Instant Messaging apps are absolutely everywhere, and despite a cluster of established, widely-used efforts, newer ones continue to crop up all of the time. WhatsApp Messenger, which works on essentially all of the major mobile platforms, has been around for a number of years and boasts a user base well into the hundreds of millions, but despite offering a decent array of features, it could still use some improvements. Not being able to send more than 10 photos at once on the iPhone app, for example, is of major annoyance to some, but luckily, a new tweak by the name of WhatsApp Unlimited Media allows jailbreakers to bypass this limitation.
Supposedly private photo sharing service Snapchat has proven hugely popular, especially amongst teenagers and anyone wanting to share images that they want to be automatically deleted once viewed. The technology lends itself to sending and receiving photos that contain sensitive information - self destructing messages if you like - but is largely used to send much less important things.
After being originally teased back in October of last year, the Beats Music app is now available to download for iOS, Android and Windows Phone through the relevant app stores. Beats, a company who take their music very seriously, are describing the new service as a place being "curated by people who believe music is emotion and life". The differentiating factor that exists within Beats Music appears to be the fact that the app and service is built around musical customization that exists to try and present subscribers with a perfectly curated playlist of music based on their current tastes and moods.
It's fair to say that, with iOS 7, animation is a much more prevalent feature than ever before. But thanks to the closed-source nature of the Apple firmware, customization is about as non-existent as it has ever been, but thanks to the wonderful work of the jailbreak community - namely, the Evad3rs team with their Evasi0n7 utility - we can actually now tweak the animations way beyond what we could have imagined at stock level. The Animer for iPhone tweak has been around a while to facilitate this, and in news that will certainly appease long-time users and jailbreakers, it has just been updated for iOS 7.
It's true that not everyone is a big fan of what Apple has done with iOS 7. In fact, it's probably more accurate to say that there's something of an anti-iOS 7 movement on the internet, and while Apple has rolled back some of its more outlandish changes, it's never going to take all of its alterations back.
It's pretty much common knowledge by now that Apple integrated native game controller support with the launch of iOS 7 last year. The officially introduced APIs in the iOS 7 SDK make it relatively easy for game developers to allow their offerings to be interacted with via a hardware controller that conforms to Apple's blueprints. However, the initial wave of controllers have proven to be quite expensive, prohibitively so in some cases, meaning that not a lot of users are taking the plunge and parting with upwards of $99 to play a $0.99 game. Thankfully the jailbreak community has come to the rescue once again with the release of Controllers for All, a tweak that allows PlayStation 3 DualShock 3 controllers to be used in conjunction with these MFi Game Controller iOS 7 games.
Although, thanks to the most recent major update, the iOS home screen isn’t as boring and uneventful as before, it still draws criticism for its one-dimensional nature and general lack of customizability. Even with a jailbreak, you’re never quite going to be able to enjoy the eclectic mix of launchers, widgets and multiple home screens a la Android, but thanks to the recent work of Evad3rs, you can bring a little bit of life to your home screen. Random Icon Flip, as you will probably have gathered, will flip random icons around for no other reason than aesthetic enjoyment, and although it is almost as pointless as it sounds, does help to rejuvenate the otherwise monotonous view. Originally released back in 2011, the tweak now has received an update, bringing with it support for iOS 7, Apple’s latest and greatest mobile OS.
Battery life and network signal strength received by the iPhone is definitely up there at the top of legitimate concerns that users have, and thankfully both can be addressed in some form. Signal Booster, a package for jailbroken iPhones, has just been updated to support modern hardware, meaning that there could be some level of improvement for those who are facing signal problems, regardless of version of iOS which the user is running.
Apple may be on a quest to rid the world of buttons, but it hasn't quite managed to pull it off just yet. Our iPhones have touch-screens that can take the strain for the most part, but we still have hardware Home and power buttons. In many ways it's the way it needs to be, but that's no consolation when either your hardware buttons stop working, or you have a specific accessibility need that means pressing those hardware buttons isn't practical.
We'd argue that Notification Center is still something of a missed opportunity for Apple. Since it was introduced we've all hoped that the company would add new features to the pull-down shade that makes it more useful, but despite promising signs here and there it seems that Apple is blind to the possibilities that could be afforded by opening Notification Center up to developers.
