While it's true that not everyone is an iTunes fan, many will concede that iTunes 11’s MiniPlayer feature is actually rather nifty. Evoking memories of the good old days of Winamp, the miniature iTunes offers just the functionality required to get the job done, all whilst avoiding taking up the entire screen just so users can skip tracks.
Mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad - and to some extent the iPod touch - have made us all more socially aware and allow us to interact with people around the world with ease. It's human nature to interact with others and express our social sides, which is one of the reasons why social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Path have managed to ingrain themselves in our lives. But what about those social beavers who either happen to travel a lot and want to see what's going on around them or just want to discover new and topical events going on in their hometown? CalendApp could be the perfect tool.
There's no getting away from the fact that mobile devices like the iPhone and iPod touch are all about convenience and being able to do what we want to do with our connected lives. Whether it be accessing Facebook on the move, downloading the latest music track from a favorite artist or reading what's going on in the world from a cherished news app; the power of mobile is in plain view. It's for that exact reason why iOS device owners love to jailbreak their devices, and it doesn't come anymore convenient that the new LockscreenToggles tweak when it comes to getting almost immediate access to an array of system settings.
The jailbreak community has never failed to amaze us with the innovative and inventive tweaks that they manage to conjure up in their minds. Refreshing and filtering through Cydia inevitably brings up a wide variety of different types of packages and enhancements for jailbroken iOS devices, with some of the more popular tweaks proving to be those simple implementations that live directly on the lock screen of the phone. One of the latest to tackle the lock screen is the Piano Passcode offering and we have to say that it gets ten out of ten for originality.
Angry Birds has been the runaway success of the mobile era, and having started as a simple game for the Apple iPhone, now spawns every major platform with numerous adaptations of the original title. We learned early on last month that Angry Birds Friends, a social take on the popular format, would soon be debuting over at the App Store, and today, creator Rovio Entertainment has delivered a double whammy of avian-slinging madness by releasing the title for both iOS and Google's Android.
We've checked out an abundance of tweaks recently here at Redmond Pie for those who love nothing more than to play music on their iOS devices, and if you are reliant on your iPhone as a double-up mp3 player, you will have almost certainly experienced that rueful situation whereby you misplaced, forgot or even completely lost your headphones. No headphones mean no music, or at least it should do in a public place, but if you're in ownership of an earpiece for purpose of making handsfree calls, a new tweak over at the ModMyi repo will see this double up as a makeshift earbud.
Apple's iOS weather app is functional, that's for sure. In fact, it's about the only really good thing we can say about it. It'll tell you the weather forecast for any location you ask of it, and it'll represent that forecast with some nicely drawn logos. Terrific stuff.
Weather is a funny old thing, unless you happen to be caught up in the middle of it. There's nothing worse than the best laid plans being ruined by some unseasonal rain, or perhaps even unseasonal sunshine! The iOS App Store is literally flooded (bad pun!) with weather apps as far as the eye can see - some are good, some are bad, even more are downright abysmal.
Spotlight search, although not a feature of everybody's iOS-navigating repertoire, is still seen as an important feature of Apple's mobile OS, and although relatively one-dimensional at stock level, the jailbreak scene has certainly found plenty of uses for the native search feature. Those of you who've used Alfred for OS X will be more than aware of its strengths when it comes to speeding up the process of finding exactly what you want, and one Cydia developer has taken the strengths of Alfred and sought to implement them into Spotlight.
The music controls on the lock screen of iOS, which are brought about with a simple double tap of the home button, are very useful in allowing you to play, pause, or skip through your music library without having to go and open the Music app itself. But if you're one of those people that like to skip to certain parts of a song, you have to go through the tiresome rigmarole of unlocking, perhaps typing in a passcode, and opening up the music app before scrubbing to find that favorite part of the track.
