Sure, you’ve got Touch ID set up on your iPhone 6, but you’ll still need a passcode to keep your iPhone secure. If you have an older iPhone without Touch ID, or your fingerprint isn’t recognized for any reason, you’ll need to fall back on a passcode.
If you want to make your passcode even more secure, try using our recipe for a code with special characters instead of a simple number-based solution.
Apple continues to tweak its emoji keyboard in the latest iOS 8.3 beta, the fourth iOS beta so far to make its way to developers to test and try out new features.
The new options organize the skin tone modifiers — which debuted in beta 2 of iOS 8.3 — into tap and hold menus, making things just a bit easier to utilize while streamlining the process as well.
In addition, all the yellow-colored Emoji people that previously had brown hair now have yellow hair, as you can see in the image below.
If you’re like me, you’ve got a ton of unread iMessages on your iPhone and tapping through them all just to get rid of your app badge anxiety seems like a bit too much effort.
Apple has your back, though, with a nicely designed way to mark all your iMessages as read. It might not be apparent at first glance where to find this magic trick. Here’s how.
Lesser brands like Samsung have to splash some serious cash to give the impression that they’re cool pieces of technology, but Apple’s so ubiquitous that pop stars are seemingly lining up to feature its products in their music videos.
The latest to create an unofficial Apple ad is pop songstress Charli XCX (a.k.a. the girl who sang the hook on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy”). In her new video “Famous” — debuted as part of this week’s YouTube Music Award Show — Charli dances around her bedroom texting and watching videos on her iPhone and iPad, before both devices run out of battery, at which point she’s whisked off on a surreal adventure.
Check it out below:
The fourth beta of iOS 8.3 was released to developers today, less than two weeks after Apple dropped the third beta.
Previous betas have added new features like racially diverse emoji, two-factor authentication support for Google, and an option to download free apps without entering your password. The second public beta of iOS 8.3 was also made available to participants of Apple’s public beta testing program.
Along with the iOS 8.3 betas, Apple also released Xcode 6.3 beta 4 with Swift 1.2. The betas are available in the iOS Dev Center or as an over-the-air update if you already have the third beta installed. The release notes don’t mention any major new features, but we’ll let you know what we find once it’s installed.
Here are the direct download links:
Steve Jobs may have had an astonishing ability to predict where tech was going next, but he very nearly missed out on the iPhone and iPad altogether.
That’s because — according to a quote from Jony Ive in today’s freshly-released biography, Becoming Steve Jobs — Apple’s late CEO didn’t see “any value to the idea” of multi-touch: the breakthrough touchscreen technology which makes iOS regulars like “pinch-to-zoom” possible.
And it was left up to Ive and a few other core Apple employees to save it.
Twitter is looking to take a swipe at YouTube’s viral video crown by adding a new feature that will automatically play videos in your timeline.
Starting today, some Twitter users in the U.S. on iPhone and iPad may see videos that start playing, whether you want them to or not. This goes for videos ads and users uploaded videos alike, as the company tests whether people are more likely to sit through a video if the action’s already started.
Sometimes you just need to emphasize something. One of the best ways to do so when you’re texting is to make the words you really need to get across in all capitals. Or maybe you just want to shout at someone, and an ALL CAPS sentence will certainly get that across for you.
Before now, I’ve always just deleted the word I was trying to emphasize and re-typed it after double-tapping the Shift key in iOS (for Caps Lock). Now, however, it looks like you can change the case of the word after you’ve typed it without deleting anything.
Here’s how.
Separating kids from their iPhones and iPads can be a big struggle for most parents, but for one mom in Boulder Colorado, things got down right deadly after her daughter tried to poison her for taking away an iPhone.
Two charges of attempted first degree murder were eventually filed against the daughter, who mixed household bleach into her mom’s drinks trying to kill her.
Boulder County’s sheriff office detained the 12-year-old girl at a juvenile center after her mother noticed a bleach smell in her smoothie a few days earlier. Officers say the mom thought the daughter had just cleaned the glass and that there was a lingering bleach sent. Then she got sick.
Touch ID might be a more convenient and secure security implementation than PIN codes, but for now at least PINs are sticking around — which makes your iPhone vulnerable to anyone who gets their hands on it.
Of course, your iPhone only gives you a certain number of failed guesses, which means that unless the hacker somehow quickly guesses the correct code out of the 10,000 possible combinations, your iPhone’s contents remain safe.
A new video which has surfaced online, however, shows off a brute-force machine capable of trying every possible four-digit numerical combination in turn, while also resetting your iPhone to try again when it runs out of attempts. You can check it out below.
Taking macros of your monitor or American Apparel hoodie with your iPhone is so last year.
A Make Magazine tutorial shows you how to make a powerful microscope with up to 375x magnification using just your iPhone, a clear plastic panel, a piece of plywood and some inexpensive hardware.
If you’re a DIY-er that knows how to drill holes and take apart a laser pointer on a keychain, you could be taking super up-close pictures of cricket legs and your cat’s tongue before you know it.
Trading up from an Android to iPhone is about to get a lot easier, as Apple plans to incentivize switchers by offering Apple Store credit to customers who bring in their old non-iOS devices for trade.
Apple plans to expand its iPhone Reuse and Recycling Program to include non-iOS devices, reports Buzzfeed’s John Paczkowski, who says Apple Stores will soon take everything from Blackberry’s to Windows Phone handsets.
Designer, artist and feminist Molly McLeod has an iPhone problem. It’s one we probably all share: We spend too much time staring at it. Imagine how much worse it’s going to get when we replace our neurotic iPhone obsession with an Apple Watch.
McLeod created four delightfully playful designs that we could use to remind us (with a healthy dose of irony) to stop staring at our tiny screens for a moment.
“I find myself habitually looking at my phone when I’m commuting or idly waiting for something,” she writes on her website, “so I thought I would make my phone give me this gentle reminder. There are always other interesting things to look at if you look up!”
It’s that time of year when office work comes to a standstill for weeks thanks to the NCAA’s annual celebration of sweat, leather and nylon nets. The brackets have been set and teams are en route to play the 67 basketball games that will take place over the next few weeks, with Kentucky being the undisputed favorite to walk away with a perfect season.
Thanks to the glories of technology, you can follow all the action this year even if you don’t have a cable subscription. With the right combo of apps, you can get expert insight into your favorite Cinderella team, watch every game — and maybe even pick the perfect bracket.
Dominate March Madness this year with these apps for Mac and iOS:
Like a Terminator in a downhill marathon, the runaway sales of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus aren’t slowing down in a hurry.
Analysts expect Apple’s smartphone to trample all competition in its path this quarter, with massive sales of more than 50 million units.
It’s been a crazy, Apple Watch-filled week, with Apple’s Spring Forward event on Monday fueling quite a bit of energy both here at Cult of Mac an on the internet itself.
We’ve got our very own head man in charge, Leander Kahney, writing up four insightful op-eds on Cupertino’s latest foray into the luxury watch market with that stunningly high-priced Apple Watch Edition. Enjoy four long-form essays worth reading. In addition, we’ll check out what your favorite apps will look like, how the new ResearchKit may change medical research forever, what your Apple Watch purchase might get in the analog watch world, and the seven biggest shockers at the Spring Forward event itself.
All this, plus much more, in this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, available for your free download and no-cost subscription right now.
You know what they say about putting your iPhone 6 in a lava lamp: it’s all good fun until something explodes in someone’s eye.
The someone in question is a colleague of TechRax, the Ukrainian YouTuber who hides behind the veil of supposed tech expert to run his seemingly limitless iPhone collection through a series of oddball endurance tests; the kind of thing that would be considered Turner Prize-worthy conceptual performance art were we not convinced he’s deadly serious.
Having previously buried iPhones in snow and assaulted them with DeWalt angle grinders to see how they react, this time he gives his Apple smartphone the 1970s treatment to see what would happen if a person accidentally dropped it into an open lava lamp. You know, as you do.
Jony Ive never prepared for this.
One of the most difficult decisions you will need to make when choosing an Apple Watch is which case size to go for. But the Apple Store app for iPhone hopes to make the process easier by displaying both the 38mm and 42mm Watch cases at their actual size.
Derek Zoolander — the male model played by Ben Stiller who first appeared as a gag character in 1996’s VH1 Fashion Awards, and who later went on to star in 2001’s cult classic film — made a surprise appearance yesterday on a catwalk at Paris Fashion Week, where he stole some dude’s iPhone, then flashed Blue Steel all over Vine.
Now that we know more about the long-awaited Apple Watch, it’s time to find out how it stacks up against Google’s Android Wear platform and the growing number of wearables that support it.
There are lots of similarities between the two, but there also some big differences in software, hardware, and price that will likely help you decide which one is right for you.
With more than 70 million iPhones sold in the last quarter alone, Apple has quickly become one of the world’s largest display buyers. To meet the increasing demand for iPhones, Apple has reportedly struck a deal with Japan Display to build a $1.4 billion factory dedicated solely to smartphone displays.
One out of every four smartphones sold in urban China was an iPhone during the three months ending January 2015, according to sales data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. The impressive stats only serve to underline what we’ve been pointing out for upwards of the past year: that China is well on its way to becoming Apple’s biggest market globally.
“Leading into Chinese New Year, Apple iPhone 6 and 6 Plus drove sales to an unprecedented high in urban China with iOS’ share of the smartphone market reaching 25.4 percent – a 4.5 percentage point increase over the same period in 2014”, noted Carolina Milanesi, Kantar’s chief of research.
Google’s efforts to counter the threat of the Apple Watch will begin with bringing Android Wear support to iPhone. Sources claim the search giant is now “preparing” an Android Wear app for iOS, and it could be announced at Google I/O in May.
Of the smartphone stories which played out in 2014, two of the biggest were the triumph of Apple’s iPhone 6, which sold a massive 10 million+ units in its opening weekend alone, and the faltering of Samsung, which fell from the dominant position it had enjoyed since 2011.
Today, a new report from Gartner (paywall) breaks down both the 1.2 billion smartphone sales that took place worldwide last year, and also the sales from Q4 2014 — revealing how Apple leaped ahead in the smartphone category, while the South Korean tech giant Samsung started to lose its footing.
Make no mistake about it: this was the year everything changed.
After China, India is the next big frontier for Apple: with a massive 1.2 billion citizens, and an impressively growing smartphone market that is far from saturated.
So far Apple has had great success in the country, as the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have sold roughly twice the volume of previous generation iPhones, and Apple has even proved willing to take a short-term hit on the earnings front to get more iPhones into people’s hands in the long run.
But one company isn’t happy about the iPhone’s success in India — and it’s doubling its efforts to get Apple barred from using the popular smartphone name in the country altogether.