Apple’s iOS lock screen has remained largely unchanged for the last five years. That’s probably because it serves its purpose pretty well, but sometimes it’s nice to try something different. Thanks to Pinch to Unlock, a new tweak for jailbroken iPhones, you can do just that. Rather than sliding to unlock your device, you just pinch.
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.
While Apple’s new Maps app has received a lot of criticism since its debut last month, it does offer a number of nifty features that weren’t available in iOS 5, including 3D Flyover and voice-guided, turn-by-turn navigation. However, these are features that are only available on the latest devices, including the iPhone 4S, the iPhone 5, the new iPad, and the fifth-generation iPod touch.
At least that’s the case if you handset isn’t jailbroken. If it is, you can now get these features on A4-powered devices like the iPhone 4, and the fourth-generation iPod touch thanks to a new tweak called ‘Unlock iOS 6 Maps’.
Back when I had a jailbroken iPhone, one of my favorite Cydia tweaks was a hack called Switchy, which came to life based upon an initial forum post mocking up a more advanced app switcher for iOS. I’m hopeful, then, that the same will prove true for this new switcher concept posted over the weekend, which might be the best looking, most attractive and most functional app switcher we’ve seen yet.
SAN FRANCISCO, JailbreakCon 2012 — Apple has Twitter and Facebook integration in iOS 6, but for some reason you can’t easily share the music you’re listening to with friends. Apple has never been great at social music discovery (just ask Ping), but it’s surprising that there’s still no sharing integration in the native Music app. Sometimes you just want to tweet a song you’re enjoying or email the track listing to a loved one. That’s where Scale, a new jailbreak tweak for the iPhone, comes in.
Unveiled by Joshua Tucker at JailbreakCon, Scale adds a new button in the Music app for sharing your tunes over Twitter, Facebook, email, or iMessage.
The iOS App Store has seen unprecedented success since its launch in 2008. Apple undoubtedly boasts the largest and most vibrant app ecosystem in existence, but the App Store’s success has come at a cost.
Apple’s ‘walled garden’ approach gives the company complete control over which apps are published in the App Store. If an app doesn’t follow Apple’s playbook, it doesn’t get in. You may work for months and months on an app only to get it rejected. Publishing in the App Store can be a huge gamble. But if you get lucky, the payoff can be huge.
Aaron Ash kicked off JailbreakCon with a talk on developing for the App Store vs. Cydia, the alternative storefront for jailbreakers. Ash has an unusual perspective because he has seen incredibly success has a developer in Cydia, and he is also a developer in the App Store.
Apple added a nifty new feature to iOS 6 that adds a splash of color to the status bar. Rather than being just black or silver, the status bar now changes to match the color scheme of the app you’re running. In Skype, for example, it goes bright blue, while in the eBay app it goes grey.
I’m a big fan of this feature, but I know a lot of users don’t. With that said, if you’d like to kill it, you’ll be delighted to hear there’s a new tweak for jailbroken devices that does just that.
Back in 2007,
If Apple skates to where the puck is going to be, then jailbreakers have usually already been there and left. The hackers and tinkerers that find security loopholes in Apple’s software are some of the most brilliant, innovative minds in the tech world.
We’ll be covering JailbreakCon 2012 this weekend in San Francisco, the world’s first convention dedicated solely to the jailbreak community. What better way to get ready for the future of jailbreaking than to examine the past? Let’s start from the beginning:
Using mobile Safari’s private browsing mode on an iOS device is a pain, because you have to activate and deactivate via the Settings app. In fact, I’ve always found that it’s just easier to use a third-party browser. But not anymore. If you’ve got a jailbroken iOS device, installing the Privata tweak allows you to switch back and forth between Safari’s private browsing mode within Safari itself.
It took Apple a long, long time to bring customizable wallpapers to the iPhone, so who knows when — or indeed if — the Cupertino company will make them scrollable. But rather than waiting, why not install the WS Wallpaper tweak on your jailbroken device and add scrollable wallpapers yourself?
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.
It’s not difficult to open up the Settings app and activate or deactivate things like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or Airplane Mode. But it could be a whole lot quicker. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have an icon on your home screen that allows you to toggle these things instantly — without having to navigate the Settings app? Thanks to IconToggles, you can.
Here’s an awesome little jailbreak tweak that you might find incredibly useful. It’s called Turn to Hangup, and as its name suggests, it instantly dismisses incoming calls when you place your iPhone on its face.
PreviewMaker is a new tweak for jailbroken iPhones that’s likely to be particularly useful to app developers, theme designers, reviewers, and more. It takes all the screenshots you’ve taken on your iPhone and applies an iPhone-style frame, meaning you no longer need to edit each one and add it manually.
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:
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
