As I have mentioned on a number of occasions now, the jailbreak community cannot seem to get enough of lock screen-based tweaks, but while Cydia developers have been showcasing their creativity in bringing all-new features to the front gate of iOS, Stride 2 is a vast improvement on an old favorite, Stride for iOS. Simply put, this tweak takes the mundaneness out of unlocking your device by enabling you to set your very own, custom pattern, and developer Adam Bell has certainly put work in to ensure his two-year-old invention is in-keeping with the recent changes to the Apple software.
The Facebook Messenger app for iPhone has just been updated, adding a myriad of exciting new chat-related features. Those with an account on the world's foremost social network can now enjoy video sharing - a feature that has been eagerly-awaited by Facebookers far and wide. As well as that, photos and stickers will now load more quickly, and the company's development team has clearly been on its game to bring this version 5.0 update so soon after version 4.1's arrival only a couple of weeks back.
It's no secret that Apple is looking to greatly improve and revamp the in-store shopping experience for its customers, and iBeacon - Apple's proximity-based, Bluetooth LE-powered communication technology - is steadily becoming an integral part of this concerted push. As well as enhancing the engagement potential of the Apple Retail Store, iBeacon has a much broader scope, and a Japanese company by the name of Tzukuri has just announced a set of MFi spectacles that will embrace Apple's fledgling beacons system.
Some jailbreak tweaks like to scrape the surface, offering minor alterations to a certain function or UI element. Others, however, seek to rebuild a part of iOS from the ground up, and Convergance, a new entry to the ModMyi repository, completely re-imagines your iPhone's lock screen.
Those who visit the site often - and you do visit us often, don't you? - will no doubt remember that we told you a couple of days ago how Apple was initiating an iPhone 5 recall of sorts. The reason for the recall was an apparently small batch of iPhone 5 handsets that have defective sleep/wake buttons, making putting a device to sleep, or even turning it on from a powered-down state, troublesome.
App Store pricing is often referred to as a race to the bottom, but that doesn't mean that every app has to be free. Some developers, usually the ones with quality apps, dare to charge a fair price for their wares, and that's the way it should be. That being said, there's no better way to get some attention for your paid-for app than to make it free for a limited time. Free downloads count towards an app's App Store chart ranking even when it moves back into the 'Paid' chart, which should in turn mean more sales. It's genius really, when you think about it.
Apple is no stranger to hardware problems with its iPhone lineup. Even ignoring the infamous Antennagate fiasco, the iPhone has been plagued by perceived hardware issues across just about all of its iterations. The iPhone 5 already had fingers pointed at its inability to keep its anodized color for any longer than the time it took to take it out of the box, and now the model is the subject of a recall of sorts.
When a company as secretive as Apple has some significant new products in the pipeline, it's only natural that we tech enthusiasts should get a little carried away, and in our insatiable pursuit of the iPhone 6, we appear to have a leak that - in a turn up for the books - doesn't appear to have been faked. New renders, which may well have been intended for case makers, show detailed clues of the handset's curved form factor, as well as revealing that the forthcoming Apple smartphone could be just 6mm thick, 33% thinner than the design of iPhone 5s.
Since the release of the Evasi0n jailbreak for iOS 7, the number of tweaks - particularly those aimed at revamping the lock screen - has sky-rocketed, and while some lock screen enhancers have sought ways to increase general functionality, others have served only to look pretty. Timely, a new entry to the BigBoss repo, certainly swings toward the vanity side of the scale, offering a completely different perspective on the clock feature.
As smartphone owners, many of us have become experts in finding apps and games for free or on the cheap, but it's all the sweeter when said deal relates to a title or app that we're actually going to enjoy or use. Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is both exhilarating and nostalgia-inducing in equal measure, and thanks to makers SEGA, it has just gone free.
