Intro? No.

Dashboard X. First let me say that I probably wet myself when I first installed this. I thought that this would be one of those tweaks that are faulty and break everything it could. I was completely wrong about that. Dashboard X from Ori is the tweak of the month for me. Now iPhones can still beat Androids because of this. It’s putting widgets on your homescreen. Widgets designed for Dashboard X and for the Notifcation Center! It’s a simple process. You hold ANYWHERE on the homescreen, and it’ll go into wiggle mode. Then  you hold it again and something pops up. That something is the start of a whole new life for your device. It’s the place where you activate widgets. When you tap on one, you’ll have the choice of two options. 1 = Interaction & 2 = Auto Center. Interaction is if you want to be able to touch the widgets. Like if you are using the weather NC widget, you’ll be able to swipe on it and see the forecast if Interaction is turned on. Auto Center just adjusts the widget to the center. Though sometimes it’s off by the slightest much and it messes with you. (or at least me)

Dashboard X is $1.99 in Cydia.

BatteryInfo from Chef, is the best Notification Center tweak out there that deals with the battery. It has plentiful to show you and it’s amazing! It shows you your capacity of the battery, (factory and the condition now), tells you the temperature of the battery which is again amazes me. Then it has your load cycles and a lot more in it. It used to be a huge widget, would take up half of the screen, but they shortened it into a half of that and it’s so awesome. If I were you, I would totally buy this now.

BatteryInfo is $0.99 in Cydia.

Switchy. (from John Coates) The tweak that was imagined, has came to be.  Switchy was originally from a blog someone has posted. (which if I can find, I’ll post) and this person thought that the multitasking tray could have been improved much more if Apple could aim for other things. Someone made that happen a few days after. I personally thought that this would not be a tweak to happen in a long time. But I was proven wrong.  It pushes the multitasking tray up further for more space. The first section is basically settings with your Settings.app in there, Brightness bar, and a button for ending all apps. The next slide over is your music. It has the same buttons as before, even the sound bar. But now it shows you the songs name, artist and album name. Pretty neat. Slide over again and it’s an extended multitask tray. Instead of one coloumn, there are two. So that means you don’t need to slide as much to find that one app that is still running in the background. All in all, it’s an amazing tweak and I love it, oh so much.

Switchy is $1 in Cydia.

How many times have you found yourself searching online or even visiting multiple stores to get the best prices on the many items you purchase for your household from week to week? You might go to one store for great prices on produce, another to purchase the cheapest generic canned items, and yet a third store to get pet food at the greatest discount. In short, you could be putting a lot of extra effort into saving a few measly bucks. And why should you? Shouldn’t retailers be competing for your business rather than making you work to buy their goods? This is the question that NetPlenish co-founders Dave Compton and Steve Markowitz asked themselves, and the result is a mobile app that allows users to find the best prices on the brands they buy every day.

This isn’t the first price-comparison app to hit the market. Many people have been using RedLaser (or similar apps) for the last few years. Previous entries to this shopping-app category have mainly included barcode scanners, though, which allow users to scan the barcode on any item (or enter the name of the item manually) to search for lower prices at nearby establishments. And while this is certainly a handy program for the average shopper, the problem is that it still requires users to run hither and yon to collect products at the best possible prices.

NetPlenish, in a way, seeks to remove this element of effort from the equation. The app will save you both money and time by allowing you to order a bevy of products online (although you may initially scan items from your weekly shopping lists to easily recall them later). While you might not be too keen to have perishable items like meats, dairy products, and frozen goods shipped to your house, there are plenty of non-perishable goods that you can order online, securing the best prices and front-door delivery in the process.

Although you will have to pay a little extra for shipping, large orders may result in reduced or even free shipping (although it depends on the retailer). And the best part is, you don’t even have to go from site to site to compare prices; the app does it for you (making up for shipping by saving you on fuel). All you have to do is set searches for the items you want to buy, create shopping carts, and check out (the app will even store your credit card information to make ordering items as quick and painless as possible). Of course, it won’t do your couponing for you (and sites like FreeStuffandSamples.com are definitely not featured). But it can save you tons of time and money, which is sure to please plenty of consumers.

What’s interesting to note is that while this app has obvious appeal to consumers, there are also plenty of retailers ready to jump on board. They want consumers to know when they are offering the lowest prices to make sure increased sales, and NetPlenish can help them get that information to the public. So far, several big names have signed on, including OfficeMax, PetSmart, Sears, Sephora, and Target (among others). And with more retailers being added every day, you may soon be able to use this handy app to secure the best prices on nearly everything you purchase. So download this freebie from the iTunes Store or Android Marketplace post-haste and get started with saving.

NetPlenish
Developer: NetPlenish Inc

Rated: 4+

Price: free Download

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I’ve missed last week’s tweak week because we simply didn’t have any tweaks that really were good. But this week, we have some interesting tweaks, and some free pizza! (we really don’t have any free pizza).

First up we have Giffy, a tweak that should have been added into the iOS itself, made from IanP. Lets back up a second. When you save a picture from Safari, it saves it in Photos.app. But when you save a .gif file and when it goes into Photos.app, it is only the still image. But with Giffy, it saves the whole “video”. There isn’t a play button to watch it play, it just plays as soon as you tap on the pictures icon. If you think this is stupid, think again. This is what makes jailbreaking iDevices fun and exciting, being able to do something you wanted it to do from the start.

Giffy is $1.99 in Cydia.

Next up is Auto App Killer from ipodtouchmaster. Auto App Killer frees up apps that are taking up too much memory. Let’s say you have a some apps open, and you are playing a game like COD:BOZ. The iDevice will try and free as minimal as possible, allowing the game to run on minimum RAM and not maximum. But with Auto App Killer you can choose and decide when the iOS will kill an app. In Settings.app, there is a slider for the tweak that allows you to choose when apps should be killed when the RAM gets low or at a certain point. It’s really great when you have a device that doesn’t have a lot of RAM to begin with.

Auto App Killer is $1.49 in Cydia.

Lastly is SwipeSelection from iKy1e. SwipeSelection allows you to use gestures on the keyboard. I have yet to find all gestures, (if there are more than one). But now editing on your iDevice just gotten easier than cutting pie with a coat hanger. You can swipe back on the keyboard and your cursor will move back also and put on finger on the keyboard and another swipes back and it will highlight that text. Pretty neat-o.

SwipeSelection is free in Cydia.

The weather plays a crucial role in our everyday lives. It tells us what activities we can safely and comfortably partake in on any given day at any given hour. It lets us know whether we should carry along our raincoats or our sunscreen, and it helps us decide how to dress when we wake up in the morning. Knowing the weather can even be life-saving in the event that a severe tornado or hurricane is approaching your area, requiring that you take cover or evacuate. It is, therefore, extremely important that you have easy access to accurate information about the weather so that you can plan your days accordingly. With your iPhone at your side, there is no longer any need to turn on the weather channel or check on your computer to receive up-to-date information about the weather. Although the iPhone comes equipped with a built-in weather tool, it can only offer the basics such as the predicted high and low temperatures for the day. For that reason, we have put together a review of the best weather apps available in the Apple App Store.

• The Weather Channel

The first app on our list is The Weather Channel. One of the most popular and useful apps available, it provides you with access to a wide range of information about the weather including the temperature, wind speed, humidity, the UV index, the dew point, and more for a given area. It also provides you with the hourly, 36-hour, and 10-day forecast so that you can plan the upcoming days well in advance. Other useful features include an interactive map with animated radar, the Social feature that enables you to read and post tweets about weather in your area, and the iWitness feature where users can view and upload images and videos of the local weather conditions. US users also receive notifications about severe weather alerts. Best of all, the app is completely free. The one complaint that users often report is that it has large, distracting advertisements, but dealing with such ads is worth it to keep such a useful app free of charge.

• Weather HD

Weather HD is next on our list due to its absolutely stunning visuals. Weather HD goes beyond giving you the basic information such as the current temperature, highs and lows, humidity, chance of rain, and wind speed. In addition to providing all of that, it takes advantage of the iPhone’s high-tech screen to present you with vibrant, high-definition videos that represent what the weather currently looks like in your area. If it currently storming outside in your area, the background of the app will be an HD video of a thunderstorm; if it is sunny and slightly cloudy, sunlight and clouds is exactly what you will see on your screen. In fact, these video representations are so accurate that they even represent the current time of day so that the graphics are lighter during the day and darker at night. The utter eye candy that this app will provide you is well worth the $0.99 you will spend on Weather HD.

• AccuWeather for iPhone

The next app on our list, AccuWeather for iPhone, is another free app that is very similar to The Weather Channel app. With AccuWeather, you can view the 15-day forecast for your area or an area to which you are traveling so that you can plan the next two weeks ahead of time. AccuWeather offers an enormous database of weather data with information on over 2.7 million locations throughout the world. Useful features include severe weather alerts, calendar integration, social sharing options that enable you to effortlessly share weather updates with your loved ones, interactive maps, and contact location viewing so that you can see the weather where any of your contacts live. In addition, AccuWeather is a must-have if you suffer from weather-related health issues such as allergies since it gives health-related forecasts. It will even let you know how suitable the current weather conditions are for outdoor activities such as walking your dog or mowing your lawn. The only issue that many users have reported is that the latest version, 5.0.1, has a somewhat cluttered interface.

• PocketWeather

Finally, the last app on our list, PocketWeather, is notable, not only for its extensive feature set, but also because it is available in a lengthy list of languages. Whether you speak English, Spanish, Swedish, Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, German, Hebrew, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Greek, Italian, or Danish, PocketWeather will satisfy your weather-information needs. The app is able to provide you extremely accurate information about the predicted temperatures, highs and lows, humidity, hourly forecast dawn, sunrise, sunset, zenith, precipitation, and dusk times for the upcoming ten days. Moreover, it comes with useful features including earthquake maps, temperature graphs, coverage of the sun and moon, and an up-to-date summary of the weather conditions in your area at the moment. PocketWeather is another free app that provides you with much more information than the iPhone’s built-in weather tool.

The App Store is loaded with weather apps, and we have picked out four of the best for your convenience. After reading our review simplify your life by heading over to the App Store to download the one that best suits your needs.

Thanks to John Page for this guest post. E-mail him.

Read more:

• How to connect your iPad to the TV: Different methods – http://www.softwarewithstyle.com/guides/16
• iPhone battery life – http://www.softwarewithstyle.com/question/show/id/34
• 10 Useful, little-known facts about the iPhone – http://www.softwarewithstyle.com/guides/12

College has gone digital allowing students to earn a bachelor’s degree and even online masters degrees. Now it’s time for primary and secondary education to join the digital fun, too. One such app, Three Ring, aims to help schools and students do just that.

With this app, students losing homework and blaming the dog for eating it could come to an end. Using Three Ring, teachers can easily create a digital portfolio for each student where they can organize, grade, and share all assignments. The app, in conjunction with Three Ring‘s website, allows teachers to take either a video recording or a picture of student’s work using a phone or other device and then upload quickly and easily onto the website. Basically, it’s like an online filing cabinet where a teacher can keep track of all student work. It eliminates the possibility of a teacher losing an assignment in the depths of the filing cabinet and keeps the students’ work front and center, where it belongs.

Using a digital portfolio would provide a more efficient grading system and help both teachers and parents track a student’s performance. Still in its beta stage, the app seeks more seed funding but that hasn’t stopped it from making a name for itself already in the world of education. Last week Three Ring earned the award for Best Education Startup at New York Tech Day. Launched only six weeks ago, nearly 2,000 educators in Maryland, New York, and Delaware are using the app. They hope to make it available for parents, teachers, and administrators in the near future. Students would be able to turn in homework assignments digitally and the teachers could send a student’s assignments with feedback straight to the parents.

The creators, Steve Silvius, Alec Turnbull, and Michael Lindsay, education reform enthusiasts, say their goal was creating an easier way to maintain and organize student portfolios since portfolios are powerful teaching tool but can be burdensome to manage.

How the app works is the teacher first snaps a picture or video of a student’s work, tags the work with the correct student name, assignment, type of assignment and how that assignment meets any of the common core standards. Then the teacher sends it to Three Ring‘s website and has access to it at any time from a computer or Internet-capable device.

The teacher has a choice of how they organize their students’ portfolios and can search the work either by class or by student name. They can group assignments together and label them however is easiest for the teacher to later search those assignments. They don’t have to sort through a mess of papers to find a specific assignment to grade and comment on, they simply have to search it on the website.

The creators hope to sell the app and website service to any schools who want to use the Three Ring system. However, Linsday made it a point to say that he and the fellow creators don’t mean for this app to replace handwritten assignments; it’s more meant to help teachers organize all those assignments and lessen their load they have to take home each night. It also is a digitized record of a student’s performance in the class making it very easy for other teachers, administrators and parents to track how a student is doing all around.

It can take hours to create your own filing system and then tons of effort to maintain that system. Three Ring makes filing and organizing student work easy and less time consuming, which, in the life of a busy teacher, would make a world of difference. Rating: 4/5 stars.

Editor’s Note

Thanks to Evan Fischer for this quest post. He is a freelance writer and part-time student at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California.

Three Ring
Developer: Alec Turnbull

Rated: 4+

Price: free Download

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