When it comes to testing the speed of one's internet connection, few do it better than Speedtest.net for obvious reasons. The site has long since been a portal for providing accurate speed tests, and in more recent times, its mobile app has helped those on-the-fly to detect the speed of their cellular data or connected hotspot. Today, the iOS Speedtest.net app has been given a significant update, and as well as belated support and optimization for Apple's iPhone 5, there's now the option to remove the ads by means of a 99 cent in-app purchase. Details, as well as the download link, are coming up right after the break.
As a music fanatic, I am always looking for new ways to enjoy my favorite artists on my mobile devices. For me, it's all about minimalism and functionality, and it's a motif to which the awesomely-named developer WhazCool also appears to subscribe. Its MorningTunes app is not only striking in terms of UI, but actually proposes a very intuitive system which purports to understand your collection of music.
An early morning alarm is by far the worst thing that can happen to a person during their day. Unfortunately, most of us have to attend work, school or some other pressing engagement which means that they are one of life's necessary evils to wake us from our overnight slumber. Still, just because the majority of us hate the morning alarm, it doesn't mean that those of us who are jailbroken can't add a little extra pizazz to that wake-up call, does it? Thankfully, Cydia has our back once again with the relatively new Wake Info package.
One of Apple's finer introductions into iOS in recent times has definitely been the inclusion of Notification Center, a section of the OS that allows users to have a dedicated area for incoming notifications and native widgets. Jailbreak developers always seem extremely keen to exploit the real-estate which Notification Center provides, which has resulted in numerous Cydia based extensions. One of the latest, and definitely one of the most in-depth to date, is the Tap to Widgets package that introduces multiple widgets to help users with productivity based tasks.
We've seen in the past that jailbroken iOS device users tend to think that the simplest tweaks are often the best ones. When developers attempt to go over the top with their creations, things tend to invariably go wrong, which is a situation we would all be keen to avoid if possible. The newly released DefaultSBPage package on Cydia can definitely be thought of as a simplistic implementation, but definitely one of that many users will benefit from.
Apple is regularly found to be adding new features to its mobile operating system that runs on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices. Each iteration of the firmware brings with it a number of changes that are designed to not only dramatically enhance the power that the software offers, but also improves the user experience that we obtain from using the hardware. Judging by the amount of tweaks that we are seeing land on Cydia over the last few weeks, it would definitely seem that the iOS 6’s Do Not Disturb feature is definitely a hit with developers and users alike.
We love it when Apple takes it upon themselves to introduce new features with major releases of iOS. We tend to find that smaller point releases contain critical bug fixes and amendments to make things a lot more usable, whereas the larger significant launches contain the notable feature enhancements. One of the more welcomed additions to iOS 6 was the ability to silence incoming FaceTime and phone calls with a remind me later type feature, but the question does arise; why didn’t Apple have the foresight to make this available across additional parts of the operating system?
When it comes to apps rotating to support the different orientations of the device, then there is definitely split opinion on what the default behavior should be. A lot of users seem to think that all iOS apps should seamlessly rotate to support the device being put into different positions, whereas a subset of iOS device owners are perfectly happy to work in portrait mode. While opinions may differ on the right way to do things with third-party apps, it seems that most users are perplexed about why certain native apps that ship with iOS don't offer any rotation support whatsoever.
Handheld gaming consoles are desperately trying to cling onto a market which smartphone and tablet devices are readily muscling away from them, and it’s also quite evident when we consider adoption rates. So how fitting, perhaps, that the first PSP emulator for iOS (jailbroken devices only), BlackBerry, Android, Windows and Linux should be a smooth, impressive experience which, besides a few to-be-expected frame rate issues, is surprisingly well put together. It's named PPSSPP, and as you'll see from the video below, its performance is exceptional for such an early build hardware emulator.
Any regular reader of Redmond Pie will know that we cover a lot of different tweaks for jailbroken devices. Regardless of whether the package is intended for the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad or even all three, if it's useful and could benefit our readers then we'll give it the once over. With that said, it's always great to find and test a tweak that makes us want to keep using it after the review, which is something we think we might have found with the RaiseToCall package.
