inSYNC - Issue 3, January 2014 by inSYNC

inSYNC

Meet the inSYNC Team George Hall - inSYNC Editor Tom Barton - inSYNC Website Administrator Tobi Stidolph - Social Network Manager & Contributor

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inSYNC Magazine | January 2014

when you have enjoyed inSYNC Magazine, make sure you recycle me...

Contents & Editor’s Note

Contents technology - iPad Air

Editor’s Note 4 And so begins another year, and a new

era for inSYNC. This is our first issue since our two issues in July and SepteDIVIDEPHOTOGRAPHY 6 ber 2013. 2014 will be the year where inNeed a wedding or event photographed? Check out the best and most value-for-money photographers in the South. SYNC will have regular issues; once a month. In Issue 3, January 2014, we covinSYNC’s Films of 2013 8 er Apple’s newest tablet, the iPad Air, and We take a look a 3 of the biggest films of the year. we look at Sony’s success, and their way Sony PlayStation 4 10 back to the top of the console market. inSYNC’s comprehensive review of Apple’s latest tablet.

We look at Sony’s PlayStation 4 sales.

Valuable Brands 11 We also have an ultimate guide on iOS

7, so you can make the most out of your iOS devices. We also take a look at the iOS 7 Ultimate Guide 12 Pebble SmartWatch, the Samsung Galaxy Gear and the Sony SmartWatch to comPart 1. pare them. This could influence your decAdvertise Your Business 18 sion toward buying into wearable tech. Cheap advertising with inSYNC for your business. The World’s Most Valuable Brands are now technology companies.

iOS 7 Ultimate Guide Continued.

19 I won’t give to much away, this Is-

sue

Happy by Pharrell Williams

iOS 7 Ultimate Guide

your

read

and

enjoy.

inSYNC looks at the new single by Pharrell, and his excellent inSYNC year in 2013.

is available to subscribe to at www.insynctm.com for free, just pay PlayStation Now 21 the Postage & Packaging. Or subscribe Sony has announced their new Internet Streaming Service. for a digital copy for free now. Enjoy! Part 2.

Blues News 25 inSYNC Portsmouth will sport the Blues News from February. Everything Portsmouth Football Club will be on Blue News.

The Simpsons: Tapped Out Revolution

George Hall - Editor Tweet Me @GeoGeoHall

We look at the addicted online world of Tapped Out.

SmartWatches 28 We look at 3 of the latest SmartWatches, and try to decide which one is right for you.

Chase & Status: Gig Review

Our Live Review from the Brighton Concorde 2 with Chase & Status’ latest tour.

January’s Top 10 Apps

The best apps of the month that you have to download.

January 2014 | inSYNC Magazine

technology

The iPad Air

Thinner, lighter and more powerful... but a worthy upgrade? If you think that Apple’s 5th generation tablet is just another iPad, then you would be wrong. The iPad Air has been made to be one of the lightest tablets ever, at just 469g, a drop of almost 200g on the porky iPad 4. The most amazing thing that we have found with the iPad Air is that the iPad Air’s lightness and new shape, sometimes makes it feel like an iPad Mini; but then you remember you’ve still got a 9.7” screen! Either way, numbers are so passé. Apple’s latest iPad forgoes them, and opts for the ethereal ‘Air’. Not the first time the Cupertino-based company has used the name. However, there is a clear reason for this. Unlike Apple’s previous models that were essentially iterative improvements of the predecessor, the iPad Air has been redesigned to play on its new level of slimness and lightness. Of course, it uses the same brilliant 64-bit Apple A7 chip as the iPhone 5S and comes with Apple’s trademark Retina Display. As far as tag lines go ‘The Power of Lightness’ is only slightly less cringey than Samsung’s ‘Designed for Humans’. However, unlike Samsung’s marketing, though, at least it makes one thing immediately obvious. Apple is making a big deal about how little the iPad Air weighs; and with good reason. The Californian tech giant has shaved 29% of the old iPad’s weight from the Air. That is a big leap. The weight is definitely the first thing you notice when picking it up, and when using the iPad Air for long periods of time. Its perfectly balanced, and you can hold it easily with one hand when reading or watching movies. Attempt the same thing with a previous iPad model, and before long you may have to see a doctor about your wrists. The rest of the iPad’s redesign has been taken straight from the iPad Mini 2. A tough aluminium shell encases the entire back and side of the Air, unless you have a 4G model, which has the signature Apple plastic panel at the top of the device, where the antennas are housed. The edges where the screen meet aluminium sport a diamond cut bezel. Explained clearly by Apple’s legendary British design chief Jonny Ive. This provides a sleek and shiny surface. However, a criticism of this is that without protective case for the iPad Air, the shiny bezel can get scratched quite easily. And while the iPad 4 also have an aluminium shell, the iPad Air’s sides are grippier and the sides rounder; both useful for keeping a comfortable hold of the device. The plastic control buttons of the previous iPads were tacky compared to the aesthetically-pleasing design. Thankfully, Apple has replaced them with hard-waring metal equivalents. This is a small touch, but makes the iPad Air have more of a premium feel. Its not just the weight though that has been reduced. The iPad Air is also much thinner and narrower than its predecessor, while keeping the same screen size. At just 7.5mm this it really shouldn’t feel as solid as it does. Only the Sony Xperia Tablet Z is thinner at this screen size. The screen bezels have also slimmed down significantly, which makes the iPad Air 16mm narrower than its predecessor. Slim bezels are sometimes a mixed blessing. Yes, they make the iPad much more compact, but an an accidental touch of the corner of the screen can hit the wrong link or cause the screen to be inoperable. I have experienced it many times on different phones and tablets, but the iPad Air’s screen is designed to ignore offending thumbs, and I didn’t experience a single issue while testing.

inSYNC Magazine | January 2014

technology So the Retina Display. The iPad Air is one the best and most comfortable premium tablets going, but the screen is just as important for the user experience. On paper the iPad Air’s Retina Display is the same as the one on the fourth generation iPad, but it has a 2,048x1,536 IPS panel offering 264 PPI (pixels per inch) with scratch-proof and oleophobic protective glass that’s resistant, though not impervious, to greasy fingerprints. If there was one thing the Air could take from the previous versions of the iPad, without getting too much stick it’s the screen, but Apple has made some subtle improvements to it nonetheless. Look at the screen straight on and the colours on the iPad 4 and iPad Air match almost exactly. Tilt the screen, however, and you’ll notice that the Air maintains its excellent colour accuracy at impressive angles. Text is also more legible from acute angles, unlike on the iPad 4. The screen on the iPad 4 was great, but I did find that it have a slight pinkish tinge to white backgrounds, particularly noticeable when browsing the net; same goes for the iPad 3. The iPad Air has clearly been given a dose of the good stuff, and manages to provide cleaner whites. Turn the brightness up and the screen is noticeably brighter, too. The 4:3 aspect ratio on the iPad Air is one that I prefer on a tablet of this size. It makes it easier to browse the Internet, but you do get bigger black bars when watching a film than you would on a 16:9 or 16:10 ratio tablet. It’s one of those trade-offs you just have to live with, but we can’t think of a good reason for Apple to change this aspect. The Air has the best screen on any other 10-inch-category tablet, and only the Nexus 10 even comes close, but if there’s one thing we’d like Apple to improve it is the reflectiveness. Use it outdoors on a sunny day and you’ll find yourself looking for the best angle to minimise the mirror effect. The brightness means you can still see what’s happening on-screen, but an anti-reflective coating would improve matters.

“The weight is definitely the first thing you’ll notice when you pick it up”

The sound quality is also to be admired. Stereo speakers come as standard on the iPad Air. It’s a step up from the mono speaker on the iPad 4, and brings it in line with the iPad Mini. Unfortunately, the stereo effect isn’t that impressive, primarily because both drivers are located next to each other at the bottom of the tablet, something the Nexus 7 2 avoids by placing its speakers at either end when held in landscape. The compact size of the iPad Air means we shouldn’t expect greatness from the speakers, but they are very good for a tablet. Audio is crisp and clear and doesn’t suffer from the tinny treble that affected dialogue on previous iPads. The speakers also offer a mite of bass, which means voices are deeper and more accurately portrayed. They’re reasonably loud too, enough so that you can happily watch a film with company, although, as with any tablet, you’ll want a separate speaker set-up to listen to music. A 3.5mm jack is included so you can plug-in your favourite set of headphones. So the Apple are back in the good books. But, we still need a ‘game-changing’ product, like that of the original iPod, iPhone and iPad. | Tobi Stidolph

January 2014 | inSYNC Magazine

Category

December 2013 | inSYNC Magazine

film

inSYNC’s Films of 2013

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

miss the traumas that led them there. The se- pretend to be in love. Often times in “Catchquels are, therefore, sometimes lingering and ing Fire” we are as strained as Katniss and Peestale, because the characters have less to do. ta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson, fine), because

In “Catching Fire”, based on Suzanne Collin’s wildly popular middle book, adapted by SiJennifer Lawrence reprises her lead mon Beaufoy (“127 Hours”, “Slumdog Milfemale role, but does the sequel live up to lionaire”) and Michael deBruyn (an alias for writer Michael Arndt, “Little Miss Sunshine”, the first? “Toy Story 3”), we see the characters do a lot I watched the first Hunger Games a few months of forced political round tripping across the back using Netflix, and I was surprised to say 12 districts of Panem for the government. the least of how much I enjoyed it. I’ve never read the books though I know they are aimed Panem, for the uninitiated, is North Ameritowards young people, so I imagined the sto- ca-redux: a setup of 12 divested townships of ry may be a bit ‘PG’, however this is totally hard labor, low to no wages and no electriciwrong as the story contains very dark themes. ty (sounds somewhat like Pakistan, don’t it?), run by an authoritarian state-city called CapiThe sequel is a strange little animal. Adapted tol that makes the full use of the “rule with an from books, or made from original concepts (I iron fist” idiom. While the districts are downdon’t know if original is the apt term in mov- trodden labor cities, the Capitol nevertheless is ies anymore), its job is a tough one: build on a place of drastic, daffy fashion sense gee-whiz the first part while simultaneously wheedle future technology (if the cultural bomb has us enough interest to keep the audience happy dressed like taffy wrappers with puffy cotton and willing to shell out bucks for part three. In candy wigs, then stop the train, I want out). “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’s” case, the part three would be part three and four, be- Anyways, the novelty in Panem is limited to cause the franchise is just too awesome a mon- their new-culture aesthetic and the need for ey spinner to confine to one movie. Why have television. Ergo, the great diversion: The Hunone climatic movie when two will do just fine? ger Games – a sport where 24 younglings (re: “Harry Potter”, “Twilight Saga” and “The from 12 districts, between 12 to 18 years, who Hobbit”, which outdoes every one of them). will serve as “tributes” and battle each othSo, as I was saying: the job of the sequel is er to the death for glory of television ratings. a straight forward one. Make you believe in where the characters are at the moment and Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), the surwhat they are going through, so when the end vivor of the last Hunger Games, is an exception: starts maxing out, gaining momentum from she not only saved herself, but in a crafty moone big pompous blockbuster event to anoth- ment of using the medium’s own entertainment er, side-stepping scenes where characters go value against itself, saves the boy from her disthrough momentary emotional voids, we don’t trict as well. Their price of living: they have to

inSYNC Magazine | January 2014

this is reality television at its most heartless. When the movie opens, we see a shaky and haunted Katniss back in district 12. Her survivalist edge is down, because she sees dead people from the last Hunger Games (the trauma of being forced to kill a fellow human being lays pitiless on her soul). She has slightly better accommodations though (the scarceness in Panem’s districts are often as hard as Ms. Lawrence’s breakthrough Oscar nominated movie “Winters Bone”). Her family is now living in a bigger house that’s 25 yards away from Peeta’s ditto-copied place. When cameras come by to check on her (which by the way look like automated monstrosities), the two slip off the snow and fake a kiss for live television. Circumstances, circumstances. Soon, Katniss sees signs of a looming revolution with her Mocking Jay symbol at the forefront. The President of Panem (a crotchety Donald Sutherland) wants revenge for Katniss’ survival, and sets up the new Hunger Games with new games master Plutarch Heavensbee (Phillip Seymore Hoffman, subtle and at times too translucent in his characterization). The new twist is that Katniss and previous year’s survivors from the last Hunger Games from each district will be set loose against each other in a forest governed by barbaric man-made technology.

film Late last year saw the release of Jack Ass’ first first in quite a while. And when young Billy’s mum is sentenced to prison, it is up to good old Grandpa Irving to bring the child to his no good father. As the two share a prank-fuelled road trip, they find an unexpected bond through a series of funny practical jokes on a clueless public. At one point in the hijinks adventure from Johnny Knoxville, who play Irving, there is a real sense of danger. It involves an actor playing an abusively hateful dad who displays his lack of tolerance in front of the wrong crowd. It is such an unnerving scene that I found it hard to believe the prank wasn’t completely staged. Certainly it isn’t a first to wonder how on earth something doesn’t go horribly wrong in prankster cinema, yet this was particularly tense. The awe-inspired insanity of Knoxville does help to make Bad Grandpa a shocking, but funny, ninety minutes of cinema. It will have you shaking your head at the unbelievably bold humour which plays out. Even still you may find yourself rooting for the films odd couple, Irving Zisman and his grandson Billy played by Jackson Nicoll.

When did it become acceptable – cel- What it does is manage its storytelling ebrated even – for children’s au- skillfully, giving Middle Earth aficionathors to start dumbing down? dos exactly what they want – a lengthy, Remember when children’s literature could be so well written, it worked on more than one level? JRR Tolkien was surely one of those great writers, able to pen involved and involving stories that didn’t patronise, credited the reader with intelligence, weren’t ripped off from something else and engaged both young and old.

complete immersion into this enthralling Tolkien-Jackson crafted fantasy world.

In no rush to tell its compelling story, the second part in Jackson’s Hobbit saga unfolds at the pace of an old-fashioned epic; it’s packed full with thrills, adventure and action but it takes time to pause atmosphericalFor a film version of such literature to cap- ly with more contemplative moments.

With the previous Jackass films, as well as the MTV series, the comedy relied simply on just the pranks or stunts. However, what sets Bad Grandpa aside is the inclusion of a narrative storyline. The story revolves around the young boy, Billy, whose mother is going to prison. Thankfully Grandpa steps in in order to bring him to his father. The parents are the epitome of white trash and of course Grandpa Irving is far from the greatest role model. As the two travel across country, they get into a number of strange and hilarious situations. As outrageous as Jonny Knoxville may be, this entire experiment would not have worked nearly this well if it wasn’t for Jackson Nicoll. The young actor, who had previously appeared in Fun Size with Knoxville connects almost too well with the 86-year-old whom he takes this journey with. And yes, the kid steals the show. The many exploits include a rigged kids ride, a disrupted wedding and a funeral gone wrong. As well as these, there are a number of scenes that are not shown in

the trailer, that are utterly brilliant. Moments that I wouldn’t want to give too much away about. However, if you have watched the trailer, you will have seen the best highlight of the film. The girl’s beauty pageant, which will make you never think of the song Cherry Pie the same again. Nicoll takes on this challenge without abandon and it works extremely well. Yet it is the reaction of the parents who parade their young girls out in real life, which is what makes it all the more uncomfortable and cringey. At one point, one of the contestants and her mother describe it being a little weird that a grandfather is bringing his ‘daughter’ to a pageant, normally something done by mother and daughter in the States. This entire sequence is one of the most insanely riotous moments ever created by the people behind Jackass. Public reaction, however, makes the scene even better. As we get to know both Billy and Grandpa throughout the movie, there are a number of scenes of the two together in a car usually getting on each other’s nerves. This is the only time where the film sometimes doesn’t live up to its potential. The two actors work extremely well together, yet I think these bits of dialogue lack genuine heart and occasionally just feel like filler. We get early on that Grandpa Irving can be a ‘Jackass’, no pun intended, of an old man who, as the film goes on, begins to really truly love his grandchild. In fact, the moments when they are not annoying each other and suddenly become a ‘due’ of sorts, the film worked far better. However, the disappointing thing about Bad Grandpa, is that I was expecting a lot more ‘laugh-out-loud’ moments, but many of these are, somewhat, used up in the trailer. Nonetheless, Jackass: Bad Grandpa is still a quality comedy. This year there have been a handful of really terrific comedies including Simon Pegg’s final Three Cornetto Trilogy film The Worlds End and the final episode in the Hangover franchise . And while Bad Grandpa may not be my favourite comedy of the year I have to say if you are in the mood to just laugh, this is simply one of the best movies of the year. Knoxville is of course terrific as Irving Zisman, a character he has taken on a number of times in the past, but it is young Jackson Nicoll’s fearless performance that really makes the film and adds to the comedic value. It is also exciting to see Knoxville and company expand the idea behind Jackass, and create a movie with an actual legible storyline, that in its part mostly works. In the end, Irving Zisman and Billy make for a uniquely entertaining modern day ‘Odd Couple’ with tons of the trashy stuff that Jackass fans have come to expect. I’m sure this is not last that we have of the pair.

inSYNC Rating: 6/10

ture the essence of its source material is rare. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings tril- Arguably the most appealing part of ogy did it, and in his new Hobbit trilogy Jackson’s film – indeed, trilogy – is its he’s proving himself able to pull it off again. ground breaking use of HFR (High

Frame Rate) technology. Shot and presented (where supported) so that the film runs at twice the normal speed, you get super sharp images, meaning that this revolutionary form of 3D is wonderfully high definition with none of the The Hobbit’s plot centres on a drag- blurring associated with traditional 3D. A prequel to the events fans are familiar with in Lord of the Rings, Jackson’s new trilogy focuses on hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and his role in the Middle Earth saga.

on named Smaug, who resides inside a mountain with all his stolen treasures. The documentary realism given to the The mountain was part of the dwarf kingdom of Erebor, and Bilbo is part of a small army of dwarves, led by Thorin, the kingdom’s rightful heir, continuing in this sequel in their quest to reclaim the throne. The main concern of fans of The Hobbit is Jackson’s insistence on spinning one well-loved book into an epic threepart tale, and in the process incorporating flab and long, boring episodes.

film at first makes you hyper-aware of its artifice but it eventually draws you in. With its excellent cast made up of exceptional British talent including newcomers to the saga Stephen Fry and Benedict Cumberbatch and its absorbing journey structure, you’re encouraged to settle back into your seat, lose track of time and let the film engulf you. inSYNC Rating - 7/10

January 2014 | inSYNC Magazine

business

Sony’s PlayStation 4 Tops One Million Units in First 24 Hours As you will have already seen in our console showdown, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are becoming ever more popular, especially as Christmas is on its way. We thought that it was incredible that Sony reached 1 million PS4 sales in 24 hours, but Microsoft have done the same. After going on sale in 13 countries, including the UK, on 22nd November, Microsoft has revealed that it reached the same feat of sales as Sony after the first 24 hours. ‘We are humbled and grateful for the excitement of Xbox fans around the world. Seeing thousands of excited fans lined up to get their Xbox one and their love for gaming was truly a special moment for everyone on the Xbox team. We are working hard to create more Xbox One consoles and look forward to fulfilling holiday gift wishes this season’, said corporate Vice President of Marketing & Strategy for Xbox, Yusuf Mehdi. Despite this, the Xbox One has not been without its problems. A majority of gamers complaining that their consoles have been ‘bricked’, halted to a stop after downloading a day one update. Not great for a £429 games console. Gamers are also complaining about an E100 error message, which seemingly isn’t an easy fix. According to Sky News, a Microsoft spokesman was unable to say how many users have been affected. However, he did say to Sky News, ‘If a user is experiencing a stall for more than 10 minutes when connecting to Xbox Live to take the day one update they should contact Xbox customer support and we will work with them to troubleshoot and get them up and running’. To add to the Xbox One hype, Microsoft also said that in the 24 hours after the Xbox One’s launch, gamers killed over 60 million zombies in Dead Rising 3, drove more than 3.6 million miles in Forza Motorsport 5 and defeated 8.5 million foes in Ryse: Son of Rome.

business

Technology Companies Are Now The World’s Most Valuble Brands For the first time are, the World’s biggest technology players have the highest brand values. Interbrand always shows us how much each brand and company are worth. These noteworthy brand names are worth billions of pounds based off of their revenues, public awareness levels and how prevalent they are in multiple countries around the world. For many years Coca-Cola has been Number One, but has now fallen from its standing for the first time ever, as Apple’s

brand dominance has taken over. It’s estimated that the Apple brand is now worth about $98.3 billion. This is about 28% higher than what its value was in 2012. The Coca-Cola brand is still very strong in value at $79.2 billion. This brand value is 2% higher than what it was last year. The World’s Top Five Brands all have brand values of $50 billion or more. In 2013, Google went up 34% to have a value just shy of Apple, at $93 billion, while IBM and Microsoft have respective values of $78.8 billion and $59.5 billion. McDonald’s, GE, and Cisco are near the top five as well. The Gap was in last place on the study, at 100th, with a respectable $3.9 billion value.

January 2014 | inSYNC Magazine

technology

iOS 7: Better than iOS 6, or Apple’s Wrong Turn? inSYNC’s Comprehensive Review With Everything You Need to Know About Apple’s Latest Mobile Operating System. Good - Successfully walks the line between “different enough to be unmistakably new” and “familiar enough not to be terrifying.” - Whatever you think of Apple’s aesthetic choices, the new design feels more consistent and cohesive than before. - New features like Control Centre, Today View, and sorting options in Mail will quickly prove themselves essential. Most of the functional changes, however small, are for the better. - Well-optimised for the Apple A5 and A6 chips, that power so much of the company’s current lineup. - Day-one availability for every device on the support list. - Didn’t break any of the apps I used, though some displayed strange visual artefacts. Most developers should be issuing iOS 7-tuned updates in the coming weeks. Bad - Generally, Apple’s services aren’t as robust or as all-encompassing as Google’s.Google Now is often more intelligent than Siri, for example, and the more of your data you have in Google’s cloud, the wider that gap becomes. - Apple still limits customisation in the name of simplicity, which is probably the right call for most people, but can be frustrating for power users. - Flashy animations with ‘too-long’ durations are impressive the first time, but frustrating by the hundredth. - Does not always play well with non-Retina Displays. - iOS 7 on anything lower than an iPhone 4S, means the performance is tolerable but choppy. - “Fragmentation” isn’t the F-word for iOS that it is for Android, but depending on the device you have, you may not be getting all of iOS 7’s features. - Battery life is down across the board compared to iOS 6. Compared to iOS 7, iOS 6 was a “spit-and-polish” release and I stand by that assessment today. Between the new Notification Centre, iCloud, and iMessage, iOS 5 felt like a big, substantial release in ways that its immediate successor did not. A lack of impressive new features, the useful-but-minor Do Not Disturb, the niche Passbook, the terrible Maps app, etc, and a visual design that was just past its fifth birthday both contributed to a feeling of inertia in iOS 6. There was a sense and an unspoken agreement it was time for a change. Well, Apple may have just pulled it off. iOS 6 had barely been out for a month before Scott Forstall, the exec who led the iOS team for as long as there had been an iOS team, left the Cupertino tech giant. Craig Federighi and Jony Ive, the Apple senior vice presidents in charge of OS X and hardware design, respectively, stepped in to fill his shoes. Today we’re looking at the result of that switch. In one sense, iOS 7 changes nearly everything about iOS. A couple of wallpapers have made the jump, but otherwise you’d be hard-pressed to find anything in iOS 7 that looks quite like it did previously. In another sense, iOS 7 is the latest in a string of incremental updates. It adds a few new features and changes some existing ones, but this doesn’t radically alter the way that you use the OS from day to day. inSYNC’s following in-depth review explores every nook and cranny of the new operating system to show you which additions actually improve iOS, and which ones are only skin deep.

inSYNC Magazine | January 2014

technology Supported Devices and Feature Fragmentation Before we delve right into iOS 7, let’s talk about installation. For the purposes of this review, we’ll be omitting any iOS features unique to the iPhone 5C and 5S and focusing entirely on the devices that are in your hands right now. The full list of devices that support iOS 7 reads as follows:

- iPhone 4, 4S, 5, 5C, and 5S - iPad 2, New iPad, iPad with Retina Display, iPad Air, iPad Mini and iPad Mini 2 - 5th Gen. iPod Touch

Two devices that supported iOS 6 have been dropped by iOS 7: the iPhone 3GS and the 4th Gen. iPod touch. Both were dropped for good reason. The iPhone 3GS was the last of the small-screened iOS devices to lack a Retina display, and both devices are stuck with 256MB of RAM, where the others have at least 512MB. The length of the iOS device support cycle remains about the same as it has been for the last couple of years. If you buy an iOS device when its brand new, you can expect three to four years of software support, even if your device won’t get every new feature promised by every new software update. While it isn’t the concern that it is for Android devices, iOS has a little fragmentation of its own. As the iOS family gets larger, that matrix of unsupported features gets more complicated. Apple provides a full breakdown:

- Panorama shooting is available on iPhone 4S or later and iPod Touch 5th Gen. Square and video formats and swipe to capture are available on iPhone 4 or later, iPad 3rd Gen, or later, iPad Mini, and iPod Touch 5th Gen. - Filters in-Camera are available on iPhone 4S or later and iPod Touch 5th Gen. Apple lists that only the iPhone 5 and newer should be able to use this feature, but because of the GM build, our iPhone 4S supports it too. Filters in Photos are available on iPhone 4 or later, iPad 3rd Gen. or later, iPad Mini, and iPod Touch 5th Gen. - AirDrop is available on iPhone 5 or later, iPad 4th Gen., iPad Mini, and iPod Touch 5th Gen., and it requires an iCloud account. - Siri is available on iPhone 4S or later, iPad with Retina Display, iPad Mini, and iPod Touch 5th Gen., and it requires Internet access. - Finally, the iPhone 4 and its older A4 chip do not support the following features: the 3D Flyover feature and turn-by-turn navigation in Maps; AirPlay mirroring; translucency effects throughout the OS; live wallpapers; and some visual effects including the parallax effect on the Home screen.

Ever since iOS 4 brought the iPhone 3G to its knees, performance on older hardware has been a concern among upgraders. We’ll talk generally about performance and battery life later on in the review.

Installation and Setup The iOS 7 update can be installed either via iTunes or by the built-in software updater in iOS 6. You’ll need an Internet connection of some kind to download the update and to activate newly purchased or registered devices. iOS 7 will leave your device with just a tiny bit less usable space than it had under iOS 6, just how much less varies from device to device, though iPads typically take a bigger hit than the iPhones do. If you’re already squeezed for space, iOS 7 will squeeze just a tiny bit harder. One notable change is that devices now ask you to create a four-digit passcode during setup. This is skippable, but we’re glad to see Apple encouraging its users to protect their devices even at this basic level. Apple’s Phil Schiller mentioned during the company’s September 10 keynote that about half of iOS users didn’t set up a passcode at all, and Apple would apparently like that to change, even on devices without a fancy fingerprint scanner.

Death to Textures! iOS 7’s All-new Design Every new iOS version brought its own visual tweaks to the operating system, but said tweaks all stuck to the same basic theme: shiny, faux-glass reflections on icons; surfaces covered in green felt and rich Corinthian leather. There were wood textures, plastic textures, metal textures, paper textures, and even a voice recorder app that looked like an oldtimey radio microphone. This desire to make digital elements resemble their real-world counterparts is known as ‘skeuomorphism,’ and in iOS 6 these skeuomorphic elements are present in abundance. At its best, skeuomorphism can be a helpful way to introduce neophytes to technology by making strange, scary digital things resemble their more familiar, real-world counterparts. This evokes Apple’s necessity

January 2014 | inSYNC Magazine

of simplicity. But all too often, previous versions of iOS have used it less to be helpful and more to be good to look at. Need to add some texture to your e-mail icon? How about an envelope floating in the clouds! Wouldn’t it be a nice touch if the notepad in the Notes app looked like a couple pages had been torn out of it? Will people understand what the Newsstand folder is for if we don’t make it look like a little wooden shelf? Will people understand that things have been deleted from Passbook if we don’t throw their virtual coupons into a virtual paper shredder? The list goes on, but you get the point. Much of iOS’ former skeuomorphism serves no particular functional purpose. Apple’s own promo page for iOS 7 shows how the company feels about this sort of thing in the post-Forstall era: ‘The iOS 7 interface is purposely unobtrusive,’ it reads. ‘Conspicuous ornamentation has been stripped away. Unnecessary bars and buttons have been removed. And in taking away design elements that don’t add value, suddenly there’s greater focus on what matters most: your content.’ iOS 7 unloads skeuomorphism wholesale. Under the direction of longtime Apple hardware design boss Jony Ive, Apple’s mobile operating system has shed its realistic-looking cocoon and emerged a simpler, more streamlined butterfly. The word used most frequently to describe this new look is ‘flat,’ and while it’s true that almost every single textured surface has been thrown out in favour of flat, or semi-translucent, surfaces, to call iOS 7 as a whole ‘flat’ is a bit of an oversimplification. iOS 7 still has layers and depth, it’s just much more subtle about how it presents that depth to the user. It’s not difficult to find bits and pieces of other operating systems in iOS 7. There’s a dash of Windows Phone in Apple’s sweeping new User Interface (UI) animations, a smidge of Android in the new Control Centre and some of the lightweight fonts, even a bit of WebOS in the new multitasking UI. You can argue about whether this constitutes ‘bor-

technology rowing’ or ‘copying’ or ‘stealing’ and who you think does more of it, but it’s a pointless debate. Everyone is looking over everyone else’s shoulders at one point or another, and no one in any industry is building products in a vacuum. iOS 7 appropriates some successful ideas from the competition, but Apple is hardly the first company to be, erm, lets say inspired by what its contemporaries are doing. There are plenty of touches here that you won’t find in Android, Windows Phone, or BlackBerry.

The Lock Screen & an Introduction to the New Aesthetic Turn on your phone and you’ll be greeted by the new Lock screen, which will serve as the first indicator of things to come. The faux-realistic slider and cropped wallpaper image are gone, replaced by text, in the new system font, Helvetica Neue, and icons laid directly over the full-screen, edge-to-edge background image. Even the status bar is no longer a visible ‘bar’ so much as it is an area across the top of the screen where connection status, time, and battery life are indicated. Two additional horizontal bars, one each at the top and bottom of the screen, exist to encourage you to pull the notifications shade down from the top of the screen or the Control Centre up from the bottom of the screen. The Camera app is also accessed from the lock screen by dragging up from the bottom-right corner of the screen, and I found that I would occasionally invoke the Camera when I meant to pull up the Control Centre and vice versa. On the iPhone 5S, you can also access the torch light from the Control Centre. The ‘slide to unlock’ dialog and arrow represent a good example of what has happened to navigation buttons throughout iOS 7. Rather than buttons, the operating system almost exclusively uses text or symbols without surrounding borders. In iOS 6, the shapes of the buttons themselves, most memorably in the Back buttons that occurred throughout the OS and its apps, often conveyed some information about what those buttons did. In iOS 7, small arrows are often used to convey the same situation. Early betas didn’t always do this, most notably, the right-facing arrow next to the ‘slide to unlock’ dialog was absent. Even people who used iOS 6 every day would become confused by the then-upward-facing Control Centre arrow underneath the dialog and try to swipe upward to unlock the phone.Even things that still look like buttons don’t really look like for-real textured buttons anymore. Take, for example, the number pad you use to unlock your phone or to make phone calls, which is now a grid of transparent circles rather than lightly textured rectangular buttons. The software keyboards have similarly removed texture from their buttons. While the drop-down menu selection dialog still moves as if it’s mounted on a cylinder, you can’t see the cylinder as though you’re spinning some kind of slot machine.

The Home Screen: Depth Without Skeuomorphism All of the new design elements introduced on the lock screen are reinforced on the Home screen. The status bar has been made transparent, fonts are thinner and lighter, and faux-realistic touches like the OS X-style glass dock and the drop shadows behind the app icons and text have all been thrown out. Those shadows are used by older iOS versions to create an illusion of depth, and while the fake shadows are gone, the sense of depth isn’t. On every iOS 7 device, except the iPhone 4, the phone uses data from the gyroscope to subtly shift the icons and Home screen wallpaper around, creating a parallax effect that conveys a sense of depth and dimension without resorting to shadows. Pop-up status messages, which are now white, and opaque, and without glassy buttons or transparencies, ‘float’ over the Home screen and other apps this way. The Notification Centre and Control Centre features now sit on top of the operating system when invoked, and when you open a folder or jump into an app, the screen zooms toward you as though you’re actually jumping into it. While individual icons and design elements of iOS 7 are ‘flat’, the operating system as a whole still has many layers and an excellent perception of depth. Note, though, everything isn’t perfect. While the drop shadows under text were employed mainly to create a false sense of depth, they also kept the labels for app icons distinct from the underlying Home screen wallpaper. Apple has resorted to a few other tricks to avoid issues like this one. Text changes colour dynamically based on whether you have a dark or light wallpaper so that light stands out against a dark background and vice versa. Still, particularly, ‘busy’ wallpapers can cause legibility issues. The effect is a bit worse on the non-Retina Displays of the iPad 2 and iPad Mini, where fonts and icons are already fuzzier and less-defined because of the lower-resolution screens. Nothing is ever illegible, but you may run into mild readability issues that didn’t exist in iOS 6. If you’re worried about them, I recommend sticking with a wallpaper that’s a bit less busy, iOS 7 has jettisoned most of the ‘classic’ iPhone and iPad wallpapers in favour of many bright, colourful, and generally attractive replacements. Looking past the way things look to the way that they work, you’ll notice that the core of iOS remains the same as ever: it’s a grid of application icons, and the Home screen exists to facilitate launching and switching between these applications. Home screen widgets or live-updating tiles like you might find in Android or Windows Phone still aren’t here. The Calendar icon shows the correct date, and the Clock icon shows the correct time, but Apple’s desire to conserve battery and keep system resource usage low keeps the Home screen relatively simple. One slight change that may throw new users is the new location of the Spotlight Search feature, which originally lived to the left of the Home screen but now lives up above it. Instead of swiping from left to right or pressing the Home button once, you’ll find Spotlight by dragging your finger downward (but not from the top of the screen, which still pulls down the Notification Centre). On the plus side, this makes Spotlight accessible from any of your Home screens, so if you habitually find yourself needing to get to Spotlight quickly from your fifth page of application icons, this will help you out. The downside is that I’ve rarely encountered a circumstance where assigning two similar actions to two different responses didn’t eventually cause problems. As with the positioning of the Control Centre next to the camera shortcut on the lock screen, having people drag down their screens to get to Spotlight and to get to the Notification Centre is going to cause some confusion, especially if people mean to perform one action, and accidentally perform the other. That’s the last bad thing we’ll say about the Home screen improvements, though all of the other changes seem purpose-built to address long-standing complaints about iOS. Application folders can now span multiple pages of apps, allowing users to boil, say, four-ish folders full of games down into one. The Newsstand icon, long empty on my phone can be nested inside another folder (though, unhelpfully, you can no longer see icon thumb-

inSYNC Magazine | January 2014

technology nails unless you actually open the folder, and its contents don’t appear to be indexed by Spotlight). I like trying to keep most of my apps on only 2 pages, a task which became impossible in iOS 6 on my iPhone 4S. The more flexible folder system means I can cram as much into one 16-icon grid as I please. The multitasking interface is also much improved: in iOS 6, double tapping the Home button showed you a small row of four icons at a time, and you could swipe through them to see all of the apps you launched. However, dismissing these apps from the multitasking bar was needlessly complex, requiring you to hold your finger down on an icon until it started wiggling and then tapping the red Xs on all of the apps you wanted to dismiss. You couldn’t see what you were doing in any of those applications until you opened them, either. That’s all gone in iOS 7, replaced by an attractive, full-screen app switcher complete with thumbnails showing you what you were doing last. To dismiss an app, simply swipe it up and away.

Apps Old and New Apple’s iPhone app developers have had to manage three major transitions since the launch of the App Store back in 2008: the jump from non-Retina to Retina Displays, the jump from 3.5-inch to 4-inch screens, and now, the jump from iOS 6-style apps to iOS 7-style apps. Apple has always used its own built-in apps as an example of what developers ought to be aiming for, and the visual changes in these apps are just as drastic as they are on the Home and Lock screens. Several minor apps throughout the operating system don’t get any new features to speak of, but they get iOS 7-style facelifts that make them look new even if they aren’t. In this case, showing is better than telling. Fonts are now lighter, icons are thinner and simpler, and textures have all been thrown straight out. As with the Retina and screen size transitions, though, there’s going to be a sort-of-awkward transition period where not all of the apps you use have been rebuilt for iOS 7. In these apps, the Status bar once again becomes a segregated bit of the screen, with white text on a black background, and the old-style textured software keyboard makes a reappearance, and it looks (and feels) like you’ve stepped back in time a few months to the Land of iOS 6. Functionally, there’s nothing wrong with using iOS 6-style applications in iOS 7. They look a little different, but they all work in exactly the same way. As with the previous major transitions, I think that the vast majority of app developers will be quick to get on board with a fresh coat of paint for their apps, even if they just throw in some lighter fonts and call it a day, like some already have done, eBay for example. A few months back, prominent iOS developer Marco Arment argued that apps that looked and felt like they were made for iOS 7 would have a much better chance to flourish in the early days of the operating system. While I don’t think that established iOS users will be quick to abandon apps they like, even if the UIs remain old, I do believe that Apple will promote iOS 7-style apps more heavily and that new users will be more inclined to pick new-style apps than old-style ones. All of this is to say that, as with previous transitions, even if your apps aren’t up-to-date now, there’s plenty of incentive for developers to get it done sooner rather than later.

Non-Retina Devices. Your Pixels Are Showing With the iPhone 3GS out of the picture, the only remaining non-Retina products on the iOS 7 support list are the iPad 2 and the iPad Mini. So much of iOS 7 has been tailored for Retina-class screens that it’s worth talking about how non-Retina devices will hold up. Unsurprisingly, you’ll notice a non-Retina screen the most when you’re looking at those light fonts and lines. Take, for example, the passcode entry keypad, where the small letters underneath the numbers look very jagged on the iPad Mini, where they’re small-but-smooth on the fifth generation iPad. The same goes for icons with fine detail, a design element used liberally throughout the operating system. It’s obvious that things like the battery life indicator and the new Safari icon were designed with Retina in mind and then downscaled, whereas iOS 6 and previous versions were designed for the earlier, lower-resolution iPhones and iPads and then sharpened for Retina screens. Other than these UI changes, the downsides of having a non-Retina screen are the same as they were in iOS 6. Text is fuzzier, and more jagged, and you need to zoom in further on webpages and ebooks to make small fonts legible. iOS 7 is usable on non-Retina devices, but it’s clearer than ever that the operating system is being built for Retina first. The way iOS 7 looks on an iPad Mini is the strongest argument in favour of a Retina iPad Mini 2. If you’re on a Retina device, and you find that you’re having a hard time with the lightweight fonts, the operating system’s accessibility options can help you out. I found the ‘bold text’ option, which wasn’t available in iOS 6, to be much more legible on my iPad Air’s display. The weight of the fonts with this option turned on is a bit closer to the way they were before, and it’s generally an improvement on iPad 2 and iPad Mini’s non-Retina screens. There is one minor benefit to using iOS 7 on a non-Retina iPad, if you often find yourself using iPhone apps on your tablet. Here’s the deal: in iOS 6, iPhone apps will run using the same 480×320 resolution that they’d use on a non-Retina iPhone like the 3GS. Even if scaled up into 2x mode, the apps would simply scale up their non-Retina assets, meaning that you’d be looking at an image scaled up to 1024×768. You may need to enlarge the images below to get the full effect. In iOS 7, the 1x non-Retina display mode is entirely gone, and iPhone-only apps run in 2x mode, and use their 960×640 Retina assets exclusively. The obvious upshot is that iPhone-only apps will look better on the non-Retina iPads. The less obvious implication is that, of course, Apple is completely done with non-Retina phones. It has no plans to keep producing old ones, and it has no plans to introduce a new one. Developers who don’t want to support older ver-

January 2014 | inSYNC Magazine

technology rsions of iOS can throw out their non-Retina iPhone assets entirely. Hopefully, in a couple of years we’ll be saying the same thing about non-Retina iPad assets.

Animations and Their Effect on Performance iOS 7’s new animations; older versions of iOS had UI animations, but they were much simpler than these. Unlock an iOS 7 phone, and your icons come swooping in from above your home screen. Opening an app or a folder or the multitasking switcher prompts a swooping zoom in or zoom out instead of just moving part of the screen. Waking your device up or putting it to sleep prompts a fade in or fade out where the screen simply turned on or turned off before. It’s all very visually impressive, and we have no doubt that the animations are leveraging the capabilities of today’s mobile GPUs to deliver effects that wouldn’t have been possible on the first iPhones or smartphones. There’s one big problem, though, animations are fine, but don’t let them get in the way. iOS 7’s animations are the kind that will prompt an ‘ooh, neat’ upon first use and then a slowly increasing sense of frustration as you begin noticing that trivial tasks take just a bit longer than they used to. When we say delay, we’re just talking about tiny delays here, but they can add up over the course of days and weeks, and before long, you’ve spent a fair chunk of time waiting for iOS 7 to finish looking pretty so you can do stuff with it. Luckily, this is an easy fix: shorten those animation durations, and the problem disappears. Apple has already tuned them somewhat during the beta, so let’s hope that tuning continues in subsequent updates. Now that we’ve exhausted just about all there is to say about iOS 7’s new look, let’s start looking at the real reasons you’ll want to upgrade: new features.

The Indispensable Control Center Of all of iOS 7’s new features, the Control Centre is the one that I couldn’t live without if I had to go back to iOS 6. Accessed by swiping up from the bottom of the screen, the feature is roughly analogous to the Quick Settings panel from Android but with a few other useful controls and shortcuts thrown in for good measure. Control Centre does a couple of new things, but its better described as an easier way to do a whole bunch of old things. The new ones

are easy to get out of the way: it lets you use your iPhone or iPod’s LED flash as a flashlight (a feature cribbed from dozens of third-party flashlight apps but implemented simply and elegantly here) and control your AirDrop settings on devices that support the feature. What Control Centre lacks in true novelty it more than makes up for in convenience. Its entire top row, which includes buttons to toggle Airplane Mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Do Not Disturb, brings frequently used settings out of the Settings app and makes them accessible via one quick swipe up. Also available even if the device is locked. This is also true of the brightness slider, which was buried even deeper in the iOS 6 settings. The media playback controls, screen orientation lock, and volume slider were all accessible from the Home screen in iOS 6, but they were buried in a place where some users may have had trouble finding them. You had to double tap the Home button to open the app switcher, and then swipe from left to right once or twice to expose the settings you wanted. Finally, the bottom row of buttons adds some useful shortcuts to what Apple assumes will be frequently used functions; the aforementioned LED flashlight, the timer function of the Clock app, the calculator, and the camera apps are all launch-able from the Control Centre with an easy swipe and tap. The design of the Control Centre is perhaps a bit cluttered, but we’ll absolutely take it over the pile of taps, swipes, and button presses it replaces. For me, it may just be the killer feature of iOS 7. I frequently toggle Wi-Fi when I’m out and about. Easy access to Do Not Disturb has added the feature to my regular rotation where I barely used it in iOS 6. Control Centre is simple, but indispensable. The biggest mark against the Control Centre is its complete lack of customisability, like you can toggle some settings if you don’t want the feature to be accessible from the lock screen or from within apps, but there’s no way to alter the contents of the Control Centre. If you think easy access to the Notes app would be more useful to you than the timer within the Clock app, too bad for you. The feature is very useful, but it could be made more so if you could tailor it to your needs somewhat.

Notification Centre The Notification Centre feature introduced in iOS 5 didn’t pick up many new features in the transition to iOS 6, but that isn’t the case here. The biggest change, aside from the removal of the execrable linen texture, is something called the Today View.

inSYNC Magazine | January 2014

technology The Today View draws data from several different sources — the Weather app, the Stocks app, your Calendars and Reminders data, and your alarms — to give you a quick, at-a-glance summary of what you have to do that day and the next day. The Notification Centre in iOS 6 presented some of this information to you, but iOS 7 does it more clearly and with additional context.

in iOS 6: you can present them as ‘banners’, which show up briefly at the top of the screen without interrupting what you’re doing; ‘Alerts’ that pop-up over what you’re doing and demand action immediately; and ‘none’ which will allow notifications to show up in Notification Centre, but won’t show you alerts in real-time as things happen. You can still swipe directly on an individual notification to jump directly into the app that generated it. Some apps, like the alarm function in the Clock app, If you need more in-depth information, tapping anything in the Today View will take can also generate special notifications that look different from the normal ones. you to the appropriate app. But the feature itself is focused on letting you view information as quickly as possible rather than for creating new appointments or remind- AirDrop It Like It’s Hot ers. Scroll down to the bottom of the list, and the Today View will also give you a quick summary of what the next day looks like, complete with any alarms you have set. iPhones and iPads still lack support for Near Field Communication (NFC), but Like the rest of the Notification Centre, the Today View is customisable within a limited range of Apple-approved parameters. You can choose whether the Today View is accessible from the lock screen and which of the Today View’s data sources you’d like to pull from. In the screenshot below, I’ve disabled the Stocks view since I don’t use it, but I’ve left everything else enabled. The rest of the Notification Centre has been moved around a bit but still works essentially as it did in iOS 6. A new tabbed interface lets you swipe left and right between the Today View and the separate-but-related All and Missed views, the first of which displays a list of all your notifications grouped by app, the second of which only shows you what you’ve missed since the last time you looked. The good news in the All tab is that you don’t have to deal with calendar invites and weather information sitting there amidst your more pressing notifications, undismissible unless you completely disable them. The bad news is that you still have to tap little Xs to dismiss notifications, because swiping is used to switch tabs; using gestures to dismiss notifications is apparently not an option. Given the removal of the ‘tap the X’ system from the multitasking switcher, it’s too bad that it still lives on in the Notification Centre. You have the same basic notification options in iOS 7 as you had

Apple is porting its AirDrop feature from OS X to help fill that void for at least some people. If the app you’re running supports AirDrop, the feature will show up in the revamped system-wide Share menu alongside the more conventional options that were introduced in iOS 6. iOS 7 will look for other, nearby iOS devices with AirDrop enabled and allow you to shoot files back and forth with them. AirDrop’s settings are controlled via the Control Centre, where tapping on the AirDrop label will allow you to make your iOS device available to anyone, only to people present in your Contacts list, or to disable it entirely. AirDrop works in a surprising amount of places. We were able to send images, Safari links, App Store and iTunes Store pages, and Maps locations from one iOS device to another without issue. The only hiccup is that it only works with the latest crop of iDevices, which cuts out the iPhone 4 and 4S and the iPad 2 and 3. It’s important to note that while AirDrop in iOS 7 and AirDrop in OS X share the same name and underlying technology, they aren’t actually compatible with one another. You can AirDrop things from iOS to iOS and from OS X to OS X, but not from iOS to OS X or vice versa. All the reports I can find say that this situation doesn’t change with the latest Mac software OS X Mavericks.

Siri Apple’s iOS 7 product pages for the Siri feature drop the ‘beta’ tag that the service has used since it was introduced with iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S, but it’s a largely symbolic gesture. Siri sports a handful of new tricks in iOS 7, but other than those it’s the same virtual personal assistant you’ve been living with for a while now. You can use Siri to set reminders, send messages and emails, open apps, get sports scores, find restaurants and other locations, check the weather, and ask more general questions. The feature will still revert to a Wolfram Alpha search for queries that it doesn’t immediately understand, and as of iOS 7, can now poll Bing and Wikipedia for data as well. Siri also drives iOS’ voice dictation feature. First off, Siri has a pair of new voices. One is a revised, slightly less robotic version of the female voice the feature has always used, and one is an all-new male voice. Aside from its gender, the male voice is of the same timbre as the female one; a bit unnatural but usually easy to understand. After putting an iOS 6 device and an iOS 7 device next to each other and talking to them for about half an hour, I can say that iOS 7 Siri seems marginally better at making logical leaps when presented with a question or statement it doesn’t understand. It at least attempted to deliver usable answers, or partial answers, to my sometimes-nonsensical queries in a few cases, whereas Siri in iOS 6 shrugged unhelpfully. It’s mostly the same feature it was before, though it’s pulling data from a couple of new places, but it’s not far-and-away more useful or reliable. If you’re a friend of Siri’s now, the additions do improve the service, but if you usually find yourself turning it off, there’s not much in iOS 7 that will change your mind. One much-requested new feature gives Siri the ability to toggle certain hardware and software features like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Airplane mode, and Do Not Disturb, pretty much most of the same things you can now get at through the Control Centre. If you issue a command that will disconnect Siri from the Internet, and thus, keep it from working, it will warn you beforehand. Another less-publicised new feature is that when Siri doesn’t understand a name you’re trying to pronounce, it will ask you how to say it so it can understand better next time. For the devices that don’t support Siri, the old, more limited Voice Control fallback is still present in the form of a flat blue screen that appears to take your input. Since Voice Control was superseded by Siri, and Siri is now supported by the vast majority of current iOS devices, Voice Control does not appear to have picked up any new features. At this point, the thing that keeps Siri from reaching the level of Google Now is the amount of data it has access to. Google’s personal assistant is perhaps more

January 2014 | inSYNC Magazine

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technology invasive, but if you carry an Android device as your primary phone, it does manage to view email messages and track my movements, and offer up some useful things: if it saw a tracking number in my inbox, it would show me the status of the package. If it saw a flight reservation, it would not only keep me posted about the flight but display the QR code I needed to check in. Now that I list it all in a row like that, I’m beginning to think that Google might have too much data about you, but for those to whom convenience is more important than privacy, the sheer volume of data Google can collect from your Android phone, if you’re signed in, makes Google Now the more seamless experience. Siri is still useful, but it’s one of the areas where Google’s traditional strengths (collecting and organising data) outmatch Apple’s traditional strengths (good hardware and software design and user-friendliness). This said, Siri and Google completely outweigh Samsung’s S-Voice in every way, which is quite possibly the worst voice control system available at the moment. Samsung users are fall better to download Google Now.

App Store The face of the App Store in iOS 7 looks much like it did in iOS 6, save for the iOS 7 facelift that every other app is also getting. The front page shows you a carousel of featured apps up top, ‘new and noteworthy’ apps beneath it, popular apps under that, and so on. It doesn’t appear as though Apple’s strategy for curating and featuring apps on its storefront changes much with iOS 7. That doesn’t mean organisation hasn’t gotten better elsewhere, though. Notably, the Top Charts used to require a lot of tapping to move back and forth through the full free, paid, and top-grossing app lists, or a lot of horizontal swiping to move through their individual rows in the Top Charts tab. It has now been reorganised into a simpler tabbed interface that doesn’t show you a glimpse of every category at once, but does allow you to look down each full list more easily, and with fewer taps. On the iPad, the Top Charts page is unchanged from its iOS 6 incarnation. The third tab is an all new one: the old Genius feature is out, and the new ‘Near Me’ feature is in. Where Genius would look at your purchase history and make recommendations accordingly, Near Me shows you a list of apps that are popular with other iOS users in your geographical area. Living near New York City means my recommendations are pretty much exclusively public transit apps. I could want for a longer list with more diversity, but I can see how it would be useful if you were on the road and needed to find these kinds of apps for the area you were in. There’s also the new Wish List feature, accessible by tapping the menu button in the top-right corner of the screen. Tapping the Share button for any paid app you want but can’t pay for, and you can add it to your Wish List for viewing and purchasing later. There doesn’t appear to be a way to share this list with others à la the Wish List feature on some online shopping sites, however. The last new feature may be the best, even if it’s not ‘new’ and merely new-to-iOS: there’s a toggle in the App Store’s Settings panel that will allow you to update apps automatically, just as you can automatically download music and app purchases made on other devices in iOS 6. If you or a loved one is constantly bothered by the presence of that red badge on the App Store icon, this feature is for you. File it under ‘Android has had this feature forever, but that doesn’t mean we’re not glad to see it on iOS anyway’.

Safari and its Space-Saving User Interface Safari in iOS 7 is all about reducing clutter. It increases the amount of screen space you can use for actual Web browsing, while keeping all of the browser features accessible. It even makes some previously buried features more accessible. With iOS 7, mobile Safari finally joins the desktop version in fusing the address bar and search bar into a single box. The rest of the top bar is all about using pixels efficiently. The title bar is gone, and the address bar now just shows the top-level domain of whatever site you happen to be looking at. Scroll down a fully loaded page in portrait mode, and the address bar will remain visible but shrink to take up less vertical space. This is in-particularly handy if you are still using a device without a 4-inch screen. The real space savings come from the bottom bar, which will now minimise itself once the page is loaded and you’re scrolling. The layout and function of the buttons is still identical — back, forward, share, bookmarks, and new tabs — it just disappears once you begin scrolling down a page. You can re-expand the top bar and make the bottom one pop up again by scrolling up. New gesture controls for One nice touch is that you can switch going back and forward have also been introduced; swipe in from the left edge of Safari into private mode from within the screen to go back and swipe in from the right edge to go forward. With both the browser itself now, where you used the top and bottom bars minimised in portrait mode, iOS 7 gives you around to have to dive down into the browser’s 50 extra vertical pixels on an iPhone display compared to iOS 6. In landscape settings to toggle it on and off. While mode, where both the top and bottom bars completely disappear while scrolling in private browsing mode, the Safari UI down, you save about 100 vertical pixels (you go from a 537 pixel-high viewa- changes from semi-transparent white to ble space to the full 640 pixels). It doesn’t sound like much in either case, but semi-transparent black. Private mode it helps address the fact that iOS devices are working with more limited screen is still an all-in or all-out affair, unlike sizes and resolutions than other competing phones. The drawbacks are the same the mobile version of Chrome, which ones you always have to deal with when making toolbars shrink and disappear can keep track of private tabs as well as on the fly: you run the risk of confusing the user, because all of a sudden their standard ones. Safari can only operate back button isn’t where it used to be, and they aren’t sure how to get it back. in one mode at once. The browser will offer to kill or restore all of your tabs The bookmarks page has also been revamped, dropping its fold- when you switch modes though. One er-heavy design in favour of a tabbed interface that lets you jump be- additional privacy option that’s still actween your bookmarks, your offline reading list, and a ‘shared links’ tab cessed via the Settings panel for Safari which polls your social media feeds for links that people are sharing. is the ‘Do Not Track’ option, something the OS X version of Safari picked up The final major change is to the tab selection screen. Now, instead of a horizontally about two years ago. As is usually the aligned collection of page thumbnails, iOS 7 makes your tabs into a bunch of 3D case, the option is disabled by default. planes, and stacks them on top of each other. You can see more of your tabs at once, even if I personally don’t find the angled 3D planes to be particularly attractive. If you have iCloud enabled for Safari, you

January 2014 | inSYNC Magazine

can also access your Safari tabs from other synced devices by scrolling down past your list of open tabs. Like before, your tabs are grouped by device, and you can tap any of them to open. On the iPad, a larger amount of screen space means that the iPhone browser’s space-saving innovations are mostly absent. The tablet version of Safari has been changed; the search and address bars have now been combined, the iCloud Tabs button has been moved to the top level from the menu it was nested in before, the swipe controls for moving forward and back have been added, and the browser has been given the standard iOS 7 facelift. Still, it’s more similar in functionality to its iOS 6 counterpart than is the phone version. In fact, it will actually fit fewer tabs in the tab bar before they begin to overflow. The amount of screen space used to display pages neither increases nor decreases from iOS 6.

music

Happy by Pharrell Williams The World’s First 24 Music Video inSYNC Has A Look at Pharrell’s New Single

For Pharrell’s new song, ‘Happy’, he has made the world’s first and only 24 hour music video. Williams debuted the music video for the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack when the film when released. Now, you might be thinking, why the hell would anyone want to make a video like that? But its obviously a song that the record company are greatly supporting, because I definitely would not want to be footing the bill of this project. In the video there are a number of big-name celebs that lip-sync the lyrics, not forgetting the 400 dancing extras, stretched across 8 miles of LA, and filmed through 11 days. Thats a lot of manpower! The 24 hour-straight vid carries on, whilst Happy plays on a loop. Thanks to the genius of Michael Jackson, it has now been three decades since Thriller showed us the ambitiousness of pop promotion, and its good to see the innovation still flying, even if the idea is a bit outlandish, and not something you’d want to watch time and time again. The video depicts a full day in Los Angeles, and features guest stars such as Jimmy Kimmel, Tyler the Creator, Steve Carrell, Jamie Foxx and former NBA player Magic Johnson; all in cameo roles. So why has Pharrell made the video? As the song is called Happy, the feeling is that Pharrell wanted to portray a number of different aspects of LA, or even life, that

makes each of us hour sequence, you

happy. From all of the shots in the 24 get a sense of what each person enjoys.

“Pharrel wanted to portray a number of different aspects of LA, or even life, that makes each of us happy” Anyway, whatever you think, it is definitely difficult to deny that 2013 has been a fantastic year for the 40 year-old American artist. First serving with Daft Punk on their comeback album, and then being featured with rapper T.I on the hugely successful Blurred Lines from Robin Thicke’s new album. Amongst this, he has also managed to get married to longtime partner Helen Lasichanh. We say good luck to Pharrell Williams…and we can’t wait to see what he will bring us next year. Check out the video now at www.insynctm.com. By Pharrell’s single on Apple iTunes today, for £0.99.

inSYNC Magazine | January 2014

gaming

Sony Announces PlayStation Now At CES 2014, Sony revealed its brand new streaming service, named PlayStation Now. This new service will allow you to play all of the classic PlayStation games, like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Little Big Planet, but they will be able to be played across the current PlayStation hardware. This will enhance the Sony experience and has now saved the Japanese game maker a lot of money, rather than building a console that can take PlayStation 2, 3 and 4 games. Sony has now harnessed the power of Gaikai, the company that Sony purchased back in 2012 for a mere $380 million. PlayStation Now is an excellent move by Sony, after losing to Microsoft for so many years, they have now taken back the top-spot as head of the world’s gaming market. PlayStation Now encourages people to purchase a PS4 as you ultimately no longer need to keep your PS3 around to experience games from that console. PlayStation Now will not only allow you to stream games to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita, but also to Internet or Smart TVs, tablets and smartphones. PlaySta-

tion Now, of course, will be available on Sony Bravia TVs, but will ultimately be supported by other Smart televisions very soon. At CES Sony’s Andrew House did confirm three titles that will be available whilst Sony test of the popularity of the new service. Naught Dog’s, The Last of Us and Beyond: Two Souls will be available when PlayStation Now launches. On the CES Show Floor Sony also confirmed God of War: Ascension and Puppeteer will be available to play on PS Vita and Sony Bravia TVs. Sony also told us that PlayStation Now will be a subscription-based service, much like Xbox Live, but whether it will be an optional extra or will tie-in with other Sony subscriptions like PlayStation Plus is yet to be announced. We also don’t know whether PS Now will support online multiplayer modes or Trophies. However, if you do not wish to subscribe, you can just rent games on a one-time, short-notice basis. After the criticism that Sony received from the media about the PlayStation 4’s lack of backwards compatibility, they have really pulled this trick from their sleeve. We don’t quite know what the specific list of games will be when PS Now launches, and whether it will just be a nostalgic way of playing whats already available for PS1, 2 and 3 over the PS Network, but either way Sony have effectively solved the main problem with its latest-gen console. Now we wait with eagerness to find out more details about PlayStation Now. I expect a closed beta for the service to roll out very soon, and Sony will probably launch the full PlayStation Now service for PS4 and PS Vita in the summer.

January 2014 | inSYNC Magazine

technology iOS 7 retains the Mail app’s traditional strengths. It’s a solid, all-around mail client that doesn’t sport the deepest integration with any particular provider, but it plays well with a wide range of services from Gmail to Exchange to Apple’s own iCloud. It sounds like no big deal, but it’s easy to take a good unified mail client for granted. Having to use two separate email clients in Android is bad enough, but the mediocrity of the built-in nonGmail client is one of my least favourite things about the operating system.

iOS 7 Guide: Part 2

Mail picks up two useful features in iOS 7. One that makes it easier to sort and view your mail and one that makes it easier to do things with messages once you’re done with them. In the main Mailboxes pane, hit the Edit button, and you can choose some new sort options that will make it easier to deal with your mail, especially if you’ve got multiple accounts. One will show you all unread messages from all accounts, one will show you all flagged messages, one will show you every message that you specifically have been sent or copied on, etc, the list goes on. Being able to see every unread message in every account I have on my phone is one of those I’m-not-sure-how-I-lived-without-this features, even if Mail on iOS still can’t create custom inbox views based upon your input. You can also do more with your actual messages. In iOS 6, you could swipe from left to right or from right to left over an email, or conversation, and then tap the Delete button to send those messages to the trash. In iOS 7, swiping from left to right anywhere in the app will take you back up to the previous screen, not dissimilar to how the gesture-based navigation in Safari works. Swipe from right to left over a message, and you’ll find the standard red Trash button and a new grey More button, which you can tap to quickly expose controls for replying, forwarding, flagging, marking as unread, and moving to the junk folder or to any other folder in your mailbox. All of these options were available in iOS 6, but only once you were actually viewing the message you wanted to respond to or mark or move. I still find myself using the Delete key more than anything in the More menu, but it’s convenient to have those options available in multiple places.

Remind Me to Tell You About Calendars These two sort of go hand-in-hand, so we’ll cover them together. Calendar and Reminders serve the same basic purpose in iOS 7, as they did in iOS 6, but they have been substantially redesigned and reorganised for iOS 7. Calendars has three views that offer differing levels of zoom: there’s a combined weekly and daily view where you can tap the different days in the week and then scroll through the day’s events vertically. Go one step back, and you’ll get a monthly view — days with events are denoted with grey dots, and you can swipe up and down to quickly scroll through different months. Finally, one step back from that is a yearly view that doesn’t show you which days have events on them but does allow for quick and easy scrolling through multiple months. The view that would simply show all of your events in one continuous list appears to have been removed, but it’s actually just in a different place. Hit the search button in the upper-right corner of the app, and before you start typing you’ll see all of your events listed in order by day. Reminders has also been changed substantially in ways that should make them easier to organise. You can create different colour-coded lists of reminders that will each show up as a ‘card’ in the app, which makes it reasonably simple to scroll through and view different cards based on which thing you’re trying to remember. Setting a priority for a given reminder can be done directly in the Details pane, where it used to require tapping once to bring up the Priority menu, a second tap to set the priority, and a third tap to dismiss the Priority menu. The whole interface is built to reduce the superfluous tapping and swiping that the old app required, and it’s a better tool for the changes. You even have some more flexibility when setting location-based reminders. Going into the advanced settings will let you set a geofencing threshold to determine just when the phone will remind you what you were supposed to do. In my testing, you can set a radius as small as 328 feet that scales all the way up to 7,920,000 feet, so it should be flexible enough for just about any situation.

Music and iTunes Radio For local music downloaded from the iTunes store or transferred from your computer, the Music app has moved some things around a bit, but by and large works the same way it did before. One nice change for those of you who do have a lot invested in the iTunes store is the ability to download your songs from iTunes to your device from within the Music app itself, rather than having to do it by way of the separate iTunes app as before. The biggest addition to the Music app is iTunes Radio, Apple’s take on the ‘Internet radio station that learns your preferences over time’ idea that Pandora popularised so many years ago. To give you an idea of how hard Apple is pushing this new service, it’s not just included in the Music app. It’s now the first thing you see when you open it up. To begin listening, you can either go with one of Apple’s pre-built stations or start building your own based on an artist, genre, or song of your choosing. From there, its pretty standard Internet radio. iTunes Radio has two interesting wrinkles that may woo listeners away from competing services: the first is a ‘tune this station’ option that will let you pick whether you want it to stick to the hits, play deeper cuts that you may not have heard, or let you oscillate between the two. The ‘Hits’ mode should make iTunes Radio a more popular DJ at your next party, while the ‘Discovery’ mode will help you out if you’re tired of all the music you have. The second feature is deep integration with Apple’s existing iTunes library. Any song you hear on Radio can either be purchased outright from the iTunes store or added to your wishlist to buy later. These wishlists will sync to all of your iTunes Radio-capable devices. As you listen to songs, they’ll appear in your ‘history’ list for easy reference later, though this list does not appear to sync from device to device. Like most Internet music services, iTunes Radio will play ads from time to time unless you subscribe to the service, and in our testing we could skip through seven songs in a listening session before being forced to stop or switch stations. The service integrates with Siri too, which can be used to play specific stations or add songs to your wishlist. It’s true that there are many, many alternatives to this service out in the wild right now. For all that Apple and iTunes were pioneering at the outset of the digital music revolution, coming years after Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, Songza and Google Play, Music All Access makes the service feel a little me-too. That said, the service’s integration with the still-gigantic iTunes Store is an edge that the others can’t boast, and the fact that it is both integrated with iOS 7 and front-and-center in the Music app means that it will quickly become a contender. Between Radio and iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match, it’s trivial to consolidate all of your music on Apple’s platforms and then stay there, rarely going outside of the Apple ecosystem to get more tunes.

inSYNC Magazine | January 2014

technology The one major component that the iTunes Store lacks is an à la carte, listen-to-what-you-want, when-you-want subscription option, almost certainly because Apple would rather you pay for individual songs and albums as you want them. For my part, I’ll probably end up introducing iTunes Radio to my rotation for when I’m in the mood for something new, and then continue to use Spotify for when I know what I want to listen to. The good news is that there are plenty of options in this space now, and you should be able to find something that works well with your listening habits no matter how you want to listen to or discover music.

The more important thing about Maps is, unfortunately, the hardest aspect to quantify. Has the mapping data improved significantly since Apple’s often-laughable initial efforts? Apple got some serious egg on its face when it flipped the switch from Google Maps last year, prompting the firing of the Maps team manager and a rare public apology from Tim Cook after the complaints began pouring in. For my part, I can say that mapping data has improved vastly since the launch of iOS 6, though of course, I am only one person, and I can vouch for only one small geographical area of the world. In that interminable three-month gap between the release of iOS 6 and Google Maps’ reappearance in the App Store, Maps couldn’t find its butt with both hands: stores and restaurants were frequently misplaced, addresses were frequently misinterpreted, and in a couple of cases whole towns were missing. In the three months that I’ve been using Apple’s Maps app again on my iOS 7 devices, I’ve become more confident in its ability to tell me where I am, where I’m going, and where things are around me. Maps doesn’t have to beat Google Maps, it just has to be good enough that running to the App Store and grabbing Google Maps isn’t Job One for anyone with a shiny new iDevice. After a year of work, I think Apple has just about gotten there. One continued glaring omission, especially for city dwellers and those who are visiting cities, is the lack of integrated public transit directions. Apple will still offer you third-party apps that provide this data, but they require a jump from the clean and simple Maps app to often-inconsistent, third-party interfaces. I have my issues with how Google Maps handles public transit, but I’d still much rather have that data in-app rather than outside it.

FaceTime Audio and Contact Blocking

Camera and Photos The camera interface in iOS 7 has changed to eschew buttons in favour of swipes, at least for the basic shooting modes. You can swipe from left to right to switch between photo, video, panorama, and the new square crop mode. On devices that support them, HDR, the flash, and whether you’re using the front or the rear camera are still controlled via buttons on the top of the screen. Nested menus have mostly been removed from the app. The ability to overlay a grid on top of your photos isn’t gone, but it has been hidden in the Settings app for some reason and is no longer directly accessible from within the camera app. On the iPhone 4S, 5, 5C, and 5S and the fifth gen. iPod touch, you can apply some Instagram-esque filters to your image preview as you shoot by tapping the button that looks like a monochrome version of the RGB colour wheel. Every device but the iPad 2 can access these filters, after the fact, in Photos. Those of you who use your iPads as cameras will also be pleased to note that recent models are now able to take HDR photos, a feature previously limited to the small-screened iOS devices. The final tweak to the camera app is small, but it will be significant to photographers and those who care about composition even in their phone pictures. In iOS 6, the image preview presented to you by the Camera app actually wasn’t showing you exactly the same image as the picture you’d take. Take a look at this screenshot of the Camera app in iOS 6 and compare it to the actual picture that the device takes. In iOS 7 the amount of the screen that is actually used for the image preview is slightly smaller, but this allows the photo app to present a preview that actually matches the crop of the final image. It’s a subtle change, but it’s one I’ve noticed people complaining about, and it’s good to see Apple paying the same amount of attention to their camera software as they do their camera hardware. What hasn’t changed about the built-in Camera app is that it doesn’t give you access to any advanced features to speak of. It makes the ISO, exposure, white balance, and shutter speed adjustments that it thinks will work best. Aside from tapping on the screen to auto-focus and pressing on it to lock the focus and exposure, there’s not much you can change. This is probably best for the vast majority of users, but you’ll still need an app like Camera+ if you want to make more granular adjustments. In addition to the new photo filters, the Photos app picks up a new photo viewing mode that makes it a bit easier to browse through photos you’ve taken over a number of years. There are three different view options in the Photos tab, each of which seamlessly combines photos in your device’s local storage with pictures from Photo Stream: Moments, which shows you photos organised by day. Collections shows you more smaller thumbnails, and groups images by things like location and Years, which shows you tiny thumbnails of all of your pictures organised by year. Scrub your finger through these little thumbnails to see a larger preview, and lift your finger to view the image, full-size. If you prefer to organise your photos in the more traditional Album format, the Albums tab works pretty much the same as it did before. There’s also a new, dedicated Share tab meant exclusively for iCloud collections that have been shared with you.

Apple has already bypassed SMS to some extent with its iMessage Maps: Getting Better All the Time Because It Can’t Get Any service, and now it’s upending traditional phone calls with the new FaceTime Audio. Open FaceTime, find your contact, and then tap the Worse phone icon next to their name instead of the camera icon. You then hold the phone up to your ear just as you would when receiving a phone Maps in iOS 7 has a slightly different look from Maps in iOS 6; not flatter, really, since iOS 6’s call. The feature appears to work well, but we think that FaceTime Maps app was already pretty flat, but per usual, skeuomorphism is out. That little curled page without any faces would be more accurately described as ‘MouthTime’. corner in the lower-right of the screen is gone, and the map directions don’t look like road Have you gone through a bad breakup recently? Has some creep gotsigns anymore. Once you’re using the Satellite or 3D Flyover features or the turn-by-turn navten his or her hands on your phone number or iMessage username igation, the app looks and works mostly the same. One handy feature for city dwellers, espeand started sending you nasty texts? Do you just want those people cially, is that Maps now supports turn-by-turn walking directions; set your route, put in your from Vodafone to stop calling you about the expiration of that free headphones, and start walking, and your phone will keep you from getting turned around. trial that you never asked for in the first place? In older iOS versions, you’d just have to deal with the consequences of all of these hypothetverb layered over the top. As with the visual design, the idea is to ical situations, but iOS 7 adds a handy contact blocking feature to make the sounds feel ‘new’ without making them wholly unfamiliar. shut those people out. Just go to your Contacts or Recents list, tap the offending number, and scroll to the bottom of the screen to find the ‘Block this Caller’ link. Tapping the link again will unblock the caller. Fixes and Warnings

Sounds

First, iOS 7 includes fixes for some iOS vulnerabilities. The CoreText bug that allows that nonsensical string of Arabic characters to crash OS X 10.8 and iOS 6 devices has been fixed, for example, so friends who are trying to troll you can no longer send you that string and break your phone. iOS 7 also stops ‘trusting’ any computer that it’s plugged into by default. Plug an iDevice into a new computer, and you’ll have to confirm that you want the device to trust the computer before the two can communicate. You can only authorise this connection if your phone is unlocked, preventing one potential attack vector.

As Craig Federighi mentioned during Apple’s latest iPhone unveiling, iOS 7 features a whole bunch of new-to-the-platform sounds to replace and augment the now-familiar clicks and chimes that have come with previous versions of the software. Many are like the chime the devices now make when you plug them in to charge. Others are merely ‘remastered’ versions of the old sounds that usuUnauthorised Lightning cables apparently prompt a warning now, though nothally sound like they did before but with some extra depth and reing in the OS actually prohibits the cable from working. This likely won’t be an is-

January 2014 | inSYNC Magazine

technology sue for most people. Still, if you happen to be using a bargain-basement cable, not authorised under Apple’s MFi Program, expect your devices to get upset at you about it.

Control able

Background App Refresh

According to CEO Tim Cook, Apple thinks ‘that the customer pays us to make certain choices on their behalf ’ and that approach to customisation is still present in iOS 7. Apple is in control of the experience. That’s not always a bad thing, but it has, and will continue to, rub some people the wrong way.

Smartphones and tablets can usually only display one app on their screens at any given time, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing other things. Apps continually refreshing themselves in the background can be handy if you want them to be updated and ready to roll whenever you want to use them, but many apps doing this independently of one another can drain your battery over time. For this reason, Apple has historically kept third-party apps on a tight leash, limiting the kinds of things they can do when they’re not actively being used. That’s the problem Background App Refresh is supposed to solve. When an app supports the feature, Apple says that iOS 7 will examine your usage patterns and determine the best time to download updates for that app in the background. If, for example, you open the New York Times app every day at 8:15am to catch up on your news, iOS will notice and make sure that the new content is downloaded before you’ve opened the app. It’s not quite ‘true’ multitasking in the sense that apps aren’t allowed to do anything they want at any time, but it sounds like it can create a pretty convincing illusion. Apple is also marketing the software’s ability to perform ‘coalesced updates’, which will queue apps that want to refresh and then refresh them all at once rather than waking up the networking hardware all the time to update the apps exactly when they want to be updated. Few apps other than Apple’s own built-in Weather and Stocks apps support the feature at present, but it should become more useful as developers issue their iOS 7-optimised updates.

Battery Life When it comes to battery life, any new operating system should have to take some variant of the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm. Unfortunately, iOS 7 doesn’t follow that advice. Battery life in iOS 7 is worse than iOS 6.1.3 and 6.1.4 across the board, though the amount by which it is worse varies from device to device. In most cases, the gap is half an hour or less, which is true for the iPad Mini and 4th Gen. iPad and the iPhone 4 and 4S. The fifth gen. iPod Touch fares slightly worse than this, losing 50 minutes of battery life in the transition to iOS 7. Nothing does as poorly as the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5S, though. It’s not even close. I heard some rumblings that the beta versions of iOS 7 reduced battery life compared to the production version of iOS 6, but this is to be expected of beta software that hasn’t necessarily been tuned for everyday use. I’ve just got to hope that Apple is aware of the issue and plans to remedy it in a hypothetical iOS 7.1 update.

only

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configurparameters.

For people who value customisation above all else, the good news is that Android will let you do plenty of it, and the Android ecosystem is as strong as it’s ever been, mainly because its Open Source software. Stock Android, in particular, offers the most iOS-like experience if what you’re looking for is speed and visual cohesiveness. Between the Nexus program, the Google Play edition phones, and the Moto X, you’ve got a lot of great devices to choose from that didn’t even exist when iOS 6 came out. Now, more than ever, whether you’re looking at iOS or Android or some other operating system, there are options. iOS remains an excellent operating system. Day-one availability of the update for all supported devices remains unparalleled in any other mobile OS. Developers who want to start using iOS 7-specific features can begin using them much sooner if they can assume that the software will make it out to most current users in short order, and this will keep the iOS software ecosystem vibrant. Version 7.0 has some new-release wrinkles that are going to need to be ironed out, like battery life, occasional iPad stability problems, and iPhone 4 lagginess are the biggest issues, but Apple is typically good about identifying and addressing these kinds of problems. Look, I don’t fancy myself as a designer or app developer. Some people can look at things like Jony Ive’s amazing app icon grid and say it is ‘wrong’ and explain why in a convincing way, and I can read those arguments and think that they are very interesting. I can make observations about what I think works well and what doesn’t, but I haven’t been professionally trained to do so. I’m no design critic, but I know what I hate. And I don’t hate this.

Like It or Not, This is iOS Now Apple’s redesign of iOS is all-encompassing. Even the Apple logo you see at boot, and the screen you see when your device goes into Recovery Mode has discarded texture in favour of flatness. The changes are large, and a lot of people are going to have a lot of things to say about them. If you’ve ever participated in a design overhaul of basically anything — a logo, an operating system, a website — you already know how complaints about iOS 7’s design will go. First, the gripes that stem from unfamiliarity will fade with time as people become used to the new look and feel. After that dies down, there will be a settling-in period where Apple looks at the most frequent complaints and actual usage data and makes further tweaks based upon that feedback. I’ll be surprised if a hypothetical iOS 7.1 doesn’t bring a few small but noticeable UI changes with it. That said, I wouldn’t expect backtracking on any of the major new design elements introduced here. No matter what you think of the design, if you’re an iOS user and you want to keep up with the newest features, you’ll have to come to terms with it. And even things that still bother me can be tolerated because of the genuinely useful new features and additions that arrive on your device with the update. As for the way that iOS 7 fits into the current mobile landscape, well, iOS 7 still occupies the same place that iOS always has. Some of the new APIs give software developers abilities and functionality that they couldn’t access before, but from an end-user perspective, Apple is very much in control of the experience. All non-jailbroken iOS 7 devices look and act pretty much the same. You can’t change your keyboard or set third-party applications as defaults. There are still pretty firm restrictions in place on what third-party apps can do in the background. Notification Centre and

behaviour very

inSYNC Magazine | January 2014

Blues News Coming to inSYNC Portsmouth

Blues News Blue News is a new introduction to inSYNC Portsmouth in Februrary. All readers in the Hampshire Area will be able to get the best and most up-to-date information on Portsmouth Football Club. At Blues News we share all things on Portsmouth Football Club. For the fans by the fans. #PUP #OURS

‘Blues News will be give all local Portsmouth fans a chance to keep up to date with the best PFC news around. Also you will be able to check out more stories online at www.insynctm.com/portsmouth or by following Blues News on Twitter @BlueNews_ and Like Us on Facebook’. Tom Emmans - inSYNC Portsmouth, Sports Editor

January 2014 | inSYNC Magazine

gaming

s n o s n p o i im olut S The d Rev e p p Ta

inSYNC Magazine | December 2013

gaming It has now been almost two years since the incredibly successful world of The Simpsons left the outdated PlayStation 2 and Nintendo DS formats and headed into the app marketplace. Matt Groening and his team launched The Simpsons: Tapped Out in early 2012 on a trial run for iPad. Due to its success it was then relaunched that May for iOS and Android SmartDevices. Gone are the days when The Simpsons games were all about completing missions in a pre-built Simpsons world, much like their most popular game The Simpsons Hit & Run. The advance toward mobile gaming now means you have an excellent sandbox game, which still includes The Simpsons classic humour, an ongoing storyline and all the buildings and characters seen in the past 23 or so years of The Simpsons, but you now get the choice of where, when and how to construct your Springfield. When I first downloaded Tapped Out I thought it was a good game, but one where I would probably give up and/or lose interest after a couple of months. I was wrong, it becomes strangely addictive, and two years down the line my Springfield is blossoming. I’m the highest level that I know of anyone who plays the game, but this is probably partly due to the fact I got the game when it was pretty much brand new. When The Simpsons team add new content, they always add a new level. I am currently Level 37, which is the highest at the moment, until they bring out more buildings and extra Characters. I particularly enjoy the seasonal changes the team makes. For example bonus content is always available at Easter, Halloween and Christmas. I particularly like the attention to detail like when the weather is changed at points during the year; at Christmas the town is transformed into a snowy metropolis, and at Halloween every is dark and creepy. The game comes with a back story scenario; the original Springfield is destroyed in a nuclear explosion and you are tasked to reconstruct the town, bringing different characters with you as you go. The mobile game is free to download and play, but they make their money through ‘Donut purchases’. A few buildings, characters and accessories cost Donuts not Money. You do collect free Donuts along the way, but if you really get into it you can also purchase them in the game. However, be warned, these are unusually expensive in-app purchases, most famously, a child of 10 spent over £1,000 on the game, without his parents’ knowledge. Despite this, the game is ‘life-ruiningly’ fun, and once you start building it is difficult to stop, especially when the seasonal content is ready to be collected. You can now add your friends on Tapped Out too. This allows you to visit each others towns, once a day, and collect extra money and extra experience points. Tapped Out will let you build everything you know about The Simpsons from the Kwiki-Mart to the Nuclear Power Plant. My only criticism of the game would be the fact that you have to connect to the online Simpsons servers, which are hosted through EA, so you can’t play the game offline. And because you are connected to a server, the game does occasionally lag when you are mid-game. This can cause problems, especially when moving buildings and scenery around in the town. Very occasionally it also makes the game crash. What is good about using the EA server, however, means you can log in and out of your account. This allows to you log into any device with Tapped Out downloaded, log into your EA account and play your town then and there, from anywhere in the world. Try it now for free from the Google Play Store or Apple App Store, and build you own Simpsons world. I promise you won’t be disappointed, and you might just get so addicted you can’t put your tablet down.

inSYNC Rating - 8.0/10

December 2013 | inSYNC Magazine

technology

The Latest in SmartWatches: Which One Should You Buy?

First Up: The Pebble The Pebble SmartWatch is fast becoming very popular, but does not necessarily grab your attention right away. ‘Wearable tech’ is largely a new, growing market, and the Pebble is ready to kickstart the wearable computing revolution. 85,000 orders, $10million and two slipped shipping dates later, the Pebble is here. The Pebble takes the most critical apps and puts them onto a concise wrist device without you ever having to take your phone out of your pocket. Although the Pebble is fairly new, they already have apps to deal with your Notifications, Music, Fitness Regime, Watch and Alarms. Despite its very low price, can the Pebble take on the might of South Korean tech giant Samsung and its Galaxy Gear? The Pebble is elegantly small, and many won’t realise that you are wearing a SmartWatch unless you were to tell them. The slim and sleek design allows the device to bend into the background of the strap borders, when the backlight is off. The Pebble has just 3 exterior controls. You’ll find Up/Down and Select buttons on the right, and a Back button on the left. There is also a set of contacts on the watch for the Pebble’s magnetic power connector, similar to that of Apple’s MagSafe charger. Its an excellent way to keep the SmartWatch waterproof without having to use large, unreliable port covers. The Pebble comes with a 1.26-inch multi-touch LED Backlit screen. Its pixilation is 114X168 and is similar to the Ama-

inSYNC Magazine | January 2014

technology zon Kindle eInk. But Pebble calls it ePaper. However, it is really a transreflective LCD screen designed specially for watches. It functions as a relatively low res black and white LCD, but with a special hard coating to protect against scratches. The screen always has content on it, whether it’s displaying the time for you, the music player, or one of your notifications, and it’s fairly readable in daylight, even without the backlight on. But the backlight does make a large difference: when it’s off, the screen is black and white, in the same way a Nook or Kindle screen is, but incoming notifications and particularly fast movements trigger the backlight on automatically, which adds an unexpected blue-ish tint to the 1.26inch screen. The screen works perfectly well, but a device can never look premium if the screen has a tacky presence. On a SmartWatch, the user experience is all around the screen after all, so I hope the Pebble really works on the display for their next generation watch. The Pebble has a polyurethane watchband, which is an excellent material if you are going to use the watch out in the elements regularly. It is forgiving when it comes to wear and tear, however, it is pretty boring. The good news is that it is a standard 22mm band, so shopping for a new one gives you unlimited options. The Pebble is a nice piece of hardware; comfortable and sleek for the price that you pay. It functions well too, and if it was in any watch shop or department store it would definitely slot in nicely to the watch section. It is a great accomplishment for an independent hardware startup company, but does it work as good as it looks? The Pebble is compatible with both iOS and Android SmartDevices, but is different with both platforms. The Pebble has an iOS app, downloadable from the App Store, which allows you to download new and different watch-faces, and also troubleshoot connection problems. Unfortunately, on the iOS-Pebble system can not yet manage what is sent to your Pebble. For example, if you only wanted email notifications for Gmail and not Hotmail you cannot select this. This needs to be added to the next Pebble too. So even game notifications from iOS will be sent to the Pebble, which can get irritating. This is only a minor problem, and when you get past selecting the Notification options for your third-party apps, like Facebook and Twitter, through the iOS framework you’ll be all good. Apple will probably improve these tools in future version of iOS, and it’ll make Pebble all the better. Unlike on iOS, Pebble for Android is concentrated more around the Pebble app itself. On the app you can manage everything, including your third-party apps. All the settings are in one place and you can easily make changes. But, there are some problems with the all-singing, all-dancing app: Pebble’s app needs broad permissions to your phone, including all you email account passwords, etc. But, Android users see more of each email on the Pebble than when using it on iOS because it is using IMAP settings not just a Notification. On Android you also have to turn on the accessibility features so the app can read your notifications and send them to the phone. You have to put a lot of faith in Pebble though because there is a lot of personal information and data required. The other issue with having everything within the Android app is that you’re limited to getting notifications from only the apps that Pebble has had time to support. However, as with Pebble on iOS these are only minor irritations, that once you have Pebble up and going it all works perfectly. Pebble has one of the most impressive battery lives of any SmartDevice today. The company claims that it will run for upto a week on a single charge, which means less having to worry about your battery, unlike on a smartphone. Especially iPhones! Using the Pebble in the first place helps to conserve your smartphone battery anyway, because there is less screen uptime for the battery to be wasted away on. The other reason you don’t have to worry about Pebble’s battery is simply, there is not a battery indicator. All you get is a ‘low battery’ warning. However, some of the battery of your smartphone will be consumed because of the Bluetooth connection, but the company has also said that the iPhone fairs slightly better with the amount of battery Pebble uses. The Pebble does support the newer, lower-power Bluetooth v4.0, but it doesn’t use it yet, so chances are battery life will improve when the next update comes around. One cool feature of the Pebble is that you can change or download new watch faces anytime you wish. That means a different, refreshing look every day. As a watch, the Pebble is very unobtrusive, and at first glance looks like an ordinary watch. The faces have a range of features from the classic watch-look, to the more digital, cryptic displays. The Pebble also offers you the ability to control your phone’s music. It can display song titles and let you skip and pause tracks. It works with the ma jority of the large music apps on iOS like Music and Spotify, but on Android it is limited to working only with apps that are Bluetooth AVRCP protocol compatible. However, getting the music controls to the watch face involves a number of selections, so it may just be quicker to pull out your phone and select your desired tune. The company has promised more apps for the future, and there is an SDK for developers, with the idea that you’ll eventually be able to download and install watch apps directly from within the Pebble app. Imagination goes a long way, and the company has suggested a golf rangefinder app, a biking app and a running app, but with no timeline for the app support who knows when people will bring these new features. To fit together with the Pebble’s calm aroma, any new Notification will buzz quietly and activate the backlight. Having the ability to see who’s texting, emailing or calling you at any one time without having to remove your phone from a bag or pocket is great. A bonus now that its getting colder too; no removing gloves and fumbling with devices. The difficulty with everything happening on your wrist is that it is harder to just ignore your phone. If filters or priority settings were introduced, this would help that problem, rather than your Pebble buzzing for every little email and message, etc. SmartWatches are quickly becoming like phones, once you’ve had one, it will be hard to live without.

January 2014 | inSYNC Magazine

technology having to remove your phone from a bag or pocket is great. A bonus now that its getting colder too; no removing gloves and fumbling with devices. The difficulty with everything happening on your wrist is that it is harder to just ignore your phone. If filters or priority settings were introduced, this would help that problem, rather than your Pebble buzzing for every little email and message, etc. SmartWatches are quickly becoming like phones, once you’ve had one, it will be hard to live without. So the big question remains. Is the Pebble a new gimmick or the start of a bold new technology platform, just like when Apple bought us the tablet computing revolution? Has a small indie hardware startup managed to create a SmartWatch for the general public, or will it just be another fad for the computer super-geeks? Only time will tell.

Pebble’s Arch Rival: The Samsung Galaxy Gear So the Samsung Galaxy Gear has had a lot of media attention, probably the most of any other SmartWatch currently out there. The Gear is slightly bigger than the Pebble, but is 0.4mm thinner. It weighs considerably more, thought, almost double the weight of the sleek Pebble device. 73.8g can feel a tad weighty, especially after using the Pebble. The Samsung has a much better screen than the Pebble; a full sAMOLED display, and it is slightly larger at 1.63-inches. The Gear also supports Version 4.0 of Bluetooth, just like its Pebble counterpart, however, it is not waterproof, and the battery will only last one day, much like most smartphones. The Samsung Galaxy Gear certainly looks the part; a piece of futuristic, wearable tech that catches the eye, and stands out from the average wrist watch. The Gear is considerably more chunky than the Pebble, and the extra 35g of weight makes the Samsung look more weighty too. The Samsung Galaxy Gear, however, has a metallic surround to the screen. The 4 exposed, polished metal screws on the front of the Gear adds to the aesthetically pleasing design, and also seems to give the SmartWatch an extra air of class. On the Gear you will only find one button. To make the screen turn on and off. The clutter-free chassis of the Gear is an impressive design feat by Samsung; even the camera is tucked out of the way, conveniently moulded into the watch strap.

pared to that of the Pebble. The screen is larger, and therefore, is much easier to control with one finger. The display is 1.63-inches across, and is a mini sAMOLED screen, which gives amazing picture clarity. The only concern with an LED screen is that it is considerably more differently to read in bright sun light. The screen is not protected, like the Pebble, with a resistant coating, and thus, can pick up scratches and scuffs more easily. This unfortunately can ruin the polished design.

The home screen of the Gear shows you the essential info; the time in a large, easy-readable font and the current temperature and weather for your location. The sAMOLED is much harder to read in bright sunlight, unlike the Pebble. When connected to your smartphone, The Samsung Galaxy Gear the Galaxy Gear shows up has a much more modern, incoming information like multi-touch display comNotifications, Calls, Texts and Emails. The screen clarity is best on any SmartWatch I have seen so far, and the device has an ‘upmarket’ feel to it, more so than what you get with the Pebble. But, then it should be considering your paying over double the price. The UI experience on the Samsung Galaxy Gear is impressive, and including the quick setup is probably one of the more easier Samsung devices to use. Like the Pebble, the Samsung has a moulded, polyurethane strap, with a buckle to fit any wrist size in a jiffy. Samsung has also made a choice of colours for the straps; standard black, cream, orange, white and chocolate brown. However, unlike the Pebble, the strap on the Gear is a permanent part of the device, so you can’t change it. Also, because the camera is builtin to the strap. All the colours look professional and smart, unlike the questionable new colours Apple have used on the iPhone 5C. Of course, the Samsung Galaxy Gear is, currently, only compatible with Android smartphones. But, it does come with a handy app, named Gear Manager. When Samsung first shipped the Gear, all the watch’s Notifications did was simply told you to check your phone; now what’s the point of that? You may as well not have a SmartWatch. With the recent changes and updates Samsung has made to the Gear Manager App, you can now see all the info you need right on the Gear’s screen, without having to pull out your phone. Now Samsung has sorted this inconvenience it has dramatically improved the Gear, and pulled it up to high-market standard. Unlike the Pebble, the Samsung Galaxy is more like a standard smartphone when it comes to battery life. Because of the higher-powered screen and v4.0 Bluetooth connection, the Gear eats up juice pretty quick, and usually only lasts the day, but does depend on what your using it for. Emails and texts will, of course, use less battery than answering calls. However, much like the Pebble, using the SmartWatch in the first place will help conserve precious smartphone battery. Like the Pebble, the Galaxy lets you respond to calls, texts and emails, all whilst seamlessly linking to your Android smartphone. If you receive a Notification on the Gear, as soon as you pick up your phone, it will automatically display the last message or email. As well as this, the Samsung will let you make Voice Memos, and something which Samsung have dubbed the ‘Memographer’, which lets you capture quick images straight from the inbuilt camera. The Memographer also lets you capture short videos, an extra way of capturing

inSYNC Magazine | January 2014

technology those short Vines. This could go a long way if an app is developed to allow you to edit videos directly on the watch. A neat, added feature on the Gear is the ability to use Samsung S-Voice. So not only does the watch respond to you fingers, it also responds to your voice. S-Voice will allow you to function a fare few applications on the watch, including Contacts, Alarm, Clock, Weather and Messages, etc. Although, the watch has now been on sale for several months, we are yet to see an SDK or API program to let developers start making apps for the watch. This is a letdown for Indie App makers, and could cause Samsung problems if they don’t get a move on, as developers can sell apps for cheaper watches now like the Pebble. This said, Samsung has by far the most upmarket watch going so far, and has fore fronted the advance towards wearable tech. If they can sort out the price of the Galaxy Gear, they will monopolise the market, and will definitely be able to fend off larger competition. Because, I’m sure of won’t be long before Apple, HTC and Amazon go down the SmartWatch route.

The Third: Sony’s SmartWatch The simplistic Sony SmartWatch is the most affordable of the three at just £79.00, but it certainly doesn’t feel cheap. Sony have not gone with the all-out marketing strategy on the watch like Samsung have done with the Gear, but they have been plodding along in the background, taking a nice amount of this ever-growing market. 2014 is definitely going to be a year for wearable tech. So how does this small piece of kit fair against the other two SmartWatches. The Sony Watch is slightly more weighty than the Pebble, and is smaller in size, but definitely doesn’t compromise the user experience. The Sony is a simple black watch with a black strap, and silver screen surround. Quite boring, but it somehow has an air of class. Like the Pebble there is just one external button which functions power, but, unfortunately the Sony is not waterproof. This did surprise me considering the excellent waterproof ability of the Sony Xperia Z smartphone. The Sony SmartWatch has a bigger screen than its Pebble rival, and only just shy of the Galaxy Gear by 0.03-inches. The screen differs from the other two, as it is an OLED screen, a step down from the sAMOLED screen that comes with the Samsung. The 1.6” screen performs well, and is definitely more scratch proof than the Gear, which is surprising considering the small price-tag. You do have to be careful with the Gear, that you don’t scuff the touchscreen glass. Theres nothing the Sony can’t do, however, that the Pebble can. Incoming messages, text and emails are picked up by the Sony device, along with messaging and your personal calendar. All are displayed effective on the OLED screen. The Sony also shows you live Facebook and Twitter messages as they pop up. This means you can keep track of your essential messages and get rid of any social messages you don’t require. All without ever having to remove your phone. Because this SmartWatch is only compatible with Android devices at the moment, Sony have included something called Android Remote. The inbuilt Android Remote can control the watch function, your music and can let you access a whole host of apps linked online to the Google Play Store. This is pretty easy setup too compared to the other two watches. There are many more apps available for the Sony, at the moment, compared to the Gear and the Pebble. And, considering the watch’s price, this will give Sony a big market advantage. The Sony’s battery life is a big improvement on Samsung’s, but still does not beat the might of the Pebble. The Sony SmartWatch will last between 3 and 4 days, depending how you use it and what you use it for. Sony has helped to conserve battery life with the OLED screen, instead of putting in a high-powered sAMOLED, like what the Gear uses. Not forgetting that the Sony has the slightly dated Bluetooth v3.0, instead of the v4.0. This means that there is surprisingly less battery used. This said, the Pebble has v4.0 Bluetooth builtin and it maintains excellent battery life. Much like the Pebble, when the Sony SmartWatch receives an incoming Notification it gently vibrates your wrist to let you know. SmartWatch always vibrates to let you know of a Notification, but I was impressed by how it does this, mainly unobtrusively. It discreetly notifies you of incoming calls, calendar events and emails. These can be dealt with on the spot without having to look directly at your phone or tablet. And, although the Sony is compatible with the ma jority of Android Smartphones, the watch works effortlessly, and in my opinion, better with one of Sony’s higher-market devices. These include; the Sony Xperia Z1, the Sony Xperia Z and the Sony Xperia Z Ultra. So if your thinking of heading down the ‘wearable tech’ road, before you splash £1,500 on Google Glass when it’s released this year, then seriously consider a friendly, technical wrist buddy. The Pebble is probably the best, non-mainstream device going, however, the Samsung Galaxy Gear is a high-quality wrist-device that can be used with all Android devices. If you have an iOS device, however, a Pebble is for you. But, if you don’t want to splash out for a, lets be honest, experimental device at this point, then you want a Sony SmartWatch.

January 2014 | inSYNC Magazine

music

inSYNC Live Tour with Chase and Status at The Brighton Centre Date: November 15th Setlist: - Gun Metal Grey - International - No Problem - Hypest Hype - Gangsta Boogie VIP - Flashing Lights - Deeper Devotion / Show Me Love / Count On Me - Pressure - Machine Gun - Eastern Jam - Time - End Credits - Blk & Blu - Smash to Pieces - Heaven Knows - Let You Go - Lost & Not Found - Alive - Blind Faith - Encore: - Killing in the Name Of (Rage Against the Machine Cover) - Fool Yourself This was the second time for myself seeing Chase and Status live, the last time being when they subbed Eminem at Reading Festival 2013, in which they played an impressive set which got the entire crowd going. This time they were headlining an impressive array of support acts including Netsky, Moko and Pusha T, each bringing as much excitement to

inSYNC Magazine | January 2014

music

Chase & Status in Brighton the crowd as Chase and Status did. Chase and Status really like to put on a show, unlike some electronic acts who may just play their tracks as a DJ, Chase and Status bring a band with them, and the featuring guest for almost every single one of their tracks as a DJ, Chase and Status bring a band with them, and the featuring guest for almost every single one of their songs - it’s clear they take it very seriously and that’s without even mentioning their hype man, MC Rage, who could even be considered a part of Chase and Status themselves as he is with them almost everywhere. Now with 3 albums, Chase and Status had a large selection of varied songs to select for their setlist, and right from the start, they do not disappoint, with an energetic Tempa T rushing on to the stage which is met by audience cheer to perform ‘Hypest Hype’. Each song was a crowd pleaser, with highlights including the new single ‘Count on Me’ ft Moko, ‘Eastern Jam’, the laid back ‘Blk & Blu’ and my personal favourite ‘Blind Faith’ which sounds just as anthemic as it ever has. Along with the songs, Chase & Status also bring lasers and smoke machines to further excite the crowd, with a blistering cover of Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name Of’ along with hard hitting ‘Fool Yourself’ to finish off an amazing night at the Brighton Centre.

January 2014 | inSYNC Magazine

technology

10 - MEXTURES

ed textures. Mextures also lets you blend, layer, or simply adjust lighting levels of your photographs.

Mextures is a great photo editing app for your iPhone. Mextures will let you save setting packages for use on more than one photo and any other photos you have in the future. The app has more than 70 pre-load-

Best Price: £1.49 Available: For iOS at the App Store 9 - PROUST Think of the game Marry, Date or Dump. Now add two more options, and change the categories to anything you want. Well that’s the idea behind Proust, a game that allows the user to create their own Marry, Date or Dump scenarios with any items they choose. You can write in your own choices, or the app will generate random ones for you, and you can send your list to your friends to see which topics they deem most important. It’s a simple game, but you can learn a lot about your friends (which we realize isn’t always a good thing).

Best Price: £Free Available: For iOS at the App Store and for Android at the Google Play Store 8 - VINE The incredibly popular 6-second video sharing app only came out last January, and has been the forth most-downloaded iPhone app for the past year. The video length is short enough to keep vids interesting, and the app has just enough editing control to give users flexibility to create unique content.

Best Price: £1.49 Available: For iOS at the App Store and for Android at the Google Play Store 7 - THIRDLOVE

The biggest danger of buying clothes online is the risk they won’t actually fit when they arrive. That’s the problem ThirdLove aims to solve. The app allows women to send in iPhone photographs that can be analyzed to determine the proper bra size (the company also designs the lingerie). This is a good example of an app using advanced technology to solve a real-world problem.

Best Price: £Free Available: For iOS at the App Store and for Android at the Google Play Store 6 - OVER A picture says a thousand words, but sometimes you need to add a few more of your own. Over allows users to overlay text onto the images that they take with their smartphone. The messages can turn routine smartphone pictures into e-cards, or simply provide a fun way to spruce up your photos before sharing them to social sites such as Instagram or Twitter.

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Best Price: £1.49 Available: For iOS at the App Store 5 - VENMO Nothing says “you’ll never see that $5 again” quite like a friend saying, “I’ll pay you back later” after you buy him a beer. Enter Venmo. The app allows friends (or roommates, or siblings, or couples) to pay one another via iPhone at the touch of a button. Simply connect your checking account to your Venmo app and settle debts (no matter how small), without paying any processing fee to send payments or cash out back to your bank account. Users can also use the app to “charge” others -- a gentle reminder to send along the money when possible.

Best Price: £Free Available: For iOS at the App Store and for Android at the Google Play Store 4 - TEMPLE RUN 2 If you’ve ever played Temple Run, you know this feeling. Thankfully, gut-wrenching failure doesn’t stop us from playing the game. Temple Run 2 turned out to be a great sequel to its predecessor, which set lofty standards. For starters, the new game has much better graphics. Plus, there are more characters to choose from and new terrains to conquer. All of this added up for iPhone users -- the app was the third most downloaded iPhone app in 2013, behind only Candy Crush Saga and YouTube.

Best Price: £Free Available: For iOS at the App Store and for Android at the Google Play Store 3 - POCKET LIGHT METER If you are an avid photographer, Photo Light Meter is the real deal. The app provides photographers with a functioning, quality light meter that tests the intensity and exposure of the photography subject. Light meters cost anywhere from $15 to $200 at the store and online. The iPhone app is free, plus you won’t need to carry around an extra gadget with you at all times.

Best Price: £Free Available: For iOS at the App Store and for Android at the Google Play Store 2 - DUOLINGO

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Apple selected Duolingo as the company’s top iPhone app of the year -- and it’s pretty clear why. Duolingo helps users learn a new language from their iPhones with both visual and verbal lessons. Learners are rewarded with experience points, which they can use to buy perks within the app. Perhaps the best part: it’s free. Right now the app offers five languages, including Spanish, German, French, Portuguese and Italian.

Best Price: £Free Available: For iOS at the App Store 1 - AFTERLIGHT

Games aren’t the only apps that can be addicting, and dedicated iPhone photographers may find Afterlight just as hard to put down. The app allows users to do the basics, like crop and rotate photos, but it also has an expansive collection of filters, borders and textures to turn your iPhone photo into an iPhone masterpiece. Of course, the app also allows users to share the edited photos to their social media accounts.

Best Price: £0.69

Available: For iOS at the App Store and for Android at the Google Play Store

inSYNC Magazine | December 2013