Chapter 11. Surf the Web with the iPod Touch
If you have an iPod Touch, you know that it can download and run many cool apps from the App Store (Chapter 3). But it comes with a preinstalled app that might upstage anything you can find in Apple’s online emporium: Safari, Apple’s versatile web browser, scaled down and redesigned for your Touch. Safari lets you comfortably surf the World Wide Web from wherever you can hop onto a WiFi connection.
You may already use Safari on your Mac or PC—why yes, there is a Windows version—so using it on your Touch will feel familiar. But browsing on the Touch is a little different from browsing on a full-size computer screen, with little being the operative word here. Never fear—this chapter will show you the techniques, tips, and tricks you need to get big results out of that small window to the Web in your pocket.
Get Your WiFi Connection
To jump onto the Web with your iPod Touch, you first need to get connected to the Internet. That’s pretty easy, thanks to the sheer abundance of wireless networks these days—in homes, coffee shops, airports, hotels, college campuses, libraries, and more. WiFi, like love, is all around.
WiFi is geekspeak for wireless fidelity, a networking technology that lets you connect to the Internet over radio waves instead of wires. Also known as 802.11, it’s the same technology that lets desktop PCs, laptops, game consoles, and other devices connect to the Web wirelessly. When you come across a network you can tap into, you’ve found what’s called a WiFi hot spot.
The very first time you fire up an application that connects to the Internet, like Safari or iTunes, your Touch scans the airwaves for a WiFi signal and presents you with a short list of available networks.
From this list, tap the name of the network you want to join. If you select one with a small lock icon (
) next to its name, you’ll need a password to join. Type it in when the Touch prompts you to (on the next screen), and you’re ready to start surfing. The 
icon at the top of the Touch means you’re connected to the network.
Thankfully, the Touch remembers the network name and password you used the first time. From this point on, here’s the sequence you’ll see when you jump on the Net:
If your Touch detects a previously used network that’s up, running, and in range, it jumps back onto that network without fuss, and you see the
icon at the top of your screen, confirming your connection.If the Touch can’t find a previous network, it pops up the Select a Wi-Fi Network screen again, listing nearby hot spots, and you start the first-time connection dance all over again. See the next page for directions.
At home and confused about why your own network didn’t accept your Touch or isn’t showing up in the list of hot spots? Check your network’s modem and wireless router (the box with the blinking lights that broadcasts the network signal from your cable or DSL modem) to make sure everything is working.
Find More Hot Spots
The Touch is great at suggesting nearby networks and you may quickly find one you can join. But you’ll see only a couple of them in the Select a Wi-Fi Network box, usually the ones with the strongest signal and no password requirement, since the iPod wants to provide a good, simple connection.
While that keeps the list short and tidy (especially in big cities with lots of networks), it’s not the full list of nearby hot spots. The initial network-selection box also doesn’t show names of hidden networks, where the owner has decided not to publicly broadcast the network’s name for security reasons.
To see a list of all nearby visible networks, go to the iPod’s Home screen and tap Settings→Wi-Fi. On the unabridged list that comes up, tap the name of the network you want to join. (Don’t see it in the list? Odds are, it’s one of those “hidden” ones. Tap “Other” and move on to the next screen. In the box, type in the exact name of the network. You also need to know the type of security the network uses (like WPA2 or WEP; you may have to ask the network’s owner if it’s not you) and its password.
Use Commercial Hot Spots
Although your home and office WiFi networks are free, that’s not always the case when you’re on the go. Airports, hotels, and other places offer commercial hot spots. When you attempt to join of one these pay-to-play networks, you get a screen requesting your billing information before you can do anything online. (Before you do that, make sure this is a legitimate hot spot by checking the network name posted in the hotel room or airport waiting area. Fake hot spots are out there, so be careful.)
If you travel a lot, getting a long-term, discounted account with a hot spot vendor like Boingo, T-Mobile, or AT&T may save you money in the long run.
Take a Tour of Safari
Ready to surf? On the Touch, Safari is your on-ramp to the Web. By default, it occupies the third icon on the Home screen’s bottom row (below left), but you can put it anywhere (The Home Button and Home Screen). The first time you tap the Safari icon, a blank browser window appears (below middle). Tap its address bar to summon the Touch keyboard (below right) so you can type in a web address. Then hit the keyboard’s blue Go button to jump to that site.
So how do you use Safari once you get out on the Web? Here’s a guided tour of the program’s bars and buttons, starting from the upper left:
Address bar. As shown in action on the rightmost screen above, this narrow strip of typeable turf is where you enter a page’s web address (also known as its URL or Uniform Resource Locator—a term that dates back to the early days of the Web, when researchers, programmers, and scientists were its big users.)
, 
(Stop, Reload). See a typo after you enter an address, or change your mind about going to a site? Click the button in the address bar to stop loading the page-in-progress.
Note
The iPod Touch runs pretty much the same operating system (OS) as the iPhone, and Apple usually releases OS updates a few times a year. While some updates are simply security fixes, the company does occasionally make bigger overhauls, like redesigning the Safari interface. If your copy of Safari doesn’t look exactly like the one pictured here, odds are you’re running a version of the Touch’s OS released before or after iPhone/iPod Touch OS 4.1. You can see what flavor you have by tapping Home→Settings→General→About→Version.
After you tap Go, a Blue Progress Bar of Loading displays the page’s download status. Once the page appears onscreen, Safari converts that button to a button. Tap this circular-arrow icon to reload the page if, say, you’re checking sports scores or election results and want the absolute latest news—or if the page doesn’t look quite right and you want to download it again.
Search box. The mini-search box on the upper-right side of the screen is now a staple of most desktop browsers, and mini-Safari follows suit. Tap the box and type in your keywords, and then tap the blue Search button that appears in the bottom-right corner. (Change Your Default Search Engine shows you how to select a search engine—you have your choice of Google, Yahoo Search, or Microsoft Bing these days.)
, 
(Back, Forward). The first two icons on Safari’s bottom toolbar let you navigate backward and forward through the pages you’ve visited during an Internet session. Tap the button to go back to the page you were just on. When you do that, you now have the option to return to the page you just left with a tap of the button.
(Add). Tap here to do one of three things: Add a bookmark for the current page, add a shortcut to that page on your Home screen, or send a link to the page in an email message (which brings up the Touch Mail app with the link already embedded).
(Bookmarks). By tapping this icon, you can see all the bookmarks you’ve added to your Touch (Create and Use Safari Bookmarks), along with any you’ve synced over from your desktop or laptop computer (Sync Bookmarks with iTunes).
, 
(Pages). You’re not stuck with just one active web page at a time, and this little icon (in the bottom-right corner) tells you how many pages you currently have open. See Use Multiple Web Pages for more on managing multiple pages in Safari.
Zoom and Scroll Through Web Pages
When the iPhone and iPod Touch first appeared in 2007, many new owners spent hours zooming and scrolling through web pages because it was cool, fun, and novel. It was also practical, because a lot of websites hadn’t yet developed easy-to-read mobile versions of their sites, with type and graphics designed to maximize readability on the small screen (see RSS Feeds and Mobile-Friendly Sites on page 235).
But even when a site offers a mobile version, you sometimes need to see something on the regular, full-size version of it. Happily, when you type in the address of a “desktop” website, the Touch scrunches down the site’s pages into palm-size replicas.
So now that you can see a whole web page at once, can you read it? Probably not, unless you have extremely good (even microscopic) vision. Here’s where Safari on the Touch shows its versatility, because it offers multiple ways to make that page readable:
Rotate the Touch. Need just a bit of a size boost? Turn the Touch 90 degrees to the left or the right so you get a wider viewing window, which is known by its formal name, landscape mode.
Zoom and pinch. Place your thumb and forefinger (or whichever fingers you prefer) on the screen and slowly spread them apart to zoom in (enlarge) the part of the page between your fingers. To go in the opposite direction and reduce the size of the selected area, move your fingers closer together in a pinch formation (it’s the same way you harassed your siblings in the back of the car on family vacations).
Double-tap. Web pages are made up of different sections, and Safari can isolate each one and magnify just that part. Find the section of a page you want to read and double-tap it with your finger to expand it to the width of the Touch’s screen. Double-tap the area again to reduce the section to its original size.
When you zoom in on a page and want to read a part that’s out of view, simply drag your finger on the glass to pull that section to the center. You can also scroll around a page quickly by flicking your finger on the glass. As your finger flies around, you’ll pass over links, but Safari knows you’re in transit and doesn’t open them. To actually click a link, stop scrolling and tap the link with your finger.
Tip
Ever hit one of those page-within-a-page situations (also known as a frame), where the inner window has its own scroll bar but you can’t scroll inside it without scrolling the whole outer page? Don’t you just hate that? Never fear, Safari Touch can handle it. Just place two fingers on the frame and gently drag them up or down to scroll through just that part of the page.
Surf with Safari
Using Safari on your iPod Touch, you can move around the Web in several ways:
Typing. As mentioned earlier, you can go to just about any page on the Web as long as you can type in its address correctly.
Bookmarks. These shortcuts to favorite sites work like they do on desktop and laptop PCs, except that you tap them instead of click them.
History. Yes, Safari for the Touch keeps a history of your page-browsing activity, and you can easily tap your way to a page from your recent past.
Links. It wouldn’t be the Web without links. And all you need to do is tap.
The next few pages look into each of these surfing moves in detail, but first consider the address bar—and its handy shortcuts:
Jump back to the top. No matter how many miles down a page you’ve scrolled, you can quickly bop back up to the top by tapping the Touch’s black status bar, the one with the clock and battery icon. That brings you to both the top of the page and to Safari’s address bar, where you can type in a fresh address to surf to another site.
Delete an address all at once. You don’t have to hold down the delete key to whack a web address so you can type in a fresh one—just tap the
button at the right end of the bar to obliterate the entire address. To get to the icon (and pull up the keyboard), tap inside the address bar.In recent versions of the iPod Touch software, tapping the URL inside the address bar also brings up the Select and Select All buttons so you can copy a web address to the Touch’s clipboard (Chapter 3). If you already did that, you’ll see a Paste button.
Don’t over-type. As with most modern browsers, you can skip pecking out http:// and .com in web addresses, since Safari is savvy enough to stick those on for you. So, instead of typing http://www.amazon.com, just type amazon and hit Go. (If you need the suffix .net, .edu, .org, or .us, press and hold the .com button and slide across to the suffix you need, as shown at right.)
If you jumped right to this chapter because you wanted to start using Safari to roam the Web immediately, flip back to Chapter 3 for more on using the Touch keyboard.
Create and Use Safari Bookmarks
You can add browser bookmarks to Safari for the Touch two ways: right from the Touch as you search, surf, and discover new places around the Web, or by syncing your desktop bookmarks with the Touch (flip ahead to Sync Bookmarks with iTunes for instructions on how to do that).
No matter how you save ‘em, you find your Touch’s bookmarks in the same place. Just tap the icon at the bottom of the Safari screen.
Depending on how you organize your sites, you may see a collection of single bookmarks (as shown at right), or you may see them grouped into folders, just as you had them in your desktop browser. Tap a folder to open it, and then tap a bookmark to visit the corresponding site.
Add a New Bookmark
To add a cool new site to your Bookmarks list, tap the icon at the bottom of the screen and then tap the Add Bookmark button. On the Add Bookmark screen, you have these choices:
Rename it. Some websites have hideously long names, like “Uncle Earl’s Good-Time Five-String Finger-Pickin’ Jam Session,” but you can change that. Tap the top box on the Add Bookmark screen and rename the site to something shorter, like “Banjos.”
The box right below that—which you can’t mess with—displays the site’s official web address.
File it. The third box down lets you file the bookmark in a folder (see opposite page). Tap the Bookmarks link to open Safari’s list of bookmark folders. When you find the one you want, tap the folder’s name to deposit your bookmark there.
Edit and Organize Bookmarks and Folders
Safari lists bookmarks in the order in which you save them, and that may not be the easiest way to remember where they are. Touch Safari is ready for this inevitability, as well as the probability that you’d like to delete old bookmarks every once in a while.
Editing your bookmarks—and folders of bookmarks—is quick and efficient on the Touch. To edit a folder, tap the button and then tap the Edit button. To edit bookmarks inside a folder, tap the button, tap open the target folder, and then tap the Edit button.
Here’s what you can do to bookmarks and folders:
Delete them. When it’s time for that bookmark or folder to go, tap the
button and then tap the Delete button.Edit them. Need to rename a folder or bookmark? Tap a folder to get to the Edit Folder screen so you can change the folder’s name. If this is a folder inside a folder, you can move this inner folder, too. To edit a bookmark, tap it to get to the Edit Bookmark screen, where you can change its name and address. Tap the Back button in the upper-left corner when you’re done.
Refile them. To make, name, and file a new folder, tap the New Folder button in the lower-right corner of the Edit Folders screen.
Rearrange them. Need a new order for your bookmarks? As shown at right, drag the grip strip (
) up or down the list to move folders or bookmarks to a new place. (You can’t delete or move the History folder, however.)
Sync Bookmarks with iTunes
Over the years, you’ve probably built up a considerable collection of bookmarks on your desktop and laptop computers. In fact, you’re probably very attached to some of those links. The good news is you can take them with you—at least on the iPod Touch.
To copy your entire Internet Explorer or Safari bookmark library from your computer to your Touch, all you need to do is turn on a checkbox in iTunes. Connect your iPod, click its icon in the iTunes window, and click the Info button at the top of the screen. Scroll down past things you can sync, like contacts, calendars, and mail accounts, until you get to the section called Other. Now, do the following, depending on the type of PC you have:
Windows PCs: Turn on “Sync bookmarks with:” and then choose either Safari or Internet Explorer from the menu. Click Apply or Sync.
Macs: Turn on “Sync Safari bookmarks” and then click Apply or Sync.
If you use Mozilla’s Firefox browser, drop into the App Store (Chapter 3) and search for “Firefox.” You can find mini-programs, like Firefox Home, Mozilla’s own free app, to port your ‘Fox faves over to the Touch.
Any bookmarks you create on your iPod can make the trip back to your computer when you sync, too. But if things start to get too messy on the Touch, you can wipe out all its bookmarks and start over. In iTunes, scroll down to the Info screen’s Advanced area (under “Replace information on this iPod”) and turn on the checkbox next to Bookmarks. Click Apply or Sync to have iTunes replace all the bookmarks on the Touch with those from your computer.
The Safari History List
The History button on desktop browsers has saved many a soul who can’t remember the name of that really informative site from the other day. Safari on the Touch doesn’t let you forget your history, either (well, not without some work), and it, too, keeps a list of the sites you’ve surfed recently.
To see your web trail, tap the button and then tap the History folder, where Safari collects your past sites in tidy subfolders with names like “Yesterday.” Tap a bookmark within one of the History subfolders to go back in time—or at least back to that site. The link won’t be in the History folder forever (time does march on, and so does the History list), so you may want to bookmark it for real before it slips away.
Erase the History List
Don’t want to leave a record of your browsing history in case someone picks up your Touch and takes a peek? One way to prevent that is to set up a Passcode Lock on your Touch. Then, anyone who wants to get into your Touch will need a four-digit code to unlock the screen; see What’s in the Settings Menu for more.
Another way to clean up after yourself is to just erase your whole History list. To do that, open the History folder (below left), tap the Clear button in the bottom left (below middle), and then tap the Clear History button (below right). You’ve just wiped away History. Many politicians are probably envious.
Tip
Proud of your bookmarks and want to show them on your Home screen? Tap the button at the bottom of your browser and choose Add to Home Screen. The site’s icon is now right on the Touch’s main screen. And don’t worry about filling up your Home screen pages—you can have up to 11 of ‘em and flick between them.
Tap Links
Links on the Touch work just like links on any other computer, except that on the Touch, you tap a link with your finger instead of clicking it with your mouse. While websites traditionally display links in blue, that’s not always the case; you can find links of just about any color online, and oftentimes pictures, logos, and other graphics turn out to be links as well.
If you want to know where a link points to before you click it (not a bad idea in these days of rampant bad behavior and evildoing on the Web), hold your finger on the link for a second or two. A box like the one at below right slides up, offering you three options: to open the page right away, to open the page in a new window (Open in New Page) so you can easily switch back and forth among pages, and to copy the link.
The Copy option lets you paste the link into a Notes document so you can save it (Other Icons on the Touch Home Screen), or into an email message so you can share it. Speaking of email, when you tap a link in a Touch Mail message (Use Email on the Touch), Mail closes and Safari opens to take you the site. Yes, these hyperlinks are a pretty nifty invention.
RSS Feeds and Mobile-Friendly Sites
As cool as Touch Safari is about showing you full websites on a tiny screen (well, except for sites that have Adobe Flash files embedded in them, an interactive technology the Touch doesn’t support), they can sometimes be a lot of work to read. That’s especially true if you just want to get a quick look at the news, or to find out the basic details of a story. That’s where two really wonderful parts of the Web come in: RSS feeds and mobile-friendly sites. Here’s how to use both:
RSS Feeds
Depending on which nerd you’re taking to, RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. No matter what you call it, though, RSS is a fabulous technology for your Touch (or any other smartphone with a browser). It lets you subscribe to short text dispatches called feeds sent out by thousands of sites and news sources around the world.
Feeds, like the one shown at right, provide a linked headline and a short summary of the related story. You can see (and bookmark) a site’s feed on your Touch by tapping the RSS Feed link on its home page, or by typing the feed’s own URL into the Safari address bar (hint: It often starts with the prefix feed://). Once you get to the feed’s home page, there are no ads, flashing banners, or dancing hamsters clogging up the works—just straightforward text. When you want to read more about a story, tap its link.
Mobile-Friendly Sites
Many major news organizations and other companies have noticed that this whole smartphone/mobile browser thing has caught on with the public, and they offer versions of their sites optimized for the small screen, with smaller graphics and bigger type.
When you surf on the Touch, you’ll likely get served up the mobile edition of a site automatically. If that doesn’t happen, try exchanging the www in the URL with an m, as in m.cnn.com. (The m stands for mobile.)
Search the Web
Imagine trying to find anything on the Web without search. At more than 15 billion web pages and counting (according to www.worldwidewebsize.com), the Web would be a pretty hard place to pinpoint information unless you knew exactly where to find it. And how many of us can lay claim to that sort of confidence?
Fortunately, the Web offers search engines. And fortunately for iPod Touch owners, three of them are built right into Safari. You can use any one as your Sherlock of the Web.
The next page explains how to set your default search engine, but no matter which one you use, they work the same way. To search the Web, tap the Search box on the upper-right side of the Safari window and then, when the keyboard appears, type in your keywords. Tap the blue Search button in the bottom-right corner to start the hunt.
Mobile web search has come a long way since 2007, when the original iPhone and iPod Touch hit the scene; back then, their browsers didn’t even have a search box. But nowadays, many search engines come in mobile-friendly versions that round up general results, news, video clips, and images. As you can see below, Google and Bing let you tap different tabs on the results page (or under the 
menu on the Yahoo screen) to see the various types of information the search engine has thoughtfully rounded up.
Change Your Default Search Engine
Google is the default search engine for many people, both at the desk and on the go, but it’s not like you have to use it. Yahoo and Microsoft also offer smooth-running engines that can bring back slightly different results from what the Big Goog might give you. In the case of search, the more choices, the better, and you can change things up anytime you want by switching Safari’s default search engine.
To try Yahoo Search or Microsoft Bing (or to go back to Google if you switched before), visit the Home screen and tap Settings→Safari→Search Engine. On the Search Engine screen (shown below on the right), tap the name of the provider you’d like to use.
Tap the Safari button in the top-left corner to go back to the previous screen to adjust other settings (like turning on the Autofill feature that lets Safari automatically fill in your contact info, user names, and passwords on web forms), or press the Home button to bail out of the Settings area and get back to searching and surfing.
Tip
Search engines do more than find web pages—they can also act as electronic crib sheets for quick data points. Need the weather forecast for Boston? Type weather 02114 into the search box. Movies in Manhattan? Type movies 10018. You can also get stock quotes by typing in a company’s ticker symbol, unit conversions (kilometers in 6 miles), and dictionary definitions (define bildungsroman).
Play Online Audio and Video
In the early days of the Touch, streaming audio and video from the Internet was an exercise in frustration, mainly because many sites used media formats, like RealPlayer and Flash, that the Touch couldn’t play. While there are still plenty of sites that don’t work with mobile Safari, more and more do. And on its own, the Touch can play MP3, WAV, and QuickTime audio files right off the Web. It also plays QuickTime movies in certain formats, like H.264.
Here are a few news sites that play well with mobile Safari:
BBC News. The Beeb’s podcasts stream nicely, and you can search shows by radio station, genre, or get an A-to-Zed list. www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/
New York Times podcasts. This is a whole page of different news shows that start streaming when you tap the MP3 link. www.nytimes.com/podcasts
But you’re not just stuck with Safari—you can stream audio or video through apps like the ones below, all available in the App Store (Chapter 3):
Last.fm. With a free account and the free Last.fm app from the App Store, you can build your own streaming radio station. www.last.fm/
Pandora Radio. Another option for personalized radio, also with its own desktop site and App Store offering, Pandora analyzes your musical taste and streams similar, but new, tracks. www.pandora.com
Netflix. Stream high-quality movies and TV shows to your Touch. All you need is an unlimited plan from Netflix ($9 and up) and the Netflix app, available free in the App Store. www.netflix.com
Hulu Plus. A mere $10 a month in subscription fees and the free Hulu Plus app from the App Store sets you up with thousands of TV episodes from old and new series. www.hulu.com/plus
Don’t want to pay for streaming video? You can always visit Home→YouTube for something truly entertaining (or weird). And Apple, in addition to all its iHardware offerings, hosts a huge collection of movie trailers on its site at www.apple.com/trailers. Tap a movie poster to get started.
Social Networking on the iPod Touch
With your iPod Touch, you can keep connected to all your favorite social networking sites wherever you can tap into a wireless network. Although you can surf to mobile versions of social sites, complete with stripped-down graphics, just about every social site out there now has a custom iPhone/iPod Touch app waiting for you in the App Store.
Chapter 7 has info about the iTunes Store, and Chapter 3 has instructions on how to install Touch apps. Once you’re ready, here’re some of the apps out there:
Facebook and MySpace. Both mega-popular destinations have free apps streamlined for the Touch. Customized with easy-to-read text and big, tappable icons, you can easily update your status, upload photos from your Touch camera, and keep up with your friends. Once you download and install the app, you need only to fire it up and log in, just like you do on the regular site.
Flickr. Browsing the pictures on this massive photo-sharing site is nice and easy with Flickr’s own app, which neatly arranges images in a grid on the Touch’s screen, with full-screen views a tap away. Once you log into your Flickr account, you can easily get all your photo albums and tags by tapping icons at the top of the screen. You can also choose to see your images listed vertically, with each photo’s name and comments in full view.
Foursquare. The new kid on the block when it comes to social networking, Foursquare is the service that lets you announce just which block you happen to be on—or your current choice of restaurant, store, or other location. You do so by “checking in” with the service, which then posts your whereabouts so your Foursquare pals can find you.
Twitter. Using this widely popular micro-blogging service is much more fun using the Touch than trying to text out pithy thoughts on a tiny mobile-phone keypad (unless, of course, it’s an iPhone). Twitter has its own app, but there are several others for the service, including Twitterific and HootSuite.
Use Multiple Web Pages
Tabbed browsers, like Internet Explorer and Firefox, have changed the way people surf. If you need to compare two pages or flip back and forth between them, you no longer have to open them in two separate windows. Tabs let you easily click back and forth between pages in the same window, making your own personal space-time continuum much more efficient.
Safari on the iPod Touch lets you do a variation on the concept of tabbed browsing. You can push older pages off to the side when you need to open a new one, but still have both within a finger’s reach. Here’s what you can do:
Open a new page. Need to check something on another site? Tap the
button in the lower-right corner. Your current page shrinks into the background. Tap the New Page button in the lower-left corner to get a fresh blank page to address. You can open up to eight pages this way. To see how many pages you have open at once, check the icon, which now has a tiny number inside it. If you see , for example, you currently have three pages open.Switch to another open page. Go back and tap
again. See those dots (• • •) underneath the mini-page (circled)? The number of dots equals the number of web pages you have open, with the white dot highlighting the current page. Flick through and tap a mini-page to expand it to full screen.Close a page. Tap that useful
icon again and flick to the mini-page you’re ready to close. Tap the 
button in the top-left corner to do so.
Use Safari Security
The Web is full of wonders—it’s like the collective consciousness and accumulated knowledge of everyone who’s ever used it, right there for you to explore. The Web is also full of jerks, criminals, and general-purpose evildoers, so you have to take care to keep your personal information safe in this Playground of Information. To see how Safari can help protect you, go to the Touch’s Home screen and tap Settings→Safari. Your defenses include these:
Fraud Warning. Some websites aren’t what they appear to be; their main purpose is phishing—using a masquerade to get you to enter personal information, like bank account and Social Security numbers. Make sure this setting is on so Safari can warn you when a site stinks like bad phish.
JavaScript. This coding tool lets developers run little programs within web pages. Many are innocent, and most people leave JavaScript turned on, but some are not, and JavaScript can also slow down page loads. Turn it off or on here.
Block Pop-ups. Once a web surfer’s lament, these unwanted extra windows (often hawking cheesy products and services) have been largely shattered by pop-up blocking controls in most browsers. Still, you may need a pop-up window here and there to order concert tickets or to fill in web forms. You can block or unblock pop-ups here, but it’s a universal setting for all sites.
Accept Cookies. A cookie is a little file that helps a website recognize you. This can be good—you get a personal greeting from sites you revisit, for example—or bad, because some cookies track and report (to paying third parties) the ads you respond to. Here, you can choose to have Safari take a cookie Never, Always, or only from sites you actually visit. You can also tap the Clear Cookies button to erase them all.
Databases. Tap here to see which sites store info locally on your Touch.
Clear History. Tap this button to erase your Safari history (The Safari History List).
Clear Cache. The cache is where your Touch stores downloaded graphics and other web page parts to speed your surfing. You can jettison these files by tapping Clear Cache here.
Use MobileMe to Keep Data in Sync
A WiFi connection is your iPod Touch’s lifeline to the Internet, giving you the connection you need to browse the Web, check your email, and play online games. An Internet connection also lets you take advantage of cloud computing—storing data and files online, on giant servers in the metaphorical sky so you can get to them from whatever Internet-connected device you happen to be using down here on Earth.
Cloud computing works great for synchronizing your contacts, calendars, mail, and other information across Internet-enabled devices. Having all your email stored in the same set of folders whether you’re on your desktop PC or your iPod Touch is a beautiful thing. So is jotting down a new contact number on your Touch and having it show up in your Address Book back on your Mac. With Apple’s MobileMe service, you can do all that and more.
First, a little about MobileMe: It’s a $100-a-year subscription service you buy from Apple, and for that annual Benjamin, you get a whole bunch of tools and services designed to make your online life a little easier. For instance, you get an @me.com email address, an online gallery so you can post your favorite photos and videos, a chunk of space on Apple’s servers called an iDisk that you can use to back up or share large files, and an online parking space for your contacts and calendar info. You start out with 20 gigabytes of space, but Apple will gladly sell you more room if you find you need it.
So how do you get started with MobileMe? Easy. Just connect your Touch to your computer and click the Info tab in iTunes. In the MobileMe area, click the Learn More (Windows) or Set Up Now (Mac) button.
iTunes whisks you away to MobileMe’s sign-up area, where you supply your credit-card number, pick out a user name and password, and download any necessary software, like the MobileMe Control Panel for Windows.
Once you’re all signed up and have that software installed, it’s time to set up your computer and then the Touch. The next page explains how to do both.
Set Up MobileMe on a PC or a Mac
Now that you have a MobileMe account that’ll sync your data between machines, you have to tell MobileMe what you want to sync.
In Windows, choose Start→Control Panel→Network and Internet→MobileMe. On a Mac, choose
→System Preferences→MobileMe.Click the Account tab and sign in with your user name and password.
Click the Sync tab. Turn on the checkbox next to Sync with MobileMe and choose how often you want your MobileMe data pushed out to your Touch (and to any other computer you plan to use with the service). Most people choose Automatically.
Next, choose the info on your computer (like contacts, bookmarks, and appointments) that you want to sync to your Touch over the airwaves.
Click the Sync Now button to upload your computer’s info to Apple’s servers.
Click OK to close the box. The first part is done. Now you need to set up the Touch to accept all the data pushed to it from MobileMe.
Set Up MobileMe on the Touch
On the Touch, choose Settings→Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
Tap Fetch New Data. On the next screen, make sure you have Push set to On.
Tap the icon in the top-left corner to go back to the previous screen. Now tap Add Account, choose MobileMe, and fill in your MobileMe user name and password.
Turn on Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, and Notes. You can even activate Find My iPod Touch—which maps the location of a lost or stolen Touch at www.me.com if it’s on a WiFi network.
