iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

Out of all of the thousands of mobile games available to gamers, few if any have generated a buzz in the core gaming community like Vainglory has. Vainglory is an unapologetically core game, built from the ground up for the mobile touchscreen platform. I had the opportunity recently to sit down and chat with Vainglory's COO Kristian "EdTheShred" Segerstrale and former pro League of Legends player George "Zekent" Liu who now serves as Vainglory's Video Community Manager. What follows is an essential and informative read for anyone who is a core gamer in this day and age where touchscreens are increasingly becoming the dominant gaming platform.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, How to Unleash Your Inner App Developer, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure and you will experience how fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 10 of the series. If you're just getting started now, check out the beginning of the series here (this post has been updated to Swift 1.2, iOS 8 and Xcode 6.3.)

In my previous post, you learned the basic mechanics of calling methods on an object. There's very little you can do in Swift, the language of iOS development, without calling methods. In this post, we're going to put into practice what you have learned about calling methods and integrate social media into the iAppsReview app we've been working on in this blog. I'm also going to introduce a new Cocoa Touch Framework concept known as collections. You can get the latest version of iAppsReview from this link.

Can you get incoming calls while on FaceTime? Yes! With FaceTime call waiting, accepting incoming calls and putting your FaceTime call on hold is easy. When someone calls you while you’re on a FaceTime call, you have two options: End & Accept or Decline. If the calls are both FaceTime Audio (FaceTime without video) or one is a regular phone call, you'll be able to Hold & Accept. This fast tip will show you how to answer calls and place calls on hold using FaceTime call waiting, so let's dive in.

Before the Apple Watch was announced, when we learned that Nike was abandoning its Fuel Band, there was speculation that the Apple offering might be more of a fitness band and less of a miniature iPhone. However, that didn't happen and the Apple Watch is indeed bulkier than most fitness bands. Potential customers looking for a smaller band may want to consider the Microsoft Band. Not only is the Microsoft Band smaller, but it's cheaper too, at $199.

Anytime you see a link in Safari or Mail, you can tap and hold it to reveal options beyond simply opening the new page. I constantly use this feature when I'm looking at the news in my personalized Yahoo page. If I see a news story I want to read, I tap and hold the link so that the page opens in a separate tab. That way I can quickly go back to the original Yahoo page without having to use the back arrow and waiting for the page to reload. The options in Safari also included adding the linked page to your Reading List. Tapping and holding a link in Mail also gives you the option of adding the page to your reading list as well as opening the page in Safari. Finally, the options include copying the link so you can paste it elsewhere.

I conducted an extensive review of three headphones. This review includes aesthetics, features, and sound. Like many areas of modern electronics, hundreds of headphones exist in a seemingly infinite variety of shapes and sizes. The most important element though, is good fit and good sound. Beyond that, nothing else really matters.

If there was a single theme in today's Apple event, it was the company's extraordinary commitment to be constantly envisioning great products, and then continually refining them. No other company seems to have such a dedicated focus, nor the resources to bring it off.