Apple's Messages app, save a little occasional downtime to iMessage, provides a fairly solid and secure overall service, but customization is extremely limited. Your chat bubbles remain two colors, the background has the aura of the sky on a dull, wintry day and aside from the aesthetics, options regarding functionality are few and far between. Luckily for the jailbreakers, there are plenty of tweaks out there to rectify this, and one, which goes by the name of MessageRenamer, allows you to change the name of a conversation to anything you like.
Not so long ago, Facebook's mobile prowess, or lack thereof, was a frequent criticism of the social network, but ever since version 5.0 landed for both iOS and Android, things have taken a dramatic upturn. Mark Zuckerberg and his team have been making frequent announcements of new features and enhancements just lately, and as a part of this progressive effort to improve the service, the iOS app has today been afforded a healthy update. Details after the break.
The wonderful world of jailbreaking contains more developers and designers than we could even begin to try and list. Even though a large portion of those individuals are frequently active within the community; experience has shown us time and time again that a handful of impressive and hard-working developers consistently push out imaginative and useful tweaks for those with jailbroken devices. Prominent developer Ryan Petrich is undoubtedly one of those guys and he is at it again with VideoPane, his latest release that adds to his growing portfolio of tweaks, utilities and frameworks.
Vine, and more recently, Instagram, are pretty well established when it comes to video sharing. However, if two individuals were ever going to build an app to compete with these two giants, it would be Chad Hurley and Steven Chen. If those names don't sound familiar, well, they should, because the duo were jointly responsible for founding YouTube. Hurley and Chen have put their heads together once more to come through with MixBit, a video creation/ sharing app with a little twist.
When Facebook made its well-publicized purchase of Instagram last year for one billion dollars, many fans of the photo-sharing app feared the worst - that their beloved service was to become an extension of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has stuck to his promise to allow Instagram to retain its own identity, but much integration between the two has ensued, and in the latest, Facebook Messenger for iPhone has just been updated, adding, among other things, a new Instagram sharing feature.
WhatsApp is one of the most popular cross-platform messaging apps and today, the company has delivered a solid update for the main platforms. The changes, which span iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry OS and Symbian, include a new feature which allows you to record and send a message with just one tap, making the whole service just that little bit more pleasurable. You can catch all of the details after the break!
When it comes to customization, iOS is one of the least compliant mobile ecosystems. In fact, the only way to apply any kind of theme or aesthetic alteration is usually by means of a jailbreak, so if you can't, or simply don't want to step into the world of Cydia and its many thousands of tweaks and themes, you're pretty much stuck with what Apple has given you. Well, that needn't necessarily be the case with a new app called Iconical, which lets you alter the appearance of your home screen icons without the need to apply any sort of jailbreak.
The Apple iPhone was seen as a revolutionary product, but also an evolutionary one by the same token since it was introduced off the back of the success of the iPod range. In today's world concerned with apps and shot-taking abilities, many of us don't hold our iPhones in as high a regard as a music player, often viewing it as just as standard a feature as making a call or sending a text. But if you're the kind of person that still takes your audio experience rather seriously, you may interested by the app Audio-3D Player 7.1, which offers a richer, surround sound-like experience.
It has long since been noted that the once clear distinction between OS X, Apple's desktop OS, and iOS, the company's mobile firmware, has been blurred over the past couple of years, and Mountain Lion, the current latest official version of OS X, is certainly a testament to that notion with its implementation of features like iMessage and Notification Center. Despite the growing list of similarities between the two, they remain aesthetically like night and day, but if you're keen to bring that desktop look and feel to your iPhone, a new OS X Mavericks 10.9 theme has you covered.
Whenever Samsung drops a new flagship device, the company always seeks to outdo itself and indeed its rivals with a plethora of new and exciting software features. When the Galaxy S4 hit the market earlier on this year there were more such implementations than ever before, and the eye sensing feature, Smart Pause, which pauses video clips when a user looks away, has proved a solid gold hit with consumers. With Apple seemingly unlikely to add this kind of functionality to iOS anytime soon, iPhone users probably won't be able to enjoy the same video viewing experience of their S4-owning rivals, but thanks to a new tweak by the name of FaceHalt, they now can, on a system level.
