iOS - page 4

Apple released the developer beta for iOS 9.3 today. To the surprise of many, it actually includes quite a few brand new and useful features whether you’re in the classroom or trying to sleep — or both. There are so many new features that we can actually dedicate an entire post to explaining all of them. So here we are doing exactly that.

Note that since today marks iOS 9.3’s release only for developers, it might be a while before the rest of us see the final version show up in the Settings app. But without further ado, here is everything you can look forward to in iOS 9.3.

Samsung is making its Gear S2 smartwatch compatible with iPhone to give it an even great chance at competing with Apple Watch and Android Wear. Its latest wearable will get an update later this year that will make it iPhone-friendly.

For managing multiple mail accounts on the go, nothing beats the brilliant CloudMagic. It packs everything you need in an email app — and a whole lot more — and supports almost every mail service you can throw at it. And now it’s finally available on your Mac!

Fitbit has upped its game to take on Apple Watch and Android Wear with a brand new fitness tracker called Blaze. It packs a premium, smartwatch-like design with color display, and it promises to run for up to five days in between charges.

LastPass, one of the best and most popular password-management clients, just got a major upgrade that brings a fancy new look, emergency access for trusted friends, and revamped password sharing through the new Sharing Center.

The internet is awash with knockoff bands for the Apple Watch that are almost as good as the genuine articles.

Knockoff products are traditionally cheap and nasty, but tons of these replica Apple Watch bands are so good, they rival Apple’s own products — at a fraction of the price.

We’ve taken a tour of knockoff band land, and found that there are lots of cheap, inexpensive bands on eBay and Amazon that are high in quality and are getting glowing reviews from customers.

“My black Apple Sport band has started flaking off, while the third-party knock-offs still look brand new,” said Neven Mrgan, a designer for Panic software in Portland, Oregon who bought a less-than-half-price band on Amazon.

We’re finishing up 2015, and now that you’re all good and tired of your families, we’ve checked out some great December iOS games to help you decompress in solitude.

This month’s offerings should cover all of your needs, whether you like to relax with a simple match-three title or need something more strategic. We have high-def graphics, pixel art, orchestrated music, chiptunes, straight-up fighting, and strategizing. December had something for everyone.

In no particular order, here were our favorite diversions from the December rush.

Witnessing the ingenuity of app developers both small and large is a real highlight of my job writing about the Apple ecosystem. In that regard, 2015 didn’t disappoint: Some tremendous new apps got unleashed this year on both iOS and OS X.

Here are Cult of Mac’s picks for the absolute best apps of the year for iPhone, iPad and Mac.

The iPhone may have fundamentally changed Google’s plans for its Android smartphone platform, but according to Google’s design chief, the iOS homescreen layout — consisting of grids of apps icons — is disappointingly stagnant.

“[The iPhone] crystallised a lot of other things that were kind of stayed even by that point, like the rows of icons, which don’t scale very well,” Matias Duarte, Google’s vice president of design, told Wired. “This idea of a tiny grid that you manually curate starts to feel very heavy and burdensome.”

iOS 9 finally brought split-screen views to the iPad, but it’s still not nearly as useful as the windowed multitasking views you get on a Mac. Developer Steve Troughton-Smith has come up with a much better solution with a new proof-of-concept called iOS window management that would bring the joy of working in a windows environment to the iPad.

Apple already has the foundation built thanks to UIKit. It only took Troughton-Smith 500 lines of code to build the concept with the UIWindow subclass, allowing individual app screens to be resized an overlaid on top of each other.

Check out the concept video:

Tis the season for playing around with weird iOS apps with your friends and family, and boy, do we have a doozy for you. It’s called Face Swap Live, and it does exactly what it says on the tin.

Usually, an app update is a good thing. But sometimes, things go wrong: An update does the opposite of what you expect it to do. In that scenario, you want to roll your apps back, but unfortunately, at least on the iOS and Mac App Stores, Apple makes that seemingly impossible.

But it isn’t impossible — just a little tricky. Here’s how to roll your iOS apps back to an older version when things go wrong.

For any mobile developer, learning Swift is a must. It’s an intuitive and fast language that’s key to iOS, OS X, tvOS, and watchOS. This bundle of four lessons — in the form of 3 apps and an E-book — will get you up to speed in practicing coding, testing scripts, and more. And the best part: the whole shebang is just $9.99.

T’was the night(s) before Christmas and all through the App Store, not a creature was moving except… wait, was that? I thought I was alone in here!

Welcome to the world of Dark Fear, a retro-styled pixel horror game that’s creepy and creative enough to keep you tingling throughout the holiday season.

There’s a reason it’s so damn scary: Dark Fear was created by Arif Majothi, a 38-year-old game developer who got his start working on horror movies. He combined his mastery of the horror genre with his love of classic ’80s and ’90s Sierra games like Phantasmagoria (it even starts with an MS-DOS-style floppy disk prompt).

The resulting title pays homage to the past, while being spooky enough to scare the bejesus out of you in the closing days of 2015. What more could you ask for?

Badland 2, the sequel to popular game that won Apple’s iPad Game of the Year award in 2013, is now available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad.

The new fantasy adventure game comes just in time for Christmas, sending you on a wild ride through a dark alien wasteland full of flamethrowers, buzzsaws, lava, oil and more obstacles to thwart your progress.

Check out the full trailer:

You no longer have to rely on third-party apps to track your fitness on a Pebble watch. Pebble is today rolling out a new update that adds Pebble Health, a new fitness and sleep tracking feature that wants to help you become fitter and healthier.

Microsoft has given its Outlook iOS app an overhaul — offering iPhone 6s owners the chance to use 3D Touch to create new emails and events, or access the calendar directly.

Security firms Symantec and FireEye say that 2016 is set to usher in an increase in the number of attacks on Apple systems — following a rise in the quantity of threats to Mac computers, and the more-than-doubling of iOS malware in 2015.

When I first became a reporter, I bought one of those little mics you could suction-cup to a telephone to record interviews. That was some gadget, except for having to tape it to the handset because the suction cup sometimes popped off.

You can still buy this kind of microphone or use your smartphone with an app called Yallo. A simple interface lets you record incoming calls, share the recorded conversation with an associate or have recordings transcribed and automatically sent to email.

Apple didn’t just see a standard year-over-year improvement in the enterprise market in 2015. iPhones, iPads and Macs all saw significant growth and adoption rates over the competition. JAMF Software published its annual survey for 2015 that reveals trends about Apple products and their role in the enterprise. The findings are excellent news for the folks in Cupertino: enterprise users adore OS X and iOS.

“Driven by user preference, increased productivity capabilities, and security advantages, Apple is no longer requested by users and executives—it’s demanded,” JAMF reports.

Microsoft Cortana is now officially available on Android and iOS following its beta run. The digital assistant, which has long been baked into Windows Phone and now Windows 10, hopes to compete with Siri and Google Now for a place on your device.

The latest iteration of Apple TV’s operating system, tvOS 9.1, is out of beta and ready for the big screen.

The new update includes support for searching Apple Music with your voice, via the fantastic Siri Remote, so you no longer have to type in long artist names with the weird keyboard line that Apple offers you.

Sony’s PlayStation app for mobile has always been something of a disaster, with a poor user interface and painfully slow performance. That’s still true today — but now you don’t have to use it when all you want to do is message friends on the PlayStation Network.

In an effort to be a better messaging service, PlayStation Messages has gone solo. With the new PlayStation Messages app for Android and iOS, you can keep in touch with the rest of your clan without having to use the main PlayStation app at all.

Teaching your kids how to code is pretty much as important as teaching them to write, according to Apple’s senior VP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, in an interview promoting the company’s Hour of Code project.

Apple is turning all of its retail locations into coding centers for kids this week. The classes will offer hands-on instructions into the basics of coding that Federighi says will hopefully set of a spark with the young learners.

Google Calendar is bringing your appointments and to-do list together with a new update that adds support for reminders. Calendar will display your tasks and to-dos alongside meetings and events so they’re harder to forget, and sync them across Inbox, Gmail, Google Keep, and Google Now.