Month: September 2012

Carrier update for iPhone 5 pushed to Verizon subscribers

Have you noticed Verizon cellular data usage increments on your iPhone 5 while connected to Wi-Fi? If so, then you definitely want to apply a recently released carrier settings update, which was issued to Verizon subscribers to fix the issue.

The update will change the Verizon carrier settings from 13.0 to 13.1. Although, under most circumstances, cellular data should not be used while connected to a Wi-Fi network, that appears to be exactly what has been happening for some customers.

Ping bids farewell. Do you care?

With much fanfare, Apple launched Ping alongside iTunes 10 as a social network for music on September 1, 2010. Steve Jobs hailed it as being "sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes". Despite signing up over a million users within the first 48 hours from launch, the experiment quickly went wrong.

The promised Facebook integration was pulled shortly after Ping was released, reportedly because Facebook wanted "onerous terms" that Apple could not agree to. Making good on Tim Cook's promise, earlier this month Ping began alerting users it was no longer accepting new sign ups and would shut down Sunday, September 30.

Are you sad that Apple sent Ping to the technology graveyard?

The iDownloadBlog top 10 news stories of the week

A new week is coming, but that doesn't mean you have to miss out on what happened last week. If you think you may have missed a few of the top stories from last week, don't sweat it, we've got you covered.

We've gathered the top 10+ most popular stories from iDB last week for you to check out. As always, make sure that you're friends with us on Facebook, Google+, and that you are following us on Twitter...

pod2g at JailbreakCon: there is no iOS 6 jailbreak

iOS hacker extraordinaire, and my new friend since this week, pod2g just took the stage at JailbreakCon. After going over who he is and his hacking CV, pod2g went on to explain how he came up with Absinthe, his iOS 5.1.1 untethered jailbreak.

But the question that was on everybody's mind was "when are you coming up with an iOS 6 jailbreak"...

Emblem brings OS X inspired notifications to the iPad

Today at WWJC, Joshua Tucker revealed a new tweak that he created in collaboration with fellow developer, Kyle Howells. The tweak — Emblem — is an iPad exclusive that brings OS X inspired notifications to iOS.

Emblem features smooth animations, and swipe to dismiss among other things. Take a look inside as we give you a sneak peak of Emblem via our video walkthrough...

Facebook Messenger refreshed with chat bubbles, iPhone 5 support, Favorites

Facebook's standalone chat client called Messenger has been updated yesterday to version 2.0. In addition to bug fixes and support for iOS 6 and the iPhone 5's taller four-inch display (so you can see more messages with less scrolling), the app comes with the handy new Favorites feature and the interface has been tweaked around chat bubbles. I also weigh in on why you'll want to keep the chat app and the full-blown Facebook client both running on your device...

Merge is a brilliant jailbreak tweak that combines messages by contact instead of by address

The idea of iMessage is great. It allows you to easily chat with friends and family across all iOS devices and Macs without incurring SMS fees from carriers.

Though iMessage is extremely convenient, it does have plenty of opportunities for improvement, which isn't surprising, considering it's only been out for a little over a year. But Apple has been steadily making improvements, for instance, the latest update to OS X, allows Mac users to sync iMessages sent and received from phone numbers.

Another major issue that iMessage runs into is organization. For example, if you're chatting with a friend that has three separate iMessage ID's, each chat started with each individual ID will result in a new iMessage thread for that contact. That's a total of three threads, just to talk to a single contact. This, obviously, can become extremely disconcerting when trying to carry on a conversation. Wouldn't it be nice if you could easily combine messages by contact, instead of iMessage ID?

That's the exact premise behind Merge — a new jailbreak tweak from developers Joshua Tucker, and Andrew Richardson. Take a look inside as we explain how Merge works...

3% of Apple’s supply chain workers still putting 60+ hour weeks into someone else’s dream

Determined to prove the world it's doing the right thing to prevent labor abuses in its supply chain, Apple has quietly updated the Labor and Human Rights web page with some interesting data points. The company's suppliers in August employed 60 percent more workers than in January of this year.

Three percent of supply chain workforce was putting more than 60 hours a week into assembling Apple products, data suggests. Ending the industry practice of excessive overtime "is a top priority", Apple writes.

It's easier said than done considering the unemployment rate of China’s youth of 7.6 percent in 2012 and Foxconn's reputation for shoddy working conditions and army style discipline in its sweatshops...

When Apple was designing the original iPhone, Maps was an afterthought

Piggy-backing on the ongoing Apple Maps drama, The New York Times gives us a couple interesting tidbits that help explain the origins of Google Maps on the iPhone. For starters, Apple never intended to put maps on the iPhone. It was a decision late CEO Steve Jobs made last minute, one that would cost Apple its reputation five years later as Apple rushed its own solution out of the door too early.

In a way, the report notes, Apple Maps continue on a string of Internet services missteps, with notable examples of the recently axed Ping social network for music, Siri, a controversial digital assistant, the MobileMe suite of web tools and recent iCloud outages.

These blunders expose Apple as a hardware and design-focused culture, which is more often than not a difficult match for online services on a world scale, where Google rules the landscape by a wide margin...

Watch the JailbreakCon event live

For those of you who won't be able to make it to JailbreakCon in San Francisco this year, you won't have to feel left behind as the event is being streamed live.

I was able to experience first hand that the wifi situation at the venue isn't very ideal so you might have to deal with some lagging and images freezing, but we can all agree that it's better than nothing.

The event will start streaming here starting at 9am sharp...

Apple removes superlatives from Maps description

Apple appears to be really determined to avoid having this Maps thing snowball into a devastating PR catastrophe which, by the way, already has tarnished Apple's reputation. Following yesterday's unexpected CEO apology and the subsequent recommendation of mapping services on the web as well as third-party Maps alternatives, Apple has made a subtle change in Maps wording.

No longer are Apple Maps being referred to as "the most beautiful, powerful mapping service ever". Instead, the app's now about "a beautiful vector-based interface that scales and zooms with ease"...