iPhone - page 208

Control Center was one of the top touted features added to iOS 7, but while the new swipe up gesture to toggle it is great, you might find yourself using multitask function more, so Bill Labus created a gorgeous iOS 8 concept that merges multitasking with control center to give you quicker access to your most used controls.

“Flicking up from the bottom of the edge allows the multitasking app views to be tied directly to the gesture, which allows for direct manipulation and avoids having to wait for a passive animation to complete before interacting with them.”

Developers can grab the Xcode project and take it for a spin or you can get your fill from the video teaser below:

When T-Mobile sent out an email to BlackBerry-using customers suggesting that they switch to an iPhone 5s, the response from the BB faithful was loud and angry.

Even BlackBerry CEO John Chen said that he was “outraged” by T-Mobile’s behavior.

As a make-good, the network operator has now said that it will offer any customer who wants to upgrade to a new device $250 for a BlackBerry phone — or $200 for any other smartphone, including the iPhone.

The TopoCharger is an odd little device, but it could be useful for some. It’s an iPhone GPS case. What? Yes. A GPS-less GPS that comes with on-board storage for maps, and a big fat battery pack so you can use your iPhone in GPS mode without killing its own battery dead. If you’re wondering why you’d bother with this instead of just using a regular battery case, then keep wondering, because I have no idea. Yet. Let’s check it out.

Text selection on iOS is still a pain in the ass. Some apps fix it up with extra buttons above the virtual keyboard, but Thoughts 2, an iPhone notes app, adds extra buttons to the text selection itself. This makes it easy to expand and contract the selection one character at a time which – given the fickle nature of text fields in iOS – should help a lot.

According to numbers from analyst firm IDC, Apple is now the fifth-largest cellphone maker in China, with 7% of the overall market share.

Apple jumped an entire 1 percent in the last quarter of 2013, based on the success of the iPhone 5s and 5c. This doesn’t take into account the impact of Apple’s deal with China Mobile, which began selling handsets to customers this January.

GT Advanced Technologies Inc. shares received a nice boost on Tuesday, on the back of reports that Apple will use the company’s sapphire glass for its next generation iPhone cover.

GT shares posted a new 52-week high of $12.72, while analysts at Canaccord Genuity also raised their price targets on the company from $13 to $15.

The BluCub is a lot like the Tempo pebble I reviewed a few weeks back, only instead of measuring just temperature, it also measures humidity, adding another feather to your home-weather-station cap. If you wear a cap and put a feather in it when you buy a Bluetooth sensor, that is.

Snippefy takes the almost-useless highlights from your Kindle and syncs them to Evernote, Dropbox or anywhere that’ll accept text. It’s an iPhone-only app, but as it’s only really there for processing your snippets to use somewhere else, it’s fine for the iPad too.

We’re all guilty of it: the “cellphone-in-the-lap” move while driving. Whether we’re reading directions, sending a text, or talking on speakerphone, we’ve all used our cellphoens in the wrong place (the vehicle) and at the wrong time (while we’re driving said vehicle). Now you can avoid the temptation with the Universal Car Mount – the perfect accessory for any car owner.

Dial your phone, talk, and hang up without ever moving your hands away from the steering wheel. And thanks to Cult of Mac Deals you can get 51% off the regular price of the Universal Car Mount because it can be yours for only $14 during this limited time offer!

Apple fans may argue that from a bang-for-your-buck perspective, an iPhone is one of the best smartphone deals around. If you’re judging simply by how much screen proportionally makes up the front of your device, though, this chart makes a strong case that the iPhone is a pretty bad deal compared to various Android phones.

This week saw the publishing of one of the iPhone’s most recognizable patents.

Arriving with iOS 3 in June 2009 was the ability to select, copy, and paste text using two draggable selection handles displayed on screen. Miles ahead of what other smartphones were offering at the time, Apple’s solution was a neat way of transferring to mobile a tool that was a key part of the personal computer user experience.

To celebrate the publishing of this historic patent, Cult of Mac spoke with one of its inventors, user interface designer Bas Ording, about the development process.

With popular music streaming apps like Spotify and Pandora already popular and on devices all over the world, any newcomers are faced with an immediate challenge. The makers behind the popular headphones and speakers Beats By Dre are taking their crack at the genre, with their new app and service Beats Music.

Take a look at the new Beats Music app and see how it compares to the competitors.

This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the iOS application “Beats Music” brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”

This poor soul on the Apple discussion forums has just lost his iPhone, in Bangladesh of all places. He’s asking how to block the thieves from accessing his personal data.

Unfortunately for him, he didn’t have Find My Phone enabled on the device. He’s out of luck, in Bangladesh of all places.

You, though, you’re lucky and now have warning: iPhones are among the most stolen items in urban areas. Here’s how to keep your personal data safe on a stolen iPhone or iPad.

While the smash-hit app Flappy Bird has been removed from the App Store, developer Dong Nguyen has still found success with a few of his other games. Consistently ranking at the top of the app charts how will Nguyen’s new game Shuriken Block rank in your interests?

Take a look at Shuriken Block and see how it compares to the hype and popularity of the late Flappy Bird.

This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the iOS application “Shuriken Block” brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”

Around half of U.S. consumers are hoarding their old iPhones in cupboards and sock drawers — representing an inventory worth around $13.4 billion in total.

According to the annual “Mobile Mountain Study” conducted by research group OnePoll for resale site SellCell.com, this figure is down from the 55% of people who admitted to holding onto their old smartphones last year — although the total amount of money being left on the table is up from last year’s sum of $9 billion, thanks to the growing smartphone market.

“Americans are still unaware of the money they can make by trading in their old mobile,” says SellCell founder Keir McConomy.

A new survey of 2,000 iPhone users saw 3/5ths of respondents admit to having a “blind loyalty” to the Apple brand.

78% percent claimed they “couldn’t imagine having a different type of phone now,”  while 52% said they had been “really impressed” with the iPhone.

The Togo Dock is a new pocket-sized iPhone dock from the makers of the Une Bobine, the super-successful “handy bendy iPhone-holding snake.” The new gadget is as simple as can be: it’s a little plastic reel with a magnet on the back, which turns a lightning cable into an iPhone dock that can be stuck to anything – as long as it’s made of ferrous metal.

Musx is like Instagram for music. Post tracks you like, add a few words and your followers can check out the same tunes. Why the hell didn’t anyone think of this before?

The new iOS 7 Weather app, taking a cue from the gorgeously designed Yahoo! Weather app that came out just before iOS 7 did, has all sorts of neat details and gestures to help you keep track of the meteorological realities around you.

If a list of all the cities you add to the Weather app and the extended 7-day forecast basics aren’t enough, there’s even more to find once you dig into the app a bit.

The elusive developer behind the smash-hit app Flappy Bird has other games in the App Store that haven’t yet been pulled. Are they any good?

Take a look at Super Ball Juggling and see if it measures up to the hype and fame of Flappy Bird.

This is a Cult Of Mac video review of the iOS application “Super Ball Juggling” brought to you by Joshua Smith of “TechBytes W/Jsmith.”

One of our favorite photography apps for the iPhone, VSCO Cam, got a big update this morning that give you more reasons than ever to turn VSCO into your only photography app/social network.

Weekend Read is a way to squeeze old-fashioned movie manuscripts onto the iPhone’s little screen so you can read them on the go. If you’re a professional script reader – or even a script writer – you’re going to love it.

BloomThat is a unique flower delivery service that harnesses the power of the bicycle to deliver a bouquet of flowers “in under 90 minutes” — pretty fast. But before you read on, there’s one big catch to using the brand-new BloomThat iPhone app to order roses on Valentine’s Day: Your sweetheart must be in the Bay Area — specifically in the tech (and bicycle)-rich towns of San Francisco, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View or Sunnyvale.

Getting so many naked pictures from beautiful, nubile women that are in love with you that your iPhone crashes? That sounds like one of those good problems to me… and to Russian snowboarding athlete Alexey Sobolev, whose iPhone was bombarded by nude pics after he put his phone number on his helmet for all the world to see. But it’s not stressing him out.

It’s easy to forget just how much the iPhone changed things. Today saw the publishing of one of the iPhone’s most familiar patents — its gesture/touch-based text selection tool.

Describing a new way of selecting text using gestures on a multi-touch sensitive display screen, the patent, which was filed back in March 2008, is credited to Wayne Carl Westerman, Apple’s Multi-Touch Architect; Bas Ording, a User Interface Designer who joined Apple not long after Jobs’ return; B. Michael Victor, and Stephen O. Lemay.