In the early days of iOS, the lock screen was considered, if anything, an ornamental feature of the Apple platform. Presenting little more than the time, date and the patented Slide to Unlock, the face of an ecosystem was traditionally one of decided blankness.
With Apple having announced the date earlier on today for WWDC 2013, we’re bracing ourselves for a marked rise in the number of Apple-related news, rumors and reports. With iOS 6 having failed, in the opinion of many, to bring any dramatic improvements on iOS 5, the concepts and ideas for iOS 7 have been arriving thick and fast. The one you're about to see below, as well as having been presented in a very professional manner, is one of the best iOS 7 concepts yet, and features a radically redesigned interface including a new Notification Center, widget support, and lock screen toggles. Catch the full demonstration video after the break!
The iOS keyboard has hardly changed since the earlier days of iPhone OS, and as such, the jailbreak community have consistently looked for ways to freshen things up for those who like to chop and change. Some alternative keyboards are a tad over-the-top, while others are just plain garbage, but when a designer manages to combine subtlety, elegance and minimalism in one fell swoop, we simply have to pay it a little bit of attention.
As my colleague recently pointed out, decent battery retention in a mobile device is perhaps at more of a premium than ever before. We love all the new and exciting features arriving with each and every updated revision, but keeping the thing running for more than a few hours at a time can be something of an uphill battle. The Infinity Cell kinetic charger is an iPhone battery pack with a twist, as it uses your body’s natural movements to generate the power, meaning you don't need to be repeatedly hooking your handset to the mains in order to keep it juiced up.
One of the latest tweaks to land on the ModMyi repo is the FBPrivacy package, which, as the name suggests, is one developer's attempt to bring additional privacy measures to those jailbroken users who regularly make use of the Facebook or Facebook Messenger apps. The tweak won’t bring the stealth-like experience to Facebook that a lot of users genuinely want, but it does bring some nice little touches to the official apps that may just serve to improve things a little.
The iOS native screenshot feature is very useful, particularly for capturing small bits of information for referencing to at a later date. But if you want to, say, snap an entire webpage, you'll find yourself doing quite a bit of scrolling as you try and pick up every last bit, and thereafter, you're left with a somewhat fragmented representation of what you were initially reading. Enter Barry - Webpage screenshot, an app which, simply put, allows you to take screenshots of entire webpages in a single hit, and if it sounds like just the app you've been looking for, you can catch all of the details after the break.
The FakeMyi package is one of the most comprehensive jailbreak tweaks we’ve seen, and allows users to fake, change and add new information to specific aspects of the device. We've seen tweaks in the past that allow call logs to be altered or certain information to be changed at the user's will, but FakeMyi takes things a little further by integrating itself into the Messages, Phone and GPS functionality of the installed device.
There is a new tweak out today on the Cydia store which in my opinion is worth checking out. This small and lightweight tweak comes from developer rvirajm and can be thought of as more of a small phone based utility rather than a large functional installation that will greatly enhance the feature set of the iPhone.
As if the iPhone wasn't already an expensive enough gadget to behold, one luxury goods company has decided to take things to the next level by customizing the handset with a multitude of gems and diamonds. In doing so, the Liverpool, England-based company Stuart Hughes has increased the value astronomically, creating a very uniquely crafted iPhone worth an eye-watering $15 million.
Facebook's been very busy of late. It launched a Facebook-centric phone with the help of HTC, and it has pushed out all manner of updates for the Android and iOS apps, partly in order to add support for Facebook Home. There's Chat Heads too, along with the less well publicized addition of the new Facebook Stickers.
