One of the most amazing things about the jailbreak community in our opinion, is the sheer diversity which it represents. When we talk about diversity, we mean that in all contexts, spanning from the range of tweaks available on the Cydia store, all the way to the cultural and age diversity of the developers who submit them. Cydia contains software and modifications of all genres which can pretty much tweak, theme and alter nearly all aspects of iOS, but somehow developers still manage to keep churning out unique ideas.
Regular readers and jailbreak enthusiasts alike may recall an article some weeks back which related to the fact that the Electronic Frontier Foundation were petitioning for members of the public to make their combined voices heard to ensure that the Copyright Office continues to protect the exemption which makes jailbreaking a legal activity, as well as extend that exemption to include additional devices such as tablets and games consoles.
What kind of world would we live in without gravity? A phenomenon defined as a force by Sir Isaac Newton, something which attracts all objects to other objects, with Albert Einstein chipping in with his theory that gravity is the result of the curvature of space-time. These two theories are the most widely accepted, and although we may never get a fully complete explanation of what gravity actually is, we all know it's a pretty awesome phenomenon nonetheless.
One of the most talked about Cydia tweaks so far in 2012 has to be the fabulous Zeppelin modification by developer Alex Zielenski, which offers users the ability to not only set a custom image to display in place of the carrier name, but also to easily create and add their own logos of whatever they desire. Since Zeppelin was released, we have been having lots of fun with it, downloading logo packs from Cydia and seeing all of the excellent offerings which the community has created, but we thought it was about time Redmond Pie was represented in Zeppelin.
The Cydia store contains a wide range of offerings from developers from all works of life. Some of the software in Cydia is uploaded by teenagers, some by indie developers, some by security researchers and some of the more professional pickings in Cydia are submitted by development houses who do this as a profession. One of those development houses is CocoaNuts, who are a small team of developers dedicated to creating tweaks for iOS which put powerful functionality in the hands of users.
Perhaps one of the most popular, but simple tweaks in the last few months is Zeppelin modification which is available through the ModMyi repository in Cydia. The tweak provides a small aesthetic enhancement to a jailbroken iOS device by allowing a custom logo to be set in place of the default carrier logo. Zeppelin is similar in functionality to that of Fake Operator and MakeItMine, except it allows total customization over the logo as long as the set graphic is within the space confinements.
One of the main driving forces behind users performing a jailbreak on their iOS device is the fact that it gives the ability to modify the feel and appearance of the operating system. As a company, Apple are a champion of innovative design and their current range of hardware is amongst the most beautifully designed out there, but a growing number of users feel the need to modify the stock interface elements to better suit their individual tastes.
One of iTunes and iOS devices’ biggest “limitations” is how users cannot sync with multiple iTunes libraries. It is one of the biggest shocks iOS converts receive when they set up their device for the first time as they are used to simply copy-pasting files from their PC and onto their device. This isn't very pleasant, but it forces the user to organize all their songs by placing them on one computer in iTunes.
We've all been there - happily humming along to a song, unable to get it out of our minds, when suddenly - we don't actually know the next line of lyrics.
Late last week, we covered Sara - a jailbreak-only Siri alternative which actually worker rather well. Of course, life experiences will tell us that nothing usually compares to the real thing, but for those not sold by the rather unspectacular iPhone 4S, it does a grand job.
