After scouring the sprawling sea of tech-gear that is CES, here's a compilation of the best of the adventure-proof, rugged gear that was on display. While not all of the items featured here are available for order quite yet, all of these products are expected to start shipping by Q2 this year, sometime around March most likely. Read on after the break to see what's coming in the world of heavy-duty gear for our iOS devices.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, How To Unleash Your Inner App Developer, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure, and you will experience how fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 5 of the series. If you're just getting started now, check out the beginning of the series here.

In my previous post, you learned about navigating between different scenes in your app, and learned about using custom user-interface controls in your apps. We started building the Write Review scene (shown on the left side of Figure 1), which we will finish in this post, and we'll move on to the App Category scene shown on the right side of Figure 1. (This post has been updated to iOS 8, Xcode 6.3 and Swift 1.2). 

There are several hands-free ways you can answer a ringing iPhone while your hands are covered by bulky, hard-to-remove gloves. You could start by wearing touchscreen-sensitive gloves. Or using a stylus. Or plugging in a pair of headphones. But what if your gloves were chosen not for their touchscreen compatibility but for their ability to keep your hands warm while the polar vortex is in town? What if you don't have a stylus or a pair of headphones quickly accessible in your winter gear and you really want to take that incoming call? There's a simple solution; just be prepared for some funny looks.

The best of the CES show is often not on the beaten path. One key vendor we make sure to lock in on every year is the Imagination Technologies meeting rooms in South Hall at CES 2015 (way back in the corner). These guys are one of a select number of innovators that design the low-power, system on chip (SoC) technology needed to run our smart homes, smart cars, and smart mobile devices.

Fortunately I'm not addicted to an iPhone—but only because I don't have one. I do, however, tend to go through withdrawal if I don't have my iPad with me. It turns out, these gadgets have become so much an extension of ourselves that scientists have found that we suffer cognitive and physiological impairment if we're separated from them. A new study by University of Missouri researchers put iPhone users in a situation where they were separated from their phones while taking a cognitive test. Not only did they do worse on the test compared to their performance when they had their phones with them, they also had a significant increase in anxiety, heart rate, and blood pressure. 

Spotlight has long been a great feature of iOS, and is especially useful at helping you find apps that are buried away in a folder on your device. Since iOS 7 you invoke this handy search tool by simply swiping down on any home screen. (But keep in mind that if you swipe down from the very top of the display you'll get Notification Center instead.) In iOS 8, introduced last fall, Apple greatly expanded what Spotlight can do. In addition to finding apps and text strings in apps such as Mail and Notes, it also now searches the web, searches Wikipedia, finds related apps in the App Store, finds related movies, and even brings up results in Maps if you search on a location.

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