iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

Fortunately I'm not addicted to an iPhone—but only because I don't have one. I do, however, tend to go through withdrawal if I don't have my iPad with me. It turns out, these gadgets have become so much an extension of ourselves that scientists have found that we suffer cognitive and physiological impairment if we're separated from them. A new study by University of Missouri researchers put iPhone users in a situation where they were separated from their phones while taking a cognitive test. Not only did they do worse on the test compared to their performance when they had their phones with them, they also had a significant increase in anxiety, heart rate, and blood pressure. 

Spotlight has long been a great feature of iOS, and is especially useful at helping you find apps that are buried away in a folder on your device. Since iOS 7 you invoke this handy search tool by simply swiping down on any home screen. (But keep in mind that if you swipe down from the very top of the display you'll get Notification Center instead.) In iOS 8, introduced last fall, Apple greatly expanded what Spotlight can do. In addition to finding apps and text strings in apps such as Mail and Notes, it also now searches the web, searches Wikipedia, finds related apps in the App Store, finds related movies, and even brings up results in Maps if you search on a location.

Jabra has been at the forefront of noise cancelling Bluetooth headsets since the early days of the iPhone. Their most recent headset, the Jabra Stealth, is the culmination of years of experience in a remarkably tiny, comfortable earpiece. I don't normally like Bluetooth headsets because they interfere with my glasses or are uncomfortable inside my ear.

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 3 of the series. If you're just getting started now, check out the beginning of the series here (This post has been updated to iOS 8.0, Xcode 6.3 and Swift 1.2.)

In my previous post, we started the process of creating a prototype of an iPhone app called iAppsReview. You learned how to create a new project in Xcode, how to add a storyboard to a project and configure it, and how to add a navigation controller to a storyboard. You had just begun to configure the table view, which we will finish in this post. You'll learn how to create multiple sections in a table view, set section header text, add images to a project, and incorporate them in table-view cells.

It never ceases to amaze me what you can do with an iPhone, especially when paired with add-on accessories. Case in point, Vaavud makes a Smartphone Wind Meter ($40) that attaches to an iPhone, iPad, or Android phone. Unlike most accessories that connect via Bluetooth or Lightning, this gadget connects via the audio-in jack, just like the Square credit card reader. Because newer iPhones have the audio jack on the bottom, you flip the phone upside down and run their companion app while holding the iPhone in the air.

Some people say that Pinterest is the new Google. People head to Pinterest to search for project ideas, recipes, and news about their favorite topics. Using the Follow Interest tool, you can easily find new pins about your favorite topics without following other pinners one at a time. Pinterest will find the most popular pins from all of of the users who are posting about the topics you love and display them in your Pinterest feed. I've used this feature to find new pinners to follow and find more great pins about my favorite topics: health & fitness, technology, and DIY. 

I love Instagram because of it's fun visual nature. I can scroll through my friend's pictures, quickly double-tap to like, and even leave a comment if I want to. What I don't love about Instagram is how easy it is to accidentally add location information (longitude and latitude of the device you're posting from) to your photos, which can be dangerous—especially for teens who are using the social media network. Here's how to remove your location from Instagram photos. 

 

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 2 of the series. If you're just getting started now, check out the beginning of the series here (This post has been updated to iOS 8, Xcode 6.3 and Swift 1.2.)

After introducing the tools you'll need to develop apps in my previous post, I assume you've installed Xcode and are ready to get a taste of app development! I find there is no better way to learn than by doing, so let's dive in and start creating an app.

Have you always wanted to build an iOS app, but lacked the knowledge and skills? Have you ever signed up for an online course on creating iOS apps, only to feel frustrated because the content was out of date or not comprehensive enough? Are you dying to learn more about Swift and programming for the Apple Watch? It's a story we hear all the time at iPhone Life. And that's why we decided to partner with iPhone app expert, former Apple employee, and adjunct professor at RIT Paul Solt to make his iOS development courses available to iPhone Life readers at a big discount.

If you own stocks or have an interest in how the market is doing, you can use Siri to check current stock prices. In addition, you can compare performance, ask more general questions about how the market is doing, ask about the performance of specific indices such as the Nikkei, and more. Note that this functionality is available on the iPad as well, even though iOS on the iPad doesn't include Apple's Stocks app.

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