NEWS REVIEWS FEATURES HOW-TO
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iPhone SWIPE
NEWS • REVIEWS • TIPS
Welcome
mag
A note from the editor Following last issue’s focus on the recently announced iOS 8 and all its new features, we delve in a little deeper this time to give you the low down on the cornerstone of the forthcoming iOS 8 – Health. The new native app will be able to monitor your well-being, but what does it mean for the predicted iWatch? Head to our features section to see what we make of it all. Elsewhere, we review a mixed-bag of apps this edition, from a truly poor effort of a productivity app (Vitamin-R) to the hugely addictive new game VVVVVV. The reviews are also headed up by another round-up feature, this time focusing on travel and providing you with all the apps you need to plan, and survive on holiday, or simply an adventure. And if you’re in the mood to learn something new then you’re going to want to hit the how-to section where you can learn how to make your background wallpaper clearer, and how to edit videos from right within the iOS. Enjoy the issue!
Andy Price Editor
Meet the team
Contributors Craig Grannell, Dan Izzard, Steve Jarratt, Gareth Main, Joe White. iOS, iPhone, iPad, AirPlay, AirPrint, iTunes, Safari, iCloud, iMessage, and any other trademark is a trademark of Apple inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Screenshots are for illustrative purposes only and all prices are correct at the time of publishing.
NEWS
iPhone 6 shells What the next iPhone could look like
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s production for the iPhone 6 ramps up, more shell leaks have appeared online. The most recent of these comes from Weibo, via user dreamerJimmy, who has posted shots of the front and rear of the upcoming device. The same user was previously responsible for leaking the iPhone 5 and 5c cases accurately, so these images my well show the final design.
The front of the iPhone 6, on the left, is noticeably bigger than the iPhone 5s
Each shot includes an iPhone 5s beside the iPhone 6 as a comparison – the difference in screen size is most notable. The rear also seems to be fully metal with thick plastic bands at the top and bottom to let signal in and out of the outer shell. These leaked images back up previous leaked shots of the iPhone 6 from nowhereelse.fr showing the internal case design and rear. Instead of the sharp edges found on the 5s, these designs feature curved edges. This should make it easier to hold, especially considering the rumored screen size is 4.7-inches. It’s also expected that the power button is moving to the other side of the device, again, in an effort to make it easier for one-handed use.
The blog nowhereelse.fr previously published the above image
It is expected that the iPhone 6 will be announced in September, so expect more leaks to appear online before then. The China Times has stated that Apple’s manufacturing partners will start building circuit boards at the end of the June with orders expected to exceed 100 million. Of course, until Apple show it off on stage we can never be 100% sure if this is the final design.
Activation Lock iOS 7 safety feature reduces theft in major cities
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ctivation Lock, the feature introduced to the iPhone in iOS 7 has been responsible for a drop in crime in some cities, police forces across the globe have reported. The feature was introduced by Apple to prevent anyone aside from the owner from using an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, if it was ever lost or stolen. Now, police in San Francisco, London, and New York, have all claimed crime involving the iPhone is improving. Those police forces have reported drops of 38 percent, 24 percent, and 19 percent respectively, in iPhone robberies in their cities.
Make sure to enable Find My iPhone via iCloud in Settings
Furthermore, NYC police have said that grand larcenies including the iPhone have fallen by 29 percent. “The introduction of kill switches has clearly had an effect on the conduct of smartphone thieves,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said. “If these can be canceled like the equivalent of canceling a credit card, these are going to be the equivalent of stealing a paperweight.” Activation lock works through the Find My iPhone app, and requires the Apple ID and password of the user before anyone can turn off Find My iPhone, erase the device, or reactivate and use the device.
REVIEWS
Travel the world The best iPhone apps for planning and going on that perfect trip
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ith the right apps installed, you can pretty much explore the world from the comfort of your couch using your trusty smart device. Though let’s face it, exploring the world the old-fashioned way (by actually visiting places) is a lot more fun! But that doesn’t mean you have to leave your iPhone behind... You can book flights, accommodation, and find the best places to visit – all through your iPhone. But which apps do you need? We’ve found the App Store’s essential travel apps for before you go, and for when you get there.
Before you go To start with you’ll need to think of the place you want to visit, before looking in to flights and accommodation. You’ll also want to find out what the place has to offer to ensure you don’t get lost in an unfamiliar city. If you want some inspiration on where to visit, you can check out the guide apps covered in the ‘when you get there’ section later on in this feature, but if you already have a destination in mind, the next step is to work out how to get there, and where to stay. The following trio of apps make it easy to find flights and places to stay as they all provide a kind of one-stop shop for such searches.
TripAdvisor Price: Free Version: 8.8 Size: 30.8 MB
The idea behind TripAdvisor is to give you the benefit of people’s first-hand knowledge and experiences. You can use it to search for hotels and flights, and in the former case, you’ll get local maps, filtering options, a ‘save’ option for favorites, and a slew of reviews. You can also browse local attractions and restaurants when you settle on a place to visit. The app is sleek and fast, with a modern, responsive interface, and is likely the strongest of the three.
DOWNLOAD
Kayak Price: Free Version: 31.0.1 Size: 18.7 MB
Like TripAdvisor, Kayak provides a set of tools for quickly searching for hotels and flights. You can deal in-app with car hire, track prices, and build an agenda by forwarding confirmation emails to the Kayak service. Once you’ve booked, Kayak can assist with flight tracking, airport details and currency conversion, although you’ll need Kayak Pro ($0.99/£0.69) for airport maps. Like TripAdvisor, the interface is clean and simple, and the app is information-rich.
DOWNLOAD
Expedia Price: Free Version: 3.6.1 Size: 31.1 MB
We’re including Expedia in part because it has an excellent reputation for saving money on hotels. The app itself, although quite modern in appearance, doesn’t match Kayak and TripAdvisor, being a bit fiddly and slow, but we did manage to find decent deals in the app that weren’t readily available elsewhere.
DOWNLOAD
Apps for flights and hotels Several apps and services take a more focussed approach, concentrating only on flights or accommodation. This often enables them to provide more detailed information and features that are useful when you want to save money or improve your planning and travelling experience.
Skyscanner Price: Free Version: 3.0.6 Size: 13.4 MB
The Skyscanner service is a big favorite of ours online, and the iPhone app is equally appealing. Once you input your preferred flight details, the app provides a chart detailing alternatives that can often save you a lot of money, simply by shifting your departure or return date by a day or two. It’s powerful sorting options round out a great app.
DOWNLOAD
SeatGuru Price: FREE Version: 2.2 Size: 2.4 MB
This app’s worth having regardless of how you’re booking flights. Although it’s not always totally accurate, it attempts to indicate the best — and worst — seats on any plane. So if a seat’s near to the toilets or can’t recline, you’ll get a warning sign; and if there’s extra leg-room, it’ll be displayed in green, signifying you should book it immediately — or make a beeline for it on flights where you can’t book seats in advance!
DOWNLOAD
Hotels.com Price: Free Version: 4.1.1 Size: 22.4 MB
In a sense, the Hotels.com app offers nothing you can’t get in the initial trio of apps in this feature, but we like it nonetheless. It’s a very colorful and image-rich app, with useful filtering options, and it quite often has deals and special offers that can save you a lot of money.
DOWNLOAD
Airbnb Price: Free Version: 3.6.0 Size: 25.2 MB
Airbnb is a service that takes you off the beaten track, through listings for accommodation you might not otherwise have discovered. With 450,000 listings in over 34,000 cities, including anything from houseboats in Amsterdam to city flats only available for a week or two per year, it’s a great place to start looking for somewhere to stay. The app is nicely designed (totally buying into Jony Ive’s iOS 7 minimalism and transparency), making searches all the more pleasurable.
DOWNLOAD
FEATURES
iOS 8: Health Your lowdown on the brand new Health app
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hat is the Health app? What will it do? And why might we not expect to see an iWatch quite yet? The first two were answered at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which took place in San Francisco earlier in June, but the third may be ascertained from the details revealed by Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, during his keynote presentation on the new Health app. The app itself will make its debut in iOS 8, likely to land in September, preloaded onto the yet to be announced iPhone 6, and available to download for other Apple devices. It comes alongside a cloud-based platform known as Healthkit, which developers and hardware manufacturers will be able to tap into to integrate their products. For users, the result will be a collation of all their health data, from multiple apps in one place: Health.
Early images of the Health app went online back in March
The idea that a Health app was coming in iOS 8 had entered the public consciousness in the last few months when the first real taste arrived via 9to5Mac in March. The website described ‘Healthbook’, which would operate much in the same way as the Passbook app, and would track the user’s fitness and health. Most details ended up being correct, except Apple would call it simply ‘Health’. Of course, apps that monitor health aren’t new – from running apps, to heart rate monitors, most of them deal with data. But back in WWDC, Federighi took to the stage during the event to reveal that those days of having your data locked to multiple apps – well, they were over. “Developers have created a lot of apps for monitoring your health,” he said. “But up to now the information gathered by those applications lives in silos.”
Apple’s Craig Federighi presenting Health at WWDC
Now, he continued, developers would be able to ensure communication with the app via the Healthkit platform, while iPhone customers would get Health, which monitors anything from activity level, to weight, all the way up to monitoring medical conditions like blood pressure and diabetes.
What will Health do? From what we’ve been shown the Health app will have a rich feature set, and while some things aren’t clear – like how it will prioritize how it presents information based on the apps you use, or how it will communicate with health services, this is what we do know... It will compile your biometric 1 data in one place: The app will be able to provide a personal overview of your health, which can then be shared with doctors and other medical professionals. You’ll be able to view your heart rate, calories burned, blood sugar, and cholesterol levels, based on what apps, and hardware you use with your iPhone. That is to say, the app itself doesn’t collect information about you, it’s simply a platform to store data collected by third party devices, such as the Fitbit Flex, or iBGStar Blood Glucose Meter. Technically, this is nothing new; third party apps have been able to collect data about you for awhile, it’s only now that you can pull it into one place to put into graphs and compare data. Of course, it’s likely that the app will become more powerful and gain more features as it grows with each iOS, especially if Apple plans to introduce its own hardware. Dare we say, the iWatch?
Hardware like the Fitbit Flex will be able to work with the Health app
You can create a medical 2 emergency card: It’s called the Medical ID, which can be added to a part of the app called the Health card. It will be accessible from the lock screen so that it can be viewed in an emergency. It can include your medical conditions, notes on allergies, the type of reactions you may have and any medications you could be on at the time. While this may not be the natural response of a medical professional to go through a patient’s phone in an emergency, it’s important to note that Apple is breaking new ground here, and as the app develops, and other phone manufacturers start installing similar capabilities, it will become more prominent. It will open up the doors to 3 third party app and hardware developers thanks to HealthKit: This software development kit, or SDK, is the platform Apple has created for developers. This is what got them so excited at WWDC. This software will allow developers to integrate their products with the Health app, much in the same way as Passbook.
HOW-TO
Fix your wallpaper A clearer background
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hen iOS 7 was released, Apple made certrain stylistic choices. One of these meant that now, background wallpaper had to be a certain size and fill the screen. This often caused images to zoom in and become pixelated. Apple tried to alleviate the problem by allowing users to turn off the zoom, but it still didn’t provide the best looking images. However, there are some simple things you can do to get a great looking background image.
The right size To begin with you need an image that’s big enough to fill the screen. You may notice that landscape pictures are particularly troublesome when setting your wallpaper so it might be best to stay away from these. Also images taken with an older iPhone can be too small for the display. To begin with you need an image at least 744 pixels wide and 1392 pixels tall to counteract the zooming effect. To guarantee an image will be that size you can find images on Google, which has a handy tool to help you out. You will need access to an iPad or computer to use the feature though. Head to images.google.com and enter your search term. In our example we’ve gone for the generic ‘beach’ shot but you can look for anything. Once the results appear select ‘Search tools’ followed by ‘Size’ and choose ‘Large’. This ensures the images will be big enough to fill the screen. Now pick the image you want and then click ‘View Image’ so that it fills the screen.
Make sure to select ‘Large’ to get a big enough image to save
Now to get it on your iPhone we’d recommend sharing the link via email to your iPhone. Once you receive the message you can tap the link, then tap and hold the image and select the ‘Save Image’ option.
Save the image from Safari to add it to your Camera Roll
Set it up Once you’ve saved the image you’ll want to set it as your wallpaper. Head to the Settings app and tap Wallpapers & Brightness. From here tap ‘Choose a New wallpaper’ and open the Camera Roll album. Here find the image you saved and tap on it to view a preview. If you have updated to iOS 7.1 or later you’ll see the option ‘Perspective Zoom’. Tap this to turn it off and give you more flexibility with fitting the image to the screen. Once your happy with the placement, select Set and choose from the options.
Turn off Perspective Zoom to gain more control when setting the wallpaper
Edit your own Now if you do want to use an image that you’ve already taken that isn’t looking great then you will first have to download an app. There are several available but we prefer iOS 7 Wallpaper Fix. It will set you back the tiny sum of $0.99/£0.69 but it is definitely worth the small outlay. As usual it’s available from the App Store. Once you open the app, tap on the image and select New followed by ‘Photo Library’. Here find the image you want as your background and open it. At first it will try to match Apple’s default preference and will fill the screen. Unlike setting the wallpaper through Settings however, if you pinch out on the image you’ll be able to scale it to your heart’s content. You can even rotate the image if you so wish.
You can size the image in any way you wish within the app
Once your happy with the placement tap the screen and select Preview to make sure you’re happy. If not, tap again and move the image around. If you are tap the screen followed by Save. This is then added to Camera Roll and you can set it by going to Settings and Wallpapers & Brightness.
Preview what your background will look like. Maybe we should make it a bit bigger.
Wallpaper paste So there you have two different ways of getting a perfect looking image for your background and no more pixellated monstrosities.
iPhone SWIPE
NEWS • REVIEWS • TIPS
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