If there's one thing iMore loves even more than iPhones and iPads (and iPods!), it's giving cool iPhone and iPad accessories and apps to our awesome readers. This week we have amazing cases from both Element and Pad& Quill! The winners are:
The official eBay app for iPhone just got a nice update that brings a UI refresh to the online auction service. The bump up to version 3.0 adds a general refresh to most areas of the app, and improves photos in listings making them now much larger and better looking. Photos also now look larger in search results at the tap of a button, though iOS 6 and above is required for this.
Hangouts for iPhone and iPad is Google's new cross-platform messaging app that lets you converse with your friends regardless of what phone, tablet, or computer they are using. It features a beautiful, clean design and support for video messaging.
There's a new iTunes update in town, and at the top of the list of new goodies is a new look MiniPlayer. The tiny little iTunes window has had a makeover that now includes a progress bar for the track currently playing, alongside your album artwork too. It may well be tiny, but it does look a lot nicer now, so good job on that front, Apple.
Amid the extravaganza that is Google I/O, the folks from Mountain View quietly pushed out an update to one of their applications that finally catches up with the times. Google Play Books has never quite matched iBooks or Amazon's Kindle, but the latest update to their iOS app finally adds support for PDF files and ePUB books bought from other sources.
Apple’s handling of location data has made its way back into headlines recently due to a tool written by security researcher Hubert Seiwert. Seiwert presented the iSniff GPS tool, which makes it easy to capture potentially sensitive iPhone user data, last July at the Blackhat USA security conference and posted the source code to Github a month later. While the tool isn’t particularly new, it has been the recipient of some media attention after being covered earlier this month by SC Magazine. While the disclosure of the sensitive information by iPhones was previously known, iSniff makes the information more easily accessible and is worth a closer look to determine if users need to worry.
Legendary game designer Jordan Mechner went back to his roots in 2012 with a reimagined Karateka, a brand new game based on his original 1984 Apple II hit (it would eventually make its way to just about every other common home computer platform of the day). Now the original has returned in all its eight-bit glory.
Some parts have been posted online that purport to belong to the iPhone 5S, or whatever Apple calls their next generation phone. While the iPhone 5 might continue the tradition of keeping the previous year's form factor, that doesn't mean the internals can't change. If these parts are genuine, they show updates to the vibrator assembly, earpiece and speaker brackets, and more. Here's the image from BGR:
John P. of GeekBeat.tv, Christina Warren of Mashable, and Kevin Michaluk of CrackBerry join Rene live from BlackBerry Live in Orlando to talk BBM for iOS, the new Google Hangouts, Google Maps for iPad, and a look ahead to WWDC 2013.
