A major update has just been made to Cydia, driving the version number up to 1.1.15 whilst adding a number of fixes largely specific to iOS 8 / 8.1, the new iPhones, and the Pangu8 jailbreak.
As far as jailbreakers are concerned, Cydia is the focal point of the entire experience. The go-to hub for tweaks, themes and other niceties, it's considered the central portal, the nucleus of the entire operation. But as many have begun to discover with this latest Pangu8 untether, Cydia doesn't operate alone, and in actual fact, there are a number of key apps and services driving devices that have been jailbroken. Cydia Substrate, also developed and maintained by Cydia author Saurik, is an essential piece of the jigsaw, and after a couple of major updates already since Pangu arrived ten days ago, version 0.9.5016 brings fixes for jailbreakers running older versions of iOS.
The Apple iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus haven’t just been popular smartphones among critics and consumers, but in terms of sales, they’ve already broken all kinds of records. Rivaling vendors in the mobile industry have sought to counter, with Google having recently taken the wraps off the Motorola-made Nexus 6 smartphone, but the rampant success of the iPhone 6 / 6 Plus won't have stung any competitor quite as severely as Samsung. The Korean outfit's Note series, considered flagship alongside the Galaxy S line-up, has been a saving grace for fans of handsets with large displays, but even with the Galaxy Note 4 announcement being bolstered by the intriguing Galaxy Note Edge, there's seemingly little that the Tizen maker can do to halt the dominance of its bitter rival.
Shazam has essentially eliminated that ever-so-annoying "what song is this, again?" conversation that we used to have amongst ourselves whenever we heard a song we liked on the radio. As a third-party app / service, it's been running for years now, but with iOS 8, Apple took the favorable step of baking it into Siri. So instead of using the app - which becomes typically hard to find when you know a song is about to end - one can simply ask for title, artist and album through the digital slave that is Siri. Yes, this is even more convenient than Shazam as we already knew it pre-iOS 8, but then again, at least Shazam keeps a neat list that we can always refer to. iOS 8 does too, although it's a little trickier to find, and so, we've compiled a very little guide to help you find a list of the songs that you've asked Siri to tag.
If you haven't been living under a rock, you would know that Handoff basically integrates your Mac and iOS device which allows the user to seamlessly begin task on one machine - say a Mac - and pick it up from another, such as an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. Users can now smoothly 'hand off' a task to another device.
With every new release of iOS comes a slew of features that expand on the OS's capabilities and functionality, and let users interact with and use their devices in a different manner. The beauty of jailbreak tweaks, however, is that they expand on those features even further, making it possible to do things that the company didn't allow by default. One such feature with iOS 8 was the Reachability aspect, which basically works only on the larger iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, bringing things in easier range by compacting them towards the bottom of the screen. While pretty great, there were certain limitations with the native implementation of Reachability, and those are what ForceReach - a freshly released Cydia tweak for iOS 8 / 8.1 - aims to address.
Hugo Barra is a well-known figure in the world of Android and smartphones. At the WSJD Live event today, Barra - the ex-VP of Android and current VP at Xiaomi - stated that the iPhone 6 is the most beautiful smartphone ever built. Google literally must have heard the violins screech.
Just a while back, we highlighted a neat little clip which presented an Apple Watch-like UI running on the iOS home screen. It was definitely among the cooler mods we'd seen since the introduction of the jailbreak only last week, and now, the whole thing is available as a free jailbreak tweak for all to download.
Apple's first smartwatch, the Apple Watch, which was announced alongside the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus back last month, has been the subject of rave reviews by most of those who've encountered it, and it seems that both techies and watch aficionados have fallen for the charms of the device's design, software, and general feature set. The UI, in particular, has garnered a fair bit of praise so far, and although we'll personally reserve judgment until we've had a chance to use it in "early 2015," one designer has already dreamt up an interesting concept that imagines the wearable's circular interface on the iPhone.
Despite its purchase of image-sharing app Instagram a couple of years ago, Facebook remains dedicated to the task of encouraging users to upload their snaps onto the world's foremost social network, and as per an official blog post, the company is now adding a couple of useful new features for this very purpose. Notably, the update is dedicated to making it easier and quicker to upload multiple photos on mobile, and with users also able to select the order of the album in swift fashion, should prove a very useful enhancement for rampant photo sharers on both iOS and Android.
