Batteries. They're a bit of a nightmare aren't they? If you think about it, you can never really have enough battery life, but you don't want to pay for it by having a thick, heavy handset that just can't compete with today's super svelte offerings. It's one of life's modern conundrums, and it's not going away.
When you're stuck in a meeting or conference, and for some reason it seems to be dragging out, that feeling of agitation always seems amplified by seeing your unread messages build up minute by minute, and in turn, the senders are likely to feel a sense of agitation. This vicious cycle of agitation needn't occur - particularly not in this Digital Age - and although Apple doesn't offer an auto-reply feature at stock level, the jailbreak scene has come up with yet another gem to deal with these cumbersome situations.
The Nexus live wallpaper is probably the most strikingly unmistakable of all the live wallpapers around. The colors shooting across the screen provide a subtle amount of activity to add an extra dimension to your wallpaper, but manage to do so without being too distracting. If you've always liked the look of the Nexus live wallpaper but, being on iOS, have yet to enjoy it on your device, you now can thanks to a little jailbreak tweak aptly called LivePaper, and its addon Nexus LivePaper.
As anybody travelling out-and-about frequently will know, keeping your iPhone (or any mobile device, for that matter) sufficiently juiced-up can be a trying task. New features being added in the hardware and software stakes all the time often prove detrimental to the battery life, and although most of us carry a USB cable around with us for such emergencies, it's not a very practical peripheral. Enter ChargeCard, a self-descriptive accessory which slots straight into your wallet, just like a card, while including the correct connectors to turn any USB port into a Lightning / 30-pin/ microUSB connection ready to charge your device up at the drop of a hat.
The mobile experience offered by Safari on iOS is reasonable, without perhaps being considered inspiring, but tweak after tweak from the Cydia Store over the past few years has ensured the app is as functional as possible. Joining the ranks of SafariDM, Tab+ and others comes SafariSwipez, which purports to offer a tab-closing experience "the way Apple should have implemented".
Remember what iOS was like before the days of folders? Page after page of assorted icons, and not only was it impractical, but an eyesore. Since iOS 4, things have been much easier to manage, but customization of said folders has been typically lacking from Apple. Despite boasting a dual-core A6 processor, not even the latest iPhone 5 can handle more than a few icons in one folder, and as for the folder icons themselves cannot be altered to look less cluttered. As jailbreakers will know, there are plenty of tweaks - namely chpwn's InfiniFolders and ashikase's revered FolderEnhancer - to allow for more icons in one folder, and if you've been looking for a way to change the folder icons from 3x3 to an altogether less-cluttered 2x2, you now can thanks to 2x2 Folder Icons.
The iPod touch is seen as the "iPhone without the phone part" by many, and while this is true to a degree (and Apple would love for you to think this), the truth is, the iPod touch falls short in every department against its cellular rival. It's not just every piece of hardware that is inferior to the iPhone, many software elements - besides those used for calling and tethering - have been skipped with the iPod touch for no good reason. The iPhone 5, for example, offers a nifty feature which allows you to capture still images from video while you are recording, and although it's only a minor feature, Apple felt it best only to offer it exclusively to iPhone 5 owners. Thankfully, the jailbreak scene is on hand to nullify this decision, and Still Capture Enabler delivers exactly what it purports to do.
Many of you will probably not use Siri often enough to have realized, but when the voice-recognition software is in action, banner notifications are disabled by default. Clearly intended to free up as much of the interface as possible for the information yielded by Siri, it's perhaps counter-intuitive to enjoy one feature whilst forgoing another, and thus, jailbreak developer Sirifl0w has created a tweak to enable the notifications when consulting Siri.
Even with a fleet of enhancements and improvements with iOS 6 - including support for the iPad - Siri is still lacking in many departments. Apple has stipulated in the past that the voice assistant is currently still in beta stage, but after some eighteen months with the end user, the vast majority of folks rarely - or never - call upon the services offered by Siri. For those jailbroken however, the Cydia Store has come up with a variety of ways one maximize the potential of Siri, and AssistantEnhancer is perhaps one of the best we've seen to date. Created by Zaid Elkurdi, it unlocks a whole new world of possibilities while also making better what Siri is already capable of.
The Cydia Store is a treasure trove of useful tweaks, and whereas last week we showed how you could remove the 'typing' icon to prevent your correspondent from knowing you're typing a message, today arrives tweak which helps you utilize that very feature, but in a broader sense. When in the Messages app, or indeed in a conversation with somebody on iOS, you can see when they are typing a message back, but if you're at the home screen, for example, you've no way of knowing who may be just about to send something through. TypeStatus allows you to do so by adding that same ellipsis / speech bubble icon to your status bar whenever anybody is typing a message to you.
