iOS 10

Apple releases iOS 10.3 beta 1 to developers with Find My AirPods & other new features

Apple today seeded the first beta of what would become the third major software update to iOS 10 since its September 2016 release. The release includes a new Find My AirPods feature and other enhancements, like Reduce Motion for websites.

iOS 10.3 beta 1 (build 14E5230e) is available to registered developers who are members of Apple Developer Program. A version of the software aimed at public beta testers registered with Apple Beta Software Program is expected shortly.

Jailbreak tweaks of the week: AntiTracker, Quickify, & more…

For those who still have their jailbreaks, it's been pretty slow in terms of jailbreak tweak releases recently. The lack of a recent public jailbreak for everyone paired with the loss of interest in iOS 9 is, without a shadow of doubt, making things rough for jailbreak developers.

Regardless, we put together a roundup every week to showcase everything new in Cydia, so following that tradition, we'll be doing the same this week, starting with our favorites and moving on to all the rest afterwards.

AntiTracker lets you know every time someone tracks you with Find My Friends [jailbreak]

Find My Friends is an app made by Apple that lets you track the location of your friends and family so you can find out their whereabouts at any time of the day, but it can also be a real privacy concern.

While some people enable this feature voluntarily so that their family members can keep tabs on them or so that friends can meet up with one another, others have the feature enabled on them behind their backs so their significant others can stalk them.

If you’re paranoid about whether or not you’re being tracked, then you need a new free jailbreak tweak called AntiTracker.

Apple posts Sketch and Photoshop design assets for iOS 10 development

Apple today shared new user interface resources aimed at iOS 10 development. They come in the form of ready-made design templates for Photoshop and Sketch and include a variety of other helpful assets for quickly designing iOS apps.

Apple says these resources accurately depict the full range of UIKit controls which are available in iOS 10, as well as views and glyphs to help speed up the process of constructing and designing user interfaces in iPhone, iPad and iPod touch apps.

Delta emulator for iOS beta 2 released

Riley Testut's new project Delta, the retro game console emulator, continued its early phase testing yesterday, with the release of a second build for those on its closed beta testing program. According to Testut, healthy feedback from the testers resulted in a slew of bugs and improvement suggestions reported from the first beta, and this second iteration consequently comes with a handy list of fixes and additions.

Apple’s new TV app doesn’t like ripped DVDs, here are some workarounds

Apple's new TV app on iOS 10.2 struggles to play videos that have been ripped from DVDs and other sources and loaded into iTunes for Mac. It’s unclear whether this is a simple bug, but that didn't stop people from flocking to Apple’s Support Communities forum to express their disdain for the app.

The TV app has replaced the old and mostly useless Videos app.

Thankfully, dedicated apps let you easily play non-iOS-friendly media on iPhone, like FireCore's versatile Infuse video player. Handbrake for Mac, which recently exited beta after 13 years, packs in a comprehensive set of tools for easy video conversion with handy presets for turning ripped DVDs into an iPhone-compatible format.

Store and watch the latest news stories offline with Hyper News

If you have ever travelled on a metro line you know what it’s like to whiz from one station to the next, always holding out for the next patch of reception somewhere between the constant outages afflicting your iPhone. Most times, the internet will cut out in the least opportune moments, like on your commute home when you slump in your seat and want to mindlessly gaze at moving images on your phone.

To weather the crisis of poor connection, Hyper News functions as a pocket of pre-downloaded news clips to fall back on whenever your data leaves you hanging.

In a spell of news apps being tested at iDB, Hyper News stands out for its utter simplicity and the concerted effort to occupy a unique space in the news realm. Here are the ins and outs to know about Hyper News.

Jailbreak tweaks of the week: OnceMore, Photicon, & more…

Despite what appeared to be a couple of busy weeks previously, it seems the jailbreak tweak assembly line has slowed down slightly once more, as releases weren't as rapid this week.

Nevertheless, we wrap up with a jailbreak tweak roundup every single Sunday, so we'll be taking this opportunity to talk about all of the jailbreak tweaks that were released this week, starting with our favorites.

Glimpse is an Apple Watch app news addicts will love (with reservations)

Every once in a while a Watch app comes along that brings something ostensibly new to the table. Glimpse, a project that sets out to relay real-time content from your iPhone straight to your Apple Watch’s watch face, is one of those notable additions. The app is home to a handful of social networks and about twenty prolific news outlets, which subject to your taste can selectively refresh on your iPhone and welcome you with new content every time you glance at your watch face.

The promise and potential of Glimpse is uncontested, but so are the flaws in its execution as of today. So before you speed to the App Store, think over the following items to find out if Glimpse has been tailored to you.

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.

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.