Fugitive phone
I had some time today (thanks to Snowpocalypse DC) and decided to give Jailbreaking my iPhone 3GS a try. It was super easy and took about 5 minutes (maybe 10 after reading up on the process).
I was initially drawn in by the promise of being able to hide applications that I didn’t want but couldn’t uninstall (thanks Apple). But what I found was a whole new world filled with wonder, productivity, and ultimate configurability (read ‘shiny new toy’).
The highlights of this experience include (but are not limited to) being able to:
- display 30 apps per screen
- display timely information (e.g. upcoming appointments) on the lock screen
- run multiple apps at once
- get unobtrusive notifications of new mail/sms messages with the option to read the full messages without leaving the app I’m in
- toggle/change system preferences on the fly
Here is a list in semi-priority order of my favorite Jailbroken apps thus far (with notes!):
- Poof (hide unwanted/undeletable apps)
- Winterboard (Customize backgrounds, fonts, icons and apply themes)
- SBSettings (Most useful app yet. Top bar slider activated. Change system prefs and access other info from anywhere in the iPhone)
- GV Mobile (Fully. Functional. Google. Voice. App.)
- Lock Calendar (Show upcoming calendar appts on the Lock Screen)
- Backgrounder (brilliant! go go gadget multi-tasking)
- GriP (great inline/unobtrusive/ignorable notifications)
- Mobile Terminal (Command. Line. Interface.)
- inetutils (Brings Mobile Terminal to life by enabling things such as ping)
- OpenSSH (SFTP to your iPhone to upload/download files)
- Notifier (Icons appear in top bar for new mail, sms, missed calls, etc)
- Find in page (bookmark added to safari to find/highlight items in a page)
- MakeItMine (Remove AT&T and 3G Carrier listing from top bar)
- Action Menu (highlighting never became so functional)
- Quick Scroll (enables a giant semi-transparent scroll bar for all programs to quickly scroll large distances)
- MulticonMover (move multiple icons between pages by checking icons to move, go to the page you want them at, and click home button)
- FivelRows (Enables five rows for icons)
- Five Column Springboard (Enables five columns for icons. If you can’t find it you may need to add cy.sosiphone.com as a source)
- Five Icon Dock (Enables five icons in the dock, instead of 4)
- iKeyEx 3 (adds a numeric keypad to the keyboard overlay when typing)
An honorable mention goes to ProSwitcher. It is a fantastic app that allows you to background whatever app you’re using, open another, background that as well and navigate between them. From there you can keep going and add as many apps as you want (resource permitting). The only downside was that my phone would crash every time I would unlock it, regardless of which settings I used or how many apps were running.
With these new features at my finger tips comes some trade-off. My phone is marginally slower and there are likely some instabilities that I have yet to see (similar to what was witnessed with ProSwitcher). But to me it’s a necessary evil for what I get in return. Let the real fun begin.
Categorised as: Technology