iPhone - page 360

9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman has been peeling through the .plist files of the latest iOS 5.1 beta, and it appears that Apple is screwing with bloggers on purpose: weary of people dissecting the iOS files for mention of future iPhones and iPads, iOS 5.1 Beta 2 references the Apple TV 9, iPad 8, and iPhone 10, among others.

We’ve dedicated more than a few posts t0 declaring that a new iPad or iPhone is coming thanks to .plist references, but even so, I think this is pretty funny. Way to screw with a poor tech blogger’s head, Apple! The message is clear from here on out: you can’t trust iOS’s .plist files for a scoop. Well done!

Spotlight search on an iOS device is a fantastic feature. If, like me, you have pages and pages filled with apps, it’s easy to find the one you’re looking for simply by typing the first few letters of its name into Spotlight. You can do the same with songs, contacts, messages, emails, reminders, events, and lots, lots more.

However, there may be some things you don’t want to show in Spotlight. That doesn’t mean you should avoid the feature altogether — just customize its results to suit you. It’s incredibly easy, and not only will this remove items you don’t want to see, it’ll also make it faster to find what you’re looking for.

I can guess your age by asking you two questions: What smartphone do you own and what’s your favorite mobile game? If you answered Android and Angry Birds, you must be between 35 and 44 years old. Turns out, 35 percent of that age group simply adores Angry Birds, while younger gamers could care less about the blue, red and yellow pig-haters.

Chronic Dev-Team member and iOS hacker Pod2g, who we’ve mentioned a number of times in recent reports surrounding an untethered iOS 5 jailbreak, claims to have successfully developed an untethered jailbreak for the iPhone 4 running iOS 5.0.1 and says it’s safe to update to the latest firmware.

By making your photographs available across all of your devices, Photo Stream makes it easier than ever to share your holiday snaps with your friends and family. However, the experience is ruined somewhat when your stream gets cluttered up with screenshots you’ve taken on your iOS devices.

Screenshot Dam is a new tweak for jailbroken devices that aims to solve this problem by preventing screenshots from entering your Photo Stream altogether.

Here’s a great sleight-of-hand trick from Samsung: trumpet that you’ve sold 300 million phones through November. While everyone is amazed that the South Korean company pumped out nearly six times as many mobile phones than Apple, people will forget the iPhone maker rules smartphone profits. Nice try, but it won’t work.

Rovio, the creators of Angry Birds, celebrated the game’s second birthday on December 11 with an update that’s guaranteed to please fans of the bird slinger. In addition to 15 brand new levels, version 2.0 of the original Angry Birds game unlocks every episode available.

AirPlay has been around for well over a year now, but the range of AirPlay compatible accessories available is still pretty slim. However, that could be about to change.

Apple is reportedly planning to introduce Bluetooth support to AirPlay, which would significantly extend the range of accessories currently compatible with the feature. The company will also improve iOS connectivity for third-party accessories.

For those of us setting out to catch the lunar eclipse early tomorrow morning — here’s a great piece in the Christian Science Monitor on why it’ll be so spectacular out here west of the Rockies — there’s nothing like an iPad armed with a great astronomy app. But according to Tim DeBenedictis, developer of SkySafari 3, his app is the only one that can predict this — and any other — eclipse. That’s fine with us, since he’s offering his app for free all this weekend.

When we have an iOS device stolen, thieves don’t just obtain our precious iPhone, but they also obtain all the information that’s stored on it. Our devices are filled with personal data such as names and addresses for our friends and family, and for our convenience, they save usernames and passwords for all kinds of different services.

That’s why we secure our devices with passcode locks. But did you know you can use an alphanumeric passcode to make it even more secure?

Which phone would fictional advertising genius Don Draper from AMC’s Mad Men use? No surprises here: as this picture of Jon Hamm from the set of the hit television proves, only the phone with the best and most convincing advertising campaign on Earth, an iPhone, would do for Draper.

[via iSource]

In the ever-changing patent wars, somedays you are the windshield and some days you are the bug. After coming up roses Thursday, Apple finds itself on the losing side against Samsung and Motorola.

Back in November, iOS hacker Pod2g announced in a message on Twitter that he had discovered a bug in the iOS 5 software that could provide an untethered jailbreak. To backup his claims, Pod2g has posted a video to YouTube that demonstrates the hack in action, but he’s yet to provide any indication as to when the jailbreak might go public.

These days of spectacularly gloomy news just might be getting you down. If you’re looking for an antidote to the “If it bleeds, it leads” media mentality, a do-good iPhone app might be just the thing.

Called “Boom Boom!” it’ll feed you a diet of good news and shared acts of kindness to go. The free app is based on a feel-good game called Boom Boom cards, which has 26 acts of kindness that you (or your kids, or teens) perform and keep track of.

Holy cow! They’d been teasing it forever, but all of sudden, now it’s here: Square-Enix has just released their beloved SNES era classic Chrono Trigger on the App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch!

Samsung has a hit on its hands. Unfortunately, it involves being thrown out of court — this time in France. To add insult to injury, not only did a French panel call an attempt to ban iPhone 4S sales “disproportionate,” but ordered the South Korean smartphone company to pay Apple’s legal bills.

Apple makes it incredibly easy for you to set up a Gmail account on your iPhone — you simply hit the Gmail button when setting up a new account and enter your login details. But with just a little bit more effort, you can enjoy a much better Gmail experience — one that pushes new emails straight to your device as they come in.

Here’s how to set up Gmail the right way on your iPhone.

Today, Twitter announced a new design for the popular micro-blogging site that will start rolling out over the next couple of weeks, which they hope will make it easier than ever to connect with other users and discover great new content.

If you go to Twitter.com, you won’t see the sexy new interface for a while yet, but as part of their push to update all officially supported Twitter platforms to the new paradigm, Twitter has pushed out a totally overhauled version of the Twitter for iPhone app.

Porn star Jesse Jane has become one of the latest iOS users to recover a stolen purse — with her iPhone inside — using Apple’s Find My iPhone feature. After her device was stolen, Jane took to Twitter to inform her followers that she had successfully tracked down her device, and she kept them updated on its recovery.

Reading the news on the iPad is one of the absolute best experiences you can have on Apple’s magical tablet device. So when news hit yesterday that our two favorite iOS news reader apps came out with updates, we were pretty stoked. While you probably heard a great deal about the other reader app, we wanted to tell you about the awesome news reader you might be missing out on. It’s called Flud, and it was just completely redesigned yesterday.

Besides sporting a major facelift, what’s spectacular about Flud is its new ability to make reading the news a social experience. Rather than relying solely on an app to recommend websites and content to you, Flud users have the ability to see what their friends are reading in the app and share content back with them rather than spamming their Facebook or Twitter feed with the 15 news stories they’ve read throughout the day. Giving each user the ability to create a “news personality,” Flud aims to change the way we consume news much in the same way that Spotify and Rdio have changed the way we listen to music, by allowing users to inspire and be inspired by others based on what they consume.

During an interview at the Le Web expo in Paris this week, Google chairman Eric Schmidt took a stab at Apple and insisted his company’s Android operating system is way ahead of iOS in a number of ways, including affordability and choice. What’s more, Schmidt claims that in six months, Ice Cream Sandwich will offer better functionality.

We’re huge fans of OnLive’s terrific cloud gaming service here at Cult of Mac, and we’re even more excited to hear that it’s coming to iOS devices. The company has announced that an OnLive app is on its way to the App Store, which will allow users to play top-tier console-quality games on the go.

Apple’s iTunes 12 Days of Christmas promotion is becoming an event that European users can depend on every year. A new app for its Christmas 2011 giveaway hit the App Store yesterday, and will offer iTunes users a free download every day between December 26 and January 6.

Personally, my favorite thing to do after having any picture taken is seek out the “delete” button. (Even if that entails arm wrestling the well-meaning friend to get at it.)

But you may embrace the idea of having your nose or midsection appear in all its glorious 3D in a photo – if so, a new iPhone app called Snappily 3D is for you.

For $1.99,  it promises to bring photos from your iPhone 4 or iPad 2 into a new dimension. Snapily walks you through the shooting process and you can view the pic in 2D or gyroscope and anaglyph mode if you want to check them out with your 3D specs.

If you’ve been whining about why the iPhone 4S has no 4G, get ready for a real letdown — 2G speeds. The move by AT&T to throttle its top 5 percent of data users to a snail’s pace is an unwelcome Christmas present for many iPhone users.