iOS

Review: PDF Viewer does not stand out from the pack, but delivers on its promise

Steffen Reich ∙ Updated October 17, 2018

When iOS 8 and its slew of extensibility features arrived, facilitating a much simpler experience importing or exporting your files, third-party productivity apps finally became well-rounded products and viable alternatives to Apple’s in-house range. Since then, more file storage and document editor apps than ever inhabit the depths of the App Store and chances are you have settled on your day-to-day favorite for the handling of PDFs a while back.

Enter PDF Viewer, a new and free app available for iPhone and iPad, which sets out to make you question your previous app choices. As the name suggests, PDF Viewer aims to deliver you an all-encompassing assistant for PDF file management including document edits, file dissection and the creation of new files from scratch. PDF Viewer gets a lot right at the first go but will also have to slowly grow its offering in depth and breadth. Find out if its an application fitting your life style below.

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PickPocket helps protect your valuable iPhone from thieves

Anthony Bouchard ∙ November 4, 2016

I hate good for nothing thieves just like the next guy, but who says you have to be completely powerless against them when your precious iPhone goes missing?

A new jailbreak tweak called PickPocket aims to help keep thieves away from your iPhone and give you additional piece of mind that you'll be able to recover it if or when it gets stolen.

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Get rid of the clunky stock volume HUD in iOS with SmartVolumeControl

Anthony Bouchard ∙ November 4, 2016

The stock volume HUD has always been a pain point of iPhone and iPad users for years. As a result, it's not surprising that so many jailbreak tweak releases have come along in Cydia to bring a better solution for what seems like a major oversight by Apple.

A new jailbreak tweak called SmartVolumeControl is just another one of those releases, and it aims to be a solution that can be customized to your heart's content and also stays out of the way when you don't want it to be.

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Surenix releases Power 2, an iPhone battery life companion app for Apple Watch

Anthony Bouchard ∙ November 3, 2016

Thientam Bach, better known by a large amount of the jailbreak community as Surenix for his design work on high-end themes and jailbreak tweaks, released his first app in the App Store last year called Power.

It was essentially an information-based app that showed data about your iPhone's battery level on your Apple Watch at a glance. But because so much has changed in iOS 10 and watchOS 3, Bach has released Power 2 in the App Store on Thursday with new features and support for the latest operating systems.

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How to fine-tune the skip and replay intervals for audiobooks in Books

Steffen Reich ∙ Updated April 12, 2021

If you consider yourself a fan of the spoken word and bank on Apple’s own Books service to listen to your favorite books, you might have been frustrated by some of the app’s design choices before. Especially when it comes to manipulating the play time of your audiobook on the fly, be it on your Lock screen, in Control Center or on Apple Watch, the experience can be inconsistent and altogether suboptimal at times.

What all those interfaces have in common however is a nimble skip forward and skip back button, both of which are pegged at a pretty arbitrary plus and minus 15 seconds per touch.

This brief tutorial is going to remind you of a trick to customise those buttons and better fit them to your skipping habits by shortening or prolonging the time jumps. After all, what’s the use of 15 second skip intervals in the middle of a J. R. R. Tolkien marathon?

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10+ new features in iOS 10.2 beta 1

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated June 14, 2017

Apple yesterday issued beta 1 of the forthcoming iOS 10.2 software update for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. For starters, iOS 10.2 beta 1 includes three new wallpapers, provides a bunch of new emoji as part of the Unicode 9.0 standard and gives Camera the optional ability to remember filter, Live Photo and mode settings.

Star ratings are back in the Music app and Videos has its own widget. Oh, and you can now annoy friends with a brand new animation in Messages.

Without further ado, here's our video hands-on with iOS 10.2 beta 1 accompanied by a detailed description of all the new features and enhancements.

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The different kinds of memory states on your Mac and what they mean

Anthony Bouchard ∙ October 31, 2016

I was recently asked about the difference between active, inactive, and wired memory on computers. Many memory measure tools use these terms to describe your memory usage and doesn't really go into much depth about what they mean.

In this piece, I hope to shed some light on this confusion and explain the differences between these memory states the best I can.

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