UI

Access missed notifications via the Status Bar with Minotaur

Anthony Bouchard ∙ August 29, 2020

Notifications are an essential aspect of owning a smartphone, and the iPhone’s Notification Center interface does a fair job of merging all your missed notifications into one convenient place, some would argue that Apple could do better. iOS developer Muirey03 would be one of such people, and consequently, a newly released jailbreak tweak dubbed Minotaur was conceived.

Minotaur was designed to provide a new way of viewing and interacting with missed notifications to your iPhone. It works by letting users quickly view and manage missed notifications via a convenient lightweight interface that lives in your handset’s Status Bar.

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Love lets you like or un-like a song without unlocking your iPhone

Anthony Bouchard ∙ August 28, 2020

If you spend a lot of your time listening to music on your iPhone or iPad, then there’s a pretty good chance that you might take advantage of your Music app’s Like button to save a song you enjoy to your collection for later. Many apps support a Like button of some sort, but when your handset isn’t unlocked, getting to it can be somewhat of a chore.

That’s a problem that a newly released jailbreak tweak called Love by iOS developer MeBlackHat tries to fix, and it does that by allowing you to Like or un-Like music from almost anywhere in iOS with Activator or with a Control Center toggle – whichever you prefer.

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This tweak upgrades Safari’s download manager with media importing & more

Anthony Bouchard ∙ August 27, 2020

When Apple released iOS & iPadOS 13 last Summer, one of the exciting new features that the company added to the iPhone and iPad experience for the very first time was a built-in download manager for the native Safari web browser. As necessary as this was to make Apple’s platforms both usable and competitive with the rest of the mobile device market, it still left quite a bit to be desired — par for the course when it comes to Apple.

Jailbreakers have significantly more options to choose from when it comes to augmenting this user experience, and with the help of a recently-updated jailbreak tweak dubbed Safari Downloader+ by iOS developer Jalal Ouraigua, jailbreakers can both expect more and get it, especially in terms of the Safari file-downloading experience. The all-new version 5.0 of the Safari Downloader+ adds full support for iOS & iPadOS 13 for the first time.

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Parcility is an upcoming website & API for browsing jailbreak repositories

Anthony Bouchard ∙ August 25, 2020

In most scenarios, someone with the desire to view jailbreak apps and tweaks would need to fire up their jailbroken device and launch a package manager such as Cydia, Installer, Sileo, or Zebra to do so. Sometimes, however, you might fancy searching for specific packages hosted on your favorite repositories even when your jailbroken device isn’t in reach, and this poses unique challenges in and of itself.

An upcoming website and API dubbed Parcility will strive to make all of this information readily available from virtually any web browser, whether you’re using a personal computer or a non-jailbroken device to browse jailbreak-centric repositories. Citing the concept’s release post on /r/jailbreak, Parcility will index more than 600 individual repositories, and this equates to a whole lot of browsing power.

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PowerUp can help jailbreakers charge their iPhones faster

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated December 6, 2021
Low Power Mode.

My iPhone's battery often finds itself scrambling to catch a charge before I leave for the day, whether it’s an all-day outing or a short trip to the grocery store. In any case, it would be helpful if my iPhone could charge faster than it already does out of the box, and it’s axiomatic that most iPhone users would agree.

On stock devices, users could enable Low Power Mode while charging to juice up their handset’s battery faster, but if you’re jailbroken, then you can take advantage of a far more effective solution that comes in a form of a new and free jailbreak tweak dubbed PowerUp by iOS developers Kurrt and Squiddy.

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Carrierizer2 can replace your Status Bar’s carrier text with something better

Anthony Bouchard ∙ August 25, 2020

Customizing the Status Bar’s carrier text is a modification that hasn’t lost even an ounce of its popularity since the dawn of iPhone jailbreaking more than decade ago. How you go about it, on the other hand, depends entirely on you.

Carrierizer2 is a newly released and free jailbreak tweak by iOS developer CydiaGeek that lets pwned iPhone users customize their Status Bar’s carrier text in more ways than one. Whether you prefer keeping things simple by replacing the carrier text with a custom text string or something more advanced like your IP address or temperature, this tweak brings a lot to the table that might be worth checking out.

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Lyrication v2 adds slick music lyric support iOS’ Now Playing interfaces

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated October 16, 2024

Music enriches our lives at a spiritual level, and that’s one of the reasons why it can be so enjoyable to turn on the radio when you’re at work or undertaking a menial task. But if you’ve ever listened to a song and couldn’t distinguish its lyrics before, then you’d understand easy access to song lyrics is such an imperative ingredient for the ideal mobile music player, much like your iPhone.

Many music streaming applications already come with lyric functions out of the box, but this only applies to when you’re in that particular app. Apple could and should make the user experience more useful by allowing lyric viewing from the Now Playing widget anywhere in iOS, and that’s one reason why a free jailbreak tweak called Lyrication v2 by iOS developer Marcel Braun exists.

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Add a splash of color to iOS’ dialer and passcode interfaces with DialerGradient

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated December 9, 2021

Apple’s software user interfaces are somewhat notorious for being both streamlined and professional, but they also tend to be on the bland side of things. The company isn’t known for offering much in the customization department, and this can be a serious pain point for those who demand more personality from their iPhone’s user interface. Fortunately, jailbreak tweaks aplenty can help out with this limiting aspect of iOS.

Enter DialerGradient, a newly released jailbreak tweak by iOS developer NaneraManu that lets iPhone users customize virtually any parameter of their handset’s numeric dialer interfaces, whether it’s the Lock Screen’s passcode interface or the Phone app’s dial pad.

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CCTime13 adds a time indicator to the Status Bar in Control Center

Anthony Bouchard ∙ August 22, 2020

The iPhone’s Status Bar exists to provide users with pertinent information at a glance. Whether you’re checking to see the current time, your handset’s current signal strength, or how much battery life you’ve got left, chances are you look at it somewhat frequently.

One thing that has always sort of bothered me however is that the Status Bar’s time display disappears when you launch the Control Center interface, and that’s a gripe that a newly released and free jailbreak tweak dubbed CCTime13 by iOS developer 0xkuj aims to solve.

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App Switcher Controller lets jailbreakers personalize their multitasking interface

Anthony Bouchard ∙ August 22, 2020

Chronic multitaskers are apt to use the iPhone’s App Switcher for rapidly moving between recently-used apps more frequently, but wouldn’t it be great if Apple offered at least some form of user customization for what could be considered one of the iPhone’s most-used interfaces?

If you answered yes to the question above, then we invite you to check out a newly released and free jailbreak tweak dubbed App Switcher Controller by iOS developer Tomasz Poliszuk, as it provides iPhone users with a bevy of options for personalizing the App Switcher interface.

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