iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

I may make this a new category of review: Games so addictive and interesting I can't stop playing them. And this week's winners are LIMBO ($4.99), and BADLAND (Currently free), two fabulous horizontal-scrolling games I could not seem to stay away from. LIMBO is not just a game, but a true work of art, immersing your adolescent character in a realistic, dark and very scary world (I was flinching and jumping in my seat playing this game). BADLAND offers similarly superb backdrop scenes, but with bouncy, full-tilt maze-style action that is just ridiculous fun. The polar opposite of the foreboding LIMBO, you use BADLAND for a spot of cheer! Uh, you'll need it...

We live in an increasingly tech-driven world. Computers have replaced many functions we used to use our brains and hands for. Since the tech boom in the '90s, kids often absorb technology the quickest and know more than their parents at a very young age. With that in mind, it can get a little dicey to determine the right time for children to earn their first smartphone. On one hand, smartphones can add a level of safety. On the other hand, it can cause more than a few problems at home or in school. Ultimately, it is up to a parent to decide when their child is ready, but here are a few factors to consider that may help you make an informed choice. 

I installed iOS 7 beta 3 on my iPhone 4S a few days ago and have had some time to check it out and the results are in—my iPhone works again!

For those of you who installed beta 2 on your iOS devices, you know what I'm talking about. With beta 2, I couldn't take a picture without shutting down and restarting my iPhone. I often had to tap the surface several times before my tap was recognized, and a few times each day, my iPhone would simply reboot itself.

This is par for the course for an early beta of any software, especially an operating system. However, I wanted to install the early betas of iOS 7 on the devices I use on a daily basis because it's the best way to become intimately acquainted with this revamped version of iOS.

I've just recently returned from a 10-day vacation in Tübingen, Germany, a university town with a remarkable and picturesque old city and castle. Many of the buildings in the old city date back to the 15th and 16th century. In preparation for the trip, I spent more than $50 on Tom Tom's navigation app for Europe, wanting to make sure I could get where I wanted to go in the city. Its offline feature was the most important for my needs, mapping info on my iPad without requiring an Internet connection. I have a Verizon LTE iPad and could have paid for data service, but it would have entailed some extra charges, and it seemed like Tom Tom, while expensive, would ultimately save me money. (Long story short: I'm currently grandfathered into a $20/month data plan with Verizon, but would have had to forego that plan if I signed up for service in Germany, and would have been forced into the $30/month data plan forever after.) 

Ever since the social app Snapchat debuted on the App Store two years ago, parents everywhere have been hyper aware of the downsides of their teens downloading and using the popular app.

Parents are concerned about enabling their children to receive (or send) sexually inappropriate photos or videos, photos that bully, or images taken in bad taste. If parents think they can routinely check their teen's phone to look for signs of these behaviors, Snapchat puts an end to that. When you take a photo in the app, it's not saved to the camera roll, and when you view a photo in Snapchat, it's available to the viewer for less than 10 seconds, and then it's gone forever. 

Welcome to my iPhoneography workflow. Here, I'll share the images I create with my iPhone and the hand-picked, trial-and-error methods I use to capture and edit them with.

This image I took recently, titled "Sunday Serenity," is a very easy-to-approach iPhoneography photo. I want to share a few quick tips first off. Using your iPhone to take professional-looking photos involves a little manipulation. Trying to get those far-away landscape shots with your iDevice can be difficult compared to using a DSLR camera.

In this photo, the sun was about to come up, which is THE BEST time to catch sunrises (for sunsets, the best time is right after the sun goes down). It all relates to lighting, and colors are more intense before or after the sun makes an appearance.

This article is intended for readers suffering from the narrow field-of-view of iPhones starting with the iPhone 4 and for programmers offering any kind of video recording in their apps.

As you may know already, recent iDevices use image stabilization during video recording. Unfortunately, not even the latest-and-greatest iPhone 5 has optical stabilization, only electronic, unlike the Nokia Lumia 92x. This, unfortunately, means part of the sensor is used for the stabilization itself, further narrowing the already limited field-of-view (FOV). I recommend you watch engadget's iPhone 5 vs. Nokia Lumia 920 videos so you can see how immensely better optical stabilization is.