‘Arco’ is a great tweak for a greater cause

Arco is a recently release jailbreak collaboration between Jack Willis and Sentry. The release, which falls under the A3tweaks umbrella, places a visual music timeline indicator in your device's status bar.

The design of Arco is very much akin to the download animation that happens in the App Store in iOS 7. In iOS 7 there's a round circle indicator that wraps around a button, which is indicative of the download progress. In the case of Arco, the "progress" is in relation to a currently playing song.

Although it's a solid tweak, the best thing about Arco isn't about design or functionality. The great thing about Arco is where the money goes when you purchase a copy. A3tweaks has generously decided to forward all proceeds to Kyle Matthews' Because of Ezra charity, which helps to fund research for neuroblastoma, a terrible form of pediatric cancer.

Some iPhone 5s owners plagued with blue screen of death

In the past week or so, we have been inundated with numerous tips about an apparent issue with Apple's iWork productivity suite running on the iPhone 5s.

Folks have been emailing us about their top-end iPhone abruptly restarting each time they'd fired up Apple's Pages, Numbers or Keynote app.

Digging deeper, the problem raises its ugly head not just with iWork but some third-party apps as well. I'm just scatter-shooting here, but this could be due to the iPhone 5s's A7 chip and the transition to 64-bit computing.

Sure enough, a quick hop over to Apple's support forums revealed a thread with similar complaints where the iPhone 5s goes into a blue screen prior to respringing - hence the Blue Screen of Death moniker.

As this issue continues to persists, I though you should know about how it manifests itself and tell you about a band-aid solution. Apple of course is cleverly keeping mum on the matter and is yet to respond with a software fix for the glitch. Read on...

iPad and iPad mini found to have most responsive tablet touchscreens

Apple's iPad mini has the most responsive tablet touchscreen, according to some new tests by Agawi. The app-streaming company recently ran it and several other slates through its rigorous TouchMark benchmark to measure the field.

The mini registered a 75ms delay on the latency test, coming in just 6ms ahead of the iPad 4, which posted an 81ms lag. And the rest of the competition was pretty far behind, with the Surface RT at 95ms and the Kindle Fire HD at 114...

iPad event pegged for October 22

According to AllThingsD, the reliable technology blog operated by The Wall Street Journal, Apple will be holding an iPad focused event exactly two weeks from today, on October 22. Now, Apple typically likes to run its big media events on Tuesdays and October 22 is a Tuesday. It's also six days before Apple's upcoming fiscal 2013 fourth quarter earnings release so it should be a boon for the stock price.

And as per the obligatory "people familiar with Apple’s plans" (read: Apple's public relations department), the invitation-only event will focus on new iPads, though new Mac Pro and OS X Mavericks should get some stage time as well...

Beautiful Jony Ive-designed Leica M camera revealed ahead of charity auction

It's been more than a year since we first received word that Apple's design wizard Jony Ive was going to be helping Leica design a limited-edition camera. The device, along with many others, was to be auctioned off for charity.

But the radio silence on the project ended today, with the German optics company revealing the 'The Leica M for (RED).' It's a one-of-a-kind camera, designed by Ive, and it's set to be auctioned off at Sotheby's late next month...

Calendars 5 updated with simpler task creation and date showing on icon badge

If you ask me, Calendars 5 currently is the best calendar application for iOS 7. It's simple, elegant and works just as you would expect from an app that has been redesigned from the ground up for Apple's latest mobile operating system.

Today the app was updated with a couple of new features, making the app an even more solid alternative to the stock calendar application...

Infuse iOS media player updated with gesture control, teases iOS 7-ified 2.0 release

One of my favorite iOS media players, Infuse by jailbreak developer FireCore who brought you the aTV Flash Black for Apple's $99 "hobby" box, has just received a nice little update bringing the software to version 1.5.

Today's update has brought out two new noteworthy enhancements: gesture-based controls and TV show groups which basically cleans up your library by grouping all TV shows together by season.

FireCore also confirmed that a major Infuse 2.0 update is "coming this Fall". I've included additional tidbits concerning both Infuse 1.5 and 2.0 right after the break so give it a quick read...

Office for iPad coming after touch-enabled Windows version, says Ballmer

Earlier in June of this year, software maker Microsoft finally posted its long overdue Office 365 for iPhone (Jeff reviewed it here). The native iPad build, however, was nowhere to be seen. Speaking at a Gartner event in Florida today, Microsoft's outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer slipped in that Office for iPad is indeed being worked on.

He also cautioned that his company will first release touch-optimized version of Office for Windows before unleashing the iPad edition. In case you've been wondering, touch-optimized Office is currently "in progress"...

Nest launches Protect, jaw-dropping smoke and carbon monoxide detector

Former Apple hardware engineer Tony Fadell needs no introduction. After leading iPod development and helping build the iPhone, he left Apple for his own startup, Nest.

There, the brilliant engineer banded together with a talented team comprised of former Apple wizards to create the Nest learning thermostat (Jeff had to say a bunch of nice things about it).

That was just the beginning of Nest's journey to the app-enabled, connected home. Today, the startup unveiled its second major product, a smart and gorgeous smoke and carbon monoxide alarm dubbed Nest Protect: Smoke + Carbon Monoxide. Like the Nest thermostat, the Protect takes everything that we hate about existing smoke detectors and re-imagines what those life-saving appliances should be and how they should function...

Yahoo totally revamps Mail, now with 1TB of free storage

Yahoo's beleaguered Mail has long given up its leadership position to Gmail although many people would agree that Yahoo's web-mail service is far more elegant, sophisticated and streamlined compared to Google's Gmail, which often times looks very much like work in progress. Taking another crack at dethroning Google, Yahoo today started rolling out a significant Mail makeover across the web, mobile and desktop.

Further sweetening the deal, the company has raised the storage cap so everyone now gets one terabyte of free storage. The new design looks absolutely gorgeous, jump past the fold for the full reveal...

Screenies of WhatsApp iOS 7 update leak

As WhatsApp continues to shrug off competition from not only Viber, but also Apple's iMessage, Microsoft's Skype and even Google's Hangouts, the instant messaging space continues to burst with activity.

However, WhatsApp - arguably the most popular cross-platform instant messaging solution - has yet to update its iPhone client with iOS 7 look and feel.

Even though we don't know when that update might drop, we have a pretty good idea of how the iOS 7-inspired application might look like thanks to iOS developer @HackiPhone who tweeted out a couple of work-in-progress screenies...