“Many Apple fans are worried about moving their MobileMe web hosting and their iDisk requirements to another provider in June,” said Gary Hall, CEO of MacAce. “We’ve addressed that with MacMate, which is designed from the ground up to have the essence of an Apple App but with our own unique MacAce stamp on it.”

MacAce points out that iCloud focuses on syncing music, photographs and apps but doesn’t provide hosting or allow files to be uploaded from applications such as Word, Photoshop and Excel, which is where MacMate comes in.

The MacMate disk sits on your Macs desktop, allowing drag and drop of any file-type as a back up. Users can also work directly from the disk. MacMate’s email has built-in virus and spam protection, and allows existing IMAP accounts to be imported.

MacMate is currently in a fully working BETA version, and MacAce intends to add features in the coming weeks and months, including photo-sharing through instant galleries, blogs, file and folder sharing options and more.

MacMate is available at an introductory price of £59 per year, with three months extra free.

Communication has become an important part of our life and with dynamic nature of the telecom sector. Smartphones have proved to be a boon for everyone. Apart from communication, smartphones also increase the fun and entertainment quotient in life. Applications for smartphones have become their soul. “App store” the official application store for iPhone offers you more than 500,000 applications in categories like games, lifestyle, social networking and more. Many applications on the iPhone are possible because of the simple and easy to use tools provided by Apple for the iPhone app developers.

Rapidsoft works in accordance to the rules and regulations set by Apple. We carry out the feasibility study, planning the whole solution with the team of iPhone experts which includes the SDK Study, UI & Prototype Design and Development along with testing and taking approval from Apple and finally putting the application on iTunes.

iPhone Expertise
On-Device portal
Themes, icon & Designing
Native website applications
Messaging clients
Travel, Navigation, Weather forecasting apps
M-Commerce
Business & Sales Applications

Application Development Process
Innovative thinking and in-depth technological knowledge is important for the application development process. One needs skilled and experienced iPhone app developers who can find a set of feasible solutions towards your ideas or business needs. At Rapidsoft Technologies we carry out iPhone Application right from scratch by interacting closely with the clients.

UI Design & Prototype
User Interface design and Prototype development are very important for delivering scalable applications. Rapidsoft offers you professional services for iPhone UI designs and icons. Our iPhone app development team follows a UI and Prototype development process based upon your idea and concept of application. Get customized themes for your application according to your needs and requirements.

SDK study: We put into practice
Following iPhone Software Development kit is a common practice for any iPhone developer. But our approach is to meet your expectations regarding your application ideas. So our talented team follows every updates and details of iPhone SDK and even the latest one. We deliver the latest application services by using our knowledge of expertise of all versions of iPhone SDK.

Ideas and results go hand in hand here
You just tell us your ideas and we will give you robust and scalable applications that take your business to new heights. We believe that every idea if executed in a proper manner gives you the best results and ultimately we believe in delivering quality and high business standard and industry specific applications.

The developer of iShoot quit his day job after earning $22,000 a day at the top of the App Store charts. Here’s what you have to do to be next…

You’ve probably heard all about iShoot. Written by a programmer at Sun Microsystems in his spare time, this Worms-style artillery shooter blasted to the top of the App Store charts earlier this year and stayed there for weeks earning its creator enough money to pack in his day job and become a professional developer.

You may also have seen the news this week about nine-year-old programming prodigy Lim Ding Wen who has developed his own simple painting app for the iPhone. Doodle Kids is doing reasonable business, attracting 4,000 downloads in less than a fortnight and gaining its author international news coverage.

There’s no question about it, iPhone has become the people’s platform. While the PC maintains a healthy indie development scene, Apple’s handset, with its low barriers to entry and seamless consumer purchasing system, is the real rags-to-riches machine. In practically a month, you can develop an application that will be available to a global market of enthusiastic downloaders.

Publishers? Distribution partners? Specialist development hardware? None of it is necessary. In the same way that cheap, accessible digital technology has brought film and music making to the masses, iPhone seems to have sliced through the painstaking game production pipeline. Everyone can be Will Wright now.

Or can they? How exactly do you go about creating an iPhone title?

I’ve spoken to iShoot coder Ethan Nicholas and two British studios involved in iPhone development – FluidPixel, responsible for fun Lemmings-style platformer, KamiCrazy and Connect2Media’s Manchester team, currently finishing off the hugely promising, Go! Go! Rescue Squad. Here are their tips to any burgeoning app stars…

1. Buy a Mac
You’ll need one with an Intel-based processor, running the Leopard version of MacOS X. It doesn’t have to be a top of the range model, though. Ethan Nicholas wrote iShoot on a banged-up old MacBook with 1GB of memory, knackered Wi-Fi and an Ethernet port that needed to be wiggled around to get it to work. The machine did however, afford him the manoeuvreability he needed: “most of my available development time involved holding a baby on the couch so my laptop was better suited to the task.”

Peter Scott, CTO at Connect2Media suggests Mac Minis, “they are more than powerful enough, small, easy on desk space when you already have PCs, three LCD monitors and a bunch of devices. They are also easy to move round, developers can take them home at the weekend if they want to continue to work.”

2. Down the SDK (software development kit)
“Apple provides the free SDK for iPhone development from their Developer site,” explains Stuart Varrall, Creative Director at Fluid Pixel. “This includes everything you need to get going, including the development environment Xcode, the iPhone Simulator for testing, performance analysers, interface builders and the full documentation reference library.”

3. Learn Objective C
This is the primary programming language for iPhone development. “It’s an extension of C to include object-orientated principles,” says Varrall. “It has scripting elements to it, so is easier to pick up than some languages and anyone with programming experience should be able to transfer their skills.”

“Here’s a short history of Objective C,” offers Scott, “It was born out of Smalltalk which was a very early Object Oriented Programming language developed in Xerox PARC (where Window/Mouse computing really begun) and as a consequence was heavily adopted by Apple since as early as the Lisa. Smalltalk is very similar to C.”

“Objective C was actually created by Next Computing owned by a certain Steven Jobs. When Jobs returned to Apple, he sold Next to the company and so Objective C became the main development environment for the Apple Mac. It is liked because in similar ways to Java, it deals with many of the problematic parts of programming…. It’s nice, simple, hides the complexities of the hardware away from the developer and deals with (on the whole) the major cause of programming issues in C and C++ which is memory leaks.”

All well and good, but what’s the best way to actually pick up the language? “This really depends on where you are starting from,” explains Scott. “If you are proficient in C/C++ or Objective C then the learning curve is in getting to grips with the APIs of the iPhone – the best place to start is the iPhone developer site. If you need to learn the programming languages themselves then the best place to start is a beginners book, actually the For Dummies series is very good for this. Also look at one of the many free tutorials online – Googleing ‘objective C tutorial’ throws up many places to get these.”

“The official Apple SDK has a wealth of detail along with examples of implementing various features,” adds Varrall. “The Apple developer forum is rapidly growing to be the best place for specific questions or to get further clarification on something”. He also mentions that iPhone supports Open GL ES which allows heavy optimisation when working in 3D. So if you’re thinking beyond a scrolling shooter or Tetirs clone, you’ll need to look into that as well. Also, many professional studios write their games in C++ rather than Objective C, especially if they’re planning to port the code onto other platforms such as N-Gage of Xbox Live Arcade.

4. Start writing something!
Forget theory; forget mastering Objective C with your first attempt. Just set yourself a project and start working. “I knew nothing about Objective C, Cocoa, or OpenGL prior to starting iShoot. In fact I barely even knew C,” admits Ethan Nicholas. “I hadn’t really touched it in a decade. I was a Java programmer for twelve years and it was quite an adjustment moving from a nice safe language like Java to one where a single misplaced byte can instantly crash your program.”

Nicholas’ first aim – and this is more or less standard procedure in the development community when presented with a new platform – was to get something to appear on the screen. “The first thing I worked on was the ground. I wanted to create a destructible landscape with falling dirt. Since I had no idea how to load textures at that point, and had just grasped the basics of Objective C and OpenGL, my dirt “texture” was just solid white. So the first thing I got onscreen was just a white rectangle that represented the ground. My wife was fortunately tolerant enough to understand my excitement at getting anything, even just a simple white rectangle, on the screen.

“By day two, my featureless white rectangle had morphed into a properly textured landscape and most of the dirt-descruction code was working. By the end of the first week I had a tank on the screen firing shots randomly, blowing holes in the ground. When I finally got it on to an actual phone and not just the simulator, I found that it only ran at one frame per second, so I had some considerable optimisation work ahead of me.”

If you can’t face starting out on an original project, however, Varrall suggests a couple of modification tasks. “The SDK actually comes with a whole host of sample projects that cover most aspects of development. So the best place to start would be to take one of those and reverse engineer it and work out how it has been constructed. You can then build on these by adding new features and create your very own game very quickly.”

5. Sign-up as an official developer
If you plan on releasing your masterpiece at any point, you’ll need to sign up with the iPhone Developer Program. The Standard cost is $99, and it involves agreeing to Apple’s terms and conditions, and signing and returning the contract. Even if you’re nowhere near completing the project, you’ll need to sign up in order to test your code on an actual iPhone rather than an onscreen emulator. Once you’re on the Developer Program you’re sent a certficate, which allows you to pair up with an iPhone device.

6. Prepare for a few weeks of work…
Depending on the time available, and your level of programming knowledge, developing an iPhone game can mean as little as a couple of months’ work. “Including learning Objective C, Cocoa, and OpenGL, I spent exactly six weeks on iShoot,” says Nicholas. “The hardest part was adjusting to an unsafe language… after twelve years working in Java, it’s very difficult to get back into the proper mindset for debugging crashes. I had one memory corruption issue where it turned out that literally only a single byte was being corrupted, and it didn’t cause the program to crash until several minutes after the corruption occurred. It took me three days to find that one…”

The professional studios I spoke to provided similar timeframes, though they involved teams rather than lone coders. “KamiCrazy took three months to develop part-time, so could be done in a month full-time,” reckons Varrall, who used three programmers, one artist and a producer. “The programming was focussed on the most part into making the robust engine that drives the game and included the level editor, allowing the levels to implemented with ease. This means that this technology can be re-used and future titles could be turned around in less time. The art took three weeks in total to produce.”

7. Submit your app to Apple
Okay, this is the big one. “Finished games have to be submitted to the App Store using the same interface as music producers use,” explains Varrall. “It’s a straightforward process of zipping up the file, uploading it with a description, a large and small icon, and screenshots. If everything is alright then it usually takes Apple a week to approve the content and it finds itself in the store. If there is a problem, such as obvious bugs or Lite apps that are mentioned as demos or aren’t fully featured, then this can take longer to review and ultimately reject. In this instance you can fix the issue and resubmit as many times as you like.”

“Any iPhone developer will tell you that the provisioning and code signing is a pain, but once I had that sorted out the submission process was trivial,” agrees Nicholas. “Fill in the fields, wait a few days, eagerly anticipate your first sales report… and then watch everybody completely ignore your app as you sell fewer than 20 copies a day. iShoot wasn’t exactly a resounding success in the beginning…”

8. Adapt, market and survive!
The work doesn’t finish once you’ve made it onto App Store. As it’s unlikely you’ll have your own in-house QA department, some bugs and design issues may only surface when hundreds of gamers get their hands on the code. Consequently, it may be necessary to submit several alterations.

And as Nicholas mentioned, don’t expect an immediate response to the release – App Store is an open market, featuring around 20,000 applications and 2,000 games. To get noticed, you’ll need to build a buzz around the game: engage with the development and gaming communities, start a blog about the programming process, produce screenshots and mail out press releases to iPhone news sites like Pocket Gamer, Touch Arcade and FingerGaming. And, of course, utilise social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Bebo.

Or just produce a free demo version. iShoot was widely ignored for several weeks before Nicholas decided to produce a cut-down ‘Lite’ version which he made available for free. “it quickly became the #1 free application, and iShoot sales followed suit. Here is an actual graph of my daily sales from iShoot’s launch through to when it became number one. To put things in perspective, you see the biggest spike before iShoot Lite was released? That tiny little bump? That was Christmas Day, when I made over $500 in a single day. I was quite excited about that at the time.”

While at the top of the Paid Apps chart, iShoot was getting over 10,000 downloads a day, at $2.99 each. Take out Apple’s standard 30% commission and Nicholas was pulling in $21,000 a day. He quit his job at Sun and is now working on a new game (“My next project involves airborne sheep, but I’m afraid that’s all I can share at the moment”). You could be next….

If you haven’t unlocked your iPhone, then check out our step-by-step guide to unlock your iPhone using SAM.

After you’ve successfully unlocked your iPhone, you can follow these simple instructions to take a backup of the activation ticket:

Step 1: Launch Cydia

Step 2: Install iFile (skip this step if you have already installed iFile)

Tap on the Search tab
Search for iFile
Tap on iFile from the search results
Buy iFile as it is a paid jailbreak app
After you have purchased iFile, tap on the Install button in the top right corner.
Then tap on the Confirm button
Tap on the Return to Cydia button when prompted

Note: If you don’t want to use iFile, you can always SSH into the folder on your iPhone and copy the contents to your computer.

Step 3: After iFile is successfully installed, press on the Home button and launch iFile from the iPhone’s Home screen.

Step 4: You need to navigate to the Library folder:

Tap on /var (top left corner)
Then tap on the root folder from the list
Then tap on the Library folder

Step 5:  Here the objective is to create the zip file of the Lockdown folder as it contains the activation ticket:

Tap on the Edit button in the top right corner
Then tap on the Lockdown folder to select it
Then tap on the zip icon (second icon from the left at the bottom)
Here you will be prompted to select the name of the archive
You can either leave it as Lockdown or name the archive and tap on the Create button
iFile will create the archive file in the Library Folder

Step 6: Email the archive file that you have just created to yourself.

Tap on the archive file to select it.
Then tap on the Mail icon (third icon from the right at the bottom)
Enter your email address, the appropriate subject and then tap the Send button.

Note: You should follow these instructions for each SIM that you use with your iPhone using the SAM unlocking trick.

As simple as that. So if you need to use the activation ticket in the future, you know where to find it.

At the moment, we’re not sure how the activation ticket can be used, but MuscleNerd has tweeted that it will be useful in the future:

Be sure to save the unlock activation ticket from this trick..it will likely be useful for a long time! Even if Apple fixes the method.

Nokia has always been good at making accessories, so they could come up with a kickass gizmo like this for the Lumia, that would make it even cooler. If they manage to somehow integrate this as an “Xbox badge” and allow gamers to interact, it will be pure gold.

The Next Wave
The Apple hype-mobile starts again, with news likely to emerge from next week’s Worldwide Developer Conference where iOS 5 will be shown with a possible new hardware unveiling. The hardware may be delayed to a specific launch later in the month but still, WWDC will be a massive platform for Apple and mobile developers to explore the latest iOS innovations and capabilities and learn how to build better apps.

Top of the agenda for Apple users will be “iCloud,” which could see your music and other content head off into the ether. Apple is believed to have signed deals with the major labels, which will give them a big boost of similar offerings from Google and Amazon. At the same time, Apple will want to do all it can to push ahead of Microsoft’s recent Mango phone update.

Additional innovations could be widgets that take over a row of the iPhone’s app icons to show information you want to see at all times. Given that Google announced its NFC services last week, Apple would be missing a trick not to announce something, although the company has time on its side as Google’s won’t go live until the fall.

The only unhappy people, apart from the usual Apple-grumblers, will be iPhone 3GS owners for whom, rumor has it, the update won’t be compatible with their only two-year old phones. That’s a bit of a low blow, as the phone is still a happy performer and Apple shouldn’t be nudging happy users up the food chain just yet. Perhaps there will be a 4.x update that offers some of the upgrades.

iPhone 5 or 4S Is Out There, Somewhere…

It is possible that iPhone 5 (or iPhone 4S depending on how Apple decides to roll) will be announced next week, (the event will coincide with Microsoft’s E3 gaming press event, ideal for scene-stealing announcements) but as of March, the device wasn’t coming to the show.

CEO Steve Jobs will be making an appearance, and a mere OS update might be beneath him, so there is plenty of reason to expect a “one more thing” moment. Or, Apple could leave it for a special event, and with the various delays, that may be the preferred option. Those delays have led to a self-contained industry of must-have and rumor articles.

The latest of these refers to the ARM Cortex A9 processor as being inside the phone, which could sport an 8-megapixel camera in the same style design as the iPhone 4. With a possible release date of August, Apple will want the queues to be big, just as at previous launches, so despite the lack of hardware innovation, perhaps it is hoping that 3GS users will toss theirs away and go for the new model.

The iPhone 5 may not make it until early next year, with a radical redesign, including curved glass surfaces being mentioned and the much-mooted NFC technology inside. That could move Apple onto a biannual launch schedule, with the main update at the start of the year and the S versions mid-year.

Groupon had an offer that sounded too good to be true this morning. A 16GB iPhone 4S for £19. That’s apparently a saving of £124.77, or an 87 per cent discount.

Of course to qualify for the deal you have to sign up to a 24-month contract at £34 a month. This includes: Unlimited data including Internet tethering; 5,000 texts per month; 2,000 minutes per month. You also get a Logic3 iPhone Speaker dock according to the description.
Groupon had an offer that sounded too good to be true this morning. A 16GB iPhone 4S for £19. That’s apparently a saving of £124.77, or an 87 per cent discount.

Of course to qualify for the deal you have to sign up to a 24-month contract at £34 a month. This includes: Unlimited data including Internet tethering; 5,000 texts per month; 2,000 minutes per month. You also get a Logic3 iPhone Speaker dock according to the description.

According to the Groupon page, 2,546 people have already cashed in on the deal which will run for the next three days.

While the offer is limited to one person, it is possible to ‘buy multiples as gifts’, which might explain the high number of sales.

The deal is on behalf of www.affordablemobiles.co.uk, a digital arm of Shebang Technologies Group.

On their website Affordable Mobiles currently offers an iPhone 4S (16GB, black) for free, on a £36 a month contract. This 24-month deal gives users: 300 Minutes; Unlimited Texts; 1.00 Data. The company offers deals from all the major networks.

By comparison, the best iPhone deal (according to MoneySuperMarket) is for a free iPhone 4S, 16GB, 300 minutes, unlimited texts, 500MB data, for £31 a month for 24 months (but including cashback, so it’s more like £29.71 a month). That’s with Vodafone, via MobilePhonesDirect.

Greenpeace infiltrated Apple’s Cupertino campus this week, projecting messages from Twitter and Facebook users who are dismayed at Apple’s use of coal at the data centre that powers its cloud services.

The messages of support from Twitter and Facebook users were projected onto walls. Four Greenpeace members dressed as iPhones, with functional screens that also displayed messages from Facebook and Twitter.

The Greenpeace activists also barricaded themselves inside a “survival device” that had been used to prevent Arctic drilling, according to Apple Insider.

Greenpeace USA Executive Director Phil Radford said: “Apple’s executives have thus far ignored the hundreds of thousands of people asking them to use their influence for good by building a cloud powered by renewable energy. As Apple’s customers, we love our iPhones and iPads, but we don’t want to use an iCloud fueled by the smog of dirty coal pollution,” reports Apple Insider.

The demonstration was the latest in a series. Last month Greenpeace promoted it’s “How Clean is Your Cloud” campaign outside London’s Regent Street Apple Store.

Greenpeace’s “How Clean Is Your Cloud” report claims that if the cloud were a country, it would rank fifth in the world for its electricity demand. Greenpeace expects the demand for electricity from cloud data centres to triple by 2020, and claim that some data centres use as much electricity as 250,000 European homes.

Greenpeace is targeting Apple because its North Carolina facility uses coal to provide the majority of the energy for the plant. The “How Clean is Your Cloud” campaign claims that Apple isn’t using environmentally friendly power for its cloud-based services.

However, Apple has contested claims from Greenpeace that its North Carolina data centre will be mostly coal powered, and says that 60 per cent of the power will be eventually delivered on-site from a solar farm and fuel-cell installation currently proposed.

The device is very thin, maybe 7mm in thickness and it has a discretely integrated camera at the back. I can’t seem to spot the LED flash, but I’m sure it’s there. This Acer concept is pictured in white, pink and blue. To me this looks like a 4.3 inch smartphone, that I suppose has the Nvidia Tegra 3 CPU inside and a 720p resolution (my speculations). There’s also a lower end device, with a 5 megapixel camera, shown as the last picture below. This is also an Android model, with 4 capacitive buttons and a smaller screen, maybe 4 inches.

The interface seems customized, actually so much that I’m starting to doubt it’s even Android. The case of the lower end handset looks very cool, with those bright blue stripes at the back and front. While the high end Acer concept phone reminds me of the Fujitsu phones I’ve seen at MWC 2012, the lower end one makes me think of Alcatel for some reason. What do you think?

If the iPhone or the iPad is on a dangerously fast course to the ground, an integrated accelerometer will sense the fall and in a split second will determine the mount to inflate by the use of a special liquid or simply with air. In addition, more crack-resistant materials will be used, such as alumino-silicate glass, known as Gorilla Glass, or materials that are more resistant to thermal shocks, such as sodalime and borosilicate materials. Apple also tries to make the iPhones more durable by the use of a special seal to prevent water damage.

The investments in this area could prove efficient for Apple after the recent users’ comments and comparison that favours the rival smartphones that are more durable. To make the matter worse, early this year, Donald LeBuhn, sued Apple complaining that his daughter dropped his iPhone 4 qnecthe glass shatters harmed her.

LeBuhn said that his older iPhone 3GS had no problem with a similar fall and then suggested that Apple made the new handset worse than the earlier device, without warning the customers. Consequently, there is no surprise that Apple team are doing their best to improve the resistance of their range of devices, to escape this PR nightmare.

In case you forgot, the last time Apple did this kind of contest was when the App Store was about to hit 10 billionth download. The iPhone user who got the plum more than a year ago was downloading the iPhone app – Bump. The app since then become more popular than it would have normally achieved if it didn’t became the 10 billionth app downloaded.

To join the contest, you have two options – first is to try to visit the App Store and chanced upon in downloading the 25 billionth app downloaded. Or you can also enter the contest without downloading an app by filling out a free, entry page on the contest website. You can enter up to 25 entries per iTunes account, per day during the duration of the contest.

So are you ready to take up the challenge? What iPhone apps will you be downloading if you win the contest? The amount will be enough to fill up your upcoming iPhone 5 with all the apps and games you need.

According to Digitimes, Pegatron Techonology, an OEM for the iPhone 4S and the new iPad has received orders for the iPhone 5 and it will be launched in September. As a proof, the report said that Pegatron has already finished expanding its equipment and labor force to fulfill Apple’s orders for the iPhone 5.

Pegatron has also downsized its SI motherboard department and has shifted its resources in working with Apple’s orders. Aside from fulfilling Apple’s orders, this strategy will also benefit the company’s operations.

So, there. That’s all we know for now about the next iPhone. September seems like a feasible launch date for the iPhone 5, right?

And here’s yet another iPhone 5 design, this one based on the long time rumored edge to edge display. This time the screen feels as if it’s actually a piece of glass fit between two metal parts, because of the lack of side bezel. Also, looking at the phone from its profile reveals a sort of a mini display, as shown here. The concept was created by Sira Design.

This iPhone 5 concept features a dual core Apple A6 processor, a 9 megapixel iSight camera and iOS 6. iCloud is also in the mix and New Siri as well. The screen diagonal is 4 inches and we’ve got a bunch of new icons to work with. What’s interesting is that in the screen diagonal area it says “4.0 + 0.5″. Is that 0.5 actually the side screen I was talking about or is this a 4.5 inch iPhone? Anyway I love this design and it’s so simple and lacks any unnecessary complications.

Hopefully with so much glass used on it, there’s still room for a decent battery. I remind you that the iPhone 5 is rumored to launch this fall and we could see its OS, iOS 6.0 being previewed next month at WWDC 2012. Excited about that? On the Sira Design page it actually says that I was right and the sides of the device are actually smaller screens, so the device is even cooler!

To enable the restrictions, tap the Settings app (which should be on the iPhone’s homescreen, unless you re-arranged the apps) on the iPhone you want to apply the restrictions to.

Then choose General -> Restrictions and tap the Enable Restrictions button.
Difficulty: Easy
Time Required: A couple of minutes

Here’s How:
You’ll be prompted to create a four-number passcode that will allow you to make and modify the restrictions, but not let the child change them. Each time you need to access the restrictions you’ll have to enter this code, so make sure to use something you’ll easily remember.

With restrictions enabled, you have a number of choices.
First, you’ll be able to turn off access to a series of apps. If you turn them off, the app will be completely hidden from your child – they won’t see it anywhere on the iPhone. Moving the slider back to on will restore the app.

Next, you can control what content is allowed to be access on the iPhone:

In-App Purchases: turn this off if you don’t want your child to be able to buy items or upgrades within iPhone apps – something that could lead to unexpectedly large iTunes Store bills.

Ratings For: Choose the country whose rating system you want to apply to content. It probably makes sense to choose the country you live in, but many are available.

Music & Podcasts: Use this to determine whether explicit content can be played on the iPhone. “On” means explicit content is allowed. There’s a trick to this, though: it only works with content from the iTunes Store. From downloaded music or ripped CDs, the iPhone won’t know whether the content is explicit or not and it will play it. This is also true of movies and TV episodes.

Movies: Chose the highest rating level you want to allow by tapping it (taps do not uncheck ratings, strangely).

TV: Works the same way as Movies.

Apps: Works the same way.
To remove content restrictions, simply tap the Disable Restrictions button at the top of the screen and re-enter your passcode.

But what about your iPhone? What if you set a ‘Restrictions Passcode’ a long time ago and now you can’t remember the digits? You’ve got a couple of options. For starters, you could restore your iPhone as a new device through iTunes. You can’t restore from a previous backup, because your passcode is saved in that file…..

Your other option isn’t quite so painful. All you need is about 5 minutes and iPhone Backup Extractor for Mac OS X, which you can get here. This guide is specifically for Mac OS X users. But if you meet the criteria and could really use some help recovering your iPhone passcode, dig in!

Step 1: Once you’ve download the free app, iPhone Backup Extractor, open it up and let it extract itself. You will then want to click ‘Read Backups’. A list of your previous backups should now populate.  Just select the backup that you want to extract the passcode from.

Step 2: You should now be looking at a list of apps that have been backed up. Scroll all the way to the bottom and click ‘iOS Files’, and then ‘Extract’. I recommend extracting it to your desktop so you can find it easily.

Step 3: Extraction will take a minute. Once completed, open the folder it created called ‘iOS Files’. Look for the file named ‘com.apple.springboard.plist’, and open it up.

Step 4: As you scroll down this list of properties, you should see a key titled ‘SBParentalControlsPin’ and to the right of it a value. This is what your Passcode is, enter it in your iDevice, and thank Simon Blog for sharing this little tidbit with us.

It is important to note that jailbroken users, can also locate their passcode via SSH. All you have to do is navigate to ‘var/mobile/Library/Preferences’.

Has anyone ever forgotten their passcode? Has anyone used this or a better method to recover it? Tell us below!