How to convert music tracks to Audiobook in iTunes

Venturing into the depths of iTunes is no longer an activity for the faint-hearted, as Apple’s gold mine is famously becoming more convoluted with every update. It is by no means impossible to keep up with the changes, but staying on top of every small cosmetic shift does pose a decent challenge today.

As somebody very fond of the spoken word on iTunes, I can attest that this general rule holds true for audiobooks as well. So as I was fiddling around with some old school CDs the other day and trying to move audio files within my iTunes library to the Audiobooks tab, I noticed my old methods were already outdated again. If you’re not up to speed on iTunes, here’s a refresher on how to get your talking book to properly identify as Audiobooks inside the application, followed by an encore for CD enthusiasts with regard to joining tracks during import.

Why to avoid third-party Cydia Substrate “patches” for the iOS 10 beta jailbreak

Yesterday, we shared our fullest opinion of why you should avoid jailbreaking with Luca Todesco’s beta jailbreak for iOS 10 until it’s out of its beta stages, but for those who’ve went ahead with it anyway because nostalgia got the best of them, there’s another difficult choice to make…

Cydia Substrate is disabled by default, and amid the nostalgia, many are already using third-party “fixes” or “patches” to get around this. Of course, there’s a reason Cydia Substrate is disabled by default, and those who’ve gotten as far as jailbreaking also have to decide whether or not to install these patches.

In this piece, I will attempt to eliminate some of the confusion about why Cydia Substrate is disabled by default and why you should avoid installing these third-party “fixes” to get around it.

iSpaceship is finally coming together

Though Apple's yet to confirm a move-in date for the 13,000+ employees it's planning to house at a new Jony Ive-designed campus, the project is finally coming together after work on it began in 2013. New drone footage from Matthew Roberts suggests the campus may open its doors early this year.

Going by this gorgeous 4K clip, there’s still some work to be done before Campus 2 opens but the main building looks nearly complete, roads are being cleared and landscaping within the building and around its central courtyard is now visible.

Kantar: iPhone 6s/7/Plus were 3 most popular smartphones in U.S. in November

Kantar Worldpanel previously said that iOS achieved its strongest growth and the highest market share in the United States in more than two years. In its latest survey, the market intelligence company found out that iPhone's share of the U.S. smartphone market grew 6.4 percent year-on-year in the three months ending in November 2016.

iPhone 6s, iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus were the country's three most popular smartphones during November, with the handsets taking share from Google's Android platform in most markets globally.

How to verify your .shsh2 blobs with img4tool

We recently reported how some of the .shsh2 blobs saved with previous versions of tihmstar’s TSSChecker were faulty. One problem affected all iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus blobs, rendering them useless. This issue has now been fixed going forward, though past blobs are invalid.

The other problem was more complex and affected only certain models of certain devices. It is also fixed for blobs saved from now on, but given these occurrences, it is important to be able to check whether the blobs you saved in the past are in fact valid and fit for use with Prometheus.

In this article, we’ll go through how to use another tool from tihmstar’s Prometheus suite, img4tool, to verify that your .shsh2 files are good. This method will clarify whether you are affected by the second problem mentioned above, but will also work in general, when checking the validity of your blobs in future.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth arrives after being yanked from App Store almost a year ago

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, an iOS version of the dungeon crawler game originally released back in 2014 by independent game studio Nicalis, is now available on iOS as a premium $14.99 download from App Store.

Nicalis originally submitted its dungeon crawler for iPhone and iPad a year ago, but the game got rejected for depicting violence against children. The iOS port has a 17+ rating.

CoolBooter demo: the dual-boot tool for iOS

Developer Jonathan Seals recently released a new piece of work called CoolBooter, an interesting tool which allows some 32-bit devices to dual-boot different iOS firmwares. With a simple reboot it can allow, for example, switching between iOS 6 and iOS 9. Whilst this functionality is commonplace in the desktop computing world, booting multiple operating systems on iOS devices is much rarer.

Sebastien and I talked briefly about the tool on Let's Talk Jailbreak 157, and in this article I'll give some more info, as well as a video demonstration of it in action.

Former AppleScript lead Sal Soghoian writes about automation for MacStories

After Apple terminated his position as Product Manager of Automation Technologies for “business reasons,” Automator and AppleScript evangelist Sal Soghoian is now guest blogging about these technologies over at MacStories.

In his first post for the publication, Soghoian shares his thoughts on Automator, AppleScript and similar services versus app extensions. Soghoian spent almost 20 years leading AppleScript, Automator and related technologies at 1 Infinite Loop.

Senior Director of Design for Mac lineup leaves Apple for engineering role at Tesla

Apple was trying “very hard” (in Elon Musk's own words) to recruit top talent from Tesla.

Now that its Project Titan has shifted gear from building an electric vehicle to developing an autonomous driving software, some of the engineers associated with the initiative have departed for Tesla.

Just as we've discovered that Swift creator Chris Lattner was leaving the iPhone maker to take a position as Vice President of Autopilot Software at Tesla, Electrek.co is reporting that the guy who designed many of Apple’s iconic Macs will now be building Tesla vehicles.

Early click wheel and icon-based iPhone prototypes shown in new video

After sharing images and a video of an early-stage prototype iPhone software based on iPod's click wheel interface, leakster Sonny Dickson is back at it with another wonderful piece of Apple history.

A new video posted on Dickson's website pits a pair of early iPhone prototypes against each other: Tony Fadell’s “P1” device based on the click wheel UI and ex-iOS chief Scott Forstall's “P2” project.

Why you should wait until Luca Todesco’s iOS 10 jailbreak is out of beta before using it

I get asked every day whether or not someone should jailbreak their iOS 10 device right now with Luca Todesco’s beta tool or continue to wait a little longer for a more stable jailbreak release.

In this post, I hope to tackle some of the confusion regarding the tool and help to answer some ongoing questions of whether or not you should jailbreak just yet. Of course, if you don’t have the time to read, the short answer is: no.