Installer

Installer 4.0 Making a Comeback to Compete with Cydia?

Earlier this month we reported on the return of a Cydia alternative known as Icy to the jailbreak scene. The renewed package installer came out swinging with a quick and simple user interface, as well as the ability to add all of your favorite sources.

From the same folks that brought you Icy, comes Installer 4.0. The Infini-Dev team posted on their blog yesterday that they had successfully ported Installer to iOS 4.3.3, let the nostalgia and deja vu begin…

Pusher jailbreaks your iPhone 2.2 firmware… without really jailbreaking!

Rip Dev, the Russian equivalent of our own Dev Team released a new tool called Pusher that installs Installer on your iPhone without jailbreaking it!
This is why we have developed a tool that does something else… and it’s absolutely amazing. Here’s what it does: it puts some tools (including our own Installer) onto the user partition of the phone without opening the system partition up! You get Installer, a whole world of third-party tools that didn’t got into the AppStore for some reason, such as Kate, Qik, Snapture, and dozens of others, all that without compromising your security or voiding the guarantee!

The tool is named Pusher (mostly because it pushes some things onto the iPhone, and because we found the allusion funny). It works for both 2G and 3G phones running 2.0.2, 2.1 and 2.2 firmwares. Simply download it, launch and follow the instructions on-screen – the whole process takes about 3 minutes.
I really like the idea but the main turn off is that since Pusher installs its tools on the user partition of your iphone, it leaves the main partition locked, which prevent the installation of important tools such as BSD Subsystem or SSH.

Pusher is only available for Mac OS X so far but a Windows version should be coming soon. You can learn more about Pusher from here, and download it here.

UPDATE: Here is what BigBoss has to say about Pusher:
Pusher is RiPDev’s 2.2 version of a jailbreak. This should be avoided and not used. Instead use the dev team’s jailbreaks. RiPDev’s version will block access to / partition and make it impossible to install Cydia.  (They want you using Installer of course). It’s pretty much worthless since most the packages are in Cydia. The dev team’s jailbreak allows you to use both Cydia and Installer. There is no valid reason to use Pusher instead of one of the pwnages below.

Installer 4.0b9 update

The RIP Dev Team posted today on their blog about new updates they brought to Installer. Here is what you can find in the new package:

Added user-driven ratings. We encourage you to submit your votes for various packages. Once more data will be collected (in a few days), that will be reflected on the Featured page.
SpringBoard is no longer terminated after the software was installed or removed.
Proxies are (again) supported. The support was broken after we moved to libcurl.
Introduced download timeouts (again) that were disabled after the move to libcurl.
Reworked many parts of the engine in an effort to get rid of the occasional GUI stalls.
If a particular source fails to update, it will be moved to “disabled” state for 6 hours and will not be included in the all sources refresh process. The disabled state is listed as the source icon with a red “stop” sign over it. This is done to prevent unnecessary stalls at the sources refresh if one of the sources goes offline for whatever reason. If you’d like to retry it before 12 hour interval, open its info and hit Refresh button there.
Removed custom Info support as it was mostly used for unnecessary ads that were disturbing many people. These pages are normally reachable from the “More Info” link.
Much better error reporting. Forget these “error 3″s and such. The descriptions are much more human readable now. And for script errors, it will show an actual script command that caused an error.
Installer will prevent iPhone/iPod touch from sleeping when it’s downloading or installing something.
The app icon badge should behave better now.
Lots of smaller fixes and optimizations I won’t list.

With the popularity of Cydia, I really wonder if there is still room for Installer. I guess time will tell.