iOS

Apple pushes new music discovery feature to beta testers ahead of iOS 10 release

Christian Zibreg ∙ September 3, 2016

First announced at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference in June, a pair of forthcoming music discovery features went live on Apple Music this past Friday for iOS 10 beta testers.

Rechristened from “Discovery Mix” to “My New Music Mix” and available through the For You section of the Music app on iOS 10, this new curated playlist suggests tunes based on your previously played music.

As a bonus, you also get another personally curated playlist—“My Favorites Mix”. These two auto-updated playlists should take the pain out of discovering new artists and music from Apple Music's vast content library, as first reported on by AppleInsider.

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AppDye 2 subtly throws a splash of color across the UI in iOS

Anthony Bouchard ∙ September 2, 2016

Adding a splash of color to the various UI elements throughout iOS 9 has never been as easy as it is with a new jailbreak tweak called AppDye 2.

With this tweak, you can colorize many parts of iOS based off of a single color you choose, or you can color your apps on a per-app basis with individual color schemes. Among some of the things that the tweak can modify the color of are:

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“Hey Siri, call Sébastien on Skype”

Christian Zibreg ∙ September 1, 2016

Apple's made a rare move of publishing multiple blog posts to whet our appetite for Siri's upcoming third-party integration on iOS 10. We already detailed how Siri will work with popular messaging/payments apps and allow you to search photos inside third-party apps like Pinterest, just by using your voice.

Now, we take a closer look at how Apple's personal digital assistant can interact with VoIP apps like Skype, Vonage and others.

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Apple previews photo-search capabilities coming to iOS 10 via Siri app integration

Christian Zibreg ∙ September 1, 2016

iOS 10 marks the first time Apple has allowed other people's apps to integrate with Siri. The following app categories are permitted to take advantage of the new SiriKit in iOS 10: ride hailing, messaging, photo search, mobile payments, VoIP and workout apps.

The company already detailed Siri integration in popular messaging and payments apps and now a new blog post shows you how Siri can find photos inside apps like Pinterest, Vogue and more.

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Apple shares examples of Siri’s third-party app integration on iOS 10

Christian Zibreg ∙ September 1, 2016

Following first hands-on demonstrations of Siri's app integration that select developers gave to The Wall Street Journal's Nathan Olivarez-Giles last week, Apple on Thursday published an article of its own to share more details regarding Siri integrations for payments, messaging apps and more.

As a quick backgrounder, Siri on iOS 10 will work with your apps thanks to Apple's new SiriKit framework which was designed to help developers integrate Siri functionality into their own apps.

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First hands-on demo of Siri’s app integration doesn’t disappoint

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated June 14, 2017

Capabilities of SiriKit, a new iOS 10 framework that lets third-party apps work with Siri, were on full display in the first hands-on demonstration given to Nathan Olivarez-Giles of the Wall Street Journal. In addition to extending Siri’s support for messaging, photo search and phone calls to more apps, SiriKit also adds support for new services, including ride booking and personal payments.

Nathan was pretty impressed with the usefulness of Siri's app integration on iOS 10, calling it a “long-overdue” enhancement that will make Apple's personal digital assistant “more useful in everyday life” than it's ever been.

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Amalthea: a video-friendly volume HUD for your iOS Status Bar

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated September 13, 2016

One of the biggest problems with the stock volume HUD in iOS is how it floats in the center of the display and gets in the way of everything you're doing. The problem is amplified when you're trying to watch a video and you can't see what's going on.

Amalthea is a new jailbreak tweak that relocates the volume indicator to the location of the Status Bar so that it's up and out of the way.

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