Sunday, January 3, 2010

The Best Jailbroken Apps!

So you’ve jailbroken your iPhone/iPod Touch! Now what can you do with Cydia and what cool apps are there? Here’s a handy starter guide to jailbroken goodness!

First you need to know that Cydia is the “app store” of jailbroken devices. Before you begin, you should add in at least these 2 “sources”, which list a whole bunch of useful apps:

http://apt.iwatcher.net/
http://cydia.xsellize.com/


See my tutorial “Get paid apps for free” on how to add sources onto Cydia (steps 1 and 2)

Once you have these sources installed, you should be able to just search in Cydia for these apps!

SBSettings
This is a must have app! Basically you swipe the status bar at the top and it brings down a handy little menu with toggles for wifi, bluetooth, 3G, airplane mode, bluetooth, brightness etc. I use it pretty much all the time, mostly to turn wifi on and off to save precious battery life. The normal way would be to go to settings>Wi-Fi>turn on/off, and that’s for wi-fi only!





Winterboard
You’ll love this if you’re into customisation. Don’t want your menu to look like everything else out there? Use Winterboard to customise your device with themes! Creators of themes upload them onto Cydia and you can browse through it in Winterboard themes in the categories tab of Cydia.


The “Illumine” Winterboard Theme I am currently using.

Backgrounder+Proswitcher
These 2 apps work wonders together. Backgrounder by itself lets you run apps in the background! My favourite use is when skyping.

When you skype someone, and you press home, skype logs you out because the program quits. However, with Backgrounder installed, you hold down the home button instead, to see a message “backgrounder enabled”, and you will exit to the home screen, but you will still be talking on skype! Backgrounder basically keeps the app running in the background while you can access any other app.

Proswitcher is an elegant way of switching between your backgrounded apps and closing them if need be. It works only when backgrounder is installed. However, native backgrounding apps (Phone, Safari, Mail, Messages, iPod) will show up with Proswitcher as well, which is another great feature.





See the loading circle badges next to Phone and iPod? That’s a feature of backgrounder which tells you they’re being run in the background!

No comments: