In the latest release of the iOS 7.1 beta, Apple sadly closed the hole that allowed the Team Evasi0n jailbreak to work, closing the door on jailbreaking until the next exploit comes along.
Given that, you might expect that today’s iOS 7.0.5 release would also close the Evasi0n exploit… but no! It’s actually still safe for jailbreakers. You just need to do a (very little) bit of hacking to make it work.
Automatic, the smart driving assistant I described as making my old car future-proof, has been updated with iBeacon functionality. The immediate benefit is that the connection between the Automatic hardware and iPhone app will be improved. But putting iBeacons on the road holds some exciting long term possibilities as well.
Darwin’s Theory is a simplistic match-three puzzle game charging you with the task of evolving insects into lizards (yes). You start off with a grid of caterpillars and snails. Each turn you can put different animals down on the grid, with the hope of matching three of them up. Of course that would be just too easy on its own.
You’ll also have to contend with the only moving characters on the board, or the bacteria. Once you trap them in a square, they’ll turn into berries. And somehow, those berries turn into oysters. Seriously, I don’t know. Darwin’s made of magic.
You never go anywhere without your iPhone. But instead of having it with you (always!) in the car, what if it ran your car?
That future may only be a few months away, when the iOS in the car is expected to go come out of the gate with the release of iOS 7.1. iPhone aficionados have been expecting it since at least last summer, when the first screens were leaked. There are a few ways Apple’s entry into the market will disrupt the industry — leading to a pile-up of failed ventures.
The car industry has increasingly relied on tech to sell vehicles in a saturated market. However, the folks who brought us ABS brakes and the four-wheel drive aren’t always the best people to engineer what drivers want (or need!) when it comes to computers on board. Many of these systems are complicated and distract drivers more than help.
Not one of these systems has become industry standard. Most drivers fiddle a bit with the parking system, then use their phones or maybe a GPS system like Garmin as add-ons. It’s rumored that Apple has made agreements with major car makers to get its system into vehicles — if so a whole segment of the proudly “I’m a PC” market will find itself de facto “Macs.” This will inevitably stall sales of smartphones by Samsung and Google, who will be basically locked out of the place most Americans spend a significant portion of their day.
What about app makers? Here the future is even less clear. There are thousands of apps in iTunes — and thousands of indie developers and startups behind them — targeted to the auto market. Apps to help you find parking, then find your car in parking lots, avoid speed traps and run diagnostics on fuel usage, etc. Apple’s in-car system will make all those apps suddenly last year’s model. For 30 years, Apple’s has focused appeal on early adopters; people with older phones and older cars will feel sorely left behind as app makers scramble to update and integrate with the new system.
The last industry Apple will leave in the dust are GPS products like Garmin and TomTom, though these have already been largely left in the dust by our smartphones. Suburban navigators see no need to spend $200 on map updates when they can easily get from Point A to Point B using smartphones with apps like MapQuest that also update them on traffic conditions and provide peer-to-peer instant updates.
Apple’s entry into the car market will be welcomed by most — drivers, I mean. A clean, simple interface that is easy to use might be one way to curb the deadly distraction that plagues our highways as people try to text, talk or answer emails while stuck in traffic. Reading a manual on the road isn’t conducive to safety, which is what some of the more clunky systems seem to require in their present incarnation.
With Apple at the wheel, we can imagine a time when finding an alternate route in a Friday afternoon snarl is as easy as saying: “Siri, get me outta here!”
Lucid Dream Ultimate — Utilities — Free
While you’re getting all that sleep we talked about in the last app, you might as well pay some attention to your dreams.
Lucid Dream Ultimate is a dream journal and reality checker that plays a noise during the day that cues you to remind yourself that you’re awake. It’ll send you the same noise throughout the night; the idea is that when you hear the noise in your dream, you’ll realize you’re dreaming, and then you can start the important business of conjuring up all the Ancient Psychic Tandem War Elephants you’ve ever wanted.
Plus one of the tones is an Inception-esque “BWAAAAAAAH,” and that’s just straight-up magical.
If you’ve ever played an older role-playing game, you know the feeling of reaching a point at which you realize that your characters are too weak to progress, which means that you have to take them back to previous areas and kill boars or something to earn the experience to level up and become strong enough to actually continue playing the game.
Loot Hero is a game that is all about that moment. It’s an action-RPG, kinda, that has you running back and forth like a crazy person, killing monsters to gain experience so that you can continue running back and forth like a slightly stronger crazy person. And once you hit a wall, you have to go back to older levels with easier enemies so you can run back and forth there to gain experience and money to make your character better equipped to run back and forth among stronger enemies.
It sounds like a drag, and it kind of is, but it’s also surprisingly engaging.
Text-to-speech is great. But have you ever wished that it could be a little more creepy? As in, child’s-voice-coming-out-of-your-computer creepy? Well, you’re in luck. Thanks to a service designed to help kids to communicate, you too can make your iPad talk in the voice of a little girl or boy. Shiver.
Felix’s FlipStand is like a better version of Apple’s Smart Cover. It covers the screen and leaves the rear case mostly naked, but instead of using a flimsy folding action to give limited viewing angles when used as a stand, the FlipStand is almost infinitely adjustable between zero and ninety degrees, and holds the iPad steady like a kickstand.
Ever wished there was a way to make Pandora (or iTunes Radio) play little snippets of news, tailored to your tastes, just like it does with music? Free app Swell Radio does just that, and does it perfectly.
Every single day, iPhone and iPad owners ask Siri millions of questions. Each and every one of those questions must be analyzed by Apple using computer-intensive natural language processing, translating it into a form that a computer can understand.
That takes a lot of computer horsepower. But how much?