Apple released the fourth beta for iOS 7 to developers today, and there are quite a few UI tweaks and additions that have been made under the hood. We’ll probably see a couple more beta releases before Apple ships the final version of iOS 7 in September, so the OS is starting to mature quite a bit at this point.
This list doesn’t include everything that’s new, but we’ve collected 11 notable changes Apple made in iOS 7 beta 4:
Along with the iOS 7 and iTunes beta releases published this morning, Apple has also seeded a the fourth beta build of Apple TV 5.4.
The new update is slim on new features, but includes a ton of bug fixes and gives iOS 7 devices the ability to set up an Apple TV after restoring or resetting all settings.
Here are the full release notes:
Former Apple Store employees from New York and Los Angeles filed a complaint in San Francisco federal court that claims Apple workers are being shorted around $1,500 a year in unpaid wages while they wait off the clock to have their bags searched.
The class-action suit claims that Apple’s “personal package and bag search” policy can cause staff members to stand around for 5 to 15 minutes every time they clock out to leave on a lunch break or at the end of a shift:
Deleting individual episodes from the Podcasts app on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch is fairly easy if you’re a longtime iOS user. If not, then it might not be as intuitive.
Here’s how to get to, and then delete, individual podcast episodes from your iOS device of choice.
Using a smartphone in China has become a dangerous task the last few weeks. First, we started hearing reports that iPhone users were getting electrocuted by their chargers, and now a Samsung S4 has allegedly devoured an entire apartment with a fireball explosion from its battery.
Looks like iOS 7 Beta 4 just conclusively outed the fact that Apple is planning on putting a fingerprint sensor underneath the home button of the iPhone 5S: strings found in iOS 7 Beta 4’s BiometricKitUI.axbundle make reference to an iOS 7 tutorial which will reference a “photo of a person holding an iPhone with their right hand while touching the Home button with their thumb” and “a fingerprint that changes colour during the setup process.”
When a user of an iPhone 5S is setting up their iPhone to recognize their fingerprint, they will get a message saying that “Recogition is X% complete”, where X% is presumably a progress bar filling in.
Hamza Sood has found a lot of hidden iOS settings in the past, so he’s got a good track record. This looks pretty legit, and we all knew Apple acquired Authentec for a reason, and that fingerprint sensors were coming to iOS devices. This is our first peek, though, at how they will be realized, with typical Apple simplicity.
Source: @hamzasood
There is an ocean of fitness trackers out there, but not many you can take into the ocean with you. There is still a large pool of sports MP3 players out there, but not many that can go swimming. We take for granted the reason for this sad set of affairs. Water may be the giver of life to this planet, but it is the supreme enemy of gadgets everywhere.
That’s an annoyance even for the best of us. How many times have you been jogging, only for your MP3 player to get shorted out in the rain, or for your headphones to short out from your own sweat? And it’s doubly annoying for swimmers like me, who not only can’t take an iPod into the pool with us when we’re swimming laps, but who can’t even track our swims using fitness trackers like the Nike+ Fuelband.
That’s where WaterFi comes in. A Californian company, WaterFi specializes in taking other company’s gadgets and waterproofing them with a dual-coated, patent-pending process. WaterFi’s promise is that their process will make any gadget utterly resistent to even the most through dunking, but how well does it work in practice?
WaterFi was kind enough to send Cult of Mac two of their products for review: their waterproofed iPod Shuffle swim kit and their Waterproofed Nike+ Fuelband. But how well does it actually work?
Along with today’s release of the fourth iOS 7 beta, Apple has also seeded a beta build of iTunes 11.1 to developers that includes the new iTunes Radio feature.
Apple unveiled iTunes Radio at WWDC 2013 last month. The new streaming music service allows users to create radio stations based on artists or songs, similar to Pandora. iTunes Radio will be free with ads, but if you have an iTunes Match subscription, there are no ads.
Developers can download the new preview directly from the iOS Dev Center.
Right on schedule, iOS 7 Beta 4 has been released to registered developers. It’s being shot out to developers on iOS 7 through a 264MB over-the-air updates, or through the Dev Center, featuring “bug fixes and other improvements.”
Here are the direct download links:
You know the document you’re looking for, but you can’t remember where it’s saved. Did you upload it to Dropbox or Google Drive, or was it sent to you in an email? Fortunately, a new iPhone app called FindIt lets you quickly search all three — all at once.
August is upon us, and that means it’s time once again for a number of U.S. states to hold their annual sales tax holidays. If you’re in the market for a new Mac and reside in one of these states then consider the following tips – especially if you’re thinking about buying a new MacBook Air.
There’s nothing like watching a movie at home – or wherever you are – with stellar high-definition and a quality that rivals that of seeing film on the big screen. Blu-ray allows for us to get that much closer to the experience of watching a film in the theater, but watching a Blu-ray on your Mac has been next to impossible. Now thanks to MacGo, you can watch Blu-ray discs natively on your Mac without issue.
If you’ve wanted to take in a Blu-ray film on your Mac, then Mac Blu-ray Player is the product you’ve been looking for – and Cult of Mac Deals has it for just $30 during this limited time offer.
Thanks to Samsung and the International Trade Commission, Apple will be banned from importing the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2 into the United States from Sunday, August 4. The Cupertino company has been trying to fight the ban since it was confirmed last October, but it’s had little success.
Now it is seeing unlikely support from Microsoft, Intel, and Oracle, which all agree that the use of standards-essential patents to ban products should not be allowed.
In case you had any doubt that iOS 7 Beta 4 was dropping today (probably around 10AM Pacific time), Apple has already uploaded at least one build of Beta 4 to the Developer Center: specifically, for the AT&T iPhone 5 with a build number of 11a4435d. The Verizon iPhone 5 also has a related download.
You can’t download these betas yet — instead, you just get a “session expired” message — but all that means is Apple hasn’t “turned on” the download yet. So start your engines, gentlemen: iOS 7 Beta 4 is coming.
Via: Redmond Pie
There was always a good chance that that image showing a bin of empty iPhone 5C packaging was bogus, and now Steve over at Nowhereelse.fr is positing just that, saying there’s a lot of noise around the iPhone 5C logo that might be consistent with Photoshopping.
Apple’s under fire again for labor abuses by one of its manufacturing partners again, this time Pegatron. Bizarrely, though, the report incriminating them also confirms the plastic “budget” iPhone, the so-called iPhone 5C.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, there’s a popular academic quiz show called Quiz Kids that airs on local public-access television. In each show, local high school teams of three players each compete for a $1,000 per-student scholarship based upon who can answer the most quiz questions correctly.
It’s a cute show, but of special interest to Cult of Mac’s readers is Episode 1110, in which the Mercy High School Crusaders competed against the Crystal Springs Griffins. The captain of the latter team? No less than Steve Jobs’s son, Reed, who talks about some of his extracurricular work helping out at Stanford, trying to assist finding new gene therapies for colon cancer. And Steve himself can be seen in the back at around the 2:53 mark, cheering Reed on.
That Reed Powell kid sure seems like a chip off the block, huh?
It’s hard to make a buck, especially in China. It’s also hard to get an appointment at the Genius Bar. It’s hard, then, to know where our sympathies should lie in this story: Chinese scalpers are apparently booking up all of the Genius Bar appointments in China and then selling them online at huge premiums. Oh wait, no, it’s not. Those scalpers are scumbags.
I routinely hide the Dock on my Macbook Air, since it takes up a significant portion of my screen. While I use Alfred most of the time to launch apps and such, I still like to use the Dock; call it a hold over from the last ten years or so.
Sometimes, though, when I move the mouse cursor over to the side of the screen I keep the Dock on (the left, if you’re curious), it pops up even when I don’t want it to.
Then I found this Terminal command which lets me set the time delay between when my cursor hits the edge of my screen and when the Dock actually appears. Now I have the delay period set to a larger number, making it much slower to respond and unhide.
Apple’s “pinch to zoom” patent, which features prominently in a patent dispute against Samsung, has been dismissed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. According to documents filed by Samsung in a U.S. federal court, all 21 claims of the patent have been rejected in a “final office action.”
One of the many big, tattery holes in Apple’s Maps app is the lack of transit data. At launch, Apple wisely allowed third-party transit apps to plug into Maps to supplement their own subway and bus directions — perhaps the first bonafide example of Apple allowing iOS users to set their default app for anything — but it was obviously just a stopgap, because just last week, Apple scooped up Hopstop, one of the biggest transit apps around.
Unlike other Apple acquisitions, though, Cupertino hasn’t shut Hopstop down. In fact, the app was just updated with a beefy 2.6 update that makes it even better, including real time delay and incident reporting.
Loom is yet another app that promises to organize your photos for you, just like the amazing Everpix. Unlike Everpix, though, which shows the Apple heritage of its engineers in its oversimplified and sometimes frustratingly opaque user interface, Loom looks to be a little more accessible. And controllable.
Windows Phone has been struggling to catch up to Android and iOS ever since its release, and most would blame the platform’s lack of apps and Microsoft’s leisurely approach to adopting the latest technologies. And it’s not just consumers that are becoming frustrated with the situation.
Even Nokia, Microsoft’s biggest Windows Phone partner, wants the software giant to get a move on and make the mobile platform more of a priority.
The Toffee Cases Fold Wallet takes a different approach to iPhone wallets that most others. Instead of trying to squeeze your cards and cash into a few tiny slots stuck onto the back of the iPhone, Toffee’s Fold Wallet is more like a regular billfold, only with an extra pocket inside for your iPhone.
Ever wonder what your iPhone might look like if Apple decided to add a zoom lens? Then take a look at Thanko’s Appollo 2, a crapware camera with a massive 30x schnozz on the front.