Posts tagged with "iOS"

How To Turn Your iPhone and iPad Into AirPlay Speakers

One of the biggest limitations of the current version of AirPlay shipping with iOS 4.2.1 (well, video streaming to Apple TV aside) is the fact that you can’t use an iOS device as an AirPlay speaker. In fact, a speaker can be an Apple TV, an audio system connected to an AirPort Express station or an AirPlay-enabled audio system. But, you can’t send audio from an iOS device to another iOS device or from iTunes on your Mac/PC to an iPhone/iPad.

Imagine the possibilities of iOS devices as AirPlay speakers: you’re in the car, iPhone is connected to your car’s audio setup, a friend’s in the backseat playing with his iPad. He wants to send some music from his iPad library to the iPhone, he fires up the iPod app on his tablet and instantly streams music to the car’s audio system thanks to the iPhone acting as a speaker. Or, your Mac’s in your bedroom and you want to play some tunes on your iPad. If only the iPad was an AirPlay speaker, you wouldn’t have to sync music (and thus eat space) on it.

With the following tutorial (files courtesy of TouchBite) you’ll be able to turn any iOS device running iOS 4.1 and above into an AirPlay speaker. Read more

iOS 4.2 Improves Support For Web Fonts→

iOS 4.2 Improves Support For Web Fonts

With yesterday’s release of iOS 4.2, a frustrating Mobile Safari bug has been resolved: previously, Mobile Safari would crash if more than one weight or style of a font was loaded. This bug has been repaired in iOS 4.2, so that users of the iPhone, iPod, or iPad who update their device will no longer experience crashing.

Web designers rejoice.

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Keyboard Issues On iOS 4.2.1 for iPad

Everybody’s loving iOS 4.2 for iPad: it brought multitasking to the tablet, folders, AirPlay (sort of) and, ehm, AirPrint. Limitations aside, iOS 4.2 was needed. We have already talked about this. As more users upgrade to the new OS every day though, more issues Apple didn’t discover in the early developer betas and GM seeds start to appear. Read more

Enable AirPlay for Video In Third-Party Apps

Disappointed Apple didn’t enable AirPlay streaming for video on all apps on iOS 4.2.1 for iPhone and iPad? Well, we are too. We thought we’d be able to stream just about anything from our iDevices to the new Apple TV, but it turns out you can only stream video using AirPlay from Apple’s native apps. Streaming video in Safari isn’t enabled, nor is it in 3rd party apps and Apple’s own camera roll. Bummer.

Fortunately, TUAW’s Erica Sadun has done some good hacking to find out what exactly is going on under the hood. She decompiled the frameworks and got ahold of Apple’s APIs and, without entering the most technical details, it seems like the whole concept is still a little bit rough for the average developer.

So caveat hackteur – this isn’t going to be appropriate for the casual developer. Yet.

Having gotten this proof of concept working, there’s still a lot left to get done to transform this into a stable solution that works with general applications. Keep in mind that you’ll be working with unpublished APIs, so the above classes and code are not App Store Safe. That’s why we have a jailbreak world, after all.

Head over the video below and see what Erica got working on her iPad. AirPlay for video in 3rd party apps isn’t impossible, I guess we just need to wait for Apple to officially enable it. Maybe in iOS 4.3? Read more

MacStories Black Friday Guide: 150 Great iOS Apps [Update: Mac Apps, Gadgets]

With Thanksgiving just around the corner and that credit card already set up with your iTunes account, it’s impossible to resist the temptation to grab all those discounted apps in the App Store. Indeed, great deals have surfaced this past week and we’re also waiting for Apple to go public with its own Black Friday deals.

We don’t think you should force yourself to not buy all those discounted apps and gadgets because you have to save money for the iPhone 5. No, there’s time for that. We want to offer you a roundup of the best apps we think are currently discounted for Thanksgiving, great pieces of software we have reviewed in the past and you should go buy right now. We haven’t listed any app in here, we have simply collected the ones we love.

So jump after the break, fire up iTunes and check out these amazing deals from the App Store. Read more

iOS 4.2.1 RAM Usage Visualized

iOS 4.2 is a major new update for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad – built on the strong foundation of iOS 4 – which introduces many new features, fixes and overall performance improvements. If you ever wondered how much iOS 4.2 improved the experience from a memory usage standpoint, take a look at the graph below, compiled by the guys over at iPadevice.

The graph doesn’t come with a provided scale, but it gives you a quick idea of the performance improvements Apple focused on for the release of iOS 4.2 for iPad.