iPhone News

Suit up, Iron Man 3 lands on iOS

Iron Man 3, the movie, is premiering today in select few market outside the United States. Even though the flick won't hit silver screens in the US until May 3, French games developer Gameloft today released the official game of the third movie on iPhone, iPad and Android devices. As previously mentioned, Iron Man 3 is a free-to-play download, increasingly the norm these days.

Hopefully, it won't constantly ask for cash as Gameloft's recently released Dungeon Hunter 4 does. You can download the Iron Man 3 universal binary for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices from the App Store. A build for Android devices is available from Google's Play Store.

I've included a few screenshots and the launch trailer right after the break...

LinkedIn launches standalone Contacts app

Having acquired the popular news reader Pulse, LinkedIn, the social network for people in professional occupations, recently revamped its iPhone and Android application with a focus on updates, content-rich streams and new navigation options. Today, the team announced a standalone Contacts app, now available free on the App Store.

"A smarter way to stay in touch with your most important relationships," the new Contacts service is also available on LinkedIn.com, bringing all your contacts from your Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other address books. Additionally, the application integrates with your email accounts and calendars...

Draw Something 2 now available

Having landed on the Canada and Sweden App Store earlier this month, a highly-anticipated sequel to the popular Draw Something game is now available for download on the US App Store.

The original game pitted two players against each other in a word guessing challenge where each player gets assigned three random words and would draw a picture to convey the guessword.

The sequel contains more than 5,000 new words, all-new 9-letter words, the new free draw mode, a gallery of your favorite drawings, additional drawing tools like pixel pen, crayon, marker, stamps and much more...

Apple opens WWDC 2013 Student Scholarships with free tickets for young devs

Apple yesterday announced its annual developer conference, WWDC 2013, takes place at Moscone West in San Francisco from Monday, June 10 until Friday, June 14. With tickets for the last year's WWDC selling out in less than two hours, Apple this time around won't screw West Coast-based developers as tickets for the event go on sale today at 10am PDT via the WWDC web site.

If you're a poor student who can't afford WWDC tickets running at $1,599 each, you may be eligible for Apple's WWDC 2013 Student Scholarship where they are offering 150 free WWDC tickets to student developers with proven creativity and coding skills...

iSpaceship gains enhanced bike pathways and sidewalks

Apple's flying saucer-shaped Campus 2 building, an upcoming 2,800,000 square foot 4-story glass structure and home to 12,000 employees, is coming online in 2016. The building was originally planned for completion in 2015, but the project got pushed back until 2016.

The reason: the initial three billion dollar budget has ballooned to as much as five billion dollars because of Steve Jobs's perfectionism. The company earlier in the month submitted revised plans. Published Wednesday, the documents reveal several previously unknown tidbits.

For starters, Apple employees working at Campus 2 will be able to enjoy unprecedented bike pathways and sidewalks depicted in a set of exquisitely rendered images...

Prime makes it easier to identify recent calls

Well respected developers thekirbylover & rvirajm have collaborated on a new tweak, and it's simple, but very much worth your time. The tweak is called Prime, and it allows you to easily tell the difference between missed calls, incoming calls, and outgoing calls.

By default, the iPhone highlights missed calls with a red font, but outgoing and incoming calls both retain a normal black font. This makes it difficult to quickly eye and identify what type of calls make up your recent calls list. Prime solves this issue by labeling incoming calls with a blue font and outgoing calls with a green font.

Like I said, it's a simple tweak, but it's one of the most practical Cydia releases I've seen in a while.

Comex getting ready to intern at Google

If there is someone in the hacking community that is filling up his resume with some of the top tech companies, that would be Nicholas Allegra, aka Comex. Although he hasn't been really active in the iOS community since he released JailbreakMe 3.0, the young hacker hasn't been resting on his laurels either.

After carrying out an internship for Apple in 2011 (which was terminated in October 2012), Comex has now announced on Twitter that he is going to intern at Google...

FocusTwist: boost your iPhone photography with refocusable photos

There is no such thing as too many photography apps. Being an avid iPhone photography fan, I've found that every single photography app I downloaded from the App Store - and boy did I download ton of these - serves a slightly different purpose, letting me go the extra mile adding something unique to my photos.

Enter FocusTwist, a new iPhone application from Arqball which gives you ability to capture your snaps now and focus later. The software achieves refocusable photography by taking several images rapidly, each at a different focus setting.

The clever software then combines those snaps into a single image that can be posted online for your friends to interactively refocus later...

Mailbox app security fail exposes your contacts, attachments and email messages

Orchestra's Mailbox has quickly become my default iPhone email application. As you know, Mailbox offloads backend email management to the cloud so the thin client running on your device can let you zip through your inbox at a rapid pace while rethinking the workflow with abilities such as snoozing individual messages as if they were reminders and more. So is there anything not to like about Mailbox?

Apparently there is. According to one app developer, a database Mailbox maintains on your device is unsecured, potentially exposing your contacts, attachments and message contents to anyone who has physical access to your device, using just a simple file transfer tool like iExplorer or DiskAid...

Employees give Apple’s Cook approval rating just shy of Jobs

Wall Street has often questioned whether Apple CEO Tim Cook could ever fill the managerial shoes left by co-founder Steve Jobs. What's more, some anti-Apple analysts like Rob Enderle in an article titled "The impossible task of fixing Apple" opines the board should fire Cook over the recent stock slide.

Despite those doubts, employees of the iPhone maker give Cook an approval rating just shy of Jobs, according to a new survey.

Cook - who oversaw one of Apple's rockiest financial periods - gets a 93 percent approval rating from company employees, Glassdoor announced. The web site is similar to Yelp, but posts anonymous ratings of corporate management rather than businesses...

Tumblr iOS app updated with read later and social sharing features

Tumblr is the home to over a hundred million blogs that have published nearly 50 billion posts. In between blogging for a living here on iDB, checking out new gadgets and just leading an ordinary life, I have little time to maintain a personal blog. But if I did, I'd definitely consider Tumblr as my blogging platform of choice. If you run a Tumblr blog, updating your posts on the go has just become a tad easier as a new version of the official Tumblr iOS app has been released on the App Store with a couple noteworthy additions...

Apple publishes ‘A Decade Of iTunes’ interactive anniversary timeline

Hot on the heels of announcing its quarterly earnings yesterday and promising this morning to show off the next major versions of iOS and OS X at WWDC 2013, Apple has posted a new web page in celebration of ten years of the iTunes Store.

What started out twelve years ago as a jukebox application eventually evolved into the Internet's biggest content store responsible for the vast majority of a record $4.1 billion in Apple's first quarter revenue from its software and services division. The interactive web page titled "A Decade Of iTunes" features ten tabs, each corresponding to a particular iTunes milestone...