From day-to-day, we see and hear many rumors and supposed 'inside information' regarding unconfirmed, unannounced, and unspecified products. Some are plausible, and make sense, if only vaguely, whilst others seem somewhat far-fetched.
For those who prefer to embark on their iOS journey in a landscape orientation, it may be slightly annoying that certain native apps and parts of the OS isn’t set-up with landscape support. Apps such as the default Settings app are strictly portrait-only affairs and no matter how ferociously you flip that device around; it refuses to to budge. The same goes for the multitasking switcher tray which can be invoked by double tapping the Home button on the device. The bar that appears along the bottom on the screen containing backgrounded apps is designed to work in portrait mode only.
It's almost that time again; work on Apple's next iPhone release is well underway, and, according to a report from a local news outlet in China, the Foxconn factory in Taiyuan wishes to hire around 20,000 employees to specifically work on the next-generation iPhone. The report notes that the factory is "urgently" in need of this massive workforce to meet demand for production. This should come as no surprise; we'll likely hear more about Foxconn factories expanding and hiring workers in preparation for the big release.
Although Apple pushed out iOS 5.1 along with the release of the new iPad earlier this month, it didn't really bring any earth shattering changes to delight the iOS user community. One of the additions that Tim Cook and his team talked about is the fact that they have removed the option to double tap the Home button on the lockscreen to display a camera shortcut button in favor of permanently displaying a camera icon that reacts to a swipe up gesture.
The lack of Messages app alternatives on Cydia could be either due to the fact that biteSMS and others have pretty much covered all bases and are extremely functional, or it could have something to do with the amount of work involved in creating such an app. Whatever the reason, the guys over at Handcent haven't been deterred and have released their HandcentSMS app through the Cydia store which they believe can unlock the messaging potential of a user’s iPhone. HandcentSMS is an entirely free, very powerful and highly customizable alternative to Apple's native app which handles both SMS and MMS messaging services.
When the iOS App Store was first launched in 2008, not even Apple themselves could have predicted the store’s meteoric rise to become the undisputed heavy-weight champion of the app distribution world. At the beginning of 2011 Apple launched a competition, offering a $10,000 iTunes gift card to the lucky App Store user who downloaded the 10 billionth app from the store. The Cupertino company has since repeated that offering by giving away a gift card of the same value to whoever downloaded the twenty-fifth billionth app.
Users of a Mac, or even a Windows-based PC, will be aware of the fact that you can flick between running apps by using the command/Alt and Tab buttons together. A quick press of these two buttons will flick to the last viewed app and back again. However, if you hold the buttons down together, a nice little view is overlaid on the screen which shows all of the running apps and allows the user to toggle between them all and choose one quickly. An iOS developer known as coffeejayyy has decided to make an iOS implementation of that feature and has called it CmdTab, available in Cydia now.
As a company, Apple doesn't particularly like to rely on Samsung or Google to keep its affairs ticking over. It's been common knowledge for a while now that Apple is looking to have its own maps/navigation system - a move which would see the current Google Maps app disappear from iOS, and just today, Sina Tech has reported that Apple is looking to replace Google Search on iOS devices in China with Baidu. Although Baidu is not such a big deal in the Western World, but is the number one search-based outfit in the Chinese market - by a long shot.
The official iOS App Store from Apple changed the way consumers think about and purchase software in a similar fashion to how the launch of the iTunes music store revolutionized the online music industry. The App Store was born in 2008 and has grown at a rapid rate over the last few years as millions of users tap into it on a daily basis to download and install apps spanning across multiple genres. Only recently Apple announced that the App Store had served up over 25 billion downloads since its inception, bringing proof if anyone needed it of the phenomenal success of the store.
One of the most favored update to be implemented into a new build of iOS has to be Apple's iMessaging system that came bundled with iOS 5 back in October 2011. The iMessage service is Apple's messaging experience on iOS devices, working across the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and soon to be officially supported by the Messages app as part of the new OS X Mountain Lion operating system coming this summer. The service allows all iOS 5 users to send unlimited messages over a data or Wi-Fi connection to other iMessage users and is bundled as part of the native Messages app.
