Last week, we brought you the news that SwiftKey was sort of coming to iOS in the form of a note-taking app, and today, it's officially available to download. Because of Apple's stingy API, developers of core apps like SwiftKey Keyboard cannot get into the guts of iOS and deliver a true replacement key-tapping experience, but for those seeking a more efficient way to make notes on their iOS device, SwiftKey Note can now be grabbed from the iOS App Store. Details after the break!
If you're looking for a way to improve the functionality of your iOS Messages app but don't feel like shelling out for BiteSMS for iPhone, there are plenty of decent alternatives out there. Couria, which is currently available in beta, is one such tweak, offering a neat Quick Reply and Quick Compose system for a more efficient way of dealing with messages. At this point in time, it's free of charge, and having been tailored for the relatively new iOS 7, looks very much like a native feature.
Many of us would love to develop our own apps, tweaks and learn programming, but like our aspirations to master a new language, pick up a new instrument or go to Australia, issues such as time, money and work often prevent these things from happening. But a tweak called Flex has long since given those with little knowledge of code the ability to create their own patches, and with a thriving community having helped to make the sequel - aptly named Flex 2 - a reality, those of you looking to create your own iOS mods can continue to do so with ease.
In this day and age, we're always connected. If we're not using our smartphones to communicate with each other, then we're using our tablets. If it's not our tablets, then it's our computers. One byproduct of all this is that we need ubiquitous messaging. We want our messages, our conversations and settings to move between devices seamlessly, meaning we can start a conversation on our iPhones and finish it on our computers.
Lock screens are a largely personal affair. What one person thinks is perfection personified, another may call ugly and overbearing. We're big fans of minimalistic lock screens here at Redmond Pie, but that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of people out there that want every option known to man to be available as soon as they turn their screen on. Being able to tweak iOS to do just what you want is what jailbreaking is all about, after all.
Apple's notification banner feature, which first arrived with iOS 5, ensured that the days of constant, obtrusive pop-ups were long gone. But it's fair to say that amid some of the changes Jony Ive and the interface design team made with iOS 7, the new banner was more rather less flattering and more just flattening, with a plain, neutral drop-down seeming the product of thirty seconds of thought. But a new jailbreak tweak by the name of Coono takes the dominant color of an app's icon and uses it to shade said app's notifications.
Zephyr was one of the most popular tweaks for iOS 6, and if you happened to use it yourself, you'll know exactly why. The ability to swipe between app windows with such fluidity felt like a feature that should always have been a part of the iOS experience, and since the iOS 7 jailbreak came about courtesy of Evasi0n, we've heard from a number of readers asking if Zephyr for iOS would be making a reappearance for the latest and greatest version of Apple's mobile operating system. Just recently, a new tweak entered the jailbreak scene called MultitaskingGestures, which, as the name implies, brings that Zephyr-esque experience to the new firmware.
Jailbreaking iOS devices has many different benefits, but possibly the one that causes most to go through the process is the added ability to customize just about everything. In our experience we've found that people will customize just about every aspect of iOS, often in ways that we would never have imagined being useful. Useful or not, it seems people like to tweak things, especially when it comes to visual elements.
History has shown us that the most popular Cydia tweaks are those that work seamlessly with iOS to enhance to overall experience for the user. CleverPin, a tweak developed by Filippo Bigarella, is certainly one of the must-have options for the security conscious and has been updated with full support for iOS 7.
Thanks to the iPhone's various sensors, a lot can be achieved with very little or no input from the user. When we put the device to our face, for example, the proximity sensor beside the receiver automatically switches the device's display off, and on other occasions, such as gaming, the accelerometer does a lot of the hard work for us. But while these are all very useful, it's fair to say that Apple isn't really maximizing the hardware within but thanks to the wonders of a jailbreak - specifically a new, feature-rich tweak called FaceOff 7 - we can begin to explore things in a little more depth. Discover more of this marvelous tweak after the break!
