For my internship I created a methodology to test the security of mobile applications. After I finished it I decided to take a look at WhatsApp and test the methodology I created. Several new vulnerabilities were found, including a very severe one that even affected people not using WhatsApp. But before going into detail let's first investigate the security history of WhatsApp.

I found that many iPhone and iPad users don’t know that they can add their favorite web sites to the Home Screen and interact with them like standard native applications. This script helps them to discover this great feature and suggests the steps needed to add your web app to the dashboard.

Full iPhone and iPad Access

Save iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch app data, voicemail, text messages, iMessages, call log, notes, contacts, music and photos to your Mac.

A few days ago I updated this site’s Web clip icon to be 300×300 pixels.

It looks great in Reeder, and it looks good as a Home screen icon on new and old iPads and on the iPhone 4/4S.

There are two (yea, three) ways to upload your Web clip icon and make it discoverable:

And now for the surprise. When you take the iPhone away from your face during a call and put it into speakerphone mode (tap the Speaker button), the top microphone is the one that is now active. Did you know this? I sure didn’t.

The reason that the 1080p versions of the iTunes Store videos can be a good deal better without doubling the file size—or worse—can be found in the tech specs of the new AppleTV and the new iPad. The AppleTV now supports H.264 compression for 1920x1080 resolution video at 30 frames per second using High or Main Profile up to level 4.0, the iPad and the iPhone 4S the same up to level 4.1. The profile indicates what kind of decompression algorithms the H.264 decoder has on board—the "High" profile obviously has some tricks up its sleeve that the "Main" or "Baseline" profiles known to previous devices don't support. The level value indicates how many blocks or bits per second a device can handle.

The A4 SoC that Apple used in the iPhone 4 and the second generation AppleTV as well as the A5 in the iPad 2 can handle Main Profile level 3.1, which is good enough for 1280x720 video at 30 frames per second. The original AppleTV can only handle 720p at 24 frames, and earlier devices are limited to SD video. This means that the increased 1080p resolution breaks compatibility with everything older than the iPhone 4S anyway, so Apple is free to use the high profile, resulting in better compression for a given quality level. The files are larger, but not that much larger. Whether the increased resolution comes with extra visual fidelity, however—and thus worth the extra download time—will vary from movie to movie and show to show.

Apple’s product launches may be the most obsessively-covered media events on the planet — presidential press conferences possibly excepted — but that doesn’t mean that people understand them.

Actually, as I mulled over today’s new iPad event and its implications, I’m struck by how little of the conventional wisdom about these rollouts feels like wisdom. Much of it is crude, out of date or just plain wrong. Including some of my own assumptions.

(PHOTOS: Apple Announces New iPad)

So here are seven things that a lot of people seem to believe they know about Apple’s events. The more attention you pay, the less they ring true. I think of them as, well, mythperceptions.

Q: How do I access my last saved email draft on my iDevice?

A: There is the long way, which is using “Mailboxes”, then scroll down to Accounts, select an account, click Drafts, then click on the draft. To go back to unified email inbox, you then have to hit back two times, then select All Inboxes. It’s surely long and tedious.

Short way: hold the Compose button (annotation 2) to bring up your last saved draft.

The shortcut to last draft is saved as long as you don’t restart your device. If you restarted the device, as of iOS 5.0.1, you have to use the long way to access your last draft.

Drafting this one for 2014, because we like to write our blog posts a couple years early at Impending. Let’s hope I’ll never have to dig it up again.

As we’ve learned from Apple’s latest earnings call, App Store revenue growth for developers has begun to stall and slip behind device sales, resulting in many beloved indie studios closing shop or selling to larger companies, folding to the pressure and tighter profit margins.

Considering the past two years with hundreds of scams, fraud apps, hoaxes, and clones that have hit the top of the charts, it’s no surprise the atmosphere in 2014 among both App Store customers and app developers can only be described as cynical.

Most significantly, what we once took for granted before 2012, the “impulse buy”, has largely evaporated. Consumer trust in apps is now completely broken, and even customer reviews can’t be trusted due to more and more elaborately sleazy services for hire to game the system. In this fallout, we have come to understand how important the impulse buy was in a market environment dominated by rock bottom pricing. Developers have raised app pricing to compensate, kicking into effect a feedback loop resulting in sustaining revenue (for now) but plummeting sales, reach and cultural relevance for popular apps.

Customers have also in turn begun to rely more and more heavily on existing giant brands, and are avoiding less trustworthy upstarts, independent developers and studios, and apps that stray from the familiar. As a result innovation in the App Store is in a slow death spiral.

I remember early in 2012, which we can now recognize as the peak of an App Store bubble, when what felt like a utopia took a distinct left turn for the worse with the first wave of scams. Now that we’re stuck in this hole, the road to recovery, if it exists at all, will be painful and take years of education and pro-active improvements from Apple.

LCD or Plasma? That was my dilemma before the multi-talented Galaxy Note came into my life and spared me the expense. I hung the Samsung in my entertainment center and never looked back. Surely this is what James Cameron had in mind when he reimagined Fern Gully.

Before and after the iPhone

(picture)

Apple may eventually move to USB 3.0, but sync and external displays will be done over wireless technologies. Thunderbolt remains a very high performance spec that we'll see limited to notebooks and desktops for the foreseeable future.

Those who have had a phone lost or stolen are familiar with the horrors that follow: the thief (or the person he sold your phone to) starts to send texts as you to your family and friends, leaving you scrambling to de-activate the device as soon as possible. For modern iPhone owners, though, such a phenomenon should be in the distant past thanks to the advent of remote wipe capabilities, right?

Perhaps not. Some unlucky iPhone owners are beginning to discover that, despite their best efforts to remove all information from their stolen phones, thieves and unsuspecting buyers are still able to send and receive iMessages as the original owner—even after the device is registered under a new account. Almost nothing seems to work—remote wiping, changing Apple ID passwords, or even moving the old phone number to a new phone—and users are becoming more than frustrated that thieves are so easily able to pose as them.

If you have tried using docks for your iPhone, you have probably felt our frustration: Undocking is difficult, many aren't designed to work with cases, they are lightweight, and are generally made as a cheap afterthought accessory. 


That's why we designed the Elevation Dock - Simple to use, quick undocking, and it works with or without a case. We didn't stop there - It's beautifully precision machined from solid aluminum and it comes in a gorgeous set of surface finishes, setting a new bar for quality and something that looks really good on your desk. It complements the high-level craftsmanship of the iPhone with like no other.

Glif+ is a deluxe Glif package. It contains the Glif, the Serif, and the Ligature. The Serif is an additional piece that is designed to keep your iPhone incredibly secure on the tripod. While the Glif is great for normal use, the Serif will keep your phone safe in more extreme situations. And, when you are not using the Serif, it fits snuggly inside the Glif, making it very compact.

Additionally, Glif+ comes with the Ligature, a simple keyring loop that attaches to the tripod thread on the Glif. Now, you'll have a way to always keep your Glif handy, by attaching it to your keychain, backpack, purse, or anything, really.

And to top it all off, the Glif+ packaging transforms into a little tripod. So, in a pinch, it's there if you need it. Cute.

I use the multitasking drawer a lot. So much that the double tap of the home button is no longer cutting it. It feels slow and interrupts my flow when using the device.

To make matters worse, the home button on my iPhone is no longer as responsive as it should be. A double tap is often interpreted as a single tap which means that instead of showing the multitasking drawer it either closes the app, or if I'm already on the home screen it takes me to the search page.

A simple gesture would decrease the wear and tear of the hardware button, and also speed up the usage of the multitasking drawer. You simply start dragging from outside the bottom of the screen and move your finger onto the screen. This edge swipe would activate the multitasking drawer.

This could be an optional setting, in the same way that Apple has made the iPad gestures optional. Certain apps might have a conflicting gesture, or a novice user might activate it accidentally. So the default behavior should probably be to have this turned off.

The announcement that Nexus One users won’t be getting upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich led some to justifiably question Google’s support of their devices. I look at it a little differently: Nexus One owners are lucky. I’ve been researching the history of OS updates on Android phones and Nexus One users have fared much, much better than most Android buyers.

I went back and found every Android phone shipped in the United States1 up through the middle of last year. I then tracked down every update that was released for each device - be it a major OS upgrade or a minor support patch - as well as prices and release & discontinuation dates. I compared these dates & versions to the currently shipping version of Android at the time. The resulting picture isn’t pretty - well, not for Android users:

Disclaimer: Any creation of a mockup through this website happens at your own risk. Note that your mockups are not protected in any way other than by a non-obvious URL. I can not be held responsible if you create a mockup and your competition figures out how to access it. Mockups can contain user-uploaded images and user-entered text. View at your own discretion. I do not watch, see or check this user-generated content in any way, and can not be held responsible for images uploaded by users of this site or text entered by users of this site.

As exciting as every new major iOS release is, there’s just as much if not more excitement in finding the little things that no one knows about. Apple spends a lot of time creating major additions and changes for their releases, and then lets the users try to figure out all the small stuff. Well, not everyone has time to figure them out or doesn’t want to go through the effort to do so. This is where MacStories comes in. We know our readers are all about the details, so we went on to scan, search and pry our way through iOS 5 to find many of the hidden treasures that will make your iOS experience even better.

Just installed the new iOS 5 on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch? There's a lot of great features to check out and play around with. After messing around with it on my iPhone 4 for a few minutes, these seven additions caught my attention. Check them out below—and tell us what your favorite new features are in the comments below.

That same footnote on the Siri page also says "requires Internet access." We never did find out exactly what that big data center Apple built was for -- given that iTunes content is mostly stored in CDNs and iCloud is implemented on top of Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's EC2 platforms.

I'm speculating that at least some of that data center's huge processing capacity is for Siri, and that at least some portion of Siri's sophisticated voice recognition works in the cloud. Presumably not all of it, otherwise it won't work when you are in a weak signal area; but consider what happens when you dictate text to the Siri software. It reads the text back and asks you to confirm that you are happy with the transcription. This is a classic setup for machine learning algorithms, and I think perhaps that each time you teach Siri a correction for a word it is uploaded to the cloud and, eventually, downloaded to everyone else's Siri implementations. There's very few effective ways to build a phenome database of all the world's dialects and accents, but this would work (for a fascinating look at how Google solved the same problem, look at the history of GOOG-411).

If my rampant and baseless speculation is correct, this means that Siri is a huge, powerful, learning network with nodes all around the world. Hopefully it'll never become self-aware, eh?

How to use the Home Button

Your iPhone has one button on its front. Pressing this button may perform different actions in different circumstances. This simple visual guide shows you how it works.

Our last roundup of awesome iPhone 4 wallpapers was especially well received. Many asked for a round 2. Contrary to what you might think, designers aren’t churning these out by the dozen, which is probably a good thing. I’ve made my best effort at finding and curating this second list, but it probably won’t be as good as the first. I pray you beg to differ.

All signs seem to be pointing at it but no one seems to notice. My gut says that Apple is planning to launch not one but two new iPhones this fall and both will be available on all four major US carriers. I believe we will see a mildly revamped iPhone 4 and an “all-new” iPhone 5.

Apple will however downplay the 4′s revamp with a comment like “the iPhone 4 has proven to be the most popular phone in history and it’s not slowing down so today we’re making it available to T-Mobile and Sprint customers too”. No new name, and no upgraded specs they’ll want the press to focus on the iPhone 5, not a bunch of internal changes to a 15 month old device.

How will they do this? Instead of individual models for individual carriers I believe that both the revised 4 and the new 5 will have both CDMA and GSM chips in them will be compatible with all four carriers right out of the box.

Prototypes for Mac turns your flat mockup images into tappable and sharable prototypes that run on iPhone or iPod touch.

If you’ve ever had to restore an iOS device from its iTunes backup—for example, if you’ve upgraded to a new phone, or if Apple has replaced an iPhone that was having problems—there’s a good chance you’ve come across one of the most frustrating bugs in the iTunes/iOS 4 system: Much of your painstakingly created Home-screen organization is wiped out. Specifically, most of your third-party apps are no longer on the screens where you placed them, and while a few of your folders may remain, even those are missing most of their original contents (which are instead scattered across various screens).

Encrypting your data on your iPad or iPhone is a great way to protect yourself on the off chance you lose your device. Even if someone plugs your device into a computer, they ideally won’t be able to steal all of your data. On current iOS devices, encrypting is as simple as setting a passcode.

Encryption in iOS 3 and then iOs 4 -- I say “ideally” because it turns out to be a little more complicated than simple setting a passcode.

Question: There are a bunch of symbols and numbers on the backs of iPhones. I know what 16GB means; what about the rest?

The process of loading a URL in a new tab on iPad can be rather cumbersome and slow. First, one launches Safari from the home screen, waits for the app to open and the old webpage to re-render, then one hits the tab switch button, presses the new tab space, waits for that tab to open, waits for it to switch to the search panel (this is the most irritating part of the process, since it seems to take even longer when what one really wants is the URL bar), and finally, one clicks on the URL bar to enter in a new URL.

To simplify this process considerably, just add a new icon to your Springboard that goes directly to about:blank. Details after the jump.

In the time it takes to read this page, millions of power cords for mobile phones, iPads, and notebooks will slide off nightstands, side tables, and desks and fall to the ground. The global frustration created by this phenomena cannot be overestimated. This problem deserves an elegant solution.

Introducing OneLessDrop.

Apple's 91-day quarter yields some impressive numbers -- take them apart a little and you get the kind of stats you can reel off at a dinner party without being seen as too utterly crushing a bore, for example, did you know there's one iPhone being sold for every two people being born into this world today?

Apple sold 16.24 million iPhones in the December quarter. That sure is a lot of iPhones, and while dwarfed by the 650 million bottles of Heinz Ketchup sold around the world each year means Apple sells more iPhones each year than there are cars sold worldwide.

When I got my first iPhone two years back I adapted the theme here on xdeb.org to work better with it. I documented it in my post Make a Drupal theme look better on the iPhone.

During the holidays I got to try out the iPad for a few days and found ways to make the xdeb.org theme work better for it as well.

Following up on my article about the best Mac apps I used in 2010, here are some of the best hybrid "Mac and iOS apps" I used in 2010. This wasn't an attempt to come up with a specific number, just the results of some careful reflection.

You may wonder why some apps appear on this list instead of the Mac list. For example, Dropbox has an iOS app, why not add it here? Because my primary use of Dropbox is on the Mac. Yes I use it with iOS, but it's usually through another app that is syncing back to my Mac. On the other hand, using OmniFocus for iPad (our review) led to me using OmniFocus for Mac more, so I put OmniFocus on this list.

All that is to say, these are my distinctions, and you are free to disagree with them.

Ensuring that your iPhone or iPad app is accessible (in this case, to visually impaired users) is the right thing to do, and thankfully it’s very easy – in many cases, there’s no work to do at all. This article for iOS developers describes how to implement accessibility support.

Avoid false positives with easy-to-configure alerting options.
Improve page load time by discovering when your servers are overloaded.
Save $1,000s worth of time - minutes to install and no complex config or ongoing management.

"Take iPod for example -- very expensive, only worked with Macs (latest with firewire). Then USB solution came, but still PCs didn't have iTunes, thus significant work arounds required. Nobody took Apple seriously on iPod -- too expensive & minute addressable market.

"Couple, three years later -- all in rapid succession -- Apple releases iTunes for Windows, iTunes Music Store, cut prices and introduced the iPod mini. Within 9-12 months iPod share exploded from 20-30% to 70-80%. Just like that Apple had sewn it up. It was too late for competitors. None of any valiant attempts were able to dent iPod share thus they folded their hands in concession. iPod created a new market.

This is a guide to integrating a iPhone application with Drupal using the services module with the REST server and OAuth authentication.

I’m kind of weird, I love negative feedback. Unsolicited complaint means somebody cared enough to write it down, and then when you fix their pet peeve they transform into a fan. Plus you got to fix a real problem for a real person, which is pretty rewarding. The oft-bemoaned fact that iOS developers can’t reply directly to App Store commenters is all the more reason to fix the root of the problem.

Customer comments do ease the planning of future software releases a little. They’re the squeaky wheels. It’d be foolish to ignore your own ideas and priorities in favor of being 100% feedback-driven… you’d find yourself in the Henry Ford «my customers wanted a faster horse» situation pretty quickly, but it’s helpful nonetheless. Popular feature requests jump up the queue, others languish.

Some negative feedback just isn’t helpful, but that’s life. The world has its share of caustic assholes with nothing better to do than give 1-star reviews on iTunes, but if mean words really bother you, you have no business making things and selling them to the public. Don’t be a musician, either. Or a writer. Or a chef.

Am I the last person to discover that double-tapping the top/bottom of a WebView (incl. Safari) pages up/down?

After downloading the desired firmware below, you can shift-click (PC) or option-click (Mac) the Restore or Update buttons in iTunes. A file dialog will open and let you choose the downloaded ipsw-file.

Note: Your browser may change the ipsw-file into a zip-file. In that case, just rename it to end in .ipsw and iTunes will accept it.

Smartphones were an established consumer-electronics market with devices that people thought were pretty cool, but often frustrating and with serious shortcomings and design flaws.

Then this happened:

Q: What is this all about?
A: It's about a site called jailbreakme.com that enables you to Jailbreak your iPhones and iPads just by visiting the site.

If you're one of the lucky ones you managed to secure themselves an iPhone 4 today (or even the past two days if you're really lucky) you've no doubt marveled at how thin it is, how crisp the Retina Display is, and maybe you've even found someone else to do a FaceTime call with… but what about loading it up with some games? Since we haven't gotten our own iPhone 4's yet, we haven't really been able to put together a "games that are really awesome on the iPhone 4" listing, but I figured we'd start out by compiling a list of some of our favorite games in the App Store.

If you think this looks a lot like our 2009 Buyer's Guide, that's because it does. However, we've updated the list with some of our recent favorites and kept some of the old ones. In the interest of space, we had to drop many off the list, but that doesn't reflect the quality of those games. If you're looking for more suggestions, please check out the 2009 Buyer's Guide for additional titles we also loved.

If you want to play games on your new iPhone, you're in for a treat.

I pretty quickly tired of the bright, busy background images for the wallpaper, and so created a few in Acorn.

Add my voice to those saying that the default wallpaper choices for iOS 4 are too busy and high contrast. So, I've made an iPhone wallpaper called Tranquil that will hopefully help with this problem.

Google Sync allows you to choose up to 25 Calendars with the Calendar app on your iPhone (on iPhone OS 3.0).

One of the default pictures included with the iPhone is a beautiful image of the Earth as seen from space.  Unless you weren't paying attention, you saw this picture when you first purchased your iPhone, and you can still view it by going to Settings --> Wallpaper --> Wallpaper; it is the second image provided by Apple.  Here is what it looks like as a wallpaper on an iPhone:

 

If you have ever wondered where this photograph came from, a recent post from Gizmodo sheds some light on the subject, although to get the full story you need to go to some more sources, including this page from the Swiss Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science.  Here is a short version.

Thanks to the work of the iPhone DevTeam, with their original “by hand” method of fixing push, they have paved the way for a more automated process.

#iphone IRC commoner anethema has setup a way to fix push via Cydia which gives you GENUINE activation certificates, and they are ALWAYS unique. You will never share acivation certs with another iPhone user. The best part? Unlike http://www.pushfix.info/ which charges it’s userbase a fee for them to get their push working,  anethema’s solution is 100% FREE.

When taking photos on the move, sometimes it pays to have photo editing apps. After all, you’re not going to tweet that picture without a bit of increased contrast, or brightness – right? It’s a well-known fact nowadays that the majority of photos we see on the web have being edited in some way in a graphics package such as Adobe Photoshop. But what if you can’t get to your computer and need reliable and feature filled editing applications on the move?
Being a keen photographer and designer, I thought it’d be fun to give you my low-down on the photo editing apps I personally think you should have on your phone. I’ll explain why I think you should have them, and what features and benefits I like most about each application. Here we go!

Just wanted to do a review of PhotoForge. Being a professional photographer it would be really cool to tweak the images I take with my iPhone. Up until recently I was using a couple apps for this. PhotoGene, Camerabag, and CoolFX. These apps are somewhat different in what they offer. I won't get into those, but I was using PhotoGene for my main image editing.

In comes PhotoForge. Long story short, it's now my favorite image editing app on the iPhone!!! It rocks! It offers so many of the options I would expect to be able to do on my desktop. Being a Lightroom and Photoshop user you get use to specific types of controls to edit your images.

I'm going to touch on the things I like about this app, the image editing mainly. I won't review ALL aspects of it. I don't really need or use the brushes, clone stamp, etc, but it's really cool they are there.

Not only did Apple lock Skype out of 3G calling with its latest beta update, Skype is now also calling out some jailbreakers who try to run the new Skype 1.0.2 on their jailbroken devices. iClarified got the scoop from a user in Switzerland who tried to run Skype 1.0.2  on a jailbroken iPhone.  

Smart tips, man kan tvåfingersscrolla i element på webbsidor i Safari i iPhone.