I am pretty sure that if you search hard enough, the Cydia store will be able to produce an extension or tweak for pretty much any kind of situation that you can image. It is literally packed to the rafters with packages, with revblaze's HTML Editor being one of the latest commercial apps to land on the ModMyi repository.
iOS developer Ganbold, who has brought customizable keyboards to the iPhone has now released a similar tweak which brings the ability to alter and arrange the keyboard on a jailbroken iPad. 5 Row Customizable Keyboard for iPad has recently hit Cydia and works in the same manner as its younger brother, which is for the iPhone. Apple have a dedicated Settings entry within iOS that allows users to define certain international keyboards, but these are pre-defined layouts and don't give the user a more advanced option of creating a keyboard to suit specific layout requirements.
Although Apple pushed out iOS 5.1 along with the release of the new iPad earlier this month, it didn't really bring any earth shattering changes to delight the iOS user community. One of the additions that Tim Cook and his team talked about is the fact that they have removed the option to double tap the Home button on the lockscreen to display a camera shortcut button in favor of permanently displaying a camera icon that reacts to a swipe up gesture.
The lack of Messages app alternatives on Cydia could be either due to the fact that biteSMS and others have pretty much covered all bases and are extremely functional, or it could have something to do with the amount of work involved in creating such an app. Whatever the reason, the guys over at Handcent haven't been deterred and have released their HandcentSMS app through the Cydia store which they believe can unlock the messaging potential of a user’s iPhone. HandcentSMS is an entirely free, very powerful and highly customizable alternative to Apple's native app which handles both SMS and MMS messaging services.
Users of a Mac, or even a Windows-based PC, will be aware of the fact that you can flick between running apps by using the command/Alt and Tab buttons together. A quick press of these two buttons will flick to the last viewed app and back again. However, if you hold the buttons down together, a nice little view is overlaid on the screen which shows all of the running apps and allows the user to toggle between them all and choose one quickly. An iOS developer known as coffeejayyy has decided to make an iOS implementation of that feature and has called it CmdTab, available in Cydia now.
The official iOS App Store from Apple changed the way consumers think about and purchase software in a similar fashion to how the launch of the iTunes music store revolutionized the online music industry. The App Store was born in 2008 and has grown at a rapid rate over the last few years as millions of users tap into it on a daily basis to download and install apps spanning across multiple genres. Only recently Apple announced that the App Store had served up over 25 billion downloads since its inception, bringing proof if anyone needed it of the phenomenal success of the store.
iH8sn0w, the well known iOS developer and researcher who is responsible for the production of Sn0wbreeze, iFaith, iReb and f0recast has been hard at work again trying to resolve an issue that has been tainting the experience of owners of the iPhone 4S and iPad 2. The said two Apple devices are powered by the A5 processor, and as any jailbreak fan will know, it hasn't previously been possible to perform firmware downgrades on those two units. When Apple releases a new version of iOS, they promptly stop signing the older firmware, meaning that any official restores result in the user installing the latest official iOS version onto their device.
When you consider all of the fantastic and powerful features that the iPhone has, you quickly come to realize that it is a fairly fantastic piece of consumer technology. The latest in the series, the iPhone 4S not only has an amazing Retina display and an 8 mega-pixel camera, but it also has an awesome built-in intelligent voice assistant. We are living in a generation where consumers constantly demand more and more from manufacturers, but it is sometimes worth stopping for a moment and considering the intense technology which we already have.
Believe it or not, there are a portion of hardened jailbroken users who tend to welcome in a new day by launching Cydia to see if any of their installed packages have updates, as well as browsing through the Changes section to see if anything new and noteworthy has been pushed to the repositories over night. It shouldn't come as any great surprise to users that the majority of the new changes within Cydia are theme-related, with only the odd useful tweak or extension showing up these days.
Considering we run a number of posts which are dedicated to tutorials on how to jailbreak iOS devices, as well as featuring new and impressive tweaks and enhancements which find their way onto Cydia, the chances are, that a good portion of those reading this have enjoyed the benefits which a liberated Apple device can bring. What started out as an exercise of technical ability has turned into a thriving and talented community which features security researchers, developers, device interface artists, and a loyal user base who support and drive the innovation forward.
