If 2016 is like previous years, Apple will unveil its annual iOS refresh at next month’s WWDC event.
While currently we haven’t heard too much about the milestone iOS 10, a group of dedicated Apple fans have taken it upon themselves to imagine what the upcoming improvements and feature set mat look like in the form of a nifty concept video. And if Apple comes up with anything like what they’ve dreamed up, we’re happy to say that we’ll be very, very pleased indeed.
Check it out below.
For several months on my new Apple TV I’ve been searching for a decent weather app that doesn’t cost too much, and truth be told I really haven’t been able to find any. My go-to weather app has been Carrot Weather for quite some time, but I don’t love the interface on a big television screen. So I was eager to try out Forecast Bar for Apple TV, which offers some standout features and lots of forecast detail.
We reviewed Forecast Bar for Mac back in September and declared it the closest thing possible to getting Dark Sky on your Mac, and it still is. Dark Sky, known for its down-to-the-minute precipitation forecasts, has become a favorite weather app on iOS and Android. So let’s see if Forecast Bar for Apple TV is the closest thing to getting Dark Sky on the big screen.
This week: the oddly uplifting tale of Apple co-founder Ron Wayne, who sold his stake in the company for $800. Plus, road-ready gifts for bicyclists, killer Vainglory strategy guide, and awesome iOS 8 widgets you won’t want to miss. That and more in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine!
Dig into Cult of Mac Magazine December 5 Edition, Free on iTunes
Yesterday Apple notified indie developed James Thomson that he would have to remove the iOS 8 widget from his calculator app, PCalc. After the news received a good amount of backlash and press attention, Apple has reversed its stance on the issue.
iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite are designed to work closely together. Just like iOS 8, third-party developers are even encouraged to write extensions and widgets for their Mac apps. The result is a more seamless experience between an app’s iOS and OS X versions.
Such will be the case with Things by Cultured Code, an Apple Design Award winning task manager that was recently updated for iOS 8. Cultured Code has shared with Cult of Mac its plans for the Mac app when Yosemite drops, including a first look at how third-party apps will utilize Notification Center on Yosemite.
The ability to add widgets to your Notifications dock is easily one of iOS 8’s most useful additions. The new functionality puts some of your favorite apps’ features right at your fingertips.
Only a limited number of apps offer widgets currently, but with developers hard at work you can be sure many more are on the way. In today’s Cult of Mac video, we show you how to install widgets in iOS 8 so you can get started enjoying what’s available now.
In this instructional video, we also give you a look at some of our personal favorites. See how widgets can make managing your to-do list, journaling and checking out your favorite teams’ sports scores easier than ever.
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Poor Dashboard widgets. They seem so sad, sitting there, their vast potential wasted by a lack of any good ones.
Luckily, our friends over at OS X Daily have pointed out a pretty slick way to roll your own using Safari. Who knew?
Here’s how to make your own darn widgets in OS X with nothing more than a copy of Safari and any web page you want to keep track of.
There are tons of iPhone-detectable device trackers, widgets that let you find your lost items using an app. But the Tile might just be the first one to get it all right. It will let you find things you lost down the back of the sofa, but it also has some other killer features.
In the last week I have jailbroken and then de-jailbrokened an iPad mini, mostly thanks to stupid little glitches that make me think the whole thing will just crash in the middle of something important like a round of Super Stickman Golf 2.
But if you have a hacked iPhone, you might want to keep it hacked fo a little longer, at least until you get to try the amazing Velox, a tweak that lets you use apps as little notification-center-style widgets right there on the home screen.
A couple of days ago I showed you two handy jailbreak tweaks for Notification Center. “Compose” and “Kamera” give quick access to Mail, Messages, and the iPhone’s cameras. Along with tweaks like NCSettings, there’s a lot you can do enhance Notification Center on a jailbroken iOS device.
A Cydia tweak called “Tap to Widgets” is one of the most useful Notification Center tools I’ve seen for jailbreakers.
Did you ever try on a pair of your mother’s clip-on earrings? Or maybe you own a pair yourself. If so, you’ll be familair with the way they use a small and cleverly designed clamp to clip the gaudy bauble to your ear.
Now, the Budsnaps are just like this, only instead of a dangling decoration, they secure your iPhone earbuds.
I’ve been in love with the iPhone for the past five years. I got the original as soon as it went on sale in the U.K. in November 2007, and I’ve had every model Apple has released ever since. My job has given me the opportunity to play with plenty of other devices over the years — including those powered by Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone — but I’ve always remained loyal to the iPhone and iOS.
That was until a couple months ago, when my contract ended and it was time to decide which smartphone I wanted for the next two years. I already have the iPhone 5 — I bought it unlocked when it was launched back in September — and I wanted an Android device to replace the Samsung Galaxy Nexus I broke late last year. So I decided to pick up the new LG Nexus 4.
I was lucky; I didn’t have to wait six weeks for the device to arrive from Google Play. My carrier had plenty in stock, so a unit was delivered to my door the day after I ordered it. I was looking forward to testing it out, but I figured I’d play around with it for a little bit, then switch straight back to my iPhone 5 for everyday use. Like the Galaxy Nexus, I thought the Nexus 4 would be mostly used for work — testing apps and writing the odd tutorial for Cult of Android.
But boy, how wrong was I.
There have been a ton of great tweaks released for jailbroken iOS devices in 2012. Innovation in the jailbreak community is far from dead, and ideas are continuing to evolve alongside iOS itself. What makes jailbreaking great is the sheer amount of customizability it unlocks. Sometimes a simple idea gives way to a crazy amount of potential.
That’s what this top 10 list of 2012 jailbreak tweaks is about: pushing the limits of what your iOS device can do. Here are the very best quality jailbreak tweaks from the past year:
One of iOS’s most limiting aspects is its icon-driven interface. iOS’s default interface, the homescreen, it simply a grid of equally sized icons, and while these icons are pretty, they all look pretty much the same. Worse, they are dumb: they can’t do anything cleverer than pin a badge to themselves to convey information.
Compare that to the way Android or Windows Phone handles the homescreen. In Android, you can pin intelligent widgets along with apps to the homescreen; in Windows Phone, the tiles operate not just as app icons, but as smart widgets that can convey to the user changes that are happening within the app, even when it’s not as open.
iOS users have been clammoring for Apple to figure out a way to make the iOS homescreen smarter for quite a long time, and this concept video describes one possible interpretation, which mixes up the iOS homescreen with Android’s widgets and Windows Phone’s Live Tiles.
So, when you use OS X Dashboard widgets for a while, chances are you’ll download a few of them that might fit together into categories. In OS X Mountain Lion, Apple set the “Add More Widgets” screen to look a lot like iOS, as we showed you in a previous tip. The cool thing is that you can create iOS-Style folders in here, too, and add a bunch of apps to one slot, thereby organizing your Dashboard in a similar way to that of an iOS device screen.
Widgets aren’t new to OS X Mountain Lion, but the way they are presented surely is. If you’re new to the OS X Dashboard, you’re in luck, because adding Widgets is a lot easier than it used to be, and there are a whole lot more of them to choose from.
Notice the screenshot above? That’s what the new Add More Widgets screen looks like. Here’s how to add to the list, until you have more than you can even handle on your Mac, and you need to use that handy-dandy Search field at the top just to find the one you want.
We’re super excited for iOS 6. Although it isn’t the complete iOS overhaul many users were hoping for, it does deliver a whole host of new features — like a new Maps app, user interface enhancements, improvements to stock apps, and Siri support on iPad — that we’re certainly looking forward to.
However, it’s hard to ignore the fact that iOS 6 still has some things missing. Things we’ve been waiting for for some time. Here are seven of them.
With just a few hours to go before Apple kicks off WWDC, some analysts are rushing to make predictions right up till the last few moments. London-based research firm Ovum, for example, delivered a list of three things that its Chief Telecoms Analyst Jan Dawson feels are essential announcements that Apple needs to make during the WWDC keynote later today.
Dawson’s assessment breaks ranks with many other analysts who have insisted that Apple must unveil its own HDTV at the event or sometime later this year but does think Apple needs to bring apps to the TV experience. The remainder of his comments focus on iOS and changes that a wide swath of iPhone and iPad owners, developers, and tech journalists have suggested since Apple released iOS 5 last fall.
Apple’s unveiling of its next major operating system, iOS 6, is right around the corner. Scott Forstall and Co. are expected to announce the new OS to developers at WWDC next week. Very little is actually known about iOS 6, but there have been some rumors that made headlines over the last few months.
iOS 6 looks to be an evolutionary upgrade from iOS 5, rather than a revolutionary jump forward. Here’s what we expect to see.
When Apple introduced Notification Center in iOS 5 last summer, jailbreak developers immediately started creating third-party widgets to enhance certain functionalities and create shortcuts for iOS. Widgets for toggling system preferences, for instance, are now available in Cydia for Notification Center. What would happen if the idea of widgets left Notification Center and made its way to the iOS Home screen?
Prolific Cydia developer Ori Kadosh has released Dashboard X, an ambitious extension for adding floating widgets to your jailbroken iPhone and iPad’s springboard.
The first thing I disliked about Mac OS X Lion was the way it changed the Dashboard display. It’s nice to be able to see behind the widgets to the stuff I’m working on in the background. Especially if I’m using a widget like the Calculator, or the Weather, or the Conversion widget to see how much that import from Europe might cost me in US dollars.
Mac OS X Lion, however, puts the Dashboard into it’s own separate space, complete with opaque background that looks like an odd mix of linen theme and bubble wrap. Or maybe a non-skid floor tile from a spaceship? I dunno. Regardless, not being able to see through the background was an issue, until now. I no longer have to launch the stand alone Calculator app to do a quick sum, and can go back to enabling the Dashboard, using the Calculator widget, and dismissing it just as quickly.
Not a huge change, but we just noticed that in OS X Mountain Lion, Apple has changed the way adding widgets in Dashboard works to be more akin to Launchpad, with a full screen of equally spaced widgets being selectable instead of Lion’s approach, which puts available widgets at the bottom edge of the display.
Jan-Micheal Cart has made quite a name for himself designing impressive new concepts for the iOS operating system, such as the dynamic icons concept you see above, and an awesome system for implementing widgets which we covered back in May.
However, it seems it’s not just iOS users who have been impressed with Cart’s work. The Apple camp in Cupertino has also picked up on it, and they’ve hired him as an intern.
Many of the complaints I’ve heard about Mac OS X Lion is about Dashboard. It now has its own space (virtual desktop) where all your Dashboard Widgets live. Well those living arrangements aren’t as permanent as one would think. Here is a tip on how you can set your Widgets free!
