When the iPhone 5s first arrived in September, the feature that many were drawn to was the Touch ID fingerprint sensor, and although some were quick to dismiss the new implementation as a gimmick, it has very much established itself as a well-crafted security asset. Given that, for such a new feature, Touch ID is already very reliable, it stands to reason that we would want to use something similar for our password needs on a more universal scale, and thanks to a little jailbreak tweak called UnlockID, Mac users can call upon Touch ID for their desktop password-entering needs.
Reddit is a great place for folks to create and join various societies relating to a myriad of topics, and with jailbreaking being so incredibly popular - especially given the recent Evasi0n / P0sixspwn breaks for iOS 7 and iOS 6 respectively - the jailbreak subreddit is currently thriving. Obliging to a request from Redditors to reveal which jailbreak tweaks that he had installed on his own iPhone, Jay Freeman - better known as Saurik, creator of Cydia - reeled off a long list of some of the most popular and long-serving tweaks available. It's a very interesting insight, and although you might half expect, in the usual ironic manner, that Saurik's iPhone would contain very few Cydia-sourced alterations, in this case, the opposite is true.
If you're looking for a way to improve the functionality of your iOS Messages app but don't feel like shelling out for BiteSMS for iPhone, there are plenty of decent alternatives out there. Couria, which is currently available in beta, is one such tweak, offering a neat Quick Reply and Quick Compose system for a more efficient way of dealing with messages. At this point in time, it's free of charge, and having been tailored for the relatively new iOS 7, looks very much like a native feature.
There have been many suggestions over the past few months that Facebook would be coming through with its own newsy magazine-type application similar to the ever-popular Flipboard, and now, the details of the iOS app have been unveiled. It's called Paper, and will aggregate various stories and tidbits from around the Web based on the settings applied by the user. It will launch next week on February 3rd, although it will only be available to users within the United States initially. Further details can be seen after the break.
In this day and age, we're always connected. If we're not using our smartphones to communicate with each other, then we're using our tablets. If it's not our tablets, then it's our computers. One byproduct of all this is that we need ubiquitous messaging. We want our messages, our conversations and settings to move between devices seamlessly, meaning we can start a conversation on our iPhones and finish it on our computers.
As much as some of us really enjoy using iOS, those amongst us that are realists surely have to admit that it has its little foibles. Apple has gradually ironed some of them out over the years and, unfortunately, baked new ones into subsequent versions of iOS as well. You don't build something as complicated as a mobile operating system without having quirks.
Apple's notification banner feature, which first arrived with iOS 5, ensured that the days of constant, obtrusive pop-ups were long gone. But it's fair to say that amid some of the changes Jony Ive and the interface design team made with iOS 7, the new banner was more rather less flattering and more just flattening, with a plain, neutral drop-down seeming the product of thirty seconds of thought. But a new jailbreak tweak by the name of Coono takes the dominant color of an app's icon and uses it to shade said app's notifications.
Ever since the Evasi0n7 jailbreak recently came about courtesy of the Evad3rs team, we've seen swathes of great tweaks and apps emerge from the Cydia Store. Many of them have offered ways to truly manipulate the functionality of iOS in a number of ways, while others, like today's tweak, are a lot more aesthetically-focused. Eclipse, a new tweak by developer Guillermo Morán brings a "night mode" to the interface, so all of the bright, white color effects become a mixture of dark grays and blacks, nicely accented by an optional orange tint.
Jailbreaking iOS devices has many different benefits, but possibly the one that causes most to go through the process is the added ability to customize just about everything. In our experience we've found that people will customize just about every aspect of iOS, often in ways that we would never have imagined being useful. Useful or not, it seems people like to tweak things, especially when it comes to visual elements.
We told you not that long ago that SwiftKey is potentially on its way to iOS via the SwiftKey Notes app, but if you're looking for a more system-wide approach to things then your only option is to spring for something that requires jailbreaking - at least until Apple sees the light and opens the door to truly customizable keyboards throughout iOS. With that unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future, you might want to check out PredictiveKeyboard.
