jailbreak - page 14

I gave up on Google Chrome for iOS about a day after it was released. Even though my iPhone is jailbroken and I can bypass iOS’s restrictions to set Chrome as my default browser, I missed Safari. Also, Chrome felt considerably slower than the iPhone’s default browser, and that was because Apple handicaps third-party apps by not allowing them to access the lightning-fast Nitro Javascript engine in iOS.

Does the lack of Nitro in your favorite third-party iOS browsers keep you awake at night? Me neither. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be cool to make an app like Google Chrome just as fast as Mobile Safari. For jailbreakers, there’s a new tweak out that makes it all possible.

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 many pros of jailbreaking is the ability to theme your iOS device. When you install a custom theme in Cydia, you’re effectively replacing Apple’s default iOS design with something new and fresh. There are many great themes for jailbreakers, but my new favorite is undoubtedly ayecon. Developed originally for the iPhone and iPod touch, ayecon is coming to the iPad on August 3rd.

I’ve been using ayecon on my jailbroken iPad for a couple weeks now, and I couldn’t be happier. Here are some screenshots to give you a taste of what to expect from this benchmark iOS theme:

Have you ever wondered how much time you spend in an app? There are those staple iOS apps most of us use everyday (Phone, Messages, Mail, etc.), and then there are our favorite third-party apps from the App Store. Which apps command the most of your time? Now there’s an easy way to find out.

A new jailbreak app called App Analytics tracks your app usage on the iPhone and iPad. Once installed via the jailbreak App Store known as Cydia, App Analytics stays out of the way. The app is simple, lightweight, and scarily revealing.

iOS 6 beta 3 has been available to registered developers for a matter of hours, and already the software has a tethered jailbreak courtesy of the iPhone Dev-Team. Like previous beta jailbreaks, however, this will not install Cydia on your device.

One of the reasons most of us jailbreak our Apple TV is to install aTV Flash (black), a terrific piece of software from FireCore that adds a ton of incredible features to your set-top box. In its latest update, aTV Flash delivers a number of features, including trakt.tv integration for those who never know what to watch.

Since its debut back in 2009, the iPad has dominated the tablet market. At the time of writing this piece, the device holds around 55% of the market share in the United States. Rival tablets from the likes of Amazon, Samsung, and HTC have tried to do battle with it, but they’ve had very little impact on its success.

But there is one tablet that Apple will need to keep its eye on: Microsoft’s new Surface. It’s already being dubbed an “iPad killer” by some, and although we’re skeptical the Windows-powered slate will “kill” Apple’s device, there are a number of reasons why the “Pro” variant will have more of an impact than you think.

Taking an innovative approach to how we experience music on our iOS devices, a new jailbreak tweak called FoldMusic lets you create playlists from the iOS Music app and view them as standalone folders on your iOS Home screen.

I was skeptical of this idea originally, but after playing with the tweak, I can see the appeal. If you have an artist, playlist, or album you want quick access to, it doesn’t get much faster than this.

Sometimes a jailbreak tweak comes along that is so subtle and yet so brilliant. Banner notifications in iOS are great, but Apple made a poor design choice: incoming banners push in on the top of whatever app you’re using at the moment. If you’re using Safari, the address/search bar is momentarily obscured by a banner notification. That’s no good.

A new Cydia tweak called CoverMeNot keeps banner notifications out of the way by automatically doubling the height of your iOS status bar. No more obtrusive banners covering the top of your favorite apps.

Notification Center on the iPad isn’t that great. It functions just like the iPhone, meaning you pull down a window from the status bar to see your notifications. While that interface works nicely on the iPhone, the window isn’t scaled appropriately to the iPad’s larger display.

In OS X Mountain Lion, Notification Center makes more sense on a larger screen. Instead of coming down from the top of your Mac’s display, your notifications are displayed on the side of the screen. Want that type of Notification Center interface on your iPad? A jailbreak tweak called MountainCenter will make it happen.

I’ve been jailbreaking my iOS devices for a couple of years now, and to be perfectly honest, I’ve thought about going back to the stock version of iOS many times. Sometimes I’ll ask myself if it’s really worth jailbreaking my iPhone. iOS 5 brought a lot of features that were only available for jailbreakers previously, and iOS 6 is adding several more.

Before the jailbreak for iOS 5.1.1 came out, I was considering abandoning Cydia, the jailbreak’s App Store equivalent, for good. I didn’t think I needed to jailbreak anymore.

And in most cases, you don’t really need to jailbreak ever. But since the iOS 5.1.1 jailbreak, I’ve fallen in love with my jailbroken iPhone 4S all over again. Here’s why.

Back in May, shortly after Research in Motion’s BlackBerry 10 unveiling, iOS developer Mario Hros announced that he was working on bringing the operating system’s nifty predictive keyboard to our iOS devices with a tweak called Octopus Keyboard. It’s a little over a month late, but Octopus Keyboard is now available to download from Cydia.

Google released its Chrome browser on the iOS platform last week, and it wasn’t long before the app shot to the top of the App Store’s charts. People clearly wanted a change of pace, and Apple’s Mobile Safari just wasn’t cutting it.

If you’re a Google Chrome for iOS fanatics out there, you’ll be pleased to hear that a couple new Cydia tweaks have surfaced to make Google Chrome the best Safari replacement around.

Google finally released its hugely popular Chrome web browser for iOS yesterday, and just as we had expected, it’s the best third-party browser so far. In fact, in many ways, it’s also better than Apple’s built-in mobile Safari browser. And you can now use Chrome as your default browser on your jailbroken iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches, thanks to the BrowserChooser tweak.

Remember when someone in the Apple camp let their censoring powers go to their head back in May, and they began censoring the word “jailbreak” across music, movies, apps, and podcasts? It didn’t take the Cupertino company too long to backtrack, and it removed the censor almost entirely just hours later.

I say almost before for podcasts, the word was still considered an expletive — until this morning, when Apple removed the censor completely. Finally.

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.

If you’ve ever jailbroken an iPhone, you should be familiar with BiteSMS, the built-in Messages replacement that delivers almost every feature you could ever want in a messages app. One of its highlights is a feature called Quick Reply, which allows you to respond to incoming messages from the home screen, the lock screen, or from within other apps using a handy popup window.

The developer behind this awesome app has now brought Quick Reply to the hugely popular WhatsApp messenger, using a new tweak that’s available now from Cydia.

For the times when you’d like a little extra privacy on your iPhone, a new jailbreak app, Protecti, will come in handy. Protecti allows you to lock down any app or notification you want, to keep prying eyes out of your information stored on your device.

Fans of jailbreaking will most likely know about Display Recorder, the jailbreak app by Ryan Petrich, that, as its name implies, lets you record your iPhone’s screen. Display Recorder is one of the reasons I initially began jailbreaking my devices. It’s a handy tool if you need to show someone how to do something on your iPhone. That in mind, I was excited today when I saw that Display Recorder had been released into the App Store. That is, until I saw it had been developed by someone else.

It’s been just four days since Apple released its first iOS 6 beta to registered developers, and it has already been jailbroken by the iPhone Dev-Team. There was some concern that the Cupertino company’s latest iOS release would make jailbreaking very difficult, but the team behind the latest iOS 5.1.1 untethered exploit have now released an iOS 6 beta jailbreak for developers.

We’re super excited for iOS 6. Although it isn’t the complete iOS overhaul many users were hoping for, it does deliver a whole host of new features — like a new Maps app, user interface enhancements, improvements to stock apps, and Siri support on iPad — that we’re certainly looking forward to.

However, it’s hard to ignore the fact that iOS 6 still has some things missing. Things we’ve been waiting for for some time. Here are seven of them.

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Back in August of last year, famed jailbreak hacker Comex — the mind responsible for the famed JailbreakMe exploit — hung up his old hacker hat and went to work at Apple as an intern.

Here’s a coincidence then. In iOS 6, the top secret, much guarded exploit used by developers to root their devices — first founded by Comex! — has suddenly been closed after being open for two years, as recent jailbreak superstar pod2g just made note on his Twitter account.

Shortly after the Chronic Dev Team released their iOS 5.1.1 untethered jailbreak a couple weeks ago, Pod2g revealed that they had already begun work on a jailbreak for iOS 6. It seems, however, that it’s going to be a long time before we’re hacking Apple’s next iOS release.

According to Dev Team member MuscleNerd, iOS 6 breaks a whole lot of stuff, including Cydia, and it’ll be a while before there’s an iOS 6 jailbreak.

Since iOS 5 was introduced last summer, our lock screens finally do something worthwhile, and that is present all of our unread notifications in one place, so that we can see what we’ve missed at a glance. However, when you have no outstanding notifications, the lock screen is stall a rather boring place.

AnimateLockscreen is a new jailbreak tweak that aims to change that, by breathing new life into your lock screen with gorgeous animated wallpapers.

I’ve never been particularly interested in theming iOS on my jailbroken iPhone. Apple’s stock iOS design is simplistic and efficient. The last thing anyone wants is to look at an over-designed interface every day.

With that said, I’ve also been wanting a change of pace recently. With iOS 6 on the near horizon, I’ve been looking for beautiful and interesting jailbreak themes to switch things up on iOS 5.1.1. It just so happens that one of the most gorgeous themes ever made was just released in Cydia.