According to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Twitter content such as tweets and accounts are coming to Apple's Spotlight search engine on Macs and iOS devices, allowing for an even tighter integration between the iPhone maker and the popular micro-blogging service, MacWorld reported Wednesday. Apple added Twitter to the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad as the inaugural third-party service integration in iOS 5 three years ago.
An unusual oversight in how OS X's Spotlight feature handles privacy settings in Apple Mail leaves the door open to spammers, phishers and online tracking companies who can obtain private data such as your IP address, current operating system version, browser details and more, whenever an email message is previewed in Spotlight.
First discovered by German technology news site Heise, the bug takes advantage of a common information harvesting technique and a Mail setting which determines whether or not the program loads remote content in emails.
For years now, Alfred has been a staple of OS X workflow applications, enhancing search on the Mac and adding many features in the process. Spotlight search remained rather antiquated in comparison until Apple revived it with OS X Yosemite, but there's still much to be desired. While Alfred will continue to hold its well-deserved position as a staple Mac app, Flashlight has the potential to reach far beyond the abilities of Alfred to make OS X's native Spotlight search an incredibly powerful and useful tool.
Imagine using ⌘+SPACE as a text-based Siri, in which typing the phrase "remind me to Write Flashlight review at 2pm" or "text Mike I'm on Steam, wanna play?" will do exactly as expected. However, Flashlight not only allows reminders to be made and messages to be sent directly from Spotlight – its potential reaches much further.
Searchlight is a jailbreak tweak that allows you to improve Spotlight in a few basic ways: it allows you to access the Spotlight search interface from anywhere, even while within an app, and it allows you to bolt on recent and favorite apps to the interface as well. If you're used to using application launchers on your desktop machine, then Searchlight might be a jailbreak tweak that fits nicely into your workflow.
iOS 8 ushered in a new QuickType predictive text feature that is bolted on to the top of the keyboard. The purpose of the QuickType feature is to help you type faster by predicting the words you might use next. I find that QuickType is usually a hate it or love it feature, but some people swear by it.
For those of you who can't live without QuickType, there's a brand new jailbreak tweak that may garner your interest. It's called SystemWidePredictiveText, and it enables the iOS 8 QuickType feature in places where it's not normally available.
Spotlight has been improved through and through to be more useful in OS X Yosemite. It has adopted an Alfred-inspired interface that makes working with Spotlight easier and more powerful.
Want to see some of the main differences in action? Have a look at our video walkthrough as we showcase some of the new things that Spotlight has to offer.
Admittedly, the myriad of new and useful capabilities that Apple's just-released iOS 8 brings to your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad are going to prove hugely popular with mainstream users, to say the least. With iOS 8, Apple is appeasing harsh critics who'd frequently point out that Android is capable of things iOS cannot do, and then some more.
iOS 8 opens up Apple's mobile operating system to third-party development to a much greater extent than ever before. And stemming from relaxed policies, iOS 8 boosts on-the-go productivity with deeper inter-app sharing while implementing some of the features our Android friends have grown accustomed to, but in a typical hassle-free Apple fashion, things like third-party keyboards, custom actions, photo editing extensions within the context of Photos and Camera apps and way more.
And though evolutionary rather than revolutionary, we have no doubt in our minds that iOS 8 is going to significantly improve the functionality of Apple's mobile platform, and perhaps even give some folks less reasons to jailbreak.
To celebrate today's release of the free iOS 8 software update, we proudly present you this detailed overview of more than two dozen iOS 8 features we think you're going to fall in love with at first sight.
The same developer who made the script for switching between Mac partitions into a standalone application is back with a new jailbreak tweak called SpotFile. This tweak brings basic iFile functionality directly to Spotlight search, allowing users to navigate iOS's filesystem from the Home screen.
While it was built for granting quick access to the file directory in iOS, SpotFile's functionality can do quite a bit more than simply browse files and directories, and the developer says there are more features on the way...
With the imminent introduction of the iPhone 6 will come the release of iOS 8, Apple's latest iteration in its mobile operating system. After spending the past several weeks with pre-release versions of the software, I can say that there are definitive grounds for anticipating its public availability. Whether you're planning on buying a new iPhone this fall or upgrading your current device to iOS 8, there are clear reasons to be excited about the features it has to offer.
Although it will be shipping with quite a few significant features – Apple claims this is their "biggest iOS release ever" – we've gone hands-on with the beta releases and picked our top ten favorite enhancements that will be available for qualifying devices this September. Here, in no sequential order, are the best of what makes iOS 8 great...
Spotlight can be used to search for content (music, app, mail etc.) on your iPhone, iPad or iPod and it can be accessed by swiping down the Home screen. Personally, I've never found Spotlight search useful and I rarely use it except when I'm tempted to. However, iOS 8 takes the feature to a whole new level by allowing users to search for an iTunes song, App Store app, website, Wikipedia entry and much more directly from Spotlight.
Inspired by iOS 8 Spotlight search, Smart Search is a new jailbreak tweak that improves the functionality of Spotlight search on jailbroken iOS 7 devices by expanding its search capability. It gives users the ability to search for a keyword from the App Store, iTunes Store, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube and more. We decided to give Smart Search a try and it worked flawlessly as advertised.
Aslock is an interesting new jailbreak tweak that brings new functionality to the swipe-down gesture used to invoke Spotlight search. Along with being able to invoke Spotlight as you normally would, you can now access the App Switcher and lock your device using Spotlight swipe gestures.
It's the type of tweak that's a little difficult to explain in writing. With that in mind, we've created a video walkthrough so that you can see how the Aslock works in action.
Like its OS X brethren, Spotlight has been updated in iOS 8 to be more intelligent. As it stands now, Spotlight is pretty bland, dumb and can only search for apps and content stored directly on your device.
In iOS 8, Spotlight can provide live search suggestions for apps, Wikipedia entries, movies, songs from iTunes radio, news and more. It's a much more powerful way to perform smart searches on iOS.