Alympus is the new jailbreak tweak to beat. Photo: Alympus
iOS engineers must keep their eyes on the jailbreak scene. In the past, popular jailbreak tweak Auxo showed what iOS’s approach to multitasking should be like years before Apple made its best ideas part of the core operating system.
Let’s hope this pattern holds with Alympus. It’s a new tweak that radically improves, for the better, iOS 8 multitasking.
Do you like Facebook’s Chat Heads as a notification system for Facebook messages? On Android, Chat Heads can run universally in any app, but on iOS, they only show up in Facebook, Paper or Facebook Messages. It’s in-app only. But if you have a jailbroken device, a new tweak will allow you to break Chat Heads out into the rest of the iOS operating system.
In iOS 6, the dock was a glass shelf. In iOS 7, it’s far more abstract: a blurry transparent layer over your wallpaper.
Some people love it, some people hate it. If you’re one of the latter, and you have already jailbroken your iOS 7 device, you’re in for a treat: a new jailbreak tweak lets you adjust the transparency and blurriness of the iOS 7 dock to your heart’s content.
iOS 7 isn’t for everyone. With its brightly-colored, flat candy chiclet design, it’s an update that many people are going to find jarring after playing in Scott Forstall’s skeuomorphic playground for so long. In fact, given how polarizing iOS 7 is, I imagine some long-time iOS users might decide not to come along for the ride at all.
Even if you hate iOS 7, though, there are some elements to love. For example, the new dock. Sure, functionally, it’s exactly the same, but the frosty two-dimensional glass looks just so much better than the faux-3D nonsense that was going on before.
Enter CopyDock. For jailbroken iDevice owners, CopyDock strips out the iOS 6 dock and replaces it with the iOS 7 dock. Simple, beautiful, and free. You can find it in the BigBoss repo on Cydia. Now how about bringing Control Center to iOS 6, jailbreak devs?
After using iOS 7 for a couple of months, I’ve been missing some of the gorgeous iPhone themes that are out there for jailbreakers. You may think that theming iOS 6 is pointless when Apple’s next-gen OS is right around the corner, but one of the most prolific designers in the jailbreak community doesn’t agree.
We’ve highlighted Sentry’s work multiple times on Cult of Mac, and he’s most famous for Auxo, a popular app switcher replacement tweak. Aplo is a new Winterboard theme from Sentry that has been in the works for quite some time, and it’s drop-dead gorgeous.
I love Google Chrome—it’s my browser of choice on Android, Mac, and iOS. But navigating your bookmarks within the mobile apps is nowhere near as easy as it should be. Fortunately, there’s an awesome little tweak for jailbroken iOS devices that solves that.
It’s called BMarks Bar, and it introduces a handy bookmarks bar that offers one-tap access to your favorite sites.
Earlier this week, we wrote about Grabby, a rad little Cydia tweak that let you extend the lockscreen camera launcher into a quickbar for up to five favorite apps.
Here’s a similar idea. Atom is an upcoming Cydia tweak that is set to be released this weekend which allows you to unlock your iPhone directly to up to six different apps, just by dragging the on-screen ‘locked’ icon to one of six positions.
Updating your apps on iOS isn’t hard, but for some reason, I suck at remembering to. There are always about nine update notifications waiting for me in the App Store, and I always think I’ll get around to it in a minute, but never do.
One of the best new reasons to jailbreak though, is an app called Auto App Updater. Like its name says, the app makes it so you never have to think about updating your apps on your iPhone or iPad again.
Here’s a great tweak if you’ve jailbroken: QuickShoot allows you to take quick pictures right from your iOS homescreen just by tapping the app icon. You can’t frame a shot or anything, but it does allow you to quickly (and secretly!) snap a picture of someone without anyone being the wiser: not the subject, not the person looking over your shoulder. And you can even change settings for Flash Mode, Camera Device, and HDR in the settings. Totally rad, and totally free.
Last week we asked you guys to show us just how amazing you can make your iPhone look with tweaks and hacks for the homescreen and lockscreen, and boy were we impressed. We received over 100 entries in the jailbreaking contest and pretty much all of them were spectacular.
To celebrate the launch of our new Flickr and Instagram groups, we’re giving the 10 best jailbreak screens a free copy of Kuvva Wallpapers. After some serious deliberation, we think we’ve got some drool-worthy winners.
Brett Terpstra, the hardest working nerd on the internet, has come up with yet another super-useful single-serve utility. It’s called Clip Text File, and it grabs the contents of a plain text file and copies it to your clipboard, all without opening the file.
We all love OS X, but sometimes there are little things about it that annoy, or get in the way, or just don’t work the way we’d like them to. For power users, the solution to these little niggles often lies in Terminal, the command line application that lets experts dive into the heart of OS X’s innards. But for the rest of us, there’s always Mountain Tweaks.
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.
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.
A new jailbreak tweak called Curiosa lets you see incoming Cydia updates in the iOS 5 Notification Center. Instead of having to open the Cydia app and refresh for changes, new updates will be pushed as notifications for you to quickly view and open.
Developed by prominent jailbreak dev Ryan Petrich, Curiosa is available for free in Cydia now. It comes with some nice features to enhance its functionality.
Introducing the HackStore, where Cydia meets the Mac App Store (design in progress)
When the App Store first launched on iOS, the need for an alternative marketplace quickly arose. Jailbreakers and power-users wanted a way to download and install apps that gave them more control over their devices than what Apple would allow.
That was how Cydia was born. Created by Jay ‘saurik‘ Freeman, the Cydia app store allows users with jailbroken devices to not only install apps that bypass a number of iOS’s built-in restrictions, but to more easily discover them.
On the Mac, there’s obviously no jailbreaking, but given the sandboxing restrictions placed upon App Store developers, there’s still a need for a Cydia-like alternative: an easy-to-use, curated catalog for apps that give power-users too much control over their systems for Apple’s comfort.
Enter the HackStore, which hopes one day to be as synonymous with user-empowered Macs as Cydia is with jailbroken iOS devices.
The first thing I disliked about Mac OS X Lion was the way it changed the Dashboard display. It’s nice to be able to see behind the widgets to the stuff I’m working on in the background. Especially if I’m using a widget like the Calculator, or the Weather, or the Conversion widget to see how much that import from Europe might cost me in US dollars.
Mac OS X Lion, however, puts the Dashboard into it’s own separate space, complete with opaque background that looks like an odd mix of linen theme and bubble wrap. Or maybe a non-skid floor tile from a spaceship? I dunno. Regardless, not being able to see through the background was an issue, until now. I no longer have to launch the stand alone Calculator app to do a quick sum, and can go back to enabling the Dashboard, using the Calculator widget, and dismissing it just as quickly.
Sick of the boring old gray linen background on your Siri? If you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone 4S, why not try the new Custom Siri Background Cydia tweak, which allows you to apply a picture from your Camera Roll as Siri’s background wallpaper.
To prolong the life of Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PC all those years ago, gamers began introducing all sorts of things — such as new cars, weapons, and skins — to the game by modifying numerous files within its directory. If you were a “modder” then, then we have good news for you: the recently released GTA 3 games for iOS and Android are also susceptible to modding.
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.
For a while Cydia has been the one and only source for jailbroken applications and tweaks, and it hasn’t really had a lot of competition. That’s about to change, as a new web-based installer called Lima is on its way to give Cydia something of a challenge.
Developed by the Infini Dev Team, Lima runs in the Safari browser and doesn’t require any additional applications – you just navigate to its webpage to access all of its packages. Downloading and installing packages is just as simple as it currently is with Cydia.
Judging from the video at the top, Lima looks like a nice, snappy way of accessing jailbroken apps and tweaks, without the downsides of the often slow Cydia. However, I’m not sure whether you’ll we’ll still be able to add our own repositories like we can with Cydia, or whether we’re stuck with whatever Lima has to offer.
As much as I love Cydia, sometimes its slow reload times and all too frequent errors prove to be a huge frustration, and I’m looking forward to giving Lima a try. What do you think; will Lima give Cydia a run for its money, or is it facing an uphill battle? Let us know in the comments!
iOS 4’s introduction of app folders is a welcome addition to the operating system in that it’s a fantastic tool to use to wrangle a large app library, but it only takes a few minutes of playing around with the functionality to discover its sad limitations… which in my case rests mostly with the folder systems’ inability to support multiple pages in folders, or folders nested matrioshka-like inside one another.
That’s why I’m so excited about FolderEnhancer, a Cydia tweak for jailbroken iOS 4.1 devices that adds a host of new tweaks to the default foldering system, including sub-folder hierarchies, pages and moving multiple icons at a time.
Sure, this isn’t for everyone, but I’m envisioning a happy future in which my multiple overflowing games folders are united and subdivided into meticulously delineated genres. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed for free: all of the best Cydia tweaks lately have had price tags attached.