For years, the only way you would’ve had a haptic keyboard on your iPhone is if you jailbroke your device. Fortunately, it seems as through the days of yore are over.
A new third-party keyboard just launched in the App Store that appears to be capable of providing satisfying haptic feedback as you type on your iPhone.
This week's edition of our Apps of the Week roundup includes a not-so-smart food identifying app, a personal shopper that is an expert at helping you pick out gifts, and a journaling app aimed at helping you improve your mood. And as usual, we have two great new games for you to check out this weekend.
Not HotdogIf you're a fan of HBO's TV series Silicon Valley, you probably already know what this is. In last week's episode, budding entrepreneur Jian-Yang demonstrated an app called Seefood, which was supposed to be able to identify different foods using your phone's camera. Instead, all it was able to do was differentiate between hot dogs and non-hotdog items—thus, Not Hotdog was born. That's literally all the app does, but I got a little kick out of taking pictures of random things and sharing them with friends using the 'Not hotdog' caption. And you could too. Not Hotdog is available for free.
GiftHeadHere's a not-so-new app that you may not have known about. It's called GiftHead and it just received a huge update with a major redesign and support for 500 new stores. The app works like this: tell it who you're shopping for, what the occasion is and your preferred price range. Then pick a gift from the curated list of suggestions, and the app will point you to the right store. Rather shop online? The app can do that too. Other features include sale alerts, wish lists and gift reminders, so you'll never miss a birthday or anniversary again. GiftHead is available for free.
StigmaStigma is another not-so-new app that could be useful for folks that don't know about it. It's described as a "mental health" app, with a built-in journal, mood calendar, reminders and a word cloud that allows you to see the types of words you're using most in your journal entries. There's also a support network aspect, with PenPals (supportive peers), Support Groups, and a community you can share your journal entries with. Now the app itself is free, but there is a Pro service that starts at $2.99 per month with premium features like advanced analytics and longer journal entries. Stigma is available for free.
Old Man's JourneyOld Man’s Journey is a soul-searching puzzle adventure game about life’s precious moments, broken dreams, and changed plans. Immerse yourself in a visual narrative as you uncover stories of the old man’s life told through beautiful vignettes of his memories. Interact with the serene, whimsical environment as you solve playful puzzles and shape the landscape around you, growing the hills to create the old man’s path forward. Note that this game has won a ton of awards for its visuals and storytelling, but some of the iTunes reviews complain that the puzzles are too easy and the game is too short. We still think this is worth checking out. Old Man's Journey is available for $4.99.
Timber TennisFrom the makers of the hit Timberman comes Timber Tennis, essentially a unique take on the game Pong with a lumberjack twist. Take part in the annual Timber Tennis World Championship—beat all your old rivals by upgrading your skills, using super-shots and staying clear of other players' specials. Unlock a slew of characters and balls, and compete in local multiplayer against your friends. Note that this is a freemium title, with an in-app purchase to remove ads, and some of the early reviews complain that the ads are super intrusive. Even so, if this game is half as addictive as Timberman, it's worth checking out. Timber Tennis is available for free.
More apps to check out Microsoft refreshes OneNote apps with new design and accessibility features Apple’s free app of the week: Eggggg – The Platform Puker Things 3 is out with overhauled interface and multiple new features Hey Siri, make some room for Google Assistant on my iPhone Gmail for iOS now uses machine learning to provide smart replies Todoist gains 2-way Google Calendar integration, Dynamic Type support & more Instagram rolls out selfie filters, rewind option for videos, hashtag sticker & eraser brush
One of the pet peeves I’ve always had as an iOS user is that when I clear notifications from Notification Center, the badges remain on the Home screen app icons, requiring me to manually dismiss the badges after I already went through the process to dismiss the notification in Notification Center.
A new free jailbreak tweak dubbed Pigeon by iOS developer ridn eliminates this tedious problem by automatically updating the icon badge number after you cleared notifications via Notification Center.
If you like adding personalization on your jailbroken device, then sometimes it’s the simple things that stand out the most. Subtly changing UI colors so they don’t overpower the whole interface or user experience is just one example of this concept.
A new free jailbreak tweak called Tinc by iOS developer ridn lets you tint the interfaces of Notification Center and/or Control Center in iOS any color you like, and is a testament too subtle customization.
If you ever listen to radio apps or random playlists that you didn’t create, then you’re probably familiar with how it feels when you can’t quite figure out what’s playing; a real buzzkill when you like the beat and want to save the song for later.
A new free jailbreak tweak dubbed Hypeman by iOS developer ridn can help in this regard, as it keeps you in the loop with song information every time the Now Playing track changes.
Banner notifications throughout iOS 10 are bland, lacking any visual appeal whatsoever. On the other hand, a new free jailbreak tweak dubbed Cheader by iOS developer ridn aims to fix that.
Once installed, Cheader automatically colorizes your notification banners based on the dominant color found in the icon of the app that delivered the notification.
Friday, drone pilot Duncan Sinfield posted his monthly Apple Park construction update showcasing breathtaking aerial views of the massive ring-shaped building lit up at night.
The mountain of dirt on Apple's new campus counties to shrink on a daily basis as contractors continually work on landscaping, planting mature trees around the site.
Solar arrays on the building's roof appear to be completely installed and light posts around the new campus are now active, too.
Aside from other impressive features and mind-boggling facts, the main building has nine entrances and sports a large café, basically an atrium-like space four stories high with a pair of huge glass doors that can be opened when it’s nice outside. The café was designed to hold 4,000 people at once, split between the vast ground floor and the balcony dining areas.
Here's Duncan's latest video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71ZK-NkluqQ
In order to be able to open and close the massive glass doors quietly, they hid the necessary mechanism underground. The glass doors weigh in at a whopping 440,000 pounds each.
“The only doors I know of in the world that size are on an airplane hangar,” said Nelli Diller, a managing director for Seele Group, a German company Apple contracted to create the largest, strongest pieces of curved glass in the world for its new corporate office.
Each of the 800 45-foot-tall panels of safety glass takes fourteen hours to create.
Seele had to expand capacity by working with its autoclave manufacturer to develop a much bigger cooker that could stack five panels at once. “The one we had was the biggest in the glass industry by far. This new one is just … giant,” said Diller.
Seele also built glass panels for Apple Stores.
Both Google Maps and Apple Maps offer three-dimensional views of Apple Park, although Google's 3D imagery appears to be a bit out of date.
For a video recap of the construction progress made on the 175-acre campus over the past year, check out a birds-eye video by videographer Matthew Roberts.
If you like these gorgeous aerial scenes of Apple Park lit up at night, be sure to check out Duncan's first nighttime footage of the new campus taken about a month ago.
Apple gave Wired a rare look inside the building with many previously unknown tidbits about the project and never-before-seen photographs of the meticulously designed interiors.
Apple began moving in first employees at the start of April, with about 500 new employees arriving every week thereafter. The iPhone maker expects to finish the move-in process, complete landscaping work and open the visitor center to the public by year-end.
Apple Park has a 100,000-square-foot fitness and wellness center for employees which includes a two-story yoga room, as well as access to medical and dental services.
“I’m a big believer in people staying active,” said Cook, who is something of a fitness buff himself. “It’s something that makes them feel better and more energetic. It’s all about the fixation on the customer, and the customers here are our people, our employees.”
Apple on Friday added four new video tutorials to the “How to shoot on iPhone 7” series on its YouTube channel. The four new videos were designed to teach customers how to shoot with zoom on their iPhone 7 Plus, convert their photographs to black & white, as well as take a one-handed selfie and edit it on the phone.
How to shoot with zoom on iPhone 7 Plus“Get closer with 2x optical zoom. Or use digital zoom to get up to 10x closer,” says Apple.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsaA1s7oCKA
If you tend to use the zoom feature while shooting video on your iPhone 7 Plus, it may be a good idea to disable the automatic lens switching feature in camera settings to avoid any glitches that may occur when zooming in and out during video capture.
How to convert to black & white on iPhone 7https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQoEsUJpy_Q “The right filter and a bit of experimenting with light levels give you a dramatic black-and-white image,” says Apple.
How to shoot a one-handed selfie on iPhone 7https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4miX5CNATEI
“The quick-draw selfie in three easy steps.”
How to edit a selfie on iPhone 7https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUxahFzjGS4
“Use cropping and auto-enhance to create an even better selfie for sharing,” says Apple.
If you'd like, feel free to explore additional photography tips and techniques at Apple's website.
The clips join Apple's seven video tutorials on using iPhone 7's camera, published last week.
Our own iPhone Photography series is a valuable resource of free tips, tricks and advanced photography techniques, whether you are an experienced photographer or a beginner.
All recent Apple Watch models come with the same amount of storage space, which is 32 GB. This tutorial will show you how to check the amount of free space you have on your Apple Watch and also see how much space each app is taking up.
Apple is going to preview iOS 11 along with other OS updates at its annual developers conference next month and we fully expect the mobile operating system to include advances that should make the Apple tablet a better laptop replacement than it currently is.
In the meantime, Federico Viticci and Sam Beckett of MacStories have put together an incredibly detailed concept of iPad-specific features that could be part of iOS 11, including the Finder, a new Shelf feature, drag-and-drop available system-wide and other perks.
With the Shelf feature, you would be able to clip pretty much anything with a simple drag-and-drop gesture. Sitting above apps both in full-screen or Split View mode, it would reveal itself automatically when you're dragging an item towards the top of the screen.
The Shelf would display your previously saved items as thumbnail previews and you'd be able to drop an item on top of another item to create a folder in the Shelf.
“The idea behind the Shelf is to make it as effortless as possible to hold something for later without the cognitive load of deciding which app or extension should receive it right away.”
The Shelf would be paginated and local to each iPad.
You'd be permitted to drop almost anything in it: from text selections and images to phone numbers and even songs. Tapping an item in the Shelf would pull up a custom Quick Look preview with additional information and actions relevant to the selected item.
And here's the concept video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyFUDQ5LLZw
Next up: file management.
As you know, Apple currently offers the iCloud Drive app for browsing your iCloud files.
MacStories has envisioned a Finder for iOS because the argument that iPad doesn't need to expose its filesystem to the user “lost its validity when Apple introduced document providers in iOS 8 and the iCloud Drive app in iOS 9.”
Unlike Finder for macOS, its iOS counterpart would not expose system information beyond the actual files. You'd be able to browse your files in column and grid views, shared items via iCloud with full permission controls, apply tags, use the Versions feature and even take advantage of Siri integration to search across your files.
“All the pieces of the current system—iCloud Drive, the document picker and document providers—should be unified into a single Finder app and system-wide layer available everywhere,” said MacStories.
Instead of having files stored within app-specific folders on iCloud Drive, users would be able to create files in a top-level iCloud Drive view.
As a bonus, rather than list a bunch of installed document provider extensions in a popup, you'd get a full-blown Finder dialog to open files from any folder or app.
MacStories notes:
With a new set of APIs and user permissions, iOS 11 could allow apps to more easily open each other's documents in complex (but intuitive) workflows that aren't possible today.
And, obviously, automation could play a role in this down the road, opening the door to ideas such as folder-monitoring utilities and file automation either via Workflow or Hazel-like apps.
Finder for iOS would integrate with other features that MacStories has envisioned, such as the Shelf and system-wide drag-and-drop, but without the complexity of macOS.
But wouldn't drag-and-drop clash with iOS's standard gestures?
In a word, no. As MacStories explains:
Because drag-and-drop would be fully multitouch-enabled, it wouldn't block the iOS interface: another finger could be used to navigate in a different "drop area" of an app, or a user could keep dragging until the Split View app picker is shown and drop an item onto an app's icon, opening a contextual action menu.
App Store could be redesigned around Apple Music-inspired redesign, as show below.
Apple could even bring aspects of the watchOS interface to iOS and move beyond the static, inexpressive nature of its interface. “Touch-down states for icons and buttons would add useful context to iOS toolbar icons and menus as well,” reads the article.
A better Split View implementation is one of my favorite concepts proposed by MacStories for iOS 11. In addition to supporting drag-and-drop between the apps in Split View mode, you'd gain the ability to quickly select an app for Split View by choosing it from a Home screen like view complete with Spotlight integration for surfacing Split View-enabled apps.
Be sure to visit the MacStories concept for additional high-resolution mockups and detailed descriptions of other proposed enhancements, such as improvements to Notes and Control Center, better extension support in Safari and more.
Feel free to let us know your thoughts on this concept by posting a comment below.
iPhones have come equipped with Near Field Communication (NFC) technology since the iPhone 6 launched in 2014. NFC's primary use in the iPhone is for Apple Pay and allows contactless payments via supported merchants at the point of sale.
On the other hand, well-known jailbreak developer Elias Limneos was tinkering with iPhone NFC on his spare time and managed to hack it to work in ways that are typically locked off by Apple out of the box.
Marking one of Apple's traditional “Beer Bash” celebrations, multi-platinum Grammy-winning artist Stevie Wonder performed this week at Apple's Cupertino headquarters at One Infinite Loop.
The corporate event for company employees was organized in recognition of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a global initiative focused on digital access and inclusion of people with different disabilities.
Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted out an image of himself and Wonder hugging onstage as a thank you to the artist. “Thank you to the incomparable Stevie Wonder for lifting hearts and celebrating accessibility with us,” reads the tweet.
Prior “Beer Bash” celebrations at Apple's headquarters included performances by Maroon 5, One Republic, Darius Rucker and other music artists.
https://twitter.com/cookiecrook/status/865371872723992576
“There's nothing on iPhone or iPad that you can do that I can't do,“ Wonder, an Apple fan, said in 2011 commenting on the assistive technologies built into iOS and macOS.
The artist sang in Apple's “Someday at Christmas” 2015 holiday commercial.
Wonder is blind so having him perform on Global Accessibility Awareness Day is fitting.
Apple celebrated Global Accessibility Awareness Day with a series of inspiring videos highlighting assistive technologies built into its platforms, the accessibility-focused “Today at Apple” sessions at Apple Stores, an App Store section highlighting some of the best apps for people with disabilities and three Tim Cook interviews with accessibility activists.