SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS now available to developers

Christian Zibreg ∙ March 31, 2017

Apple said yesterday that a software-development kit (SDK) for SAP Cloud Platform development is now available to iOS developers. Announced in May 2016, the Apple-SAP partnership aims to help reinvent business processes and workflows. The SDK lets developers build native iOS apps in Swift, Apple’s modern programming language, and integrate them with SAP's Cloud Platform.

For the uninitiated, SAP is a German business software maker that writes enterprise software for managing business operations and customer relations.

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Apple officially opens iOS App Design and Development Accelerator in India

Christian Zibreg ∙ March 31, 2017

Phil Schiller, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and the guy in charge of all App Stores at Apple, announced on Twitter this morning that the company's iOS App Design and Development Accelerator in the Yelahanka area of Bengaluru in India is officially opening. Bengaluru is the home of India’s startup scene. The populous country has some of the most vibrant and entrepreneurial iOS development communities in the world.

Apple also published useful resources at developer.apple.com/accelerator, including information pertaining to local iOS development scene.

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Galaxy S8 biometrics can be tricked by a headshot

Christian Zibreg ∙ March 31, 2017

Samsung's newly introduced Galaxy S8 features iris scanning and facial recognition via the front-facing camera. Both these features can be used to unlock the phone for those times when you don't feel like reaching your finger around the back and feeling for its built-in fingerprint reader alongside the rear camera. iDeviceHelp posted a hands-on video with Galaxy S8's biometrics.

They concluded that eyeballs and faces are not as secure as fingerprints because the phone could be tricked into unlocking by scanning a user's headshot.

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Do more from your App Switcher with EnhancedSwitcherClose

Anthony Bouchard ∙ March 31, 2017

The stock App Switcher looks alright, but it's not as useful as it could be. Apple limits what you can do inside the App Switcher to force-quitting apps, but as jailbreak developers have shown for years, there’s so much untapped potential.

A new free jailbreak tweak called EnhancedSwitcherClose by iOS developer DGh0st provides you with a new way to interact with your App Switcher cards and gives you more options depending on the way you swipe them.

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iOS 9.x Re-restore bug even more powerful than previously thought

Joaquim Barbosa ∙ Updated March 19, 2019

I reported a few weeks back on an interesting new bug for 32-bit devices, which allowed you to restore them to any unsigned iOS 9.x firmware, provided you had blobs for the destination firmware.

At the time, it was thought that the bug would mainly be of use for people downgrading from iOS 9.3.5 to a lower firmware, to jailbreak with Home Depot or Pangu9. However, it turns out the bug is in fact more powerful and wide-ranging than previously thought, and may have much wider utility.

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Twitter stops counting @usernames toward the 140-character limit

Christian Zibreg ∙ March 30, 2017

Twitter announced Thursday that it's no longer counting user names in tweets, such as @idownloadblog, toward its 140-character limit. With this change, any user names for mentions and replies will no longer shorten the amount of characters you could include in a tweet.

Last year, the micro-blogging service began allowing users to attach photos, animated GIFs, videos, polls, quoted tweets and direct messages to tweets without the links counting against the 140-character limit.

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Infuse 5.3 brings optimized playback performance, parental controls, Blu-ray disk images & more

Christian Zibreg ∙ March 30, 2017

Infuse by aTV Flash Black developer FireCore is a versatile, very powerful media player that lets you watch non-iOS optimized media file types without the need for manual transcoding or a helper app to do the heavy lifting via your computer. The app was updated on App Store to version 5.3.

Infuse 5.3 for iOS and tvOS comes with a completely overhauled high-performance playback core that's now now faster and better than ever before.

Other new features are available in Infuse 5.3 as well.

The app now accepts your Blu-ray disc images and folders and lets you restrict access to videos and settings with built-in parental controls. The release also packs support for ISO 9960 (Joliet) disc images, country-specific age ratings for movies and much more.

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Here’s latest Apple Park drone flyover ahead of grand opening in April

Christian Zibreg ∙ March 30, 2017

Apple Park should be ready for more than 12,000 employees to begin occupying in April, although landscaping and other finishing touches will take six more months to complete.

As it appears, the main ring-shaped building should be soon open to employees in some of the wings.

Drone pilot Matthew Roberts just posted his latest flyover footage of the 175 acre campus in glorious 4K resolution, showing continued work on landscaping, solar installations and more.

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Teardown analysis finds Apple’s new 9.7″ iPad is a repackaged iPad Air with a few differences

Christian Zibreg ∙ March 30, 2017

Repair experts over at iFixit tore apart Apple's new iPad with a brighter 9.7-inch screen. What they discovered doesn't come as surprise: the canonical iPad is basically an original four-year-old iPad Air with a more repairable screen and some new jewelry in the form of Touch ID, Apple Pay, Apple's homegrown third-generation 64-bit A9 chip with the embedded M9 motion coprocessor and other minor updates.

Unfortunately, the device's A9 processor is outfitted with two gigabytes of RAM. iPhone 6s's A9 chip has two gigabytes of RAM as well, just like iPad Air 2's A8X chip, so this may not be that big of a deal. On the other hand, it's a letdown considering iPhone 7 Plus is rocking three gigabytes of RAM.

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