Year: 2014

Happy new year!

Out with the old, in with the new, may you be happy the whole year through! All the editorial team at iDB joins me to wish you a happy new year. May this year bring you health, wealth, love, happiness and everything in between.

Now that we've got the wishes out of the way, I'd like to talk to you about something that I feel is pretty important, especially as we enter a new year.

Confero: tidy up the Home screen by hiding app badges

Confero is a brand new jailbreak tweak that helps you to clean up the iPhone's SpringBoard by eliminating (or at least lessening) the red notification badges. Many find such badges, which sit in the upper right-hand corner of an app with pending notifications, to be an eyesore. Confero is a viable solution for getting rid of said badges.

Apple faces class-action lawsuit over how much storage iOS 8 takes up

"The biggest iOS release ever."

SiliconBeat reports Apple has been hit with a class-action lawsuit alleging it doesn't inform its customers how much storage iOS 8 takes up on their device, and then asks them to buy more space on iCloud.

The case was filed in a San Francisco Bay federal court on Tuesday, claiming iOS 8 can take up to 23.1 percent of storage on the iPhone 5s and 23.1 percent on an iPod. It says Apple isn't truly representing the storage available on its devices. 

Spotify4Me, the Spotify Notification Center widget for Mac

Ever since Apple updated iOS and OS X with the ability to add extensions to Notification Center, I’ve been all about the widgets. On my Mac, I’ve got weather widgets, to-do lists, countdowns, and package trackers. I love them. I want more.

Spotify4Me is a Notification Center extension that adds song skip and volume controls to your Today View. It may not do much, but what it does, it does right.

Ace Ferrara & the Dino Menace is back in the App Store, and free for a limited time

In August, a fun little space shooter launched in the iOS App Store under Bulky Pix, but had since been pulled due to ownership rights issues. The game’s original developer, Philipp Seifried, has been able to re-release the title under his own name.

In order to make the transition into his ownership easier, Seifried has made Ace Ferrara & the Dino Menace available in the App Store for free until Jan. 2. You can now take on the entire dino invasion on your own.

The best Keyboards of 2014

For a few months now, iOS users have been given a special treat in the form of third-party keyboards. We’ve been lucky enough to try out all of the best ones as they come out. Different keyboards are great for different reasons. Some of them have unique features that no others have.

The iDB writers picked through the cream of the crop to find the ones we like the most. We then put them to a vote to decide which was best-loved by all. Below is the list, including the winner and runner-ups. Since third-party default keyboards are only a few months old, we have decided it is too soon to select a best ever winner.