Apps

GriP (Growl for iPhone) Notification Extension for iPhone

Guest Author ∙ Updated November 12, 2019

This is a guest post by Antonio J. If you would like to guest post on this blog, please check out the guidelines.

I absolutely adore my iPhone. However, there are some little details that are increasingly affecting the experience because the UI starts to show its age. I could name the lack of multitasking, or the lack of active content on the lockscreen and/or springboard (no widgets). Or, my main grip, the lack of a decent notification system.

Now that push notification apps are pretty much everywhere, it becomes obvious that the iPhone OS notification system does not cut it anymore. This is something even more blatant when you compare with the elegant and non-obtrusive way WebOS and Android handle notifications.

Jailbreakers however can suffer less with this. GriP (Growl for iPhone), a Project by KennyTM, author of other well known projects like QuickScroll, presents a great alternative to the stock notification system, even on its current beta stage.

Xpandr: Shortcuts Made Easy on the iPhone

Sébastien Page ∙ October 27, 2009

Do you have to enter the same text over and over again on your iPhone? Do you need a reply template for emails? If so, Xpandr is for you.

Xpandr is a shortcut expander for the iPhone / iPod touch. It allows you to define an unlimited number of shortcuts to save time and make your life easier. It works in every application, even on App Store applications.

Let me tell you how beneficial Xpandr is for me

Every day on Twitter people ask me where to get jailbreak information. So every day, several times a day, I have to manually type a tweet containing the following URL: https://www.idownloadblog.com/jailbreak/. Not too complicated, but when you have to do it 8-9 times/day, it gets very annoying.

That's where Xpandr comes in. Xpandr allows you to create macros, or shortcuts if you prefer. To create a shortcut, simply tell Xpandr what the shortcut is and what the value of this shortcut is.

In our example, my shortcut is !jb (as in jailbreak) and the value of this macro is https://www.idownloadblog.com/jailbreak/

Now if I go to any application on my iPhone and I type !jb, it will automatically insert https://www.idownloadblog.com/jailbreak/.

I also set other shortcuts for !unlock, !signature, and more... This is a real time saver.

Xpandr is available on Cydia for $1.99 and I believe it is worth every penny.

Have you already tried this application? If so, tell me us what you think about it.

MultiIconMover: Move Several iPhone Icons at Once

Sébastien Page ∙ October 24, 2009

MultiIconMover is one of those applications that should not exist. Why? Simply because they are so good that Apple should have implemented them into the iPhone OS. Yes, that's how good I think MultiIconMover is.

This app is very simple yet very practical. It allows you to select multiple icons to move them to a different page on your springboard. So instead of moving your icons one at a time, you can select many of them and move them all at once wherever you want.

MultiIconMover is a mod, not really an application per say, so you won't find an icon for it after installing the application. Follow these steps to get MultiIconMover into action

Simply tap and hold your finger on an application until they all start wiggling. Then select all the icons you want to move and a little red checkmark will appear (see image above). Now move to a different page and hit the "home" button. Done! Your icons will be moved to the selected page. Hit the home button one more time and the icons will stop wiggling.

This is definitely a faster way to move your icons around the springboard.

MultiIconMover is available for free in the App Store. No, I'm kidding. It's on Cydia...

What do you think of this mod?

Orbit (Previously Expose) is Now Available on Jailbroken iPhones

Sébastien Page ∙ October 17, 2009

There has been a lot of noise recently about a concept called Expose (see video below). Today, Expose is more than a concept and it has officially become an application renamed Orbit for the occasion.

Orbit brings you an instant way to switch between pages on your home screen. Based on the "iPhone Expose" concept, this modification gives you an icon that, when tapped, animates your home page into Orbit.

The app was created by Steven Troughton-Smith, the developer of Stack. If you have a Mac, you might even be familiar with the concept as Orbit is pretty much like Spaces on the Mac.

Orbit is available from Cydia for $1.99. I haven't downloaded the application has I wouldn't make any use of it (I don't have many apps installed) but I know there are a lot of people out there who were patiently waiting for the release of this app.

Will In-App Purchase Kill iPhone Apps Piracy?

Sébastien Page ∙ October 16, 2009

Yesterday the news fell that Apple was finally allowing free iPhone apps to include in-app purchases. Until then, developers who wanted to offer a free trial of their applications had to create 2 versions: a full-featured paid version, and a "lite" stripped-down version with very basic features.

The news was very well welcome, especially by developers who see in this new system a chance to reduce application piracy. Two articles got my attention yesterday as they were insinuating that in-app purchase for free apps was the end of piracy.

From MobileCrunch:

Here’s the trick: while you can crack an iPhone application and throw it up for all to download in a matter of seconds, you can’t fake an In-App purchase receipt. A pretty notable chunk of the In-App purchase process is actually handled on the developer’s server, in addition to Apple’s – so unlike the initial purchase (which devs actually get to know very, very little about), developers know pretty damn well exactly which iPhones should be running which In-App Purchase. Developers have a specific receipt for each in-app purchase, which resides on their server. Faking this would be like tricking Amazon into shipping you a TV that you didn’t pay for.

From TUAW:

"Will this help in anti-piracy measures?" Definitely. StoreKit allows developers to validate receipts, ensuring that unlock codes are only sent to paying customers. Add a hash-check algorithm for the current device and developers have better control over who gets to use their applications.

I am not much of a technical person ("StoreKit" and "hash-check algorithm" sound like Chinese to me) but I really doubt that in-app purchase is the end of piracy. If anything, it's going to start a new era of iPhone app piracy.

To crack an application, you first have to download it. So let's say I'm a cracker, I download the app, I pay for the in-app purchase that "unlocks" the full-featured app. Now that I have everything, I just need to crack the application and make it available to the general public.

Nothing changes. Maybe the way I crack the application changes. Maybe I have to bypass a few new protections like the StoreKit thing, but in the end, if I have the full application to work on, there will always be a way to trick the app into thinking it is legit.

So to me, in-app purchase will not kill iPhone apps piracy. At best, it will slow it down and instead of getting the cracked version of XYZgame in 2 hours after the release, I'll get it in 3 hours. At the end of the day, you still get your cracked app.

As I said above, I'm not technical at all and I might be missing something here. I'm interested in hearing what you have to say about it. Do you think in-app purchase will put an end to iPhone app piracy? Why? How? Leave a comment to share your views.

10 iPhone Apps to Save the Planet

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated November 12, 2019

I don't know if you guys are aware of it but today is Blog Action Day, an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day. The goal is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion about important issues. This year's topic is climate change so we selected a few applications that will help you lower your environmental impact on our planet.

iLocavore

iLocavore (download for free) will be your mobile tool for finding locally grown foods and locally made products at home and on the road. Never get stuck shopping at the big box stores or the giant chain restaurants again. You will always be able to find the independent retailer, the farmers’ market, the restaurant that supports local farms. Really experience the local scene when you travel, and easily support your local economy, local farmers, artisan producers, and independent retailers while at home.

Carticipate

Save money on gas while helping the environment by carticipating with friends, family, groups, or co-workers. Coordinate driving plans, carpool, or a ride share by indicating where you are going, when, and post your ride. The app will match you to local carticipants going your way. Carticipate (download for free) is also available on Facebook, for those friends of yours unfortunate enough not to have an iPhone and want to rideshare.

iRecycle

iRecycle (download for free) makes it easy to access over 100,000 recycling and disposal locations for over 200 materials anywhere in the United States. Find places to drop-off your old cell phone, get directions and find out what else they accept. With information provided by local governments, industry insiders, organizations and everyday consumers, you can recycle hundreds of products from packing peanuts to computers.

Carbon Tracker

Carbon Tracker (download for free) enables you to manage your personal carbon footprint from commuting, vacations, or business trips. Use the iPhone GPS feature to determine the approximate distance of each leg of your trip, select the mode of transportation, and let Carbon Tracker calculate your carbon footprint. Set monthly maximum footprint goals, and play an important role in helping to reduce carbon emissions globally.

greenMeter

greenMeter (download for $5.99) is an app that computes your vehicle's power and fuel usage characteristics and evaluates your driving to increase efficiency, reduce fuel consumption and cost, and lower your environmental impact. If you're into hypermiling or eco-driving, want to make your transportation more efficient, or are simply interested in maintaining a green lifestyle, give greenMeter a try! It pays for itself within 1-2 tanks of gas.

Green Outlet

One of the easiest ways to save money is to reduce your electric use and while you save money on your bill your also helping save the environment. Green Outlet (download for $2.99) helps you identify which of your household appliances are costing you the most to run so you can make informed decisions about your electric use. By selecting the types of appliances you use in your home and entering how many hours of use per day for each green outlet will give you a detailed list of what your appliances are costing you and will show you how to save money.

GenGreenTips

Many people are dedicated to going green on Earth Day, but we believe making small changes are the way to take better care of the planet every day! GenGreenTips (download for free) will suggest a Green Tip of the Day that you can use to decrease the environmental impact of your daily routine in a small, but significant way.

AllOrganic

Want to eat healthy and naturally? Want to help reduce the negative impact that we have on the environment? Find it difficult to locate and find establishments that sell & serve organic and local foods? Then AllOrganic (download for $0.99) is for you. AllOrganic is a green resource for people who want to eat healthy, and eat organic in the city you live in, or while traveling.

Cruelty-Free

Published by the Coalition for Consumer Information on Cosmetics’ (CCIC) Leaping Bunny Program, Cruelty-Free (download for free) is a shopping guide that lists over 200 U.S. and Canadian companies that do not test ingredients, formulations, or finished products on animals. The Leaping Bunny Program certifies that no new animal testing is used, so you can be confident about your cruelty-free choices.

GoodGuide

GoodGuide (download for free) helps you find safe, healthy, and green products while you're shopping in the store. GoodGuide strives to provide the world's largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental and social impacts of products and companies. This app makes it fast and easy to get the information you need, to help you make better decisions on everyday purchases based on what's important to you.

Do you use green apps? Let us know in the comments...

Action Menu Considerably Improves Your iPhone Copy/Paste Experience

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated May 19, 2010

Action Menu is one of those mods that once you try it, you simply can't live without it anymore. I've had the opportunity to use Action Menu for about a month now, and it has quickly become my favorite Cydia app. So what does Action Menu does?

Action Menu takes a stab at enhancing the copy/paste function of your iPhone by adding a bunch of add-ons to it. The lite version is free but for $2.99, you can get the full-featured app, which I think is well worth the money (even though I have to admit I didn't pay for it since the dev gave me a promo code).

In addition to the stock cut/copy/paste functionality, the app has many features that are very useful, such as:

Select all - select all the text at once Dial - dials any number that you select To top - scroll all the way up the page To bottom - scroll all the way down the page

Very helpful but not "ground breaking" features, right? Well, this is just the tip of the iceberg because Action Menu also comes with some very useful features that I use every day:

History - all your copied or cut text is saved to a clipboard for easy access. You can edit the clipboard to delete them and move them up and down the list, just like hClipBoard and Clippy used to do. Favorites - this is my top fav of them all. If there is text that you have to paste on a regular basis, just add it to your favorites for quick and easy access. That favorite text could be an email signature for example, a phone number, a website URL, etc... I currently have 6 favorites. I use this all the time. Lookup - don't know what this word means? Want to know how to translate this word in French? Just select a word or sentence and hit the "lookup" button. You will have the ability to search this word in Google, Wikipedia, dictionary, or even translate it in the language of your choice. Very handy, especially for a Frenchman like me... Tweet - Select some text and hit the "Tweet" button. It will open your favorite Twitter app and copy the text into it.

Action Menu is available from Cydia and if your iPhone is jailbroken, I really suggest you at least try the free version. I bet you won't be able to live without it anymore after trying it.

I also bet you that Apple noticed this application and they will implement these features in the next 4.0 OS next year. Take that as a prediction.

What are you still doing here reading this? Launch Cydia and download Action Menu now! Then come back here and tell us what you think about this application :)

FlightTrack: a $5 App Can Save You a $200 Flight

Guest Author ∙ Updated January 23, 2016

Last weekend, my fiancé and I went to San Francisco for our friends' wedding. We had a flight out of San Diego at 9.40am, which is awfully early for me as it doesn't give me enough time to do my daily online routine. Anyways.

So we get at the airport about an hour before departure and I see a huge security line and while Tina is taking her time to look at the monitors to find out what gate we have to go to, I just take a quick glance at it and see "Gate 7". I grab Tina and tell her to hurry.

MyProfiles Lets You Create Different Profiles for Your iPhone

Sébastien Page ∙ September 23, 2009

I remember my good old Nokia 8210. It was about 10 years ago and this nice little piece of technology would already let me create different profiles to fit different situations of the day. For example, I had a "night" profile where everything was silent with no vibration; I had a "work" profile where everything was silent with vibrations; I had a "normal" profile where everything would ring and vibrate, etc...

Fast-forward 10 years and about 10 other cellphones later, and here I am, with a $560 iPhone not capable of creating different profiles. It's not a big surprise. Apple is deliberately handicapping the iPhone and releasing must-have features (hint: copy/paste) one at a time.

Fortunately for iPhone users, there is the jailbreak community which really helps make the iPhone the best phone by developing all these important features that Apple won't let you have until year 2027.

MyProfiles is one of these great applications only available for jailbroken iPhones, and lets you create different profiles for your iPhone.

Find yourself constantly changing the settings on your iPhone depending on what you're doing or where you are? How about getting alerted when a critical email comes in from your boss? What about being able to sleep at night without being disturbed, unless it's a call from a loved one? Wish you didn't have to keep changing the auto-lock function when you're charging at your desk? Do all of this and more with MyProfiles!

Features:

Custom alerting of email based on Subject, Sender, Sent Only to You, and Mail Accounts. Custom alerting of SMS messages and missed calls based on caller phone #. Modify the Vibrate Pattern so you can be quietly alerted to a specific email. Repeating Alerts for Email, SMS, and Missed Calls. Silence Calls via WhiteList or BlackList Escalating Rings and Vibrate 1st then Ring Adjust WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, Push Email, Auto Lock, and 3G based on Location, Time of Day, and more. Automatic rules engine to enable profiles Manual Override Profile by holding down the home button and pressing up and down on the Volume buttons.

I haven't personally tried MyProfiles but I hear great things about it, even though it's still in beta. MyProfiles is available for jailbroken iPhones only via Rock Your Phone.

mQuickDo Brings App Switching to the iPhone (+10 Promo Codes)

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated January 28, 2019

When I first heard and tried mQuickDo, I wasn't really impressed at all. First, the description didn't highlight the real benefits of this application because the developers sell it as a "virtual home and power buttons for the iPhone". What the hell does that mean? Exactly! I tried mQuickDo and was very confused about what it did and how it worked. I quickly gave up on this app without giving it much more thoughts.

Then last week I read an article by fellow iPhone blogger Patrick Jordan at JAIB. Patrick's article described mQuickDo as what it really is: an app switcher for the iPhone. This is what really made me think twice about this app, and ultimately led me to give it another shot.

Originally, mQuickDo lets you set up gestures to perform predefined actions (ie. slide left to right to close an opened application; or slide right to left to shut off the phone, etc...) but to be honest with you, I think this is kinda useless.

The real power and most exciting feature about mQuickDo is the App Switcher. As its name suggests, the app switcher allows you to quickly switch between apps. You have to tweak the settings to customize the gestures to trigger the app switching, but once you got it to work properly, this is a real time-saver.

I have to admit that it takes time to get used to some of the gestures. To make it easier, I set up mQuickDo to launch the app switcher for all the predefined gestures, which means I am not using any of the other features of mQuickDo, but as I said above, I find them useless anyways.

The app switcher feature is pretty awesome. Add Backgrounder to this and you actually get a productivity booster that will allow you to multi-task and really get the most out of your iPhone.

mQuickDo is available from Cydia and comes with a 3-day trial period. After that, it will cost you $7.99 if you want to keep it. Although a little pricey, I still think mQuickDo is a must-have application and it undoubtedly makes it in my Top 10 list of favorite applications.

The developers of mQuickDo were kind enough to provide us with 10 promo codes for our loyal blog readers.

How to Win

You have to do 2 things to win one of the 10 promo codes:

Follow me on Twitter and Retweet this post by clicking here Leave a comment at the bottom of this page with your Twitter ID Download the mQuickDo free trial from Cydia

10 winners will be randomly selected and will be notified on Twitter sometimes next week.

Good luck :)

PrivaCy Prevents These iPhone Apps From Spying on You

Sébastien Page ∙ August 25, 2009

Last week I wrote an article about how certain applications are spying on you and tracking some of your personal data. Although the practice is legal, it is nonetheless very controversial.

Thanks to the collaboration of Saurik, BigBoss, and the major companies tracking your apps stats, it is now possible to opt out of being spied on via an application appropriately named PricaCy.

Pinch Media realized this fact, and took the lead in contacting me regarding getting this feature out there to all the users of jailbroken devices: they care.

With BigBoss, we then contacted all of the other providers, getting not only their blessing, but also their technical expertise in disabling their systems.

The result is PrivaCy: a new Settings panel that allows you to selectively opt-out of sending anonymous usage statistics to each of these providers.

This extension was a team effort, and was able to be executed as quickly as it was thanks to the help and interest of the companies involved.

I am positively surprised to see how the major tracking providers were proactive and willing to address the matter by collaborating with Saurik and BigBoss.

If you're slightly concerned about your privacy, I suggest you download PrivaCy, which is available for free from Cydia. Hopefully, Apple will release a similar feature to allow the opt out from data tracking for non-jailbroken iPhones also.

Your iPhone is Spying on You

Sébastien Page ∙ August 18, 2009

I just read an interesting article by the Dev Team showing that some applications available in the App Store are spying on you, tracking your personal data and reporting this information "home".

The apps in question are applications using Pinch Media, a mobile analytics company that aims at helping developers figure out how their users interact with their apps (ie. how long they spend on the app every day, is it accessed over 3G or wifi, etc...). Apparently, apps that use Pinch Media are doing much more than reporting your interactions with the app and go as far as tracking the following information:

iPhone's unique ID iPhone Model OS Version Application version (in this case, camera zoom 1.x) If the application is cracked/pirated If your iPhone is jailbroken Time & date you start the application Time & date you close the application Your current latitude & longitude Your gender (if Facebook enabled) Your birth month (if Facebook enabled) Your birth year (if Facebook enabled)

Pinch Media says the company is no spyware as it requires YOUR approval to track the data, but as the Dev Team explains:

Being an approved app, it must first ask you for permission to use your location. If you tap “Don’t Allow”, it will ask you again in about a minute, the next time its ad changes. So you either stop using this app (because it pesters you so much about the location question), or you finally submit and tap “OK”. From that point on, your location and path info (your actual physical path through your area each time you launch the app) belongs to Pinch Media, Inc. We think that’s a Pinch too much.

I don't know how concerned you are about your privacy and I assume most people wouldn't care about that. Although the data being recorded is anonymous, I am not necessarily excited about a company that doesn't disclose what type of data is collected, and more importantly, how this data is used.

What do you think?