Time Warner Cable recently released an official iOS app early last year that gave subscribers the option to watch live TV. Despite some early issues with channel agreements, the app is still going strong and it appears that it is popular with customers as well. It seems that the app was such a hit that the company has decided to update the app to also work with the iPhone and iPod Touch, so now no matter which iOS device you have, you can tune in to some live television granted that you are a Time Warner Cable subscribers.
For those of you who are subscribers, the app is called TWC TV and you can download it for free from the App Store. As you might have guessed already, it requires users to have a reliable internet signal so chances are you’ll need a Wi-Fi connection for streaming. You‘ll also be able to browse through program schedules and information and even set your compatible DVR to grab your favorite shows on the go.
The app is welcome addition to the company’s service and it’s probably one of the best iOS implementations that a media company has offered. It’s also nice to see the company expanding its supported devices with an update along with the fact that Timer Warner Cable is dedicating itself to make its content available even on Apple’s platforms for customers. Hopefully other service providers will be hopping the bandwagon.
Hacker planetbeing, a part of the A5 untethered jailbreak dream team, announced via a tweet on Twitter today that we are one step closer to the A5 untethered jailbreak. Why? Because the dream team's newest member, saurik, helped them with getting out the sandbox. It was originally planetbeing's responsibility to deal with the sandbox, but saurik helped once more. Saurik has been in cahoots with the A5 untethered jailbreak since the beginning.
It all started with pod2g's A5 caching issue. Saurik was able to assist in getting pod2g over that mountain. Not too long ago, we reported on MuscleNerd and pod2g tweeting the update that they were almost past solving the sandbox. Saurik was introduced once more to get today's result.
Escaping the sandbox is a very important step in the jailbreak. This is good news because the sandbox is one of the tough security measures that makes hacking into an iDevice hard. It mixes things around - imagine a literal sandbox. If you buried several small parts in it and mixed it all around, you would find it incredibly difficult to find the things that you buried in it because it hides the resources. This is the idea behind it. The sandbox measure keeps information from being discovered by malicious processes. It runs new processes separate from other processes so that they are limited in resource and cannot cause damage.
With the sandbox measure completely defeated, the rest of the jailbreak process will coast along nicely. We don't have an estimated time of arrival for the jailbreak yet, but we can properly assure you that the toughest mountain has been climbed. We expect that many iPad 2 and iPhone 4S owners will be happy to hear this news.
Update: Dow Jones misunderstood Hesse. The data throttling is only applied to the Sprint data users that use too much data when they are using the data roaming feature abroad. It doesn't refer to the raw data usage itself.
Sprint was the first cell phone company to brag about their unlimited data plans in the arrival of the iPhone 4S in their hands. They also like to brag in the commercials about how they offer truly unlimited data. Well folks, even in the smallest number that it is, that appears to be a lie - one percent of the top Sprint data users are actually throttled on the spot, as Sprint CEO Dan Hesse confirms.
As we know, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon all throttle their heaviest users. It's a practice that is commonly used by cell phone companies to help lower data traffic and also to keep people from using excessive amounts of data. The people who use the network for things like video streaming, tethering, and other heavy data eaters are the most likely to face this discipline. It doesn't mean that just because you use your network that you'll be throttled, but the people using 20GB or more a month really are using the data too much. From regular use on a phone, I find it pretty hard to come anywhere near 2GB. (Jeez what are you people doing with your data?)
Now that Sprint has officially admitted to throttling their top one percent of data users, all of the top cell phone companies in America are now guilty of it. We knew it was coming, but what we weren't expecting was for Sprint to advertise truly unlimited data and be caught lying about it. This is especially so with all of the bragging and enthusiasm that came from Sprint with the release of the iPhone 4S on their network last year.
With the news that Sprint is no longer 'truly' unlimited in the sense that if you're one of the top users, you'll be turned down, it might still not be enough to make Sprint look bad. Sprint only throttles the top one percent - which isn't enough to worry about. Additionally, they still offer unlimited data - even when you're throttled. This means no overages. Other phone companies on the other hand, have all implemented caps on their data plans. Unlimited users who are grandfathered in are throttled, but the percentage on those networks is much higher than one percent.
Are you a frequent listener of music on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad? iOS is an amazing operating system for music playing. It allows you to control your music from your lock screen using the iPod controls that appear on your lock screen when you double tap the home button. It appears along with the camera button. What do you do though, when you want to change to a different song? Do you unlock your iDevice? Do you fumble around to find your Music application on your SpringBoard? Do you enter a passcode before doing all of that?
Check out this neat new jailbreak tweak called Recludo by iOS developer Nicolò Ciraci (iStopped). Recludo makes it so that when you double tap your home button on the lock screen to enable the iPod controls and then you unlock your iDevice, the operating system will automatically unlock to the Music application. If, on the other hand, you don't have the iPod controls enabled on your lock screen, your iDevice will unlock to the home screen like normal. Here is a video demonstration of the before and after installing Recludo on your iDevice:
I think that Recludo is a useful jailbreak tweak because I listen to music very often on my iPhone. I think that it's a great idea to open the Music application when you unlock your iDevice while you have the iPod controls open on the lock screen. Since your iDevice unlocks like normal when the iPod controls are not displaying, Recludo doesn't get in the way of you using your iDevice for other things.
What I like about Recludo is that it makes it easier to change between music on the fly. It's great for iPod power-users. It's even great if you're not that much of a music listener - you can use when you need it. With the standard iPod controls, all you can do is tap next and back between songs, while Recludo offers you an easy way to pick from a list of your own music from your iDevice. Recludo doesn't have any settings to configure in the Settings application and it doesn't add any new icons to your home screen. Recludo also works with iOS 5. To disable the features of Recludo, you will need to uninstall the tweak from Cydia. Recludo is free and can be downloaded today; if you listen to music, then give it a shot!
You know those iOS 5 notifications that pile up on your lock screen?
There has come with the new iOS 5 operating system, a new method of notifications. This method allows your notifications to stack up one over the other on your lock screen instead of the way that iOS 4 would only show you one at a time. If you have been annoyed by the large pile of notifications on your lock screen, then maybe you should check out this new jailbreak tweak that has been dubbed Ipsum by iOS developer Nicolò Ciraci (iStopped).
Ipsum adds to the intuitive iOS 5 interface by allowing you to dismiss notifications on your iDevice lock screen. Usually, when you unlock your iDevice and then go back to your lock screen, the notifications will disappear. But, let's say that you have a pass code or even worse - a longer password. Maybe that might seem like too much work for you to go and dismiss all of the notifications for your lock screen. Or, maybe you don't want to dismiss all of them, but instead just one embarrassing one, or maybe you want to delete one to keep the rest as a reminder for something. Whatever the case, check out Ipsum. Here is a video demonstration on how it works:
Ipsum is free in Cydia and as you can see the video above, you can slide all the way to the right to activate the tweak and then slide all the way to the left to invoke it. When you slide to the right and not to the left, the iDevice will open the application that the notification is in. If you slide it to the right and then to the left, it will dismiss the notification like it was never on your lock screen to begin with. I think that it's a nice little addon to have, whether you might use it or not. It doesn't get in the way of anything, plus, being free you have nothing to lose.
After you install Ipsum, there are no settings to configure in your Settings application and there are no applications added to your home screen. It starts working right after you install it. The only way to disable it is to uninstall it from Cydia. Hopefully you won't be a jerk and use Ipsum to hide your friend's notifications from them...
SuperSwitcher is a new jailbreak tweak that lets you add favorites and more to your App Switcher/
The App Switcher is a nice little tool to use when you want to switch between applications quickly, but wouldn't it be nice if it did more than just make you scroll through the applications that you used last? With a new jailbreak tweak that has been dubbed SuperSwitcher by its developer Akhil Tolani, you can do just that. As you can see from the image above, you are given a box that includes a list of chosen applications which you can set in the Settings application after you install the tweak. But is that all? No... actually there's also a few really useful toggles included!
SuperSwitcher was invented to keep you from having to swipe through your applications in the App Switcher to find your favorite ones. You will find that it makes it easier to launch applications that you've chosen as favorites in your settings than if you had to go through and manually find it in the list of applications in the App Switcher. When you open the Settings application, after installing SuperSwitcher, you will find the ability to set up to nine favorite applications that will always be in your App Switcher no matter what. The applications won't be in the App Switcher itself, but they'll appear in the black box above it. The settings for SuperSwitcher look like this:
The applications that you choose as favorites will always be accessible in the App Switcher and will appear in the box in the order that you choose them respectively. You can move them around by changing your first application with another, your fifth with another, and so forth. You can't just drag to move them like you do on your SpringBoard. When you touch one of the applications in the black box, you'll get a nice glowing effect that occurs until you release the application; at that point the application will launch.
If you didn't notice already from the first image in this review, SuperSwitcher has two pages. One has to do with application switching (the Favorite Apps page), which includes shortcuts for the Phone application, Email application, Messages application, and Safari application. The next page might excite you even more. It includes some useful toggles and sliders (System Settings page). You can see what the toggles and sliders look like in the image below:
SuperSwitcher includes four switches; a Bluetooth toggle, an airplane mode toggle, a Wi-Fi toggle, and a location services toggle. Additionally, there are two sliders at the top. The top one adjusts your screen brightness and the one below it adjusts your iDevice volume. I think that the appearance of the toggles and the sliders looks really nice; very Apple-like for sure. To be straightforward, it basically integrates a really good idea into a function of iOS that we met in iOS 4; it uses SBSettings-like functionality.
You will also notice that there are four buttons; one to respring, one to reboot, one to toggle safe mode, and one to shut off. The four buttons work as soon as you tap them but unfortunately work without giving you any notice of what it's doing first. You might not want to tap one by mistake. At the top left of SuperSwitcher there is a red exit button which you can use to close the black window. After you close it you can get it back again by closing the App Switcher and reopening it.
SuperSwitcher works with iOS 4 and iOS 5 and it doesn't put any icons on your home screen, just a settings cell in your Settings application that lets you choose your favorite applications. I think that this is a cool tweak, you should try it out if it looks like something you could use.
I talked to Akhil about his thoughts on this tweak and here is what he had to say:
Anthony: What was the purpose of making something like this: Akhil: I have a lot of apps so i really hate scrolling left and right every time I want to launch my favorite app. Also after searching, it's pretty pointless to type the name of it in the spotlight, so that gave me the idea of bookmarking apps in the App Switcher so I can quickly access them without searching the whole SpringBoard.
So while the motive behind making an intuitive tweak like this might have been laziness, you don't have to be lazy to use it. I think that having the toggles there in my App Switcher is a cool idea since you normally have to navigate through settings to get to them. I also feel that the SBSettings method is a bit outdated now - it makes Notification Center lag too much and the pull down menu just doesn't look good anymore with nice-looking applications like IntelliScreenX to compete with it. I think SuperSwitcher is worth trying out - won't you give it a look in Cydia?
Note: Akhil has released two updates for SuperSwitcher to BigBoss which should go live shortly; 1.0.1 will fix a problem which makes the power buttons and other functional buttons not appear correctly. Version 1.0.2 will fix an icon scaling problem. There are no other known problems with SuperSwitcher.
Christmas morning came and went and with it new smartphone and tablet owners downloaded Angry Birds 6.5 million times.
The total includes downloads of three different versions Rovio’s game including Angry Birds, Angry Birds Rio, and Angry Birds Seasons. The downloads included a mix of paid and free downloads, although an exact split of paid verse free sales was not given.
The number of downloads far exceeds last Christmas’s download number of two million across iOS and Android devices. However, it's still a small portion of the one billion apps reportedly downloaded during the week after Christmas this yearf according to Flurry analytics.
Quote:
“We’re really excited to have such a massive number of new people get acquainted with Angry Birds over the holidays — we have exciting new releases lined up for 2012, and can’t wait to introduce them to the public,” Rovio’s Ville Heijari told AllThingsD.
One billion apps in a week is amazing, as is 6.5 million Angry Bird downloads. Judging by the holiday totals new device owners and current owners flush with holiday cash and gift cards embraced both mobile app markets. However, it would be interesting to know the percentage of free apps downloaded compared to the percentage of paid for apps downloaded.
Display Recorder is an iOS classic that lets you capture video recordings of your screen.
Did you ever want to show a friend a demonstration of something on your iPhone without having to explain it in words? Are you an application reviewer that finds it cumbersome to take numerous screenshots to explain a point? Then maybe this classic jailbreak application called Display Recorder by iOS developer and hacker Ryan Petrich is just what you've been looking for. Back in the days when I always wanted to share with my friends how to use Cydia, I would have killed for this kind of jailbreak application. It wasn't until recently that I actually heard about it though - and I bet some of you are in the same boat.
Display Recorder has a lot of functions and settings. By default it captures video of your screen in '.avi' format. That can, and should be changed to the other option, "H.264/MOV" because iPhone doesn't support '.avi' format. With H.264, you have the option to save the screen recordings to your Camera Roll, view them from the iPhone, and transfer the video from your iPhone to your computer much easier. Since the iPhone doesn't support '.avi' format, if you choose to use it, not only will the file-size be extremely large, but the only way to get the video on your computer is to SSH into the iPhone. We know that SSH can be slow - so imagine trying to transfer a 500-900MB+ file through it. For this reason, we recommend using the H.264 option, because since it shows up in your Camera Roll, you can easily transfer it through USB connection using Image Capture, or Windows Explorer. The file size is also over 80% smaller than the '.avi' version. So not only can you do more with the H.264 option, but it's a smaller file size - yeah we think it's a better option. You can see from the image above the options available for an H.264 video; Deleting it, uploading it directly to YouTube (Display Recorder lets you integrate your YouTube account so that you can upload videos right from the application), play the video (H.264 only), and add it to the Camera Roll (H.264 only).
Display Recorder is activated in one of two ways. One is that you can go into the application and tap the '+' button to start capturing a screen recording, or you can invoke an Activator action that does the same thing. When you do either of the two, a message will appear that looks like the one below, asking you if you want to start recording the display. You have the option to say Cancel or Record:
After you tap on the Record button, Display Recorder will work in the background to capture your screen movements in video. It will also record your taps and swipes as you will see indicated by the white circle that appears. Below is a video example of the recording result of Display Recorder. It will show you through all of the settings of Display Recorder in the Settings application and also show you Display Recorder in Cydia:
After you finish recording your video, you can either go back to the Display Recorder application and tap the, "Stop Recording" button that appears only when you're in mid-recording, or you can invoke your Activator action that you used to start recording the video in the first place. When you do either of the two, a popup like the one shown below will appear letting you know that your recording was completed:
Once the recording has been completed, you can tap on the recording to bring up any of the four options in the first image of this review (assuming you recorded in H.264). If you recorded in '.avi' format, then that means all you will be able to do is either delete the recording or upload it to YouTube. That's the basic usage of the video recording, but now we're going to look at the settings more in depth.
If you take a peek in the Settings application (which we showed you in the video above), you'll see a cell that's been made for Display Recorder. If you look inside you'll find a Users Guide, which tells you all about Display Recorder. You'll also find a framerate slider which can be adjusted to have more control over file size. The more frames in your video, the larger the file size will be. The less frames there are, the smaller it will be. The more frames you have, you'll find it will also be more fluid and have less lag in the end, however it will reduce device performance until you stop recording the video because it makes the CPU (central processing unit) do more at once. You'll also find a switch that lets you lock the framerate so that the iPhone can't change it mid-video for performance. Under that, you'll find a rotation option that lets you choose between portrait, upside down, landscape left, or landscape right. The developer recommends that you keep it on portrait for the best performance. You can always rotate the video on the computer to fit a landscape application orientation later on.
Below that you'll find some more advanced options including the '.avi' or H.264 video format which we already discussed (go with H.264). You can also select your video quality to help have more control over your file size. You can pick low, medium, or high (medium selected by default). You can enable OpenGL capture which puts some more duty on the GPU (graphics processing unit) since you only use this option to record things like OpenGL-based games. If you disable this option, your performance will be a lot more fluid, but you won't be able to record OpenGL games until you enable it again. Under that is the option to record in grayscale. Below that is the option to scale your video to either full size or half size - but keep note that if you have OpenGL recording enabled then you cannot record in half size. Half size will help reduce the file size on retina display devices after the recording is finished.
Under those more advanced settings you'll find some more easy ones. Did you notice that there was a white circle following all of the taps and swipes in the video above? That is what these settings pertain to. You can enable or disable that option completely, or select what size the circle is; small, medium, or large (medium by default). There is also a setting to show the circle all of the time, even when you're not recording a video on your iPhone. You'll also see a Web Server switch which lets you enable the ability to browse your iPhone's screen in live view through your computer's Web Browser application. Under that is a setting cell for Activation methods were you can select your Activator action to invoke the application. Last but not least, you'll find a place where you can sign into YouTube so that you can upload videos directly to YouTube from the iPhone in the Display Recorder application (works best of Wi-Fi).
We thought that Display Recorder was such a useful application that we're actually going to give it extra credit. It's very useful, and you can send these videos to friends via text message or iMessage to show them what you're doing. It's handy for giving directions or for recording yourself playing fun games on iOS. Using it couldn't be easier either. I recommend this application to everyone with a jailbroken iDevice. It is compatible with iOS 4 and iOS 5 and it places an icon on your home screen as well as the settings in the Settings application. A big thanks to Ryan for making such a useful application for the jailbreak community!
A4 iDevice users have been enjoying the labor of love that is the iOS 5.0.1 untethered jailbreak for over a week now. However, A5 device owners (iPhone 4S and iPad 2) still live in a jailbreakless world, and apparently many have expressed their displeasure to pod2g.
This displeasure resulted in pod2g posting the following FAQ on his blog this morning. It explains, in brief, why an A5 jailbreak is currently not possible.
Quote:
How could pod2g have an untethered 4S and dev teams still haven't released tools to achieve this at home ?
The exploit I used to inject the untethering files to the 4S relies on having a developer account, and can't be released publicly.
It's the same reason why @MuscleNerd has an iPad 2 tethered jailbreak but couldn't distribute it.
So, we need to find a distributable exploit to remount the system partition read/write and to set Corona files at the correct places.
Why A4 version of Corona was easier to release ?
Because a tethered jailbreak is a good way to install Corona!
Why don't you do a tethered jailbreak then ?
A tethered jailbreak also relies on an exploitable vulnerability that we still haven't found yet !
While an A5 jailbreak will likely happen at some point in the future, don't expect it anytime soon. The fact that an untethered A4 iOS 5 jailbreak exists has no influence on the timeliness of the untethered A5 jailbreak's release. Patience is a virtue. A largely ignored one, but still a virtue.
Oops. It looks as though Verizon's chief financial officer Fran Shammo prematurely spilled the beans on a major fact of business for the nation's largest wireless carrier.
The revelation came at the Citi Global Entertainment Media & Communications Conference on Wednesday where Shammo was speaking.
It isn't clear exactly why the Verizon executive opted to reveal this information only a few weeks before Apple is set to report earnings for the holiday sales quarter, but one thing is for sure: Verizon apparently sold a whole bunch of iPhones.
As the numbers indicate, for the final three months of 2011, Verizon logged twice the number of iPhones it sold during the third quarter of last year. By comparison, AT&T sold 2.7 million iPhones in the third quarter. And it now appears that both carriers may be neck-and-neck in terms of Q4 iPhone sales.
The reason, according to AT&T and Verizon, that Q3 iPhone sales were a tad sluggish is because consumers were eagerly awaiting the next-gen iPhone, which ultimately debuted in October (after Q3 ended in September). And, as we all know, the iPhone 4S became the best selling new iPhone in Apple history.
In the days ahead, we will finally see just how much cash the iPhone 4S craze has generated so far for Apple and its carrier partners in the United States.
