It has been just under two weeks since Mark Zuckerberg invited various members of the press to Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters to discuss the new Facebook Home for Android, and although its subsequent release was restricted to only a handful of devices, the integration of the Chat Heads feature into Facebook Messenger for Android offered the wider audience a taste of the new social plugin. Now, it has been revealed that Chat Heads will also be making its way onto Facebook for iOS, with an App Store update imminent.
Abstergo Gives You Greater Control Over iOS Notifications, Lets You Set Reminders For Later And More
We already know that Cydia and the official repositories are full of fantastic, powerful and innovative packages that make interacting with our iOS devices a lot more pleasurable. We also understand that developers and designers are always working hard behind the scenes to improve their existing packages or come up with new offerings that provide some needed functionality to the loyal jailbreak user base. It seems that Joshua Tucker and Andrew Richardson have been doing exactly that and are all set to release their new notification and scheduling centric tweak that will be known as Abstergo, which will land on Cydia on April 21st.
Are you one of those iPhone users who are just simply too cool to walk around with the ringtone enabled on the device? I'm pretty sure we have all gone through a phase of leaving our devices permanently on silent in an attempt to escape the consistent ringing that comes from friends, family members and colleagues. And while it may be the best move for our social lives, it certainly does a lot for our sanity. If operating an iPhone in a permanent state of ringer silence is part and parcel of your daily usage cycle, then perhaps the new Calmi jailbreak tweak is worth checking out.
As much as we love the iPhone, and iOS in general for that matter, we are perfectly able to concede that it has some pretty basic flaws that wouldn't take Apple long to resolve if they saw fit. There are certain aspects of interacting with native apps that often leave us feel infuriated, with the Camera app and the way Apple has chosen to handle the LED flash being a prime example of this frustration.
iOS 5 brought native Twitter integration to the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, and this was followed up nicely with a deal to bring a similar offering to iOS 6 with Facebook. But while this deep affiliation has done wonders for seamless sharing of various content, the Notes app is missing this ability to share a note via Facebook or The Twitters. Thanks to a nifty little tweak called ShareNotes, this restriction needn't stop you sharing your notes with your followers and friends, and although Twitter's 140 character restriction will also apply to your notes as well, at least you won't have to be cutting and pasting anymore.
Widgets may not be as commonplace on iOS as they are on Android, but the jailbreak scene has presented us with a great deal more in terms of options than we'd otherwise have at stock level. MusicWidget is a very simple, clean, and aesthetically in-keeping widget for music fans which presents you with album art, song title, and artist when you double-tap the Music app icon on your home screen. Said information reveals itself in the same way a folder does when opened, while the icon is in turn minimized to place further focus on the widget itself.
The ability to record voice calls would seem a basic feature in comparison to the many options we have as smartphone users nowadays, but it's not an avenue Apple has hitherto explored, so once again, it's down to the jailbreak scene to try and help users work around this limitation. Audio Recorder, a new tweak offered at the ModMyi repo, is the very first tweak to allow the recording of voice calls natively, and if you're the kind of person that likes to keep a record of important business correspondence, Audio Recorder will help you keep them safely stored for your records.
The Samsung Galaxy S4 is due to hit the market later on this month, but already, iOS developers have begun the task of offering Apple device users some alternatives to the new, S4-specific features. Earlier on this week we featured DuoCam app which introduces the Dual Shot feature for iPhone, an app which seeks to replicate one of Galaxy S4's most applauded features, and today, an iPhone-made take on the Smart Pause feature has just emerged over at the App Store. With so many different applications making up Sammy's "Smart" range, it's difficult to keep track of them all, but Smart Pause, which automatically pauses media when a user looks away from their device, has somewhat manifested itself on iOS in the form of LookAway Player.
Preparing your smartphone's camera quickly enough to take a decent shot before the 'Kodak moment' has passed, is a predicament many of us find ourselves in on a frequent basis. Apple's solution has been to place a camera slider on the lock screen of the iPhone for quick access, but having found it to be rather slow at times, I, like many, rarely use it. If you also feel as though the camera shortcut could be put to better use, you may be taken in by a tweak called PowerSwipe, which allows you to instead reboot, reboot or power down your device when performing that upward swiping gesture.
It may seem a little strange to say but here at Redmond Pie we are still continually blown away by developers within the jailbreak community and their continuing ability to come up with new and usable tweaks. Just when we think Cydia is reaching saturation point someone goes and submits a package that makes us all wonder why it hasn't been done already, which is definitely something that springs to mind with the new Pluck tweak on the ModMyi repository.
