Hamza Khalid

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

Quickly Compose & Reply To Texts On iOS Without Launching Messages App

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You might be a fan of its themes or the well-organized conversation threads but for most users, biteSMS is all about quick compose and quick reply. The ability to type messages without waiting for an entire app to load can be really time-saving and efficient. Interactive reply windows have been a part of GO SMS as well, and a few Cydia tweaks in the past have even added a similar feature to the stock Messages app. With iOS 6 though, ImmediateSend stopped working, and hasn't received an update until now. So, taking advantage of this vacuum in the jailbreak store, a new tweak by the name of Messages has just reared its head. The tweak is a bit more detailed compared to other similar ones released in the past, and offers integration with Activator as well. It is also possible to tinker with the appearance of the quick reply window, and choose the number of previous messages from a thread that are loaded when you are composing your reply. Read More

Toggle iMessage Read Receipt Separately For Each Contact & Text

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If Facebook ever allows users to choose whether they want others to see the accusatory ‘seen’ indicator below their messages, we are pretty confident that a significant majority will likely disable the feature for good. iMessage has been offering similar read receipts for a long time, but at least you can turn them off at will from the Settings app. There are occasions, however, when keeping these receipts enabled can help. If you are talking to a close friend, it is probably convenient to keep the read receipt enabled, but during a conversation with your boss, you might not want that. SelectiveReading is a Cydia tweak that grants you complete control over iMessage read receipts. Users can choose to turn of the receipts for certain contacts, turn them permanently on for others, or even choose to make the decision individually for every message they receive. Read More

Place Text & Doodles Over iPhone Photos In Real Time With Text Camera

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A few months back, Instagram announced its decision to remove live filters from the famous app, and not many have received this omission kindly. You can always edit your photos after you have snapped them, but the capability of applying filters and other image effects even before shooting the picture is sure to come in handy every once in a while. A testament to this is the popularity apps offering real-time filters have gained in the recent past. Text Camera for iPhone goes beyond simple image effects, and lets you overlay doodles, text snippets and even quotes over the scene you are about to capture. You can easily adjust the position of these entities by simply dragging them around, and to keep you coming back for more, Text Camera offers the option to unlock more effects by sharing photos through it. Read More

Make Objects In Photos Pop Out Of Their Frames With PopAGraph For iOS

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Instagram can make your photos look good without much effort, but this convenience comes at a cost. Since there are a only a limited number of photo effects available in all one-touch photo editors, a lot of times monotony might start creeping into your pictures. This is why there is always a market for photo editors that aren't too complicated but still offer some level of control over the output. If you are looking for an iOS app of this kind, ColorStrokes might be the simplest available option, while AnyShape is a similar though more complicated photo editor. The newly released PopAGraph offers a way to edit selective portions of an image, making an object within pop out of the photo. The app lets you mask objects within a photo, apply a frame and then have these objects seem as if they're popping out of the frame, forming a 3D effect of sorts. Read More

Get Galaxy S4′s Dual Camera Photo Capture On Windows Phone 8

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The importance of front-facing cameras in smartphones has increased manifolds due to apps like Tango and Skype, but there are other perks of having cameras on both sides of your phone. Front cameras make sure you don’t have to hand your device to strangers when you want to take a picture of yourself, or even use the front cam as a handy mirror every once in a while. Despite all these advantages though, there are some things that even two cameras can’t accomplish. While taking a group photo, there always has to be one person who is forced to assume the responsibilities of a photographer and is left out of the picture. iOS and Android already have a few apps that can solve this problem by simultaneously activating front and rear cams to take a photo with both views. Signature Camera is a perfect example of this, while eyeReport is based on the same principle as well. It is good to see that a similar app is now finally available for Windows Phone. With Dual Cam Photo, users can easily add a shot from the front camera every time they take a picture from the rear one. Read More

Pit Your Karaoke Skills Against Friends With Just Sing It! For iPhone

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The popularity might have started to subside now, but games like Letterpress and Draw Something have managed to become the favorite time-killers for many iOS users. The main factor behind the success of such games is their ability to let you compete against real people, including your friends. So, you can easily show off your drawing skills or mental superiority using these games, but what if singing has always been your strongest point? Or maybe you just like karaoke and want to have some fun singing your favorite songs. Previously covered Sing! is a great app for karaoke singing but if you want an incentive to keep singing, you should definitely give Just Sing It! a try. Like Songify and Jam, the app augments your singing with different sound effects. You can share your songs over various social networks, and also challenge your friends (and strangers) to karaoke face-offs. Read More

Use The Gesture-Based TouchPal Keyboard As Default Input Method On iOS

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A discussion on gesture-based keyboards for any platform has got to be incomplete without mentioning the famed Swype. The app is massively popular on Android, and even enjoyed a brief period of iOS presence via Cydia. Now, however, it is not easy for iPhone owners to get a keyboard that is based on this type of slider input method. You can get your hands on third-party apps like TouchPal and Path Input, but having to type everything in a standalone app before copying it to the actual destination is never convenient. Every time an app like TouchPal is released in the App Store, users always wonder if they will ever get a tweak that integrates the gesture-based keyboard with iOS. If you have ever wanted to compose texts, notes, emails and just about anything on your iPhone using TouchPal as the default keyboard, there is now a tweak in the Cydia store that lets you do just that. In fact, this TouchPal tweak has been around in the jailbreak store for some time now, but has just shed its beta tag and works perfectly on both iOS 5 and iOS 6. Read More

Restrict Access To Apps & Photo Albums On iPhone With Protect Photos

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Despite the recent passcode-related bugs discovered in iOS 6, most users are satisfied with the security their iPhone offers by default. Having said that, when you are at home, or in any secure environment, the lock screen protection can get a bit annoying. There are a few ways of changing your device’s level of protection with a single gesture. If you have a jailbroken device, it is also possible to avoid the passcode altogether while keeping selective apps protected. Protect Photos is the latest Cydia tweak that lets you do this but as its name indicates, it focuses mainly on keeping your images private. The app can be used to put password protection on the stock Camera and Photos app and in addition, you can also restrict access of third-party apps to your image library. Read More

ClipCrop For iPhone Lets You Crop Photos Using Shapes & Characters

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The concept of cropping photos to fit different shapes and frames is not really new. Even if you don’t want to turn on your computer to edit photos, you can easily crop them or apply masks over them using several iPhone apps. In the past, we have covered apps like PIP Camera and SymbolGram, both of which allow you to use different masks to cut photos into patterns of your choice. While no app is likely to rival the vast collection of frames offered by PIP Camera, the app could have been a bit better in terms of customization options and sharing. SymbolGram, on the other hand, lacks variety. ClipCrop is a new app of this genre, and it seems to have found the perfect balance between simplicity and variety. The app offers a decent number of masks, a great UI, and plenty of sharing options. Read More

How To Hide Current Song’s Album Art & Info From iPhone Lock Screen

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Headphones were invented to let people listen to music without disturbing everyone in their vicinity. Another purpose of these little accessories is to provide you with some privacy while you are listening to songs in a crowded environment. If you own an iOS device, or any other smartphone for that matter, this privacy is violated to some extent due to the display of album art on your lock screen. We have to admit that the presence of the current song's information and album art on the lock screen is useful in most scenarios, but there are some tracks that you never want anyone to discover in your iPod. For such songs, the new Secret "Now Playing" (yes, it has quotation marks in its name) tweak is perfect. The tweak makes sure that users get to keep the control of their lock screen completely in their own hands, even when listening to a song. You can use Secret “Now Playing” to hide album art, artist name, album, and other information associated with the song from your iPhone’s lock screen. Read More

Udemy Brings Its Virtual Academy Of Video Courses To iPhone

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Education is not a process that should end at a certain age. After every few years, your skills get a bit outdated, and if you really want to stay at the top of your game, constant improvement is needed. Thanks to the internet and portable connected devices, it has become really easy to keep learning new things. A lot of apps in the ‘Education’ category of App Store are meant to help children, but even if you are a university student or are just trying to enhance your skill set on your own, there are apps like iTunes U that can be of assistance. In recent years though, people have started moving from books to videos as one of their primary modes of education. This is why Udemy has gained considerable fame in the few years it has been around. The service offers online courses for programming, cooking, designing, photography and almost any subject you can think of. Udemy has just released its iPhone client, and now you can truly keep learning new things anytime and anywhere. Read More

Pinnacle Lets You Hold Back Button In iOS Apps To Go To Main Menu Or Navigation History

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Anyone who switches to the iPhone from another smartphone is bound to feel a bit lost due to its minimalistic attitude towards hardware buttons. Even if a mobile device doesn’t have a dedicated shutter button, it is bound to have the essential Home and Back hardware buttons or softkeys. iOS, however, doesn’t roll that way, but that hasn’t stopped developers from coming up with alternative ways of navigating backwards in the OS. For example, tweaks like SwipeBack that make navigating bacwards within an app easier using gestures. Pinnacle is the latest addition to this sub-genre of tweaks. Unlike SwipeBack, Pinnacle isn't about going back one step in an app. The tweak is actually meant to help you easily return to the main page of any app that might have led you into its sub-menus. The greatest thing about Pinnacle though, it its ability to add a full ‘history’ list to the default back button in any app. Read More

Camera360 Comes To WP8 With Live Photo Filters & Great Interface

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Among the crowd of photo editors available for iOS and Android, Camera360 has been among the best for a long time. The app is so good that it even made its way into our list of top ten Android photo editors. Windows Phone has been getting a lot of big apps lately, but no one expected Camera360 to pop up in the WP Store out of the blue. Yet, the app is here in all its simplistic glory, bringing with it all the great image effects you can expect from a photo editor of this class. Camera360 for WP8 lets you apply filters to a scene in front of you, even before the picture is snapped. The app also lets you view your entire image collection in the form of a calendar, or sort photos based on the exact time they were snapped. Read More

mosaic.io Combines Multiple iPhones To Create One Big Display For Viewing Photos & Sharing Files

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People always love apps that are capable of performing mundane tasks in novel ways. If an app can also add convenience to the mix, even better. Bump and Chirp both are basically designed for file sharing, but one uses sound to transfer files between iDevices, while the other requires touching two devices together to share photos quickly. mosaic.io for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch does something similar, but in a way more fun and unique way. This universal iOS app lets its users place multiple iDevices side by side, and then stretches a single photo across all their displays. In simple words, if you own more than one iDevice, mosaic.io lets you create one big real-life photo mosaic out of their screens! The app is also capable of transferring Dropbox files between two or more devices (that are located in close proximity) via a simple gesture. Read More

Viber For Windows Phone 8 Gets HD Voice Calls & Better Live Tiles

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When we first covered Viber for Windows Phone a year ago, the app was quite disappointing. For some reason, the team behind the famous messenger didn’t add VoIP calling options to the WP7 client, and even when the calling capabilities did come, they were limited to Nokia devices. On Android and iOS, Viber is used almost exclusively for its free calls, since a lot of other text messengers (like WhatsApp) are already more popular. So, it is nice to see that after a considerable wait, Viber has properly arrived on Windows Phone. The app’s WP8 version has just been updated with several new features, and the most important among them are voice calls (that too in HD quality). Apart from free VoIP calling, the update makes better use of the WP8 Start screen by letting users pin individual conversations as live tiles. Read More

View Real-Time Weather Info On Any Stock iOS App’s Icon

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We have seen iOS weather apps that change color with changes in temperature, and then there is Sun - a web app designed for iPhone that has an icon capable of displaying the current temperature in your area. All these apps are great, but most iOS users don’t like turning to third-party solutions if the stock apps are good enough. A testament to this fact is that a lot of people stopped looking for weather apps as soon the evad3rs released a fix for the Weather app crashing issue. The stock Weather app looks pretty good, specially in iOS 6 but ever since updating, I have been missing WeatherIcon - the tweak that brings the Weather app’s icon to life, and also lets you view the current weather stats on the iPhone status bar. Almost all major tweaks have gained iOS 6 compatibility during the course of the past few months and thankfully, WeatherIcon 6 brings the much sought-after weather tweak to the latest iOS firmware version as well. Read More

View Bandwidth, Memory & Storage Usage In iPhone Notification Center

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Users of SBSettings might know that the tweak's drop-down window isn't just a place to access system toggles; it also shows some basic system stats pertaining to your iPhone. N Stats is a Notification Center widget that isn't based on some truly novel idea, but it shows a few very important pieces of system data in graphical form, which is something not many apps or tweaks can accomplish without consuming a lot of screen space. This NC add-on shows just three system stats, but the developer has made sure that the displayed entities are the most important ones for most users. Thanks to N Stats, jailbreak users can get an idea of their device’s current RAM, storage and internet connection state at a glance. The tweak isn't customizable, but this only adds to its appeal since everything is ready to go as soon as you install it. Read More

Unification Is A Combined Notification Center For Windows Phone & Windows

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Since the days of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft has been claiming that the ‘Me’ section of the People hub is fully capable of serving as the notifications area of your phone, but most users haven't been satisfied with the somewhat limited functionality the Me tile offers. The People hub is enough if you are only interested in social media updates, but what about all the notifications you might miss from third-party apps just because the device was in your pocket when the toast notification showed up? Unification is a new app that has the potential to act like a notification repository for all the apps you use on your Windows Phone. The app has been released only on WP8 at present, but it is slated to arrive for Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 pretty soon, which is sure to make it a truly universal notification center for the entire Microsoft ecosystem. Read More

Reeder Bids Google Reader Farewell, Mac & iPad Apps Go Free

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Although Google Reader still has a few months of life left in it, a mass exodus has already begun. People are switching to alternatives of the service, and have started discovering that the world won’t end on the 1st of July. If you are on iOS, apps like Rockmelt offer options that are certainly better than Reader itself in many ways, and it is nice to see that there are other conventional Reader alternatives available as well. Reeder is one of the most popular Google Reader clients available on iOS and Mac. Since it has, up till now, relied on Google Reader to function, its users feared the worst, and assumed that it will stop working as soon as Reader goes down. Fortunately, the Reeder team has refused to throw in the towel, and the service is expected to become independent of Google Reader before July 1. Not only that, the Mac and iPad clients of Reeder are now available for free! Read More

Enable HDR & Grid Mode For iPhone Front Camera

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When it comes to the camera hardware in iOS devices, the rear cam has always had better resolution. Though in recent times, the differences between the software features enabled for the rear and front camera have started coming to the fore as well. HDR mode has been around in iOS for a long time and even after that, the stock Camera app has been updated with a few new features. When you are using the front-facing camera though, the app is pretty much like it has been since the days of iOS 4. There are no options, and you can't do anything other than shooting your photo. It has taken a while, but a developer over at the Cydia store has finally come up with a solution in Front HDR, which brings the front-facing camera almost at par with its rear counterpart. The tweak adds the familiar Camera app options menu that houses the HDR, panorama and Grid options. The panorama mode doesn't work, but the other two options are fully functional. Read More