Apple to launch iOS in the Car next week with Ferrari, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz

Nearly a year after its introduction, it looks like Apple is finally ready to launch iOS in the Car. The Financial Times is reporting that the company plans to introduce the new feature next week with 3 major launch partners: Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo.

Oddly enough, the Times doesn’t mention the project by name, but says that drivers will be able to use Apple’s ‘in-car operating system’ to use Apple Maps, watch movies, listen to music, make phone calls and send messages using the vehicle’s in-dash display…(...)

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How to quickly toggle iMessage read receipts

One of the coolest things about using iMessage is the fact that you can tell when others have read your messages. A read receipt toggle is built right into the stock Messages app, allowing users to enable or disable the feature at will.

Unfortunately, you have to venture into Settings > Messages to access this toggle. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could easily disable or enable read receipts from anywhere on your iOS device?

That’s the exact premise behind ReadReceiptsFS. It’s a toggle for the Flipswitch framework that allows you to easily toggle read receipts on the fly. Take a look inside to learn more.(...)

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How to enable the Fleksy Keyboard in stock applications

The Fleksy Keyboard is a third-party keyboard with an SDK that iOS developers can tap into if given access by Fleksy. The benefits of using the Fleksy Keyboard over the stock iOS keyboard is readily apparent after just a brief hands-on experience. You can actually go out to the App Store right now to download the standalone Fleksy Keyboard app to try it out. Other apps, like Launch Center Pro, have recently incorporated Fleksy in-app, providing for an arguably better typing experience.

But what about using the Fleksy Keyboard with built-in apps like Messages, Reminders; even Safari? What then? Up until now, this has been impossible. But the recent creation of a brand new jailbreak tweak called Fleksy Enabler, allows you to use the popular keyboard with some first-party and unsupported third-party apps.(...)

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TouchBar: disable status bar items with a touch

When I first took TouchBar for a spin, I have to admit I was a bit confused. I understood the fact that the tweak allowed you to invoke a quick toggles bar near the status bar; that much was clear. What I didn’t understand was a setting found in the preferences for the tweak that allows you to “enable items.”

Well, apparently, this enable items toggle lets you touch the actual icons present in the primary status bar. For example, if you touch the little signal bars in the upper left-hand corner of your iPhone’s screen, you can engage AirPlane mode. If you touch the Airplane icon, you can turn off Airplane mode. This works for most of the items that you’ll find in the status bar.

This is one of the few tweaks that I’ve run across that lets you interact with actual items in the status bar. Remember, these items are insanely small, so it’s a little odd and a bit intriguing all at once. Have a look at our video walkthrough after the jump to see what I mean.(...)

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CallShare: create notes, calendar events and more during phone calls

Have you ever wanted to quickly create a note as you engaged in a phone conversation, or perhaps setup a calendar event right there mid-call? CallShare is a recently released jailbreak tweak that allows you to do that and more.

Available for download from Cydia’s ModMyi repo, CallShare lets you create new messages, emails, calendar events, notes and reminders directly from the stock Phone app. To see how CallShare works in action, please watch our video walkthrough that appears after the break.(...)

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StatusBright: swipe across the status bar to change brightness

StatusBright is a just-released jailbreak tweak available on Cydia’s ModMyi repo. It’s a simple tweak that lets you change your iPhone’s brightness settings using a swipe on the status bar.

You might remember a similar jailbreak tweak entitled SwipeBright. It, too, allowed you to swipe on the iPhone’s status bar in order to adjust the brightness settings of the device. Sadly, SwipeBright has yet to be updated to support iOS 7, so the developer of StatusBright felt that a new tweak was justified.

Although adjusting the brightness on the iPhone is much easier with iOS 7′s Control Center, it’s still one less gesture that you need to perform by putting the controls directly on the status bar. Check inside for more details about how StatusBright works.(...)

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Sailfish OS Maker, Jolla, On Questing For Scale In The Age Of Android

"It's not every day that a new mobile operating system is born," says Jolla's Marc Dillon preaching to a congregation of the curious from atop a stool at Jolla's booth at the 2014 Mobile World Congress. This is the world's largest mobile device-focused gathering. The show which annually transforms Barcelona into a city of suits and queues and shiny things. Read More

PowerBanners: change low power alerts to unobtrusive banners

Don’t you just hate it when you’re in the middle of a game or a movie only to be interrupted by the low power notification at 20% and at 10%? Wouldn’t it better if the notification was a bit less intrusive? That’s the premise behind PowerBanners, a new jailbreak tweak available for free on Cydia’s BigBoss repo.

For those of you who have been around for a while, there’s another jailbreak tweak called LowPowerBanner that brings similar functionality to iOS. Sadly, as is the case with many tweaks for iOS 6 and below, it was never updated for iOS 7. PowerBanners was created from the ground up with iOS 7 in mind, and it works on arm64 devices like the iPhone 5s as well.

We’ve taken some time to test out PowerBanners and we can report that it works as advertised. Want to know just how well it works? Check inside to watch our hands-on walkthrough.(...)

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How to delete photos from your iPhone

I hadn’t even started typing the title of this post that I could already imagine the comments from witty readers. Of course you know how to delete photos from your iPhone. We all do. It’s so basic even my mom can do it without having to ask for directions.

Yet, deleting pictures directly from your iPhone can be a tedious task if your ultimate goal is to batch remove hundreds, maybe even thousands of photos. In this post, we will show you how to delete photos from the iPhone photo library. We will explore the various options we have for not only deleting photos one by one, but also for deleting all pictures from an iPhone at once.

All this information applies to the iPad too. The process is exactly the same no matter if you want to delete photos from iPad or iPhone. If you want to delete photos from your iPad, just follow the instructions below and you’ll be all set.

If you think you already know it all, I encourage you to take a peek at this post because you might still learn a thing or two…(...)

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Solve challenging physics puzzles with Enigmo: Explore

The 2-D puzzle games in Enigmo have been fan favorites since Pangea Software presented them in 2003. The original title launched a sequel in 2009 that feature not just 3-D graphics, but the puzzles themselves are 3-D.

Pangea handed off the series to another game company, Team Chaos, who recently launched the third title in the series on iOS in the form of Enigmo: Explore…(...)

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Polus: a customized QuickLaunch experience for Control Center

A3tweaks—the development duo behind great jailbreak releases such as Auxo—is back with a brand new upcoming tweak, and we want to show it to you. The tweak, which is called Polus, is an extension that adds significant improvements to the QuickLaunch section of Control Center.

With Polus, you can customize Control Center’s apps shortcuts, and assign them with Activator gestures…but that’s not all. We’ve taken the upcoming tweak for a detailed spin on video. Check past the break for more information.(...)

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Apple: 40 billion iMessages sent daily, Apple TV raked in $1 billion last year

As expected, Apple held its 2014 shareholders meeting on its Cupertino campus this afternoon. Apple executives were on hand, as were the company’s board of directors, to reassure investors that things are on track for another successful year, and to field shareholder questions.

Most of the meeting was filled with the usual dreck: approving and rejecting proposals, reelecting board members, and so on, but things began to liven up when Tim Cook began dropping numbers. Keep reading for a roundup of some of the most interesting points from the meeting…(...)

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NoGrabber: how to hide Notification Center and Control Center grabbers

Grabbers, like the one in the photo above, appear while trying to invoke Notification Center or Control Center in a full screen app. The grabbers essentially force you to perform two invoking gestures in order to launch Control Center or Notification Center. The grabber feature is there to prevent accidentally launching the aforementioned overlays while using a full screen application or game.

Some people, apparently, find the grabber feature annoying, and they want to launch Notification Center or Control Center like they normally do, even while using a full screen app. If you’re one of those people, then NoGrabber is something you should consider using. It forces the overlays to behave like normal, eliminating the grabber while in full screen applications. Take a gander at our video walkthrough to see how it works in action.(...)

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This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: All MWC Everything

Reporters are drunkenly finding their way home from a long week in Barcelona, where the Mobile World Congress conference yielded a number of exciting new phones and tablets. Most notably, Samsung launched the Galaxy s5, Nokia launched a new Nokia X line of Android/Windows Phone hybrid devices, and we finally got up close and personal with the BlackPhone. We discuss all this and more on this… Read More

How to quickly swipe between message threads in iOS 7

MessageSwiper7 is a recent Cydia release that brings the ability to swipe between Messages app conversations in iOS 7. We posted about the original MessageSwiper almost a year ago, and as you’ll see, that version differs quite a bit from the latest version.

Since iOS 7′s Messages app already features built-in actions for swipe gestures on both the right and left side of the app, more thought had to be put into the tweak to get things right in iOS 7. We’ve taken MessageSwiper7 for a brief spin on video to show you how it works. Have a look at our full walkthrough inside.

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The Ring Input Device Puts Gesture Control And Home Automation On Your Finger

There was once a rumor that Apple would actually use a ring device for input to an Apple television. Neither of those gadgets exist yet, of course, but Ring is a Kickstarter project trying to fund a finger-based wearable that could enable the kind of controls envisioned in that Apple flight of fancy. The Ring is a hardware device that resembles an ordinary (if slightly chunky) ring, filled with… Read More

vColor: change the color of your volume HUD

The volume HUD has always held a weird place in the hearts of jailbreakers. It’s been used to launch apps, it’s been customized, it’s been given music features. Now, it’s being colored, again.

vColor is the latest volume HUD-based jailbreak tweak that allows you to change up its look. It lets you alter the background, depletion bar, volume number, and volume meter colors. vColor is from developer Javier Brito, and it’s available for free right now on Cydia’s BigBoss repo. Check inside as we step through vColor’s functions on video.(...)

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ActiveAlarm: Open the Clock app directly to the alarm section

ActiveAlarm is a brand new jailbreak tweak that can be handy for those of you relying on your iPhone as an alarm clock. It’s a tweak that allows you to assign an Activator gesture of your choice to the stock Clock app.

While it’s true that Activator already contains an action for launching the stock Clock app, ActiveAlarm takes it one step further. ActiveAlarm will take users directly to the alarm clock section of the stock Clock app upon using the Activator gesture. Have a look at our video walkthrough inside as we show you how it works.(...)

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Apple Made Over $1B On The Sale Of Around 10M Apple TV Units In 2013

Apple’s TV business still consists only of an over-the-top streaming media box, and not a proper TV set despite longstanding rumors that kind of hardware was on the way – but it’s showing impressive growth nonetheless. The company sold approximately 10 million Apple TV units last year, according to estimates based on figures Apple CEO Tim Cook offered up at the annual Apple… Read More

Arq – the nested dock that keeps on docking

The Arq, a new Kickstarter project, seeks to solve the problem of charging multiple devices simultaneously. This cleverly engineered accessory lets you charge multiple form factor iOS and Android devices individually, via either Lightning or micro USB. And thanks to its modular design, devices can be charged in groups or closely nested together, because Arq docks can be conveniently nested together, all within a small footprint.

To give you the exact idea of the Arq’s size, each measures 1.85 inches deep, 4.03 inches wide and 1.38 inches tall. There are also nano micro suction pads on the bottom that keep the Arq firmly anchored to smooth surfaces for easy undocking, as seen on the Slope iPad stand I recently reviewed…(...)

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Classic Badges: use iOS 6 app badges on iOS 7

Do you hate the look of the app badges in iOS 7? Would you prefer to use the app badges present in iOS 6? If so, ClassicBadges is a new jailbreak tweak that allows you to do just that.

While ClassicBadges is a standalone tweak, it does rely on some help from WinterBoard to get the font and spacing of the old-school inspired badges to look just right. As we always like to do, we’ve put the tweak through its paces in a hands-on video walkthrough. Check inside for all of the details.(...)

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How to mark conversations in the Messages app as unread

Have you ever wanted to mark a conversation in the Messages app as read or unread, but eventually realized that there was no way to do so with stock iOS? I’ve certainly been there before. Perhaps the jailbreak community has come up with a good solution?

Unread is a jailbreak tweak that allows you to tap and hold on a message to mark it as unread. If the message is already unread, you can conversely tap and hold on it to make it read. The concept is certainly admirable, but I found that the tweak is not without issue. Check inside for the full rundown.(...)

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Backed By $10 Million, Flyby Messenger Is The First Consumer App To Use Image Recognition Tech From Google’s “Project Tango”

Flyby, a new messaging application that lets you share text and recorded videos attached to objects in the real world, is the first consumer-facing app to use the image recognition capabilities found in Google’s “Project Tango.” That project, for those unfamiliar, involves an Android-based phone with advanced 3D sensors that’s capable of building visual maps of the world… Read More

Apple Stores treating Apple TV buyers to $25 iTunes Gift Card

Fueling rumors of a potential Apple TV hardware refresh next month, Apple has apparently instructed its retail employees to start treating Apple TV buyers to $25 iTunes Gift Cards. The move basically brings the price of the $99 media-streaming box down to $74.

Of course, you’re still paying the full price for the Apple TV hardware, Apple is just throwing in a $25 iTunes Gift Card with every new purchase. The credit can be redeemed against any content purchase in the company’s many online stores. So in a nutshell, you’re getting a $25 iTunes credit for apps, books, movies, music and more, free of charge.

The offer is valid through March 5, 2014…(...)

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Apple Adds New “Designing Great Apps” Micro Site For iOS 7 Developers

Apple has offered up a central location that houses a number of resources around designing software for iOS 7. The collection of videos, documents and whitepapers seems aimed at making it easier for developers to not only accommodate their existing designs for the new, pared down graphical look of iOS 7, but also to help them start thinking about how to push the envelope with the UI of their app… Read More

Best Buy offering $150 gift card to iPhone users trading up to 5s

Folks looking to score an iPhone 5s on the cheap may want to check out your local Best Buy store. I know it feels like we’re saying this on a weekly basis now, but the retailer is once again holding a sale on Apple’s most popular handset.

This time around, Best Buy is offering a minimum of a $150 gift card for folks looking to trade-in an iPhone 4s or 5 for a new iPhone 5s. And between that and its current $50 off promotion, you could easily score a 16GB model for just $1…(...)

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Moga teases new MFi Bluetooth controller for iOS 7 devices

Moga didn’t make a very good first impression in the iOS 7 controller space. Plagued by the typical new-category teething issues, the Ace Power launched to mostly negative reviews last fall despite its large built-in battery and dual analog joysticks.

But the mobile accessory-maker isn’t going to let a little bad press get it down. This week, Moga began sending out a teaser image (seen above) for a new MFi controller. It looks a lot like the Ace Power, but with one big difference: a Bluetooth button…(...)

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‘Tiny Firefighters’ goes free as Apple’s App of the Week

Apple has named ‘Tiny Firefighters’ by Wonderkind its App of the Week for this week. This means that through next Thursday, you’ll be able to pick up the application for both your iPhone and iPad, for free—a nice little savings of $1.99.

For those unfamiliar with it, Tiny Firefighters is an interactive app/book/game for kids that’s both fun and educational. Help the firefighters and police officers perform their duties around town by putting out fires and catching burglars…(...)

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Looking To Make Fantasy Sports More Accessible, IAC’s Skyllzone Launches Fantasy App That Lets You Play The Computer On The Go

Spurred on by its entry into the digital and mobile age, the fantasy sports world is booming. From the fact that a hilarious and increasingly popular show based on fantasy sports is about to enter its sixth season to Yahoo’s increasing investment in fantasy sports products as part of a new mobile strategy that comes all the way from the top, the signs are everywhere that fantasy sports is… Read More

Gaming Veterans Start Midverse To Bolster App Marketing, Engagement on Android

Riz Virk and Mitch Liu have been through pretty much every wave of the shift to free-to-play mobile and social gaming. They had an early mobile gaming hit called Tap Fish (which even had its own silly moment on The Daily Show). They sold their company Gameview Studios to Japanese gaming giant DeNA. Virk was also an early investor in Tapjoy, which became one of the better-known players in app… Read More

Introducing Moov multi-sport fitness tracker, your new personal trainer

Time to meet your new coach. Introducing the Moov, a new wearable device conceived by a three-person startup led by a former Apple engineer. Not only does it track your activities, it gives you personalized tips to improve your workout performance.

The brainchild of smart engineer Nikola Hu who used to work at Apple and his colleagues, the Moov is packed with nine-axis sensors like accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer.

Thanks to the data gathered by these sensors and clever programming, the Moov can sense both motion and 3D form to improve your performance.

The biggest selling point of the Moov is its software which can provide real-time audio advice and feedback. It uses 3d motion reconstruction technology to analyze and distinguish between a bunch of activities like running, biking, swimming and weight lifting, to mention just a few.

And if you’re into boxing, the Moov does that, too – it’s even capable of measuring your power and form, giving you a report card at the end of each session detailing how many calories you burned, your progress against previous workouts and what not.

Each tracked activity is an app of its own so this modular system allows for support for new activities to be easily added via firmware updates and new apps…(...)

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Theme Thursday: Axla, FlatIcons, Gusht and more

This fifth edition of Theme Thursday marks one month since we began highlighting some of the best Winterboard themes available for iPhone and iPod touch. It has been a lot of fun putting this column together each week, and I’m glad that so many readers have been enjoying it. iPad users, your roundup is on the horizon.

Best of all, it makes me proud that we’re able to give some well-deserved recognition to the talented graphic designers in this community. If it wasn’t for those people, we wouldn’t have these great themes to use on our devices. So, without further ado, this week’s featured themes are: Axla, iOS 8 Concept, FlatIcons, Gusht and iOS 8 Infinity Theme. Dive right in…(...)

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ABC to live stream the Oscars via its iOS ‘Watch’ app this Sunday

ABC has said that it is going to stream the complete Academy Awards ceremony this Sunday to mobile phones. The network has long offered highlights of the event on mobile, but this is the first time it’ll stream the event live.

The feed will be funneled through the ‘Watch ABC’ app, which means that if you have it installed on an iOS device and meet the requirements, you’ll be able to catch the show. Unfortunately, the requirements are pretty stringent…(...)

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ETA lets you easily check driving time to your favorite locations

I often go to the Bay Area, which is about 100 miles from where I live. If you know anything about California traffic, you’ll know that a simple 100-mile trip could take anywhere between an hour and a half and four hours. So, knowing drive times in advance is very important when I’m trying to make it to a show on time.

ETA is a very simple app that lets you check the estimated time of arrival for any location you save in your iPhone. Plus, you can get driving directions through the app as well…(...)

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