From The Tips Box: iOS Notifications, Firefox Search Box

Readers offer their best tips for opening notifications in iOS 5, finding out why a program isn’t responding, and using Firefox’s dedicated search box.

Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons — maybe they’re a bit too niche, maybe we couldn’t find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn’t fit it in — the tip didn’t make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favourites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Email it to tips at lifehacker.com.au.

Swipe iOS Notifications to View Them

Chase shares an incredibly useful gesture for iOS 5:

Just figured this out today…If you swipe the icon of a notification in the lock screen, it will unlock your iPhone and automatically redirect you to that notification. Comes in handy if you have multiple unread texts, emails, and other notifications but only want to view the most important/urgent one. I’m not sure if this works differently with a passcode protected iPhone.

Don’t Remove the Firefox Search Bar; Use It As a Secondary Search Engine

Dathbe shares a use for the seemingly unnecessary search box in Firefox:

I hear a lot of complaints from Chrome users about the redundancy of the search box in Firefox. Why not just use the address bar, they ask. Well, I set my search box to an engine other than Google so that I have two options depending on what I’m looking for and which engine I think will give me the better results.

After all, there are some searches you should make on engines other than Google.

Find Out Why a Program Isn’t Responding with Resource Monitor

Java-Princess shares another useful task manager for managing hung processes:

Here’s a useful alternative to closing a locked-up program from task manager. Launch resmon.exe from the start menu search box and then click the CPU tab. Right-click the process which is locked up, it should be highlighted in a different colour- – red on my system. Select Analyse wait chain. Sometimes it’s not the fault of the program that it locks up, it might be waiting on another process and that will show up here. You can then try closing the second program which can potentially save you from losing your work.

I haven’t been in a situation where I’ve gotten to test this, but it’s a good thing to check when you have a program that’s not responding.