DreamBoard – Reinvent Your iOS Home Screens

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And they say iOS isn’t customizable… Fortunately for jailbreakers, it certainly is! DreamBoard, a $2.99 tweak that’s available in Cydia, will completely reinvent the way your home screens look. It’s very easy to use, and there are a number of different themes available. Check them out below!

After installing DreamBoard, you’ll notice a new icon on your SpringBoard. It’s not an actual app. Instead, it’s a shortcut that activates the actual DreamBoard interface. DreamStore is actually a small application that allows you to purchase and install themes. DreamStore isn’t installed with DreamBoard, so you’ll have to manually download the Debian package and install it via SSH or iFile. “Purchase? WTF??” Yes, purchase. Most of the nice themes cost a few bucks, but there are a few free (but not as nice) ones. DreamBoard actually comes with “Endroid”, an HTC Android clone that looks and acts like the real thing.

Please note that the initial screenshots that you’re seeing below is of an Android theme. If you’re anti-Android, there are lots of other themes available. You can view some of them in the photo gallery at the bottom of this post.

Using DreamBoard is very simple. After activating it, you’ll be taken to the theme selection interface. You simply scroll through the different themes that you have installed. Tapping on a theme’s screenshot will give you a few options.

The first option is to actually apply the theme, the edit button will take you to an interface where you can edit the icons that show up in certain places within the theme, reset will reset your icon layout, and cache icons (not supported by all these just yet) will cache the icons for better performance, and the cancel button will make the popup go away.

Here, we’re in the edit mode, where you can add icons to various places within a theme. You can also remove icons if you wish. Pushing the home button will save your layout and switch to the actual theme.

Here, you’ll see the Android theme called “Endroid”. It’s very similar to what you’d find on HTC Android devices. The weather widget is customizable, and there’s also a Facebook and clock widget. There’s even animated weather that will show up on your screen. Performance with this particular theme is alright. It’s fairly smooth, but it’s not as smooth as switching between regular SpringBoard pages.

DreamBoard itself has a few bugs. For instance, the multitasking dock is somewhat glitchy under certain conditions. DreamBoard is also very resource intensive, often using more than 130MB of RAM. Where I would previously have 300MB of free RAM, I would then have about 170MB of RAM after I apply a theme. Going back to my regular SpringBoard setup will free up that used memory quite a bit. If you’re aren’t a heavy multitasker, then this won’t affect you, although opening apps is just a tad slower. The developers are working on making DreamBoard carry a smaller memory footprint.

Feel free to check out some of the other available themes in the below photo gallery.

Also, feel free to follow Brian on Twitter.

Photo Gallery

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