iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

How To Use Game Center

By Paula Bostrom

My grandmother lives in a retirement community, and several times a week she heads up to the social center and plays cards and other games with her friends. For the rest of us, most of our gaming entertainment comes from an interactive screen. Our iDevices provide that entertainment and Game Center ties it all together.

There's really no limit to what you can do with your iPhone. In this interview, I get the opportunity to talk to Kristian Day, a filmmaker from Iowa who managed to shoot an entire TV show with his iPhone, and sell it to a local network. He talks about how he got started, the best apps for filming, and overcoming rejection. Check it out below!

We do enjoy the games at iPhone Life. What's not to love about having something like a kabillion titles to choose from?! So, we decided to run a series amongst the gamers here that highlight our favorites over the years (some of us been swiping, tapping, or joysticking since the 1970s), and expound a bit on our opinions about freemium, downloadable content (DLC), and regular old-school purchase models. Siva Om has regularly covered this area (and does a superb job) in his column, but the other iPhone Life gamers thought maybe we would each throw in our two cents as well. Here is mine...

This tip was originally published on 03/17/2014. Due to recent updates, this particular tip no longer works for devices running iOS 9 or later.

 

Apple Maps has improved a lot since its disastrous debut. But many people still prefer to use Google Maps as their go-to navigation app. The problem is, when you ask Siri for directions, it'll automatically use Apple Maps as the default app for turn-by-turn directions. If you want to use Google Maps or some other navigation app with Siri instead, try this handy trick:

Children are getting cell phones at younger and younger ages, and even the cheapest smartphones on the market are capable of browsing the Internet. With the web as vast and accessible as it’s ever been, monitoring teenagers' iPhone use can be as challenging as dealing with their hormone-driven attitudes. This is why it is good to know what easy, go-to options are available to parents to protect those inquisitive eyes from at least some of the Internet’s unsavory side.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, 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 much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is part 38 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

In my previous post, I talked about using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as cloud storage for your iOS app's entities, and demonstrated their Persistence Framework for Core Data.

But what about the storage and retrieval of images and video for your iOS apps? Amazon has a different tool for this job, and it's Amazon Simple Storage Service, or Amazon S3 for short.

How to Use the Calendar on Your iPhone

The Calendar app for iPhone and iPad is one I use multiple times throughout the day; it's so useful! You can create an event or appointment, and your Calendar can be synced between all your Apple devices using iCloud. You can even use multiple calendars: one for work, one for home, and more! Let's get started learning how to create Calendar events on your iPhone and iPad.

Review: Documents 5 by Readdle

By Krisoy Desouza

Documents 5 (free) allows users to read, listen, view, download, and annotate almost any content they desire on their iPad. the app is more than just a tool that will help you stay organized; it combines a document viewer with a file manager and a media player. The app is super-fast and looks good with clean graphics. There are plenty of options to use and everything is easy to locate on the app. 

Recently, I unsubscribed from all but a few of the email newsletters I receive. Now, when I write “newsletters”, I am referring to those emails that are blog posts. I didn’t unsubscribe from them because the emails were no longer relevant or important to me (they still were) but I did so for two reasons:

1. I was getting a lot of emails. Some sites I subscribe to post several times a day.

2. It was not easy to share the content with my followers on social media via email.

The success of the freemium model is impossible to deny. Taking a look at the top grossing games in the App Store paints a clear picture. In 2013 all ten of the overall top grossing games were freemium titles. The highest grossing paid game, Minecraft ($6.99) only ranked 18th in overall top grossing games.

If you migrated to iOS gaming from a dedicated gaming device like XBox, Playstation, or even PCs then the freemium game model is most likely not that appealing. Likewise, if you came into iOS gaming as a veteran gamer of the 90s or early aughts, then overall the freemium game system is very likely viewed by you as a travesty.

And yet, this hotly debated new gaming modality is undeniably bringing in the big bucks, at least for certain developers and gaming houses. Enough game developers are making money exploiting the freemium model that the trend continues much to the dismay of what seems like the majority of dedicated gamers.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, 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 much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is part 37 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

My last few posts took a bit of sidetrack as I covered appsworld 2014. In this post, I get back on track and talk about another option for outsourcing your iOS app's web processing, messaging, and data storage—Amazon Web Services (AWS).

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