Jailbreak

Upcoming Springtomize 3 update for iOS 9

One of the most popular ways to customize your iOS device is the Springtomize tweak. With the ability to drastically modify the UI, Springtomize allows for modifications like the number of dock icons, status bar clean up, animation changes, and, my personal favorite, icon label manipulation. I absolutely hate icon labels and for several iOS generations, Springtomize saved the day.

There are a lot of questions about when the tweak will be available for the recently jailbroken iOS 9. I was able to chat with the Springtomize developer, Filippo Bigarella, this afternoon.

This tweak adds audio and haptic feedback to music controls on iPhone

Listening to music on our iPhones is one of the most classic uses for the device. The Music app has been with us since the beginning, in the form of the old iPod app. It has gone through a few iterations and improvements throughout the years, but there is always something that third-party apps are doing differently or better.

Feedback, by Ron Thakrar (@ronthakrar) enables audio and haptic feedback for media controls. It only works when controlling audio playback remotely, like in the Control Center or Lock screen. For example, it doesn't work within an app itself, when you're in the Music app and press play or skip track it won't make any feedback sounds.

Noir expresses dark minimalism in this clean and simple theme

There is a lot of themes in Cydia, many of which don't get as much attention as they might deserve. A lot of hard work goes into the thought process of creating a coherent design. It has to make sense and look good.

Noir, by Roberto Alvarez (@0phicleide) was born out of his desire to have a clean-looking minimalist theme that would be updated regularly. He started out theming the icons for free tweaks at first, and has plans on moving to paid apps as they're requested.

IneffectivePower and Unicode Suppressor will protect jailbroken devices from the “effective power” Messages bug

There is a new bug in iOS that resprings most peoples phones due to a low memory crash. It is caused by iOS's inability to render certain strings of Arabic characters which overloads the memory, causing resprings and reboots or safe mode on a jailbroken device. Simply explained, when someone messages you those characters and you get a banner notification, your phone starts kicking the bucket.

A few developers have stepped in and saved the day for jailbreakers. This isn't the first or second time the jailbreak community receives a security fix quicker than Apple is able to push one to stock devices. It's a great example of the argument that jailbroken iOS, in the right hands, can be more secure than stock.

SwishSwitcher plays a sound when you kill an app from the App Switcher

SwishSwitcher by Metion is one of those 'why not' tweaks that are released here and there in Cydia that just add a little fun thing to a small part of iOS. They seem to be mostly projects that developers undertake in order to learn more about developing.

They can practice working with certain frameworks and passing information around by using Substrate to hook into Apple's private API's. There is also a lot more to learn about making a tweak than just coding it, and it's a great accomplishment to set everything up and create a deb file.

In this case the developer uses the 'whoosh' sound you hear when you hit Send from the stock Mail app, and calls it to play after a user has swiped up on a card in the App Switcher.

iOS 8.3 patches another jailbreak exploit

In addition to a lengthy change log of improvements, today's iOS 8.3 release also includes several security patches. In fact, as MuscleNerd points out, the new firmware features 39 security patches, rivaling the amount found in the jump from iOS 7 to iOS 8.

Among the patches is one of particular interest, to us anyway, that is credited to the TaiG Jailbreak Team. It's labeled CVE-2015-1087, and described as a backup bug that can allow an attacker to use the backup system to access restricted areas of the file system.

iOS 8.2 jailbreak: what we know so far

It's been nearly 2 months since Apple killed the iOS 8/8.1 jailbreak, and in that time we've seen the public release of iOS 8.2 and multiple betas of iOS 8.3. So with that in mind, along with the hundreds of questions we've received on the subject, we decided it was time to take a look at the current state of the jailbreak.

Remove the dock on your iPhone’s Home screen with Abeo

One of the useful features of iOS is definitely the dock, where you can place your four favorite apps to access them quickly, no matter which page of the Home screen you're on. If you ever wished to get rid of the dock, you should definitely check out a solid new tweak called Abeo.

The tweak has just one purpose and it does it nicely. With Abeo, you'll have the ability to hide the dock on your iPhone's Home screen leaving space for other icons to fill in. The tweak doesn't add a new row of icons, but rather increases the spacing between adjacent rows of icons to accommodate the empty space. 

VolumeNotifier makes your device beep as you increase or decrease the volume

Normally, when you increase or decrease the volume on your iPhone, a large volume HUD appears on the center of the screen that displays the volume level as you adjust it. VolumeNotifier is a brand new jailbreak tweak that goes a little step further and notifies you when you change the volume on your device.

The tweak adds a sound effect when you're changing the volume such that when you increase or decrease the volume, a beep sound is made, just like how it works on Mac.