Since the advent of iMessage Read Receipts, there have been a lot of mixed feelings about them. Some people like them while others think they’re creepy as all hell. I’ve always had them on because I have a fairly liberal view of my privacy and don’t really think that it’s that big of a deal.

Usually, I like to have them enabled to let whomever I am communicating with to know that I’ve read and acknowledged their message. If you’re talking to a fairly reasonable person, and you didn’t get back to them right away, the logical conclusion they should draw is that you saw the message but don’t have time to respond right away. Maybe you were driving or in a situation that you can’t reply immediately.

Anyway, all of these problems or misunderstandings can be alleviated with one simple tweak: SafeTexting by Aaron Thomas, which is $1.00 on the BigBoss repo or SafeTexting Lite which is free with a limited feature set. The paid version allows you to chose when to send the Read Receipts and hide your typing indicator.

Head on over to Cydia and check out the lite version to give it a shot if you’re interested. Continue reading this post ->

Image via Gotta Be Mobile

When Apple introduced the new and improved App Switcher in iOS 7 it gave people the ability to easily close apps by swiping up on the preview card. Something happened where a large portion of people with iPhones became obsessed with swiping up and killing apps; almost as if they’re afraid of seeing them in the App Switcher at all. In this article, I will be covering what your iPhone is doing in the background, why you shouldn’t kill apps, and the exceptions for when you should.

I would also like to mention that the inspiration and most of the technical content of this article some from reddit user Secretss, who was kind enough to let me turn her write-up into an article.

To get started we will get some vocabulary out of the way by defining some terms relevant to iOS’s background memory management.

Backgrounding Capability

The grace period for background tasks in iOS is 10 minutes, which is set by default is the system’s configuration. That said, the app itself may be coded to have a shorter limit. This is what happens to your apps if they have backgrounding capability:

1. Foreground app gets minimized. (home button is pressed)
2. iOS to app, “Ok bro, you need to sleep now.”
3. App to iOS, “No wait! I’m not tired, I still have something to do!”
4. iOS to app, “Alright you have 10 minutes, then it’s bedtime.”
5. App does stuff/waits around.
6. 10 minutes later, or sooner if the app is done with it’s activities it goes into hibernation, gets shelved and removed from active memory.

The above only applies if the app isn’t doing the following:

• Using location services.
• Giving navigation directions.
• Using VoIP to wait for incoming calls.
• Recording audio.
• Playing music or in a call.

If the app falls into one of the categories above, then it will the app will stay in the background indefinitely. A example of when it’s a good idea to kill an app is after you’ve used navigation, but no longer need it (think: Google Maps). If you keep it open it’s going to be constantly requesting your location and therefore using up that precious battery.

There is speculation that some third-party navigation apps will go to sleep by themselves if left in the background too long or the phone is locked.

Yesterday in part one of this mini-series I covered what happens when you close out of app without killing it and Background App Refresh which allows apps to download and update data in the background. To finish things up, in part two I’ll be covering what happens when you kill an app permanently (swiping up on the app in the app switcher) along with some final thoughts and things to consider if you kill apps on a regular basis.

Killing an App:

When iOS itself (not the user) terminates an app it is meant to shelf the app in its current state. It is like pouring liquid nitrogen all over a LEGO play set in its current mess and then chucking that masterpiece on a shelf. It’s removed from the play area (active memory) and isn’t taking up system resources anymore. When it’s opened again, the LEGOs are magically thawed and you continue with the mess. Here it is in Apple’s words.

The user terminating by swiping the app from the app switcher is like sweeping every LEGO piece into a box, and filing the box back in the warehouse in alphabetical order. When you want to open it again, the system has to spend more juice/resources to locate the box, pull it out, open the lid and set everything up. Even without demanding it to return to the artsy mess you had it in before, this still takes more energy – because unfreezing it is really just that much less effort for the system.

Every time an app launches from the warehouse, a verification is done between that app’s purchase info containing the purchasing AppleID and the list of AppleIDs your device has been authorized with. If there is a match, the app gets decrypted and run. This decryption happens every time you start an app after killing it in the app switcher. For a more in-depth description of what happens, read this quote from trusted tweak developer Ryan Petrich. Continue reading this post ->

Notifications for Reddit is a simple new app developed by Andrew Chang (/u/RedBanHammer) that does just one thing and does it very well — real push notifications for everyone’s favorite social bookmarking site. Currently, it is $0.99 for the launch special and will go up to $1.99 shortly after. Strangely though, this is the first app that has push notifications for Reddit. When I say “push notifications” I don’t mean enabling background refresh to occasionally fetch your messages from Reddit servers while simultaneously gobbling down half of your battery life in the process. With this app you don’t even have to have background app refresh enabled, all the heavy lifting is done by his servers, and it simply delivers your messages when they are received. He has even integrated several Reddit apps including Alien Blue, AMRC, Biscuit, and up and coming Apollo so that when you tap on the message it will open your favorite client. It’s also a fairly decent inbox manager for Reddit, although the original plan was to just enable the push notification to open other apps. When he discovered the limitations of open messages within those other apps he chose to develop an inbox client as well. Continue reading this post ->

Ahead of the Apple Watch launch on Friday, Apple has published a new support page going over the Watches heart rate monitor. We know that the Apple Watch tracks your heart rate when you’re doing a workout and every periodically throughout the day. Using the Heart Rate Glance, the user can check their heart rate as many times as they please. The Watch is also capable of determining the amount of calories burned per day using intensity data recorded during workouts.

The support document notes that the Apple Watch will be recording your heart rate every 10 minutes. This data will be recorded in the in-house Health app for viewing this data at a later date and for third-party iPhone app support.

The Watch has incredible software features, but the hardware is just as great. Apple also has a diagram of how the Apple Watch should be worn for the best accuracy.

The function on the Watch isn’t perfect either. To get an accurate reading, Apple recommends having the Watch close to your skin. Obviously, other aspects of the human body can negatively effect the Watches reading of the heart rate, as Apple claims.

A fancy way of describing how much blood flows through your skin, skin perfusion varies significantly from person to person and can also be impacted by the environment. If you’re exercising in the cold, for example, the skin perfusion in your wrist may be too low for the heart rate sensor to get a reading. Motion is another factor. Rhythmic movements, such as running or cycling, give better results compared to irregular movements, like tennis or boxing.

Will you be able to reliably trust the Apple Watch reading your heart rate? Continue reading this post ->