There can be no denying that the favored jailbreak flavor of late 2011 and 2012 has to be the iOS 5 exclusive Notification Center and Siri digital assistant. The inclusion of the two new features in the public release of iOS 5 presented practically limitless opportunities for developers when it comes to extending their native limited abilities.
There is no doubt about the fact that the current trend for Cydia tweaks is all about modifying the new Notification Center and giving additional functionality to the Siri digital assistant software. Since the release of iOS 5 in October of last year, the Cydia store has been inundated with modifications and tweaks which add widgets, settings and even an animated Nyan cat to the Notification Center screen, but in all honesty there are only a handful which are any good.
In May of last year we brought you some news about a truly fantastic piece of development work by a developer known as Chris Simpson, also known as Apocolipse if we are to give him his online moniker. We covered the initial release of a tweak known as 'RecognizeMe' which used the front facing camera on a jailbroken iOS device to provide an extra layer of security before access could be granted to the passcode protected gadget.
If you are a long term, regular user of the Cydia store then you might be familiar with the MultiIconMover tweak which was created and submitted by Lance Fetters quite some time ago. One of the most annoying thing about a stock installation of iOS in my opinion, is the fact that when in editing mode. you can only select and move one icon at a time. I am sure Apple has some deep underlying reason why it is so, and always has been the case, but the bottom line is; from a user experience point of view it just seems pointless.
I don't know if it is something that has been out into the global water supply recently, but swiping seems to be the new tapping. Why take the time to lift your finger up and decompress a button when you can feel manly and powerful enough by quickly swiping your finger across the screen to achieve the same result? I certainly know which one I prefer.
The 'Path' iOS application will no doubt go down as one of the most popular applications of 2011 thanks to its mix of having an innovative and beautiful user interface as well as operating as an extremely functional journal-type app. Although the Path app had been around since November 2010, the 2.0 release in final quarter of last year introduced a revamped UI which gained the application quite a lot of media attention and a large amount of new users.
Siri has arguably been the main focal point of iOS 5 since Apple’s latest and greatest mobile operating system dropped in mid-October of last year.
Even though iOS is pretty easy on the eye for the most part, our tinkering nature entices us to make certain visual changes in order to make things a little more to our liking.
Although iOS is renowned for being a smooth and invariably seamless mobile experience, it does lack many customization features which would render it a more 'complete' operating system.
We are getting extremely close to the saturation stage in Cydia, where developers are having a difficult time creating new and unique tweaks which haven't already been thought of. With that being the case, jailbreak devs tend to be really creative and inventive or attempt to improve upon an existing solution by coming up with a better implementation of something that already exists.
