Hamza Khalid

Handles Windows Phone, iOS and Cydia. A big WP7 fan, who just loves writing about anything and everything. Google+

Bondsy For iPhone Is A Social Network For Buying & Selling Items

by on
Leave a comment
As useful as online shopping can be, it has also paved the way for many new forms of fraud and embezzlement. Although purchasing/selling stuff online is now a lot more secure than it was in the past, many people still feel a bit uneasy when they have to hand over their money or expensive goods to a complete stranger. At times, relying on Craigslist or eBay is the only option, but won’t you prefer trading with people you know in real life? Bondsy is an iPhone app that lets you post an ad of any product, but the twist is that only your friends and acquaintances can see it. Another advantage of Bondsy is that the ads created through it can also be posted to any social network or website without any editing. Read More

Add Download, Share & Other Options To Instagram For iOS With Instahancer

by on
Leave a comment
Instagram might be among the most popular iOS apps to ever exist, but it is far from perfect. Although the app receives updates pretty regularly, there are still some missing features and other stuff that forces users to go to the service’s web version. The iPhone client is perfect for sharing and browsing photos, but there is no way of saving images directly to your device from your Instagram feed. You can’t zoom into photos either, which can be pretty annoying for images that have a high level of detail. Instahancer is a Cydia tweak that supplies the official Instagram app with some potent steroids. Thanks to this tweak, the app gains options for saving photos, sharing them via email or copying their links to clipboard. It is also possible to open images in a new, zoomable view. Read More

WhatsApp For Windows Phone Gets Backup, Lock Screen Notifications & More

by on
Leave a comment
Although WhatsApp has been around on Windows Phone for quite a while now, the app has never been as good as its Android and iOS counterparts. Apart from the usual interface and live tile support issues, WhatsApp (both on Mango and WP8) didn’t even have lock screen notifications. Thankfully, the app’s latest update has brought this much-needed functionality to Windows Phone. In addition to a better notification system, it is now easier to personalize the app as well, thanks to a host of new options in the app’s settings. The attachment options have seen some improvement as well, letting you share media, contacts and your location with your contacts. Read More

Chat & Share Dropbox Files With Nearby iPhone Users With ProxToMe

by on
Leave a comment
Sharing photos with nearby people using Bluetooth isn’t much of an issue even on iOS, since the App Store offers plenty of apps for this purpose. When it comes to sending and receiving other files though, things get a little tricky. Sharing music, videos and documents takes some extra effort, but recently some easy ways of doing this have finally started to emerge. ProxToMe is a new iOS app that allows you to connect with other users of the service who are nearby to chat with them and send them any file stored in your Dropbox account. The app uses Bluetooth to find the nearby users. Any files that you receive can be stored in the ProxToMe folder created by the app in your Dropbox. Read More

SubtleLock Creates More Room For Notifications On iPhone Lock Screen

by on
1
The design and interface of iOS makes many people fall in love with the iPhone, but there will always be those who like tinkering with things and stamping their own personality on a device. You can make changes to your iPhone even without jailbreaking, but having access to the Cydia store unlocks a whole new world of themes and interface-related tweaks that apply to every nook and corner of your device. SubtleLock is a fine example of this category of Cydia tweaks, changing the lock screen to give it a much more personalized look. The lock screen is among the most frequently viewed areas of an iPhone, and the notifications that appear there are greatly useful as well. SubtleLock reduces the size of all the elements of the lock screen to show more of your wallpaper. Apart from giving your lock screen a fresh look overall, the tweak also makes more room for the notifications that appear on it. Read More

Audible For iOS Updated With iPad Support, Better Design & Navigation

by on
Leave a comment
An iPad might be better suited to typing and reading rather than listening to music, but a lot of people still use it as an audio player. Apart from music, there are many other things you can listen to on your iDevice. Podcasts have an app of their own, while the most popular vendor of audiobooks, Audible, offers its dedicated client for iOS as well. Until now though, the official app from Audible.com has been iPhone-only, with only a letterboxed version available for iPad and iPad mini. Finally the folks over at Amazon seem to have realized that people listen to audiobooks on tablets as well, and have made Audible a universal app. Apart from iPad optimization, the app’s latest update also brings changes in the UI, a new filter for sorting your collection, and easier ways to log in to your account. Read More

#NoCrop Lets You Share Any Photo On Instagram Without Cropping It

by on
3
It is not easy to upload photos to Instagram without losing some of the details in them. This is owing to the fact that Instagram only supports a fixed aspect ratio, forcing people to crop most images before they can be shared. This is particularly troublesome if you want to upload a panorama to your account, since a large portion of it will have to be left out. Even iPhone’s default aspect ratio for photos doesn’t match the one Instagram’s cropping tool supports. This can be quite an issue for many who don’t want to transfer images to their computer for the sole purpose of making their dimensions match Instagram’s requirements. Thankfully, you can now easily accomplish this task right on your iPhone with #NoCrop. Read More

View Endless Streams Of Vine Videos On Your iPad With VineTube

by on
Leave a comment
Countless examples have shown in the past that merely being a brainchild of some giant company doesn’t ensure an app’s success. Google, Microsoft and Apple have all been forced to shut down certain services that the masses simply refused to use. Some might have expected Twitter’s Vine to meet the same fate, but people have taken to it pretty quickly. More and more Vine videos are showing up on almost every Twitter user’s timeline, despite the fact that the app is presently available only for iOS. We are sure Vine’s popularity will soar when its Android version is released, but we've got to wait for it for now. Even the iOS app isn't optimized for the iPad yet, which is a source of frustration for many tablet users. Creating and uploading videos in Vine’s letterboxed version isn’t much of an issue, but you just can’t enjoy browsing through the service’s video collection without a dedicated tablet-optimized client. In Vine Flow, Android already has a pretty decent app for discovering and viewing Vine videos, and now, there is an app by the name of VineTube that basically brings the same idea to the iPad, albeit with a slightly different implementation. Read More

Cloze Brings Its Combined Email & Social Media Feed To iOS

by on
Leave a comment
For a brief period of time, email was the most important part of most people’s online life, but then social networks came along and changed everything. With Facebook and Twitter’s rise to fame, most of us regularly check our social network accounts for messages, in addition to our email inboxes. Since email and social media are now almost equally important, it makes sense to manage and view them in one place. Cloze is a web service that that gathers data from your social network and email accounts to come up with an integrated feed consisting of updates from people that really matter to you, and its iOS app has just made its way to the iTunes App Store. Cloze calculates a person’s importance based on your past interactions, but you can also manually alter this rating to customize your stream. Posts from other contacts aren’t ignored either, and have a separate section of their own. The app has options for both viewing items and corresponding with contacts, making it a one-stop shop for your everyday correspondence. Read More

Snappn Is An iOS App Discovery Tool With Ratings Based On Reviews By Professionals

by on
Leave a comment
Since there's a staggeringly large number of apps available for iOS, app discovery tools are always coming up with novel ideas to help users find interesting and useful apps for their iDevices. Some of these offer app recommendations based on your current collection, while others ask your friends about their favorite apps or go through social media feeds to look for items that may be worth a download for you. Snappn brings yet another dimension to the field of app discovery for iOS. It gathers reviews from iTunes, blogs, news websites and industry publications to come up with an average rating for apps, making it great for assessing any app’s popularity and finding out if its really as good as your friends have been telling you. As an added bonus, Snappn also features videos related to most apps, which can come handy if you can’t really figure out a specific area of the app’s usage. Read More

Sky Is A Minimal iPhone Weather App That Changes Background Color With Temperature

by on
3
Most people who rushed to the evasi0n jailbreak soon after its release got hit by the Weather app’s crashing issue. Although the evad3rs have since fixed the issue, losing access to the stock Weather app forced many people to look for alternatives. Maybe this is why some really good weather apps have been showing up in the App Store lately. Sky is the latest to join an already impressive collection of weather-related apps for iOS. The app doesn’t offer much in terms of features and customizations, but is perfect for anyone who admires minimalism. Most people want a weather app that gives them adequate information in a single view, and Sky does just that. The app displays any area’s current temperature, an icon depicting the current conditions, and a dynamic, colored background. Read More

Retouch Faces In Photos With A Tap Using Beauty Box For iPhone

by on
Leave a comment
Instagram and many other iOS photo editors come with some fine image effects, but these filters might not be much help if you want to retouch photos of a human face. To make yourself look better in a photo, you need apps like Perfect 365 that have been designed specifically for this purpose. However, you have to choose the app wisely if you are looking for good results with minimum effort. Perfect 365 offers a lot of editing options, but it doesn’t work too well for all photos (like side-poses), and you also have to do a lot of manual work before you start seeing the fruits of your labor. Beauty Box Photo, on the other hand, requires virtually no effort at all to achieve this. It works pretty much like any ordinary photo editor available for iPhone, but the effects it offers are meant specifically to retouch faces in photos. Read More

Customize Notifications For Individual Contacts & Apps On Your iPhone

by on
Leave a comment
Everybody loves free stuff but if an app is really good, most people don’t mind spending a few bucks on it. Before you give a developer your money though, it is always nice to get a taste of things to get a good idea of what you're paying for. This is why a lot of tweaks and apps come with trials or free lite versions. RingerX VIP is a Cydia tweak that thoroughly deserves its $2.99 price tag, but even if you aren’t willing to pay that amount straight away, its free version has finally arrived in the form of RingerX Lite. The new arrival has some pretty significant limitations and a few features are missing altogether, but overall, the tweak gives a pretty good account of itself. Apart from setting custom notifications for contacts or apps, you can also do several other things like disabling all notifications while on a call and setting different preferences for blocked or anonymous contacts. Read More

Transfer Instagram Photos To Tumblr & Flickr, ZIP & Save Them With Recygram For iPhone

by on
Leave a comment
In addition to all the fancy photo effects and social sharing options offered by Instagram, the world's most popular mobile photo app is also a huge repository of images. Everyone who has been using the service for a while is sure to have a decent collection of photos in their Instagram account. Most of the times, a picture that has been shared from Instagram remains there and we don’t give much thought to re-sharing it on other services. Recygram is an iOS app with the potential to change all that, by letting its users share photos from Instagram to Tumblr and Flickr in bulk. It is also possible to download these images to your device, or compress them into a ZIP file and send the archive to others via email. Read More

Rundavoo For iPhone Lets You Plan Events With Friends On The Go

by on
Leave a comment
About a month ago, we covered GrouPlay - an app that lets users collaborate on choosing the music for a gathering. Before you get to the point of selecting music for your party though, you have to choose a place, invite everyone and fix a time that is convenient for all the guests. Usually, any event’s planner decides upon a venue and time before sending out the invitations, but changes can invariably be made later when people start giving their feedback. Won’t it be more sensible to collaborate with the invitees before finalizing an event’s specifics? Rundavoo is an iPhone app that invites your contacts to an event and asks them for suggestions regarding the time and vanue. All events created using the app are synced with your default iOS calendar, and come with chat rooms of their own to allow easy interaction. Read More

Schedule Airplane Mode For Multiple Time Periods On iPhone

by on
Leave a comment
Most people like keeping their smartphones switched on 24 hours a day. Back in the feature phone age, many of us preferred switching off our phones before going to sleep, but now everyone receives notifications instantly even if it turns out to be a Farmville request at 3 o' clock in the morning. The Do Not Disturb toggle in iOS 6 can help you sleep peacefully, but it doesn’t have any positive impact on the battery life of your iPhone. After all, if you aren’t going to receive any notifications, why waste your battery by keeping internet and carrier reception on. Toggling Airplane mode on sounds like a good option in this scenario, but trying to remember doing that each day is a bit too tedious. That’s where AirplaneScheduler can help you. This handy Cydia tweak lets you map out a full schedule to toggle Airplane mode automatically, with multiple activation and deactivation times of your choice. Read More

Stream AirPlay Audio On iOS From iTunes, Apple TV & Other iDevices With AirFloat

by on
5
AirPlay has been around in iOS for so long that at times it tends to get ignored when people are showing off all the great things their iPhone can do. Siri, iCloud and even the chameleon status bar get mentioned more than AirPlay, but that doesn’t diminish its usefulness and importance. Apple has kept things pretty simple with AirPlay while keeping it quite efficient at doing its job of streaming media to other iDevices in the vicinity. Maybe this near-perfection is the reason not many Cydia developers have thought about making changes to AirPlay’s default functionality. AirFloat, however, goes against this trend and demonstrates that AirPlay can be improved. The app that was taken down from the App Store in 2012 has returned to iOS via the Cydia store to provide you with an easy way to convert your iDevice into an AirPlay receiver, allowing you to play audio streams from iTunes, Apple TV or any other iDevice. Read More

NaturalReader Converts Documents & Web Page Text To Natural-Sounding Speech On iPhone

by on
Leave a comment
There have always been some pretty decent text-to-speech apps around for iOS, but the niche has never taken the market by storm. The main reason for this is the fact that no one appreciates listening to the contents of documents or websites in a mechanical and monotonous voice. However, there's a new app on the App Store by the name of NaturalReader Text to Speech that aims to tackle exactly this issue. It comes with a lot of different voices and accents that you can listen content from any document or web page in. You can transfer documents to the file using iTunes, open email attachments from it, use its Dropbox integration to load documents from your cloud storage, or use the built-in web browser that can read contents from out any webpage on the go. Read More

Get True Multitasking On iPhone By Keeping Background Apps Active With InfinityTask

by on
2
Android is always touted as being better than iOS because of its true multitasking capabilities, but iOS handles the matter pretty intelligently as well. Most of the times, users don’t mind waiting a few extra seconds for an app to reload after they have launched it already. Though in some situations, it is easy to see why true multitasking can be such a big deal. People with lots of apps on their iPhone must have noticed that most games show some lag when you come back to them after using other apps. In some games, your progress from the last session might even be lost completely if it becomes inactive. InfinityTask solves this issue by handing the control over multitasking to users. Thanks to this Cydia tweak, you can keep any app active for as long as you want, no matter how long you use other apps or keep your device screen locked. Read More

How To Get Voice Dictation In iOS Keyboard On Older Devices

by on
Leave a comment
The topic of Siri being limited to only a few iOS devices has been discussed ad nauseam. Now that it is quite clear that the older iPhone and iPod touch devices are never going to get Apple’s talking assistant, users can only concentrate on finding good apps and tweaks that replicate Siri’s functionality as accurately as possible. While there are already plenty of good Siri alternatives available for iOS, most of them focus on bringing a conversational personal assistant to your device while overlooking one important feature - the voice dictation button that is available in the keyboard of all Siri-enabled devices. Even the tweaks that port Siri to legacy phones usually leave the keyboard untouched. Having said that, voice dictation is as useful as Siri itself, and it is nice to see that a tweak has finally brought this feature to all jailbroken iDevices. Sara Dictation Keyboard adds the small microphone icon to the stock iOS keyboard, letting you dictate to your device in a number of languages. Read More