There's been much talk of late regarding Apple's expansive bank balance. As opposed to making a large acquisition like Google or Microsoft with its $100 billion kitty, the fruit company decided a share repurchase program would be a forward-thinking way to utilize some of that eye-watering wealth.
When it comes to mobile apps, the people in the know generally agree that keeping it simpler is the way to go. In fact, one widely used design model for developers is the Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) method which encourages designers and developers to make their creations as simple as possible. Mobile devices function differently from their desktop or notebook counterparts as they don't have as much screen real estate to take advantage of and need to function perfectly through a touchscreen interface.
Of all the essential everyday uses our smartphones give us, the simplest - and perhaps, the most vital - is the alarm clock.
World of Warcraft - a popular MMORPG that has been part of many stereotypes of grown men living in their mothers' basements, playing the game day in and day out - may be headed for the iPhone. Speaking to Senior WoW producer John Lagrave, gaming blog Eurogamer has learned that Blizzard is still determined to get the game ported to the iPhone.
Like most mobile device features, the idea of having a camera as a standard feature wasn't one that occurred overnight. Many years of quite terrible cameras passed, amid cries of "it will never stick", "who needs a camera all the time?", and, the ironically overused "it's just a novelty feature".
With the Nokia Lumia 900 set to launch at the back end of next month, the Finnish company is hoping that the Windows Phone powered handset will make a large impact on the American buyers. The Nokia Lumia 900 is the latest in the Lumia family of handsets to be launched and will be seen as the flagship device of the range featuring premium features, including 4G LTE technology and will hopefully be available for AT&T customers in the United States in the next six weeks.
There can be no denying that Apple puts a lot of effort into the native apps that it ships pre-installed with their iOS and Mac OS X operating systems. Some of the installed apps that make up the individual OSes are extremely in-depth and functional pieces of software which are often a lot more advanced that any competing offering that may be available from third-party development studios. With that said, there is always going to be a part of any app, regardless of whether it is part of the operating system or not, that doesn't appeal to users.
Believe it or not, there are a portion of hardened jailbroken users who tend to welcome in a new day by launching Cydia to see if any of their installed packages have updates, as well as browsing through the Changes section to see if anything new and noteworthy has been pushed to the repositories over night. It shouldn't come as any great surprise to users that the majority of the new changes within Cydia are theme-related, with only the odd useful tweak or extension showing up these days.
Considering we run a number of posts which are dedicated to tutorials on how to jailbreak iOS devices, as well as featuring new and impressive tweaks and enhancements which find their way onto Cydia, the chances are, that a good portion of those reading this have enjoyed the benefits which a liberated Apple device can bring. What started out as an exercise of technical ability has turned into a thriving and talented community which features security researchers, developers, device interface artists, and a loyal user base who support and drive the innovation forward.
The production of the AssistantExtensions tweak for Cydia has made it a lot easier for developers to produce Siri based modifications for download from the Cydia store. Rather than have to do their own groundwork and lay the foundations for hooking into the intelligent assistant, developers can simply build their modification as a plug-in to the already created AssistantExtensions framework making things a lot easier and a lot less time consuming.
