One of the many bug bears that a lot of users have with Apple's mobile operating system is the severe lack of personalization and customization options, meaning that in a stock installation of the OS, every user is doomed to the same fate of having to use a standard looking interface. Granted, iOS is still one of the, if not the most powerful mobile OS in the world, but there is nothing wrong in being unique.
When Apple released iOS 5 in October of 2011, it brought with it a number of exciting features that developers within the jailbreak community immediately became interested in. The introduction of Siri was obviously something that peaked interest, but the most widely hooked-into aspect of the current major release of Apple's mobile operating system has to be the Notification Center. Just trawling through Cydia will return multiple widgets that can be used in the new notification hub, with the PictureFrameCenter package being one of the latest.
Anyone familiar with pre-release bits of iOS as well as the art of jailbreaking will no doubt be aware that as soon as Apple pushes out a beta version of their mobile operating system, the jailbreak community is usually on hand to implement some of its features into the current public release.
On Monday, the world got its first look at iOS 6 after it was officially announced by Apple at this year's WWDC event, and of all the features anticipated and discovered, the replacement of Google Maps with the new, Cupertino-engineered offering was easily one of the most exciting.
We live in a world that contains multiple file types, all of which serve their purpose on devices like the iPhone and iPod touch which are capable of doing so many wonderful things. It is understandable why Apple allows only certain file types to be included when sending and receiving iMessages and text messages, after all, it could get extremely messy if every file type could be used within short messages.
The jailbreak community and the technology loving world have been talking about it for quite a while now, discussing what they believed would and wouldn't be included in Apple's overhaul of iOS. The Worldwide Developers Conference pretty much confirmed or dismissed all of the speculation, leaving us with the first beta of Apple's iOS 6 software to get our teeth into.
What fun would a powerful and popular smartphone be without having the ability to share information with the world through one of the popular social media networks? With Apple’s last major release of iOS, we saw the inclusion of native sharing of info to the Twitter network and it looks likely that more services will be added in future releases of iOS, but until that time comes, some additional installations through Cydia should suffice.
Having the ability to change the Springboard wallpaper on Apple's iOS devices was an addition that was certainly welcomed by users when the Cupertino company introduced iOS 4 in 2010. In the following two years not a great deal has changed when it comes to giving users options or abilities relating to being able to customize or personalize their displays.
In some circumstances, the simplest apps and tweaks are often the best and most successful ones. One of the underlying concepts of mobile software is that simpler is usually better, and in my own experience I have found that packages that are overly complex and unnecessarily in-depth often just get removed and are never used again.
There can be no denying the fact that the Instagram app has been insanely successful since its launch onto the iOS platform. What started out as a simple service allowing users to take a photograph, apply some filters and upload it to the Instagram network ultimately ended up with the social networks’ biggest player, Facebook, stepping in and slapping $1 billion in cash and stocks on the table to buy it.
