Some carriers don’t appreciate the simplicity of the iPhone and iOS, and they slap big ugly carrier logos in the status bar that just look nasty. I use my iPhone 5 on Vodafone in the U.K., which is guilty of this very thing. Thankfully, there’s finally a way to change your iPhone’s carrier logo without jailbreaking.
I am forever adjusting my iPhone’s brightness settings, whether it’s to make the screen as dark as possible so that I can use it in bed without keeping my girlfriend awake, or to make it as bright as possible when I’m rummaging around in the attic for the Christmas decorations. The problem is, Apple doesn’t make it easy to alter brightness levels on the fly.
If you’ve got a jailbroken iOS device, however, you can take matters into your own hands. Install the new BrightVol tweak on your handset and you’ll be able to adjust your display’s brightness levels using your volume buttons. It couldn’t be quicker.
Last week, we reported on a great little hack that allows you to remove Apple’s stock iOS apps from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch without jailbreaking it first. The only problem with it was when your device was restarted the apps would reappear, and you had to repeat the whole process again to remove the apps that are wasting space on your home screen.
Now the tweak’s been improved somewhat to make the whole process much quicker by using the new Passbook app in iOS 6. And no, it still doesn’t require a jailbreak.
While most of Apple’s stock iOS apps are pretty handy, there are a few that the large majority of us probably never open. I’m talking about apps like Stocks, Voice Memos, and Weather (which always seems to be inaccurate in the U.K.). Unfortunately, the Cupertino company doesn’t allow us to remove these, so the only way to do it was to jailbreak. Until now.
Thanks to a nifty new web app, you can temporarily remove stock iOS icons from your device without jailbreaking. Here’s how.
Here’s a nifty little tweak that’ll help you write new emails a little quicker: It’s called SpotMail, and it lets you create new emails from directly within Spotlight on your jailbreak iOS device. All you have to do is type in the recipient’s email address and hit search.
The iPhone-Dev Team has updated its popular Redsn0w tool to offer full iOS 6 compatibility, including an official Cydia app. Until now, the iOS 6 jailbreak was strictly for developers, and so Cydia was not installed automatically when jailbreaking an iOS 6 device. Now it’s ready for the public.
To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, Slashdot persuaded former Apple co-founder and everyone’s favorite geek Steve Wozniak to answer some questions thrown at him by the site’s readers. Woz took the time to answer a number of questions on Apple and his thoughts on how the company is doing without Steve Jobs at the helm, jailbreaking, the iPhone, and more.
Here are some of his best responses.
Using banners for your notifications — rather than full-blown alerts we had to suffer prior to iOS 5 — is a great way to ensure incoming alerts stay out of your way while you’re busy sending tweets, chopping fruit, or writing emails. However, it would be nice if those banners could be even slimmer — maybe the same size of the status bar.
Thanks to DietBulletin, they can be.
If you’ve been browsing the Internet every day in the hope that someone’s going to announce a jailbreak for the third-generation Apple TV you bought back in March, then look away now. iOS hacker Pod2g has confirmed that neither he, nor any other hacker he knows of, is working on an exploit for the Apple’s latest set-top box.
LiveClock, a tweak from Ryan Petrich that animates the Clock app’s icon to show the time, was once one of the first tweaks I would install after jailbreaking my iPhone. But after installing iOS 5, I had to live without it — because it just wasn’t compatible. Now, nine months after iOS 5 made its debut, it is!
One of the first tweaks I used to install after jailbreaking previous iPhones was Safari Download Manager, a terrific little package that does exactly as its name suggests: allows you to download files right within mobile Safari. The downside to this tweak, however, has long been its lack of support for iOS 5. That is, until it got updated today.
There weren’t many iOS 5.1.1 devices that the Absinthe 2.0 and Rocky Racoon jailbreaks didn’t support from day one, but one of them was the iPad 2,4 — the latest Wi-Fi iPad 2 that Apple released alongside the third-generation iPad earlier this year. Thanks to their latest updates, however, that’s all changed.
Apple is expected to give us a sneak peek at iOS 6 during its Worldwide Developers Conference this June, and after its announcement, the company is likely to issue the first beta to registered developers. Until then, no one knows what iOS 6 will have in store for us, but that isn’t preventing hackers from making progress on its jailbreak.
They haven’t even released the untethered jailbreak for iOS 5.1.1 yet — though it’s expected to go live very shortly — and already Pod2g and his team “have a part” of the jailbreak for Apple’s next-generation iOS operating system.
Jailbreakers who rather foolishly updated to iOS 5.1 shortly after its release earlier this year are still waiting for an exploit that will allow them to reclaim root access to their device. But according to iOS hacker Pod2g, that exploit could only be another month (or two) away.
The U.S. government declared the act of jailbreaking legal on July 26, 2010, encouraging hundreds of thousands of iOS users into hacking their devices, safe in the knowledge that their actions would incur no legal repercussions. The ruling certainly had a huge on the jailbreaking community, but the tables could be set to turn once again.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), jailbreaking could become illegal again this year, but you can do your bit to prevent it.
One of the advantages to jailbreaking the iPhone — at least for me — is the ability to add shortcuts to your home screen that will quickly adjust your device’s settings. There are a number of tweaks that allow you to change your brightness; and toggle 3G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Airplane mode, and more.
It’s not so easy if you’re device isn’t jailbroken, but a new app called IconProject changes that — for just $0.99.
It seems that panoramic camera feature isn’t the only thing Apple is hiding inside its latest iOS 5 software. There’s also an autocorrect keyboard feature just like that found on Android devices, which suggests words as you type making it quicker and easier than ever to type on an iOS device.
When Apple seeded its first iOS 5 beta to registered developers back in June, it was discovered the company’s next-generation mobile platform eliminated untethered jailbreaking and meant that hackers must connect their device to their computer every time they wanted to boot it up if they hoped to maintain their jailbreak.
Since then, however, reports surrounding an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5 have surfaced. The latest glimmer of hope comes from the Chronic Dev Team member Pod2g, who claims to have discovered a bug in the latest iOS 5 software that could lead to an untethered jailbreak.
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Speaking of jailbreaks, check out this trailer for Unlocked, a mock biopic in the style of The Social Network incorporating footage from his various media appearances as well as a movie starring The Wire’s Ziggy that I’d be pleased if you guys would identify for me in the comments.
Brilliant, though I can’t tell if it’s been done by geohot’s fans or people pissed off at his jailbreaking queue-hopping on Sunday.
The iPhone jailbreaking community likes to maintain solidarity within its ranks. After all, while hackers love being the first to discover a new technique or exploit, the jailbreaking community has an enemy — Apple — who would like nothing more than to shut them down for the count.
That threat, in turn, has made the jailbreaking community a pretty tight-knit bunch: at any given time, there are a few working exploits that hackers are sitting on, waiting for Apple to invalidate a currently working jailbreak technique through a software patch before they release the next one. Why? Because the world doesn’t need more than one jailbreak at a time, and if all the known exploits are all in the wild at the same time, Apple can fix them all at once, leaving jailbreakers with nothing up their sleeves.
That’s why the jailbreaking community is so steamed up about the surprise Limera1n jailbreak geohot released over the weekend… the day before the Dev Team released their own highly publicized 4.1 jailbreak that used a totally different exploit. Geohot essentially barged ahead in line by releasing his jailbreak exploit unannounced, which risked alerting Apple to the methodology used in the Dev Team’s exploit.
Earlier this month, a member of the Chronic Development Team announced that he had discovered an exploit that would allow any iOS device currently on the market to be jailbroken forever, no matter how Apple patched it through software. Christened “SHAtter,” the exploit is widely anticipated, not only because it will allow versions of iOS 4.0.2 and above to be jailbroken, but because the only way Apple can fix it is through hardware. Once SHAtter is released, all current iOS devices will essentially be jailbreakable forever.
Here’s a warning, though. The SHAtter jailbreak still isn’t out, which means that any website or program claiming to be capable of jailbreaking a device running iOS 4.0.2 or above is likely a scam unless it was released by the Dev Team themselves… and chances are, it’s something much worse.
According to security researcher Costin Raiu at the Kapersey Labs, there is a new exploit in the wild that is being circulated as greenpois0n, a purported iOS 4.0.2 or above jailbreaking tool. Instead of actually jailbreaking iOS devices, though, it instead steals your passwords.
It’s easy to forget after the remarkable ease of August’s JailbreakMe exploit that jailbreaking your iOS device is actually a complicated process and not one that should be conducted by amateurs. As always, remember that the only real source to trust when it comes to jailbreaking your iPhone is the iPhone Dev Team… and unless they have released a tool directly to jailbreak your device, you should stay far, far away.
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Without dedicated analog controls, playing emulated console games on an iPhone or iPod Touch is always going to be a maddeningly imprecise experience, but even so, it’s can be nice to see the graphic capabilities of Apple’s touchscreen line explored.
The latest emulator to hit the iPhone is the 3G4, a Nintendo 64 emulator developed by fourteen year old programmer, “Doogie.” That’s a regrettable internet handle for a precocious teenager smack dab in the voice cracking throes of pubertal hormone imbalance, but it is apropos: the 3G4 is an impressive display, not only of the iPhone’s capabilities, but the programmer’s as well.
It’s not perfect by any means. The graphics have had to be heavily rendered down to work smoothly on the iPhone, and Doogie is still struggling with some elements of the interface: namely duplicate button registers, delayed button presses and a few mysterious crashes. He’s also yet to implement the L, R, and Z keys… and, in truth, it’s hard to see just where he’d cram them on 3G4’s already cramped display. But Doogie’s working on it, and anticipates a release sometime next year… although obviously not through the App Store.
