iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

In episode 201, David and Donna unpack everything from Apple’s biggest announcement in years. Aside from the usual software features for the iPhone, Mac, iPad, and Apple Watch, Apple threw its hat in the ring with its first AR/VR headset, the Vision Pro, and released three new M2 Macs. Should you buy the new headset or wait? Is AR the future? Listen in and find out!

How to Organize Your Calendar in 2025

(Sponsored Post) By Amy Spitzfaden Both on Thu, 10/31/2024

Apple is pretty good about updating its products, but it seems to have forgotten about the Calendar app and its many downsides. The makers of Informant 5, on the other hand, do not forget to regularly improve their app based on user experience. The latest updates to this calendar and task-management app are a productivity game-changer.

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 beginner app developer, 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 app ideas into reality can be! This is part 40 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here. 

One of the hottest technologies to come out of iOS 7 is iBeacon. In case you haven't heard, iBeacon is Apple's trademark for what it calls "a new class of low-powered, low-cost transmitters that can notify nearby iOS 7 devices of their presence." This new technology solves one of the biggest problems with Location Services on iOS devices—pinpointing the location of a device when it's indoors. Unlike GPS technology that determines a device's absolute location in terms of latitude and longitude, the iBeacon technology measures a device's relative distance to an iBeacon in an established location. Since iBeacons work without the need for a WiFi or cellular connection, it makes them ideal for indoor use.

I have been a fan of Google Drive for a while now. I mean, how can you go wrong with 100 GB of storage for $2 a month? I don't think you can.

And if you don't know, part of Google Drive is their software suite that includes  Docs (documents like MS Word) and Sheets (spreadsheets like MS Excel) to name two.  At first glance, I loved this set up.  Everything was in the cloud for me, accessible wherever I had an Internet connection.

Houston, we have a problem

But then I purchased a Wi-Fi iPad Air. That's when I discovered that there is a huge flaw in Google Drive: no Internet, no access!

Creative, a company well known for their Sound Blaster PC audio cards, is making a bigger splash these days in the wireless speaker market. I favorably reviewed their Sound Blaster Axx 200 a few months ago, and Creative has also released a speaker with an emphasis on the discerning mobile audiophile. Read on to learn how the Sound Blaster ROAR SR20 compares in the very crowded market of Bluetooth stereo wireless speakers.

I'm finally back at the helm after attending last week's Macworld / iWorld 2014 conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco! My company had a booth at Macworld again this year, selling books in my iOS App Development for Non-Programmers series, and it was the best conference for us to date! There was a lot of positive energy at the conference and we met lots of great people who are interested in getting into iOS app development.

Here are some of the highlights of Macworld / iWorld 2014.

DragonVale App Review

By Guest Blogger

 

 

If you’ve ever wanted to know what it’s like to own a dragon, the app game DragonVale can make that a virtual reality for you. This game lets you become the parent of a variety of dragons while you decorate your own colorful island and chat with friends who are just as dragon obsessed as you.

 

Sennheiser has made quite the name for themselves when it comes to premium headphones. It’s almost common knowledge that their wired headphones are like the Porsches of the headphone world. That’s all well and good, but what about their Bluetooth headphones; how do they rank against other high quality Bluetooth headphones currently available? I got to spend some time with the Sennheiser MM 550-X over-ear Bluetooth travel headphones ($499.00), which are Sennheiser’s top-of-the-line pair of Bluetooth headphones. Read on to find out how they performed and how they stack up in an ever more competitive Bluetooth headphone category.

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.

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