Over the last few years, Cydia has gone from strength to strength to become a very formidable alternative to the official App Store experience that Apple provides on their iOS devices. The official repositories that power Cydia is literally packed to the rafters with packages, tweaks and extensions that have been released for users of jailbroken Apple devices. It may not seem like it on the face of things, but Cydia is actually extremely similar to Apple's store in the fact that packages are regularly updated and require users to physically download the new version of the software to the device when a developer pushes it out.
When Apple announced iOS 5.1 to the public last month, some hoped Siri for iPad would be somewhere on the list. Unfortunately, the fruit company only implemented Voice Dictation, which, although better than nothing, left the Siri hunters to continue using the alternatives available.
With the adoption of iOS 5 being relatively high and growing rapidly, most new tweaks which hit the Cydia store have the latest major release of iOS as a firmware dependency before installation can be allowed. The SwipeCam tweak by developer Ron Melkhior that has been released in the last day or so is no different, and offers iOS 5 users the ability to gain access to a few different system toggles through the use of a swipe gesture.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the time has come for you to stop worrying about receiving an astronomical monthly bill from your network provider telling you that you owe them an extortionate amount of money due to the fact that you have massively exceeded your cellular data download limits. In my experience, cellular data is a varying beast. One month I can hardly use it, and the other, I can go way over my allocated service plan limit, meaning that it is very difficult to gauge an average of how much I am likely to use.
Over the course of the iPhone’s life, it had to undergo quite a bit of scrutiny in regards to its battery life, with a lot of analysts claiming that it often falls way too short of the estimated life which Apple claims in their literature, and seem quite proud about it in their keynotes.
The release of VoiceMailKiller onto the Cydia store brings a tweak that disable’s the network provided voicemail service that allows callers to leave an oral message, should the intended person being called does not answer for whatever reason. I personally think that the voicemail service on a phone is a vital feature, and I believe that anyone who uses their iPhone for business purposes would agree with me on that.
The most popular extensions and tweaks that can be found within the Cydia store are generally the ones that add some kind of functionality to iOS that the developer and users believe that Apple should have included as a standard implementation. Each individual user has their own taste and desire and therefore expects different things from their device, but a lot of the time the majority agree that certain things should be a native part of the operating system.
One of the most well-known, popular and professionally implemented tweaks for jailbroken iOS devices has to be MyWi, something which has also proved to be a massive hit within iOS users. The team behind the software have been at it again with the release of the updated version of MyWi, taking it to version 5.5. The developers of MyWi have already shown that they have an extremely successful piece of software on their hands, so the news of the 5.5 update should wet the lips of users.
For those music lovers out there, the MediaSpeak tweak which has just landed on the Cydia store could be something you have been looking for. If you are a regular iOS device music listener who always has their headphones on, then this little package could add a little bit of extra depth to your listening experience, as well as actually providing a very good little audible service to users. MediaSpeak is essentially a very lightweight installation that hooks into the Music app on your jailbroken device and listens to when a new song begins playing back.
When Apple flipped the switch to push out iOS 5.1, it wasn't exactly a mind-blowing update, bringing only minimal changes for users. One of those little updates was one that was only available to AT&T users with an iPhone 4S and came in the form of a '4G' indicator in the status bar that replaced the 3G symbol.
