iOS

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Square Enix announced earlier this year at E3 that it would bring back its beloved Final Fantasy VII title as a remake for consoles, PC, and iOS. Today, the iPhone and iPad version of the game officially arrives on the App Store.

While we learned previously that Square Enix wouldn’t be using its Luminous Engine for the remake, the game’s iTunes page does confirm that the iOS title is a direct “port based on Final Fantasy VII for PC” and arrives without any changes to the original game’s storyline. It’s also made some enhancements specially for the iPhone and iPad version…
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Data from Appsee claims to have identified information regarding the as-yet-unannounced larger iPad Pro, expected to feature a display ranging between 12.3 and 12.9 inches. The app analytics firm says an iPad with identifier ‘iPad6,8’ appeared in its logs with a reported screen resolution of 2732×2048. Internally, the larger iPad models are referred to as J98 and J99. The resolution is especially notable as it was previously spotted within code for iOS 9. For comparison, the current iPad Air 2 has a screen resolution of 2048×1536 with a ‘iPad5,1’ model identifier.

The jump in pixels for both axis is substantial although somewhat expected given the screen will also be increasing in area by about 80%. AppSee says its logs indicate the device has been used to open several apps from the App Store. The company has also identified ‘iPhone 8,1’ and ‘iPhone8,2’ devices corresponding to the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus.

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Another day, another series of iPhone rumors. Yesterday’s roundup included the latest information about a September 18th next-generation iPhone launch date, faked benchmarks, and new system-on-a-chip schematics, and today our roundup covers a likely fake rose gold iPhone 6S image, reservations for the new phone from carriers, and Germany, and a pair of claims out of China about future iPhone models. Let’s start with the rose gold image:

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Over the weekend, we learned some preliminary details about Apple’s planned updates for two of their most popular Mac accessories, the Apple Wireless Keyboard and Magic Mouse, in the form of FCC filings. Aside from new and improved connectivity thanks to Bluetooth 4.2, both accessories appear to have design deviations from their existing models, as detailed by the rough sketches accompanying the FCC filings. Based on these sketches, I decided to more fully visualize the changes Apple could be planning for an all new and more modern wireless keyboard based on other modern Apple product designs.

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Earlier this month SwiftKey for iOS gained a new emoji insight feature called “My Signature Emoji,” and now the company is further expanding on its emoji insight offerings. The company announced today that it is rolling out two new emoji insight features to users of its app, called “My Top Emoji” and “Emoji State.”

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Nuance, the voice recognition and productivity software company behind the iOS keyboard’s Dictation feature, today has revealed a series of updates to its applications and a new cloud-based synchronization service at the core. Nuance provided us with a demonstration last week of the new iOS and Mac apps, and we came away impressed with the accuracy, speed, and capabilities of the upgraded platform.

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A new study from research firm MusicWatch shares some insight into Apple Music usage, including the percentages of users the subscription streaming service has been able to attract from Apple’s old iTunes music platform and competing services.

Around 11 percent of iOS users report actually using Apple Music (although 77 percent were aware it had launched), and that number is approximately the same among users purchasing or managing their music through iTunes. Compare those numbers to the approximately 40 percent of iOS users that MusicWatch says buy music in the form of digital downloads through iTunes.

In addition, the report notes that usage among existing iTunes Radio users sits at 18 percent. That would mean Apple Music has only attracted a small portion of iTunes users in general. While the numbers compared to iTunes usage are low, MusicWatch notes that the service has been able to convert around 52% of users that gave the service a try since launch. To me, that’s a good sign that the biggest hurdle is actually getting users to try the service. But how does usage relate to that of competitive services?…

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Fitness device maker Misfit and swim-accessory expert Speedo are hitting the pool together this summer to create a special version of the fitness tracking Shine wearable made especially for swimmers. The Speedo Shine is enhanced for workouts in the pool thanks to “proprietary lap counting algorithms with industry-leading accuracy” that swimmers should appreciate. Data captured by Speedo Shine syncs up wirelessly with Misfit’s iPhone app over Bluetooth for evaluating workouts in the pool and hitting swim goals. And while the water resistant Apple Watch with non-leather bands plays nice with some water, Speedo Shine is made with swimmers in mind and waterproofed to 50 meters.
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Apple today announced that it will be holding its annual music festival across 10 days during the month of September in London. Previously known as the iTunes Festival, this year’s show is known as the “Apple Music Festival” in reference the recently launched Apple Music service. It is also notably shorter than the typical 30 days of concerts. Pharrell Williams, One Direction, Florence + The Machine and Disclosure will be the headlining acts at this year’s festival, which takes place from September 19th to September 28th.

Apple’s Eddy Cue in addition to the main artists have commented on the announcement:

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Earlier this month, the United States Patent Office made a non-final ruling that one of Apple’s design patents for the original iPhone is invalid within Apple’s long-running lawsuit against Samsung, according to a report from FOSS Patents. This particular patent, as seen in the drawings above, references the overall design of the original iPhone launched in 2007. It is known as the “D’677” patent in court proceedings and legal documents. FOSS explains the reasoning behind the invalidation:

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Apple plans to hold one of its annual fall media events on Wednesday, September 9th to introduce the new iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus with Force Touch, and after many fits and starts, it appears that the long-awaited next-generation Apple TV will also be unveiled. We’ve been reporting on this upcoming model since 2014, as Apple has been planning to update its set-top-box with support for an App Store for quite some time.

Earlier this year, Apple had locked in a June WWDC debut for both the new Apple TV hardware and software upgrades, but the company ultimately decided to delay the introduction until the fall. While some had speculated that the announcement was pushed back due to a lack of content deals, we are told that the delay was internally attributed to a concern over compromising iOS 9 engineering resources, as the latest OS release is focused at least as much on polish as on new features.

Why would the new Apple TV potentially take away resources from iOS 9? According to sources, this new Apple TV model, codenamed J34, will be the first model to run a full-blown iOS core. Specifically, the new Apple TV operating system will be a TV-optimized version of iOS 9. In addition to the new hardware inside, running iOS 9 will give the new Apple TV a series of benefits over the current model. Below, we explore what users can expect from Apple’s next-generation living room product.

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Artwork by shoplemonde.de

While we’ve reported extensively on what to expect from Apple’s next generation iPhone 6S — including Force Touch in May and what enhancements it offers last week — a fresh set of rumors are floating around today regarding the pending iPhone model ranging from expected, known, and spoofed. We’ll unpack each one below:
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While a larger iPad Pro and a thinner, more powerful iPad mini are likely in the cards for this fall, Apple’s flagship 9.7-inch tablet sounds like it will be left out of this year’s update cycle. In a new report today, hit-or-miss Taiwanese technology trade website Digitimes says that Apple is not preparing a third-generation iPad Air for this fall. This follows up on a report from earlier this year that claimed that such a tablet would not debut until 2016.

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Apple has quietly added a new data restore feature to iCloud.com, enabling users to rollback accidentally deleted documents, calendar changes and contacts. The new ‘Restore Files’, ‘Restore Contacts’ and ‘Restore Calendars’ features are hidden in iCloud.com Advanced Settings pane.

Seemingly unrelated to iCloud backup, Apple shows snapshots of your recently deleted documents and lets you put them back onto iCloud Drive. This means there is now a way to recover accidentally deleted iCloud documents for the first time, because there is no equivalent to the Trash folder in iCloud.

Similarly, Contacts restoration shows timestamped snapshots of  your iCloud contacts database. Restoring to an earlier version reverts all changes made since the backup date. Unlike with files, you cannot individually restore single contacts. The same is true for Calendars.

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Update: Apple appears to have now disabled external testing in iTunes Connect again after briefly enabling it this afternoon.

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When Apple updated the TestFlight app for iOS 9 compatiblity earlier this month, it came with the caveat that developers could only submit iOS 9 betas to members of their own teams. Today, however, the company has enabled external testing, allowing developers to start pushing iOS 9-ready betas to any users.

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Apple has released an official iOS update for all users with iOS 8.4.1 now available. The update follows the major iOS 8.4 release which included an all-new Music app with Apple Music, the new subscription music service, plus Beats 1, Apple’s Internet-based radio station with live DJs. Apple initially started testing the changes in iOS 8.4.1 with developers in mid-July. The maintenance update includes several issue fixes for Apple Music and Beats 1. 
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Google today has started rolling out an update to its iOS app for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. The update, the first significant update to come to the app in some amount of time, bumps it to version 7.0 and includes a handful of notable new features.

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Flight tracking apps have been popular on iOS for as long as the platform had the App Store, and this fall Apple is baking a key function of those apps right into the operating system. A little known feature called ‘flights data detector’ is included in both iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan but was not highlighted on stage during Apple’s WWDC keynote. As one Reddit user highlighted, the feature lets iOS automatically detect when text is referencing a flight and allows users to actually check on the flight’s status and progress with an attractive interface. Here’s how it works on iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac…
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