As stated on numerous occasions, the number of image-based apps post-Instagram has grown at an incredible rate, and although many boast a plethora of great features, minimalism is oft overlooked, yet can yield some beautiful, elegant results.
With its thick veil of secrecy and unique approach to every product it creates, the fascination surrounding Apple is unmatched in the consumer electronics industry, and whether it's the latest iPhone or the memoirs of the late Steve Jobs, a large amount of interest always encircles the Cupertino company.
Following some mild teasing at events like the Mobile World Congress earlier this year, AT&T has just officially announced that it's entering the home automation and security business with its Digital Life suite of services to compete with the likes of Crestron, Lutron, and other noteworthy providers of premium home automation. To deliver the functionality demanded of home automation, an array of connected devices will be provided such as cameras, window and door sensors, smoke, carbon monoxide, motion, and glass break sensors, door locks, thermostats, moisture detection, and appliance power controls.
It may not bring the most exciting of functionality to a jailbroken device, but the new VertaSwitch tweak that has just landed on Cydia does offer users the ability to change the visual app switching properties of the device. As we all should know by now, switching between running apps is as simple as double pressing the home button to invoke the app switcher and then selecting the desired app to display.
When iOS 5 was released last October, it brought with it a sleuth of features big - iCloud, Siri, and iMessage most notably - and small, such as the ability to assign individual text tones to contacts, for one. And now that the months are flying by and we're beginning to approach the release date of first beta of the next major version of iOS - iOS 6 - now seems like the perfect time to pen a list of features that I hope Apple introduces to iOS.
The endless possibilities created when that Cydia icon first appears on the iOS home screen should never be underestimated, and it's thanks to the likes of Redsn0w - the popular jailbreak tool released by the iPhone-Dev Team - that users can truly test the resolve of their iPhone, iPad or iPod touch devices.
Since the introduction of iOS 5 in October 2011 to the public, Notification Center has been a staple part of the iDevice diet for users and has brought about an efficient and easily accessible method of accessing any device notifications. Even though Notification Center is used daily by iPhone owners and has been extremely well received, there are obviously a few things that users would like to change.
The App Store contains over 600,000 apps in total, and while there are plenty to choose from in a variety of categories, the improvement of the iPhone's camera has seen a meteoric rise in the number of camera and image manipulation-based apps.
Apple products are renowned for being in sync with each other in a harmonious, seamless fashion. The Cupertino company places much emphasis on getting things done with less and less wires, buttons, and optical drives, and designer Ishac Bertran has created a wonderful concept in keeping with that motif.
The Apple iPhone 4S has been with us for about seven months now, which means that we have also had the fabulous Siri personal assistant organizing our digital lives for the same amount of time. For those non iPhone 4S owners the lack of official Siri support has been very frustrating, especially considering numerous developers have proved that Apple's assistant performs perfectly fine on older generation devices.
