Every so often an application comes along and drops into the App Store which catches our eye for one reason or another. It could be for a number of reasons, sometimes the app is unique and the first of its kind, sometimes it contains a beautiful user interface and sometimes it's just because it is plain cheeky.
Apple's iOS isn't exactly a cutesy operating system. Steve Jobs and co set out to make the iPhone, iPod and iPad OS as usable as possible without adding unnecessary bells and whistles. In the main part they succeeded, but it's hard to deny that there are a couple of areas where it could do with that personal touch - something to make the whole experience feel a little more like home.
Despite Apple maintaining a closed-source stance with its iOS mobile software, jailbreaks from the various dev-teams have allowed an abundance of useful, unregulated apps to be installed onto our beloved iDevices.
There is no denying that one of the most commonly used applications on any iPhone will be the default Messages application which ships as part of iOS. The app itself is extremely simple, and whilst it is functional and does everything it needs to do, it has been said that Apple should have maybe added a little bit of additional functionality to it over the years.
For those of you who have been hanging around the jailbreaking scene for quite some time, you will no doubt be familiar with a number of the more prominent developers in the community who regularly release high quality work which is designed and implemented to a very high standard. If you are anything like me, you will probably have your favorite developer(s) who you will always support and purchase or download their releases but whatever you do, don't ask me to tell you who mine is.
The "another day, another tweak" cliché has never been more relevant than in the current state of play. Last weekend saw the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S join every other iDevice in the iOS 5 untethered jailbreak wonderland, and developers have been pushing those tweaks through the Cydia store at an incredible rate ever since.
Back in December of last year, much was made of a very useful app from dev outfit App Cubby known as Launch Center, which utilizes the iOS 5 Notification Center in order to launch series of apps and tasks.
With one or two third-party apps already knocking about, the guys at Valve Corp. have just a released an official Steam app for both Android and iOS.
If the words 'Misson Control' are mentioned to you, then you will more than likely either think about the part of OS X Lion which brings together Expose, Dashboard and Spaces to give you a bird’s eye view of everything that is running on your Mac, allowing easy navigation. Either that, or you would think about some far off NASA control center overseeing the latest space mission.
Considering Siri is still officially in its beta stage, I think most would agreed that aside from a few niggling issues, the advanced personal assistant from Apple definitely sets the iPhone 4S apart from other devices in the same class range. No piece of software is ever going to be perfect, and will always have real-world limitations, but Siri is an extremely powerful extension to iOS which is growing in features as time progresses.
