. I’ve definitely caught myself a time or two swiping to search on my iPhone to do a simple math problem and quickly realizing that I can’t.

Once you install QuickMath there is nothing to configure. Just swipe on over to search and type in your math problem. Hit search and the solution will show up in the search bar. It’s a bit quicker than searching or paging through for the Calculator app in my experience. Maybe this math tweak will be enough to make Leanna jump over to #TeamJailbreak?

QuickMath is available in Cydia for free.

[Free - Cydia Search Link]

Note: This interview was conducted a few days before WWDC 2011.

What’s your name? Kai Yu

What’s your company’s name? Beejive, Inc.

Where are you located? South of Market in San Francisco (AT&T death zone)

What’s your website address? www.beejive.com

What’s your Twitter name? @beejiveim. Also beejive on facebook.

What apps do you make? BeejiveIM with Push, BeejiveIM for iPad, Beejive for Facebook, Beejive for GTalk.

What apps, other than your own, are currently among your favorites? Garageband for iPad (my kids love this one), FlightTracker Pro, NYTimes (use this all the time, but don’t like the implementation and bugginess, but content wins), MLB.tv, DropBox

How long have you been a developer? Professionally for 17 years.

How long have you been an iOS developer? Since the first SDK came out.

Do you develop for any other platform in addition to iOS? If so, which one(s)? Android, BlackBerry OS, dabbled in WinMo and S60 a few years ago.

What primary computer setup do you use for your iOS development? Mostly on a MBP17 + 27 inch cinema display. Sometimes on just a MBAir, which forces me to be extra careful about dependencies in order to avoid the really long build times.

What iOS device(s) do you personally use most often? Verizonn iPhone, iPad 2.

What mobile devices, other than iOS, do you currently use? We have a bunch of Android and BlackBerry phones around the office, though these are mostly just for testing. Last one I tried to use extensively was a Droid 2.

What’s your favorite thing about developing for iOS? Definitely the quality of the Libraries. Wish I had done more work in Cocoa before iOS, it’s really a joy to work with.

What’s your least favorite thing about developing for iOS? XCode leaves a lot to be desired, especially around refactoring, though it’s gotten better. On the business side the app approval process is quite a drag. Apple does what it has to do and the review folks there do the best they can, but at the end of the day the process is opaque. All of our eggs are in one basket.

What feature would you most like Apple to add to the iOS SDK? On the UI side, better notifications and better task switching. I’m actually not a huge fan of the Android notification system either, it’s way too busy. The iOS system is perhaps too simplistic, maybe the folks over there can come up with a happy medium. The current double tap home button task switch takes too many touches. This may be as simple as expanding the UI for running apps to more than 4 icons per screen (just an idea).

On the SDK side, I’d like to see Apple expose more of their private APIs, especially on the UI side. They’ve managed to expose more stuff with each revision, so hopefully this will continue at a good pace.

What feature would you most like Apple to add to the App Store? For the end user, better app discovery mechanisms. The existing cataloging system is way too simple, and App Store genius doesn’t work well yet. Better discovery mechanisms will help developers as well, so we can better target potential end users. I already touched on the review process earlier, always wishing for more transparency and better communication with the reviewers.

If we were to eavesdrop on you while you were coding, what curse word would we hear you use the most? You fkg doofus, usually aimed at whoever wrote the piece of code I’m looking at, sometimes it’s myself.

What do you do when you’re not coding iOS apps? Playing with my daughters. Following the Red Sox.

What should we look for from you next? In addition to some exciting updates to our existing apps, we’re working on a new iPad app…

What do you think of efforts from companies like Facebook with the new messages, Google with Wave, [and now Apple with iMessage] to conflate IM with SMS, email, etc. into a one-protocol-fits-all solution? Is that the way communications is heading or will there always be a place for standalone IM? I think there is always a place for IM. We have different expectations for the different types communications, and merging them into a one-size-fit-all subtly changes the end user’s expectation, without filling the voids left behind. For example, we generally expect emails to be longer, often richer, and it’s OK to respond to emails within a day or longer. With IM, the messages are shorter and expected response time is much faster, and you expect a conversation. SMS is somewhere in between. If anything the merged interfaces makes everything look more like IM, which I don’t think is correct either. The problem that we’re trying to solve is to better organize our communications with each other, so it’s not so fragmented, but I don’t think putting everything in a single thread is the best solution.

Thanks Kai!

Don’t use Spotlight on your iPhone very much and wondering how you can just remove the feature altogether? If you have a jailbroken iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad there’s a free and easy way to stop Spotlight from ever bothering you again, and we’re going to show you how after the break!

To remove Spotlight search go into Cydia and search for an app called NoSpot (free). What NoSpot does is removes Spotlight from your iPhone homescreen completely. I personally can’t recall the last time I actually used Spotlight for searching my iPhone or iPad, so this is a great way to stop it from always showing up when you swipe left or press the home button on the main home screen.

Installing this extension will not put a new app icon on your springboard and won’t add any additional settings in the settings app. There are no options for this extension, it simply removes Spotlight search from ever showing up. Brilliant!

Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to dailytips@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)

Been using Spotlight search on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad but curious how to customize your results? Part of what makes iOS Spotlight great is the fact that you can tailor the results to show up just the way you want them to. Read on for a quick and easy way to customize Spotlight to fit your own search needs.

I have a tendency to move apps around in folders and on my home screen quite often, so I’d rather just use Spotlight to find them than have to dig through folders and pages. Not only can you teach Spotlight what results are more important to you, you can also choose for certain items not to come up in search. I don’t like songs from my iPod to show up, so I’ve disabled that setting. Almost 100% of the time I use Spotlight, I’m looking for an app or an e-mail. I’ve set Spotlight to bring those results up before anything else.

Whatever your preferences are, telling Spotlight what content you want it to find only takes a few taps. I’m going to use the iPhone to demonstrate but the process to customize Spotlight on the iPad is exactly the same.

1. Open Settings.
2. Tap General.
3. Tap Spotlight Search.

4. You’ll see an editable list like below. Simply drag the type of results you want in order of how you want them. Anything you don’t want to show up, simply uncheck it.

That’s all there is to it. Spotlight will now filter your results based on the criteria you’ve specified. If you’ve never tried this before, give it a shot and let us know if it makes Spotlight more useful for you.

Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to news@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)

It’s been a little while now since iOS 4 was released so we thought we’d check back and see how it’s working (or not) for those of you with the 2008 iPhone 3G?

My iPhone 3G (above, yeah, cracked perhaps a tad poetically) really chugged away at first, but after a clean install (not restored from backup) and turning off Spotlight Search, it’s working much better now. Of course, if you’ve gotten used to an iPhone 4 or iPhone 3GS, it’s obviously slower but if its your one and only — or newly acquired hand-me-down, it’s almost as fast as it was under iOS 3.x.

Let us know your experience, and if you’ve come across any other speed tips we’d love to hear them.

Update: According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is looking into the issue. [WSJ]

While iOS 3 (iPhone 3.0) introduced Spotlight search for on-device information like contacts, songs, and apps, iOS 4 examples Spotlight to search the Web and Wikipedia as well.

From the main home screen, just swipe to move left to Spotlight, or click the home button to toggle to it, and start typing your search. You may see the aforementioned local results start to pop up but you’ll also see a Safari icon saying Search Web and a curiously blank icon saying Search Wikipedia.

Tap those and Spotlight fades, Safari comes up, and you’re off and searching the internet.

Already familiar with this? Then let us know if you’re using it and how it’s working for you. Any advantage to just going straight to Safari or tapping open a Wikipedia app?

For more features, see our complete iOS 4 walkthrough.

If you update to iOS 4 on an iPhone 3G the performance, to but it mildly, will be poor to the point of frustration. When I first updated mine it was so bad I didn’t want to use it — though admittedly I’d gotten used to an iPhone 3GS, then iPhone 4, and it’s never easy to go back.

iPhone Forums and stoovie to the rescue. Turns out there are a few things you can do to make it faster to the point of livable:

• Turn off Spotlight. Go to Settings, General, Home Button, Spotlight Search and just turn it all off. iPhone 3G is so resource constrained Apple wouldn’t even enable wallpaper. Indexing Spotlight in the background seems to be the straw that breaks the performance’s back. With Spotlight off, it’s a usable device again.

If you’re still having trouble there’s always the nuclear option:

• Restore as a new iPhone. Do a clean wipe and re-install without copying back your data. It’s a royal pain in the apps but there seems to be something borked about including old data that just slows stuff down. I got an immediate speed boost with a clean install as well.

Unfortunately, it’s Jailbreak territory if you want to downgrade from iOS 4 to iOS 3.1.1 again, and many users seem to have problems even with that method. So try the above methods first and let us know how they work for you.

Spotlight in iPhone 4.0 takes a %&@ good on-device search that could find your apps, contacts, and other personal data, and makes it a ^%^(&$ fantastic on-device and web-resource search that can also send text strings out to the internet — spelled Google and Wikipedia and bring you back the results.

First, yes, Google is still the default search engine, so that coffee break obviously worked. Second, yes, those Wikipedia strings that were discovered in previous iPhone 3.2 betas looks like they’ve finally surfaced.

Now if we could just search Twitter for real-time results… (Yeah, give us two services, we want twenty!)

[via Engadget]

UPDATE: WhenWillApple thinks they know what’s going on with the 3.1 fix.

Looks like the tempest has run out of room in the teapot, as that bug we linked to earlier, about iPhone 3.0 Spotlight showing email messages that should be well and truly deleted, seems to have indeed been crushed in iPhone 3.1.

[Via WhenWillApple]

UPDATE: iPhone 3.1 does indeed fix this.

Matt Janssen has discovered what looks like a bug in iPhone 3.0 Spotlight, whereby the search feature keeps emails in the index/cache even after they’ve been deleted from the inbox and purged from the trash (and even obliterated from the host server). Janssen claims in the video above he’s found emails he deleted several months ago using this method.

Email is likely cached to speed up searches. Initially tapping on a deleted email in a search result will launch Mobile Mail, which will promptly crash, but searching and tapping a second time will actually show the email, albeit in a buggy manner.

Engadget (via CultofMac) has heard this bug might be fixed in iPhone 3.1, now on Beta 3, and perhaps to be released as soon as Apple’s next iPod/iTunes event rumored for the week of September 7.

For some, even the newly expanded 11 Home Screen, 180 (including 4 fixed dock) app slots under iPhone 3.0 isn’t enough. It’s not about need — it’s about want. Luckily, iPhone 3.0 offers another handy, theoretically unlimited way to access apps: Spotlight. According to David Pogue:

You can install UNLIMITED APPS! Only 180 show up as icons—but Spotlight can find and open all of them! (And yes, we tried. Stopped at 250!)

So, check off every single one of your 56,000 (maybe?!) apps and sync them over. Then, instead of swiping right through 11 pages only to find the excess unaccessible, swipe LEFT to go to the Spotlight Search screen (or just press the home button again to get there super quick).

Next, start typing the name of the app, hidden or otherwise, you want to access, and as soon as it appears in the results, tap it to launch.

Boom. App pack rat bliss.

Note: Spotlight also shows WebClip icons you’ve bookmarked from MobileSafari to your Home Screen, so you can go crazy with quick access to your favorite websites as well.

And for those who prefer not to fill up their iPhone with apps, remember you can delete an app when not using it and download it again via the on-board App Store app, without any duplicate charges, any time. Cloud management is a reality, and a second option.

One of Dieter’s longest longings for the iPhone was the ability just to start typing to search. Just turn the phone on and start typing to launch a device-wide query for all your contacts, emails, events, etc.

Well, it looks like iPhone OS 3.0 finally delivers for him, and all of us. The new iPhone 3.0 Settings > General > Home Button preference page expands on the iPhone 2.0 options of Home, Phone Favorites, and iPod with the two new, much appreciated additions:

• Search
• Camera

Primarily an on-the-go photographer? Just set this option and the Camera is always just a double-click of Home away. Mobile accomplisher like Dieter, choose Search and with a double-click you can immediately start typing in Spotlight to launch Apps or find your data.

Boom.

The rumors had said that the iPhone would pick up some features that had been touted for the Pre. One feature of the Pre: Universal Search. The iPhone does the Pre one better with their Spotlight search — it not only searches contacts and apps, but will also search within other key applications like Mail and SMS.

Spotlight on the iPhone works thusly: it becomes your new left-most home screen. When you get there, you can just start typing to bring up a list of everything that matches your search. The list will include data from:

• Contacts
• Calendar
• Email (To, From, Subject)
• iPod
• Notes
• Messaging (SMS / MMS)
• Apps (name of App)

The search results get listed in a big, touchable list and each result will have the icon for the app it’s from set to the left of the result.

Ladies and Gentlemen: this is the single most important new feature of iPhone 3.0 for me and how I use phones. The ability to ‘just start typing’ in order to find what I want to get done is my killer app. How about you?

A lot of people have been poring over screenshots from the iPhone Software Roadmap event — our own Chad Garrett saw evidence that there might be Task/ToDo functionality built into iCal. The other shot that’s been making the rounds is the one above, where you can clearly see a magnifying glass at the top of the “scrolling strip” in the contacts app. The current speculation is that it will finally allow us to “Type to find” a contact rather than have to scroll through the list. That’s what I want, but Pocketnow has just posted up an editorial with this little tidbit:

However, none of the internet communities made mention of how this may be a function of the integration of Microsoft function; rather, these sites just mention it as an Apple update. [...] However, thinking back to the contacts search, perhaps this is a Microsoft innovation related to server searching ability for contacts and emails.

AHA! We know that Apple already told us we’d be able to search through an Exchange server’s Global Address list, and I wondered how exactly it would work. On Windows Mobile a search just automatically scans through both your local and the Exchange list — with luck it will do the same on the iPhone. It’s possible, though, that all we’ll get is a separate search of Exchange with that icon. Windows Mobile uses very similar databases as Exchange so a common search is likely much easier to implement than it would be on the iPhone.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that search icon might not give us the contact search functionality we’ve been jonesing for.

Apple’s Thursday press release (via Ars Technica), while big on Enterprise and chock-full of SDK goodness, also snuck in some new, long sought-after features for one of the built-in apps: MobileMail (Mail Touch?).

In addition to these new iPhone network and security features, the beta iPhone 2.0 software provides several new Mail features such as the ability to view PowerPoint attachments, in addition to Word and Excel, as well as the ability to mass delete and move email messages.

But what about the other built-in apps like Calendar and Contacts?

Our own eagle-eyed Chad Garrett has already spotted a mysterious new icon on Calendar, and predicted we may indeed see Task integration (GTD’ers, put it on your to do’s!).

Now BlargKABOOM (via TUAW) has hauled out the iMicroscope and discovered yet another tantalizing new icon, this time in Contacts:

It is a little spotlight icon right above the A on the alphabet.

Does this mean we may just be getting search as well? If so, how will it be implemented, and will it be limited to contacts or (dare we hope?) system wide, SDK-level CoreSearch?

iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, YouTube, the Weather, Stock and other widgets, and MobileSafari Touch have all had search for a while now. C’mon Apple, share the love!

Yesderday’s Apple Event was very, very exciting. My wife is a clinician and was almost leapt off of the couch when she saw Epocrates with the new functionality. I was excited by the gaming apps; go figure.

With all of this energy around the SDK, you might ask why am I feeling a bit disappointed? I feel there is still a lot of work to be done with the core iPhone applications and functionality. The iPhone has been out a year, yet there is basic and fundamental functionality still missing. I think we know what the big ones are; copy/paste and MMS. However, there are some areas that I don’t feel get enough attention. These areas include search and calendars.

It is very difficult to find an appointment on the iPhone. I literally have to go day by day to find an appointment. Since the iPhone runs OS X, where is my Spotlight?

For those of us who use multiple calendars, why can’t I add an appointment to any one of my calendars instead of a default one? While we are on the topic, where is my Notes and Task syncing?

I did notice the 2.0 calendar that was shown had the calendar buttons placed on the bottom instead of the top and a mysterious button located in the lower right. Could it be a task button? Am I getting worked up over nothing? Only time will tell.