Category: I-phone

Dear Aunt TUAW,

One iMessage “feature” is that messaging can be started on one device and picked up from another device, like from iPhone to iPad. My wife and I share an iTunes account so that we don’t have to pay for apps twice, or worry about signing into different accounts. Will sharing an iTunes account across two iPhones mess with our ability to text to each other with iMessage? Thanks!

Your loving nephew,

Toby

Dear Toby,

Fear not. Your store account is distinct from your iMessages account. You can create separate Apple IDs for iMessage so you and your wife can pseudo-text back and forth.

You will, however, require two email addresses. Select Settings > Messages > Receive At and create a new Apple ID specific to those addresses.

Hugs,

Auntie T.

Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me iMessage my wife originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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June 2012 is the date that monthly Android App downloads will exceed monthly iOS app downloads says Xyologic, a German company that indexes both the Android Market and iOS App Store. Currently, iOS has about 1.45 billion downloads each month, while Android has 640 million. Assuming Android continues its meteoric rise and iOS’s growth stabilizes, both platforms will have a staggering 3.2 billion downloads per month in June 2012. At this point, Android will begin to eclipse iOS. Xyologic also predicts Android will surpass iOS in the total number of downloads sometime in mid-2013.

Predictions like this are fun to ponder, but you have to remember they are based on the assumption that Android will continue to climb exponentially and iOS will slow down slightly. This may not be the case. Google is increasingly facing legal action over Android and is rumored to have delayed the rollout of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich due to patent issues. If Google is stymied from introducing important upgrades in a timely manner, then it will not have the momentum to surpass iOS.

Report suggests Android app downloads will overtake iPhone by summer originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Over the years, I’ve run the AirPort Utility on my Mac more times than I’ve wanted to. Usually I’m at a client’s office, trying to troubleshoot a network issue. Now life has just gotten a bit easier for network admins — the AirPort Utility for iOS (free) is now available on the App Store.

The app is designed to manage all Apple Wi-Fi network base stations, including the AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule. If you’re used to using the AirPort Utility for Mac, then you’ll have no issues at all with the new iOS utility. The design is extremely simple and easy to understand. When you launch the app, you’re immediately greeted with a diagram depicting the Internet and any base stations on your network.

Tap any specific base station to begin; you must enter any passwords that you’re using to protect the device (you DO have passwords set up, don’t you?). Once you’ve done that, life is good. As you’ll see in the gallery, there’s a ton of information you can view and edit.

I won’t go into too many details about the utility, but be sure to take a look at the gallery to see everything that you can accomplish. Basically, it’s everything you can do with the Mac app, neatly distilled into a very usable and comprehensive tool. Well done, Apple!

AirPort Utility for iOS is a network admin’s dream originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In advance of iOS 5, Apple has released Find My Friends, a location sharing app similar to Glympse. As the name implies, Find My Friends will let you locate your friends on a map. It’ll also let you share your location so your friends can find you.

For those concerned about privacy, the location sharing feature can be turned on permanently or only temporarily which is great for when you want your friends to meet you while you’re eating dinner at a local restaurant, but not when you go home. It’s also conveniently integrated with the built-in contact and map applications so you can find your friends and generate a route to meet up with them.

You can install Find My Friends by visiting iCloud.com on an iPhone running iOS 5. You can also download it from the App Store.

[Via Macstories]

Apple’s Find My Friends app now available originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 12 Oct 2011 10:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple Design Award-winning Pulse News has been updated with Pulse Sync, a new feature that allows for instant syncing of sources across devices for anyone with a free pulse.me account. In my case, I have Pulse News on both my iPhone and iPad; adding a new source to my news feed on the iPhone will automatically sync it to the news feed on my iPad. It’s a great new feature that works quite seamlessly, and it ensures I have essentially the same news reading experience no matter which device I’m using.

I did notice a small snag during the initial setup. I enabled Pulse Sync on my iPhone first, which turned out to be an unfortunate error on my part — my iPad has been my primary device for Pulse, with all my feeds set up exactly how I wanted them. Enabling Pulse Sync on the iPhone first meant Pulse Sync assumed my iPhone’s feed was how I wanted things set up on all of my devices, and I couldn’t find any way to back out of that. I wound up having to manually re-order my news sources on my iPad, but the good news is after I did that those changes automatically propagated back to my iPhone.

Pulse News is free for both the iPhone and iPad, and it has built-in support for Instapaper, Evernote, Read It Later, and Reader. Pulse is hands-down the best news reader I’ve used on any device, well-deserving of the Apple Design Award it won this year, and it’s an app that all iOS users should have on their devices.

Pulse News updated with source syncing originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Aiko Island is a physics puzzler with a little different take than usual — instead of flinging cute little guys around, you’re instead working to keep them from falling off of the screen. The idea is that there are little blue creatures and little red creatures, and by deleting some of the red creatures (and/or support structures, just by touching them), you can remove them from the screen without letting the little blue guys fall.

It may sound complicated, but once you dive it, it’s really that perfect mix of easy to understand and (eventually) really hard to master. Oftentimes, I just found myself trying experiment after experiment to see if I could make things fall correctly — deleting some of the blocks in one order or another. There is some strategy to the madness (usually, you need to work on balancing one of two sides, or just make sure you’re closing up all of the gaps in the right order), but still, sometimes I would just find the solution by random. Not a great feature, unfortunately, in a precise puzzle game like this one.

Still, Aiko Island is colorful and fun, and especially if you like physics puzzlers, this one is right up your alley. It’s even cute and fuzzy enough for the kids to play with (though some of the younger ones probably won’t figure out the toughest levels right away). The game’s packed with content, with over 120 puzzles to play with, really polished graphics and score, and full Game Center and OpenFeint integration. Aiko Island is a deal at just US99 cents for iPhone, or you can pick up the iPad version for $1.99.

Daily iPhone App: Aiko Island originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 12 Oct 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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T-Mobile might not be an official carrier for the iPhone in the US, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make T-Mobile phone calls on your iPhone.

The company has released its Bobsled app for iOS. Bobsled is T-Mobile’s web-based phone and messaging service. With it users can call anyone in their Facebook contacts for free in the US, Canada, or Puerto Rico. Even if you are outside of the US, you can call any of your Facebook contacts in those countries for free.

The service isn’t just for iPhone to iPhone calls either. It allows you to call any mobile phone or landline from any iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Android device. Right now the service is free to everyone, but as CNET points out T-Mobile does eventually plan to charge for certain calls and/or run in-app advertising. However, right now the company is more concerned about encouraging adoption of the app.

Bobsled is a free download, and it requires iOS 4.2 or later and a Facebook account.

Place a T-Mobile call from your iPhone with Bobsled originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 12 Oct 2011 06:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iOS 5 firmware is now available for download. These are the steps to update to iOS 5 on your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. iOS 5 brings 200+ new features to your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch compared…

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Your detailed guide to jailbreak iOS 5 using RedSn0w jailbreak on iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad and iPod Touch 4G, 3G. MuscleNerd has confirmed that the current RedSn0w can jailbreak iOS 5 *tethered* on…

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Must anticipated iOS 5 firmware for iPhone 4S, 4, 3GS, iPad 2 and iPod Touch 4g, 3g is now available. Your can download iOS 5 firmware from the links below. Hit the jump to know more about iOS 5 and…

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This week is one of the busiest weeks for the folks at Apple. Mutiple major software updates are to be pushed, including iOS 5, and iCloud, a major cloud storage and sync service from the house of…

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We have waited a long time for this. I know many who are more excited about iOS5 then they are about the iPhone 4S (I know I am). Last night I downloaded iTunes 10.5 in anticipation of installing the new iOS version, which I am currently downloading now.

It has been about an hour and it looks like it is going to take two to three more hours if the remaining time is correct, though I would be a fool if I did not expect such a wait time. On a side note, many folks are getting an “error 3200″ when trying to download the software, which seems to be a result of the overloaded servers.

To kill the time I thought I would check out some of the various guides I found to get iOS 5 setup.

Gizmodo has this great article, The Complete Guide to Updating to iOS 5. They go over what you need to do before you upgrade to iOS 5 and how to get things like iCloud and other iOS features setup.

Lifehacker has several guides that are very useful:

How to Set Up Wi-Fi Sync in iOS 5

How to Setup iCloud in iOS 5

How to Configure iOS 5 Notification Center

Everything You Need to Know About iOS 5 in Seven Minutes

There you go, some great reading while you wait for iOS 5 to be installed. Have fun.

Now that iOS 5 is upon us since this is such a massive update I have added an iOS 5 SDK page where tutorials from iOS 5 developers will be listed.

With such a massive update I expect we’ll be

Today I added the first few tutorials which include:

– A beginners guide to using the new Storyboards feature.

– A step-by-step tutorial on using the new UIKit customization API’s.

– A tutorial on using Cocos2D with automatic reference counting.

– An excellent guide on understanding ARC (previously mentioned)

As always I’ll be scouring the web looking for more gems, but if you’ve written a tutorial on using iOS 5 you can submit it here to request addition to the page.

©2011 iPhone, iOS 4, iPad SDK Development Tutorial and Programming Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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Just wanted to post a small video that shows the game I’m going to be talking about at VTM in November. The video is a little shaky as I was trying to video while swinging the iPad around (it uses the gyro for input). Once the conference is out of the way the new tutorials […]

Just wanted to post a small video that shows the game I’m going to be talking about at VTM in November. The video is a little shaky as I was trying to video while swinging the iPad around (it uses the gyro for input). Once the conference is out of the way the new tutorials […]