If you’re listening to music in the background while you use other apps on your iOS device, it’s quick and easy to control your Music app by using the buttons in the multitasking tray. If you have a faulty home button, however — which is a common problem on Apple’s iOS devices — you may have an issue.
Thankfully, SpringPod offers an alternative solution by adding music controls to your home screen.
Don’t you wish your iOS device would do something a little more spectacular when you use that “slide to unlock” button? Well UnlockFX from Filippo Biga might be the answer. It’s a tweak that offers all kinds of fancy effects designed to transform the unlock animation on your jailbroken iOS device from boring to beautiful.
Do you ever wish that you could get quick access to your iOS apps from your device’s lock screen? With LockLauncher installed on your jailbroken iPhone, you can.
Did you know that you can easily record your jailbroken iOS device’s screen with an app called Display Recorder? Thanks to a recent update that introduced iOS 5 compatibility, jailbreakers running the latest version of Apple’s mobile OS can record screen activity and share it with the world.
Display Record is a fantastic Cydia app that has been around for years. Version 1.2.5 introduces the ability to record your screen on iOS 5, save the movie file, and share it with YouTube or your desktop computer.
Apple has begun an attack on App Store piracy. The popular resource for cracked iOS apps known as Apptrackr recently said that Apple has begun sending large amounts of takedown notices, thereby forcing Apptrackr to relocate many of its servers and implement more steps for its users to avoid legal ramifications.
In a note to users of Installous, a Cydia app for downloading and installing pirated apps from the App Store, Apptrackr frontman “dissident” explains Apple’s attempts at crippling the piracy service and how Apptrackr supporters can help keep the resource running.
iOS devices receive a lot of criticism for their static app icons, which, although often pretty, are a little boring to look at. Other than the Newsstand icon, which changes depending on which publications you have installed within, iOS icons do nothing.
If you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone, however, you can make them a little more exciting. Motion is a nifty tweak available from within Cydia, which will animate the app icons on your home screen with all sorts of fancy effects.
The popular jailbreak tweak vWallpaper has received a pretty significant update that finally brings live home screen wallpapers to iPhones running Apple’s latest iOS 5 software.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZEypDIqekQ
One of the most useful little introductions to Apple’s iOS 5 software are the new multitasking gestures on the iPad, which allow you to use four-finger swipes to switch between the apps you have running in the background. Unfortunately we didn’t get these on the iPhone, but thanks to a new jailbreak tweak called Zephyr, we can add them ourselves.
Well, isn’t this a nice little late Christmas gift. Following the last month of updates, pod2g has finally released his untethered iOS 5.01 jailbreak through the iPhone Dev Team and Chronic Dev Team. But sorry chaps, it won’t work on the iPhone 4S or iPad 2. Not yet, anyway.
We’ve been hearing a lot about pod2g’s upcoming untethered jailbreak for all iOS 5 devices, but the latest blog post on the hacker’s site makes clear just how close to completion the jailbreak is for distribution. In fact, according to pod2g, it’s “near ready for prime time,” and to prove it he’s showing the jailbreak running on a stock iPhone 4.
Not all of the best apps available for the iPhone, iPod touch or iPad are sold on the App Store. For jailbroken phones, there’s also Cydia, the equivalent of the App Store black market… and for those brave enough to experiment with the very cortex of their device, the benefits of hacking can be great indeed.
In many ways, some of the most innovative and daring development work is happening on Cydia these days, so here’s our list of the best jailbreak apps and tweaks for 2011. Check out our choices below, then help us pick the best jailbreak app or tweak of the year by taking part in our poll!
iOS hacker Pod2g, who has become increasingly famous over the last few weeks thanks to the progress he’s made on an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5, is one step closer to jailbreaking the iPhone 4S. Apple’s latest iPhone was tricky to hack thanks to its new dual-core A5 processor, but Pod2g reports the new chip “is not a problem anymore.”
BiteSMS is a strong contender right now for our best jailbreak tweak of 2011, and almost as if it were trying to get ahead in the poll, they’ve gone ahead and released the new 6.0 version of the bite-sized text messaging app, which is the first to fully support iOS 5.
It’s always seemed like such a simple tweak, but SBSettings has turned out to be the jailbreak tweak I have the hardest time living without: a simple interface for turning on or off the most common iPhone or iPad settings with a single button press, opened by simply swiping your finger across your iOS’s status bar.
Now that Siri’s here, though, wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to just tell your iPhone to do the things SBSettings does? Turn Bluetooth On or Off, for instance, or go into Airplane Mode.
Apple mysteriously left the ability to use Siri to toggle system preferences out of iOS 5, but the functionality’s reportedly on the way thanks to a new app called Toggles. The only problem? We’ll have to wait for an iPhone 4S jailbreak first.
One of the first tweaks I make to any Mac I use is this neat little tweak that adds the currently playing album’s art to any song playing in Tunes.
Wouldn’t it be cool, though, if you could do the same thing on iOS, replacing the Music logo on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch with the album art cover of the song you’re currently listening to? As usual, with a jailbreak and a simple Cydia download, you can.
Every couple of years, Apple gets a new design fetish in their UIs: brushed aluminum, for example, or that god awful faux leather look Cupertino’s rocking for iCal and Address Book.
Less objectionable than most of Apple’s UI fetishes is the gray linen background we’ve been seeing creep through iOS and Lion over the last year or so, but if you’re sick of drab gray, here’s a colorful way to replace your iOS Notification Center’s gray linen background with a colorful, blurred version of your springboard.
By making your photographs available across all of your devices, Photo Stream makes it easier than ever to share your holiday snaps with your friends and family. However, the experience is ruined somewhat when your stream gets cluttered up with screenshots you’ve taken on your iOS devices.
Screenshot Dam is a new tweak for jailbroken devices that aims to solve this problem by preventing screenshots from entering your Photo Stream altogether.
If you’ve been whining about why the iPhone 4S has no 4G, get ready for a real letdown — 2G speeds. The move by AT&T to throttle its top 5 percent of data users to a snail’s pace is an unwelcome Christmas present for many iPhone users.
Following its debut on the iPhone 4S back in October, it seems every iOS user wants to get their hands on Siri. A number of developers have attempted to port the feature to older devices, but because it needs to talk to Apple’s servers to function properly, they’ve had little success. Until now!
A fully functional (and possibly illegal) version of Siri has made its way to the jailbroken iPhone 4 via Cydia.
Ever wondered how long you spend on your iPhone playing Angry Birds, or watching videos on YouTube? Well, if your device is jailbroken, there’s a handy new tweak called App Stat that will tell you exactly how much time you put into each app.
While we all eagerly await an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S, many of us are using custom settings shortcuts on our iOS homescreens to duplicate the functionality of a more robust Cydia hack like SBSettings.
The only problem? While the shortcuts work really well, some of the icons can be ugly and distinctly un-Apple-like.
Why settle for some puked-up icons, though, when you can have icons sexy enough to lick? Just go over to https://brdrck.me/settings/ on your iDevice and get downloading. Follow our previous how-to if you need guidance on setting these up.
[via iDB]
For years, Apple has been warning would-be jailbreakers that jailbreaking their iPhones could lead to them getting ripped off. How rich, then, that the latest jailbreaking scam originates in Apple’s App Store itself: a new, approved iOS app simply called Jailbreak that definitely does not do what it says on the tin.
While Apple’s latest gadgets are a must-have for some, they’re not all that useful for iOS jailbreakers. The company’s new iPhone 4S, along with the iPad 2, cannot be jailbroken when running iOS 5. But thanks to the iPhone Dev-Team, it won’t be long before you’re using Cydia on them.
While Apple is yet to open its iOS 5 Notification Center up to third-party widgets, developers have been hard at work creating awesome tweaks that can be installed on jailbroken devices. One of the best is a tweak called WeeSpaces, which makes it easier than ever to multitask on an iOS device.
If you’ve already updated to iOS 5, I’m sure one of the features you’re enjoying most is the new Notification Center. It’s a fantastic addition to iOS, and something we were begging for from Apple for some time. However, there are a number of ways in which Notification Center can be improved… and one of them is to install IntelliScreenX.
