Cydia news and information: read the latest development about Cydia, including jailbreak tweaks.
Soon after the Electra Team updated its jailbreak with support for tihmstar’s new v1ntex exploit, the Sileo Team came forward with an update for the beta preview of the Sileo package manager – an alternative to Cydia.
A Tweet shared Thursday by the Sileo Team denotes how the newest update adds support for the latest dpkg (version 1.19.4) for package installation (themes, tweaks, etc.):
If there’s one thing about jailbreaking my iOS devices that stands out to me most, it’s being able to customize the look and feel of iOS outside of Apple’s stock parameters. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of jailbreak tweaks that can do this, and new ones are seemingly being released every day.
In this piece, we’ll take a closer look at Colorful Widgets, a new free release by iOS developer Mateusz Morawski that colorizes your iPhone or iPad’s widgets with a whole host of different options.
Despite the relatively small number of redecorations the Cydia app has received over the last several years, it continues to be a reliable package manager today. Fortunately, Saurik (Jay Freeman) empowered developers to tweak and modify the Cydia app under Cydia Substrate starting in 2015.
Given the circumstances, the ball is very much in the jailbreak community’s court to make Cydia look and behave differently than it does out of the box, and that’s exactly what a free jailbreak tweak called CellDia by iOS developer Julio Verne attempts to accomplish as you’re about to witness.
Shortly after the Electra Team dropped a couple of updates for the Electra jailbreak tool, hacker and unc0ver lead developer Pwn20wnd released a duo of updates to the unc0ver jailbreak tool to the general public.
Pwn20wnd announced the updates Wednesday afternoon via Twitter, noting that it would resolve a problem with installing Cydia and extracting bootstrap upon jailbreaking. At the time of this writing, unc0ver v2.2.2 is now the latest public release:
On Wednesday, the Electra Team released an updated version of the iOS 11-centric Electra jailbreak tool. Version 1.2.0 adds official support for iOS 11.4 and 11.4.1, making it the first public jailbreak tool to officially support these firmware versions.
The Electra Team made the announcement via Twitter, noting that Electra 1.2.0 uses a newer exploit dubbed voucher_swap. This exploit is allegedly more reliable than the traditional multi_path or VFS exploits that users have been relying on for months:
iOS’ notification system tends to be subtle enough that it can be easy to forget or miss an incoming notification. Fortunately, a free jailbreak tweak called BLightAlert by iOS developer Julio Verne can help mitigate this problem.
BLightAlert leverages your handset’s display backlight to grab your attention for incoming notifications. Once installed, the display brightness changes rapidly from low to high for a couple of seconds whenever an incoming notification rolls in, like so:
If you like how the Windows 10 Lock screen looks and feels, then you’ll probably enjoy using a jailbreak tweak called Ventana by iOS developers CoolStar and Jeremy Goulet. This tweak redesigns your iPhone or iPad’s Lock screen to make interface elements appear more as they would on a Windows 10 device.
Right out of the box, Ventana themes the Now Playing interface, any incoming notification banners you might have waiting for your attention, and the date and time display. Ventana also provides you with a Siri shortcut akin to the Cortana shortcut that you might find on Windows 10.
It’s been quite a few years since Apple has used the classic ‘slide to unlock’ interface on any of its mobile handsets, and with the advancements in biometric authentication and software since then it should be safe to say it isn’t coming back; at least not officially.
But if you’re feeling a bit nostalgic about the slide to unlock interface, then you’ll be thrilled to learn about a new free jailbreak tweak called Slyd (SlideToUnlock) by iOS developer Nepeta. Just as the name implies, this tweak ports the classic slide to unlock interface from iOS 7 to iOS 11.
Hacker and unc0ver lead developer Pwn20wnd has been on quite the roll lately; just yesterday he released unc0ver v2.1.4 to the general public, and he also pushed a bevy of revisions this weekend to the unc0ver v2.2.0 pre-release with bug fixes, performance improvements, and experimental new features. But as it would seem, there’s still more work to be done.
Pwn20wnd shared a Tweet Sunday morning denoting how he’s “actively implementing user requests” to make unc0ver “even better.” The Tweet points to the hacker’s official GitHub repository, where unc0ver users can reach out about problems and feature requests via the Issues tab on the web page:
While most Dark Mode-oriented jailbreak tweaks support iOS’ native app interfaces, the vast majority lack support for the various web pages you might visit while surfing the web.
Two tweaks launched in September, dubbed Deluminator and Nebula, were some of the first to bring a full-featured Dark Mode experience to web pages in particular. But now, a new release called Umbreon by iOS developer Soh Satoh accomplishes this same goal while providing some additional customizations.
In the screenshot examples above, you can see how white backgrounds on most web pages are darkened to reduce the eye-searing effect that’s typically endured while browsing the internet in a dark environment. Umbreon should play nicely with most standard web pages, but there are some instances where a web page won’t be fully compatible.
After you install Umbreon, you’ll find an extensive preference pane in the Settings app where you can configure the tweak to your liking:
Here, you can:
Toggle the tweak on or off on demand Enable Dark Mode for web pages Combine custom CSS formatting with Dark Mode CSS Select different apps to disable features in Configure a CSS injection delay Toggle gray background instead of black for Dark Mode Enable web image brightness adjustments Use a slider to set a custom image brightness level Enter custom Dark Mode CSS styling if you don’t want to use the default Toggle website filtering Choose whether filter is a black list or a white list Choose whether filter should exactly match URLs or guess websites based on name Inject custom JavaScript Toggle filtering for JavaScript injectionThe developer includes a respring button at the top right of the preference pane that you can use to save your changes. You should use it any time you adjust the settings in this pane.
Compared to Deluminator and Nebula, it seems like Umbreon intends to offer more features to the end user, but its aesthetics aren’t as streamlined. As you can probably discern from our screenshot examples above, some website elements don’t render as expected, such as the Google search bar text field and the filtering tabs just above the Google search results.
Finally, we should mention that Umbreon looks best when paired with a core Dark Mode tweak, such as Eclipse or Nightshade; otherwise, you'd only be theming web pages and not the apps you use on a regular basis.
If you’re interested in trying Umbreon, then you can download it for $1.00 from Cydia’s Packix repository. The tweak is compatible with jailbroken iOS 10 and 11 devices. Any bugs should be reported directly to the developer such that they can be fixed promptly.
What are your thoughts about the versatility that Umbreon presents? Let us know in the comments section below.
Apple designed the iOS Home screen such that you could scroll through pages of app icons, but there’s always been a single row of non-scrollable, static app icons near the bottom of the display, more commonly referred to as the Dock.
Love it or hate it, the Dock is a staple in Apple’s desktop and mobile operating systems, but a new free jailbreak tweak called Fullboard by iOS developer Heft Johnson lets you nix it entirely, instead transforming the full height of the Home screen into a scrollable interface.
All great online stores, including the likes of Amazon and eBay, have a wish list feature that lets you take note of things you’d like to purchase later. But wouldn’t it be great if digital content stores like Cydia touted something similar?