Getting board of the same old Siri look? Change it with one of these amazing themes!


Neurotech Siri - Replaces the Siri icon with a futuristic/alien-like Siri icon which glows when you speak.


Diamond Siri - Replaces the Siri icon with a diamond which spins when you speak.


Siri Glowing Apple - Replaces the Siri icon with an Apple logo which glows when you speak in several colors.


All of these can be found in Cydia and enabled within Winterboard after installing.

Booksstand is a Cydia Tweak that will put your dusty old Newsstand to use by creating book shortcuts. Instead of subscriptions, your Newsstand can now hold your favorite books for quick referencing. After installing, open up iBooks, tap edit, choose a book or two, tap move, and choose Booksstand. This will add the items you selected to your Newsstand when you can just tap the cover art to open the book! If you aren't big on subscriptions but read some books or PDFs on your iDevice, this is perfect for you. Booksstand can be found in the Cydia Store for $.99 under the Big Boss repo.

SlideToMod is a Cydia Tweak that will allow you to customize your Slide to Unlock bar. Now we've seen many tweaks already which do this but there is one feature here that could be useful. Within the settings, you can set a custom title, date, or time to be shown instead of your "Slide To Unlock" text. You can also disable the camera button, media controls, and Slide Show(ipad) buttons. Finally, this tweak give you the ability to set set an Activator option to unlock your device. Instead of sliding all the time, why not tap the volume buttons or double-tap the status bar? You can find SlideToMod in the Cydia Store under the Big Boss repo for FREE.

Apple has filed another patent. And this time is for something really interesting and potentially futuristic. The US Patent & Trademark Office has received Apple’s solicitation to registers multiple patents affiliated to the concept of “macroscalar processor architecture”.

Scattered rumors about such technology have been randomly spotted, because reportedly Apple has been focusing on it since 2004. The patents discussed here appear to be the “continuation” sort, meaning that they appear to complement and expand upon previously granted patents.

The inventor of the technology is listed as being Jeffry Gonion who has worked with Apple as Platform Architect since 2003, when the Cupertino company snatched him from the Geneva-based semiconductor firm SMMicroelectornics.

So what is this macroscalar technology supposed to achieve? Well basically processors benefiting from it would be able to maintain separate pipelines allowing the device sporting them to run multiple set of instructions, without having to halt and wait for the first to be completed.

“The parallelism is parallelism "generated at run-time, rather than scavenged, improving efficiency and performance while reducing power dissipation per task. The number of program registers is increased considerably, and over-specification of binary code for a specific processor is avoided, replaced by mechanisms which may ensure that software for prior versions of the processors automatically utilize additional execution resources in future versions."

Recently filled patent are a reason to get excited about them being incorporated into the iPhone 5 and iPad 3, but in all honesty it is too early to tell. Even if this technology has been developing in Apple’s labs for years, it is still not a good indicator that it will jump out and unto the new devices this very year.


Source: Main Device

Mathematica’s computational search engine Wolfram Alpha, has developed a special friendship with Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri. As it turns out, the little artificially intelligent software accounts for 25% of all searches ever made with the engine, reports the New York Times.

Wolfram Alpha is a special search program because it allows users to type in complex queries, providing accurate answers thanks to the structured data which contains hundreds and hundreds of datasets.

“Less than three years ago, Dr. Wolfram created a new kind of search engine, called Wolfram Alpha. Unlike Google or Microsoft’s Bing, Wolfram Alpha does not forage the Web. It culls its own painstakingly curated database to find answers. [...] the technology has come a long way; including delivering many answers for Siri, the question-answering personal assistant in the Apple iPhone 4S.”

Google should start sweating now, because by the look of things, Siri has become enamored with Wolfram Alpha and is almost ready to put Google out of mind. If right now, you would be telling Siri to “Google the X restaurant” when the results would come up, you’ll be hit in the face with tons of adverts. On the other hand if you ask “Which is the closest Chinese place” (yes, you are very hungry) Wolfram Alpha will produce clean search queries with no advertise infestation attached to it.

Originally intended just for math and science queries, the Wolfram has expanded into areas that would benefit most average consumers who happen to be owners of the iPhone 4S.


Source: iMore

According to a report on Eurogamer today, Gears of War and Infinity Blade publisher Epic Games has won the rights to release four iOS games based on the Fighting Fantasy role-playing series of books. However, there’s a slight twist to the news, in that as part of the Make Something Unreal Live Challenge, Epic has farmed the task of making the games out to four start-up studios, who get to use Epic's Unreal Development Kit in the process. Epic is giving them one book each to work on, from a choice of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, The Citadel of Chaos, Deathtrap Dungeon and Armies of Death. The four studios are The A-Team, Nova Eye, Team Gandalf and an “all star” group, and they won the chance to make the games after competing in the Epic Game Jam contest. The finished games will be shown at the Gadget Show Live event in Birmingham, UK in April, with a panel of judges selecting the ultimate winner, who will be awarded the prize of a full source commercial Unreal Engine 3 license for making iOS games.

"Steve Jackson and I are delighted to see our Fighting Fantasy gamebooks being developed as iOS games by new teams of talented and enthusiastic students. It will be really interesting to see how our IP will be captured and interpreted for the iOS platform," Fighting Fantasy co-creator Ian Livingstone told Eurogamer.

Source: Epic secures rights to Fighting Fantasy iOS games • News • Eurogamer.net

Mixed news for Sprint today, as reported on by AllThingsD’s Ina Fried, with the company announcing a big net loss for the fourth quarter of 2011, but increased revenue and customers. As far as the bad(ish) news goes, Sprint reported that it lost $1.3 billion or 43 cents per share on revenue of $8.7 billion for the three months ending December 31, according to Fried. This is up from a loss of $929 million or 31 cents per share on revenue of $8.3 billion for the same period in 2010. But now for the good news, as Sprint also reported that it gained more than 1.6 million customers in the fourth quarter of 2011, including prepaid, wholesale and contract. The company also revealed during its earnings conference call that it sold 1.8 million iPhones in the fourth quarter, which was the first quarter in which it had the iPhone, with 40% of those sales being to new customers. In total over the year, the company added more than 5 million net new customers and grew wireless service revenue by more than 5 percent, said Sprint CEO Dan Hesse, who is overall very happy with Sprint’s performance, singling out the iPhone for particular praise:

“Our strong fourth quarter performance illustrates the power of matching iconic devices like the iPhone with our simple, unlimited plans and industry-leading customer experience,” said Hesse.

Source: Sprint Posts Wide Loss, Big Gain in Revenue and Customers - Ina Fried - Mobile - AllThingsD
Sprint Sells 1.8 Million iPhones in Initial Quarter - Ina Fried - Mobile - AllThingsD

AllThingsD’s Ina Fried has an exclusive interview today with Vonage Mobile CEO Marc Lefar, talking about the company’s new iOS app, which is released today, and which provides free calls and messages to users within the Vonage Mobile network. International calls are also available for a small cost, which Vonage says is less than that charged by other carriers or by Skype for the same service. Fried says that Vonage believes that its top-quality HD audio and brand name recognition with consumers should help it win customers from rivals.

“We think there is a very large marketplace, and while it is fragmented right now, three to four years later, there will be a couple of winners,” Lefar told Fried.

Clearly, Lefar is hoping that Vonage will be among the "winners", although as he points out, mobile apps are just a very small part of the company’s $900 million business.

Click here to download the free app: App Store - Vonage Mobile - Free International Calls & Texts

Source: Exclusive: Vonage CEO on His Company's New iPhone and Android Apps - Ina Fried - Mobile - AllThingsD