WinterBoard, the jailbreak application that allows you to customize virtually every design aspect of your iPhone, has been updated with support for iOS 5.
After a week or so of beta testing, saurik has finally worked out all the kinks and made sure that WinterBoard is fully compatible and stable when running on iOS 5...
For many iDevice owners, the ability to use custom themes has been more of a secondary benefit to jailbreaking, than an outright reason to jailbreak, but that's beginning to change.
With the rise in popularity of theme platforms such as DreamBoard, and the WinterBoard enhancing theme stores such as ThemeIt, there's little doubt that many are seeing this as the reason to jailbreak their iDevices.
CodeThemed takes the premise of theming to the next level, allowing users to easily and quickly create their own custom themes; rate, share, and download from a community of users. Be sure to check out the full in-depth video walkthrough after the break...
There's no shortage of brightness adjusting tweaks available on Cydia. You've got tweaks like Light Bright, SBBrightness, LockGestures, and many others that are all capable of adjusting your iPhone's brightness.
The latest addition to the fray is Brightness Icons — a tweak that places brightness adjusting app icons directly on your iPhone's SpringBoard...
Jailbreaking your iDevice has many benefits. One benefit is the ability to customize and make it your own by changing your lockscreen.
Jailbreak tweaks, such as Winterboard and Dreamboard, break free from these restrictions, and as such, these avenues of customization have spawned an underground community dedicated to providing beautiful, awe-inspiring themes and modifications for your iDevice.
One such example is Cardboard Cutout HD, created by tadad1. As the title of the theme suggests, the lockscreen is given a beautiful cardboard appearance...
Judging by the popularity of pasts posts regarding themes, we understand that there's a very strong theming interest in the jailbreak community.
For that reason, we are proud to unveil our new "Themes" page which will be the permanent hub for all of our theme coverage, video tutorials, walkthroughs, and faqs.
We plan to update our theme page with at least one new walkthrough of a popular theme each week, but likely more.
Interested in seeing what our new Themes page looks like? Step inside for a look around...
Why should you jailbreak the iPhone? That's a question that gets asked here at iDB all the time. If you consider yourself a jailbreak expert, you've most likely been asked the same question once or twice.
There's perhaps no one man more qualified to answer that question than Jay Freeman, a.k.a. "saurik." Saurik created Cydia-Â the hub of the jailbreak world. He is the man responsible for what the jailbreak community has become today.
Here is a jailbreak app that will sure make iPhone themers happy. Masks, a new application that lets you quickly and easily customize the look of your wallpaper and icons.
Up until now, the best way to customize your springboard was by using WinterBoard. While a great application, WinterBoard can be a bit cumbersome: you have to search for a theme, download it, activate it in WinterBoard, and respring. Masks takes all that away by bringing to the table a new way to tweak your iPhone springboard...
SpringClean is a new "all-in-one" tweak that has been available for jailbroken iPhones for a couple days now. SpringClean allows you to clean up a few elements of your springboard without the need of WinterBoard.
For example, SpringClean can hide the battery state, the carrier name, page indicators, badges for apps and folders, and much more. The app also allows you to replace your low battery alerts that usually occur at 20% and 10% by setting them up at whatever level you want...
Finding good themes for a jailbroken iPhone has never been that easy. Themes are usually posted by designers on forums and portfolio websites, and it can be difficult for the average jailbreaker to discover all of the great themes that are out there.
Cydia recently added the "Theme Center," which aims to help users find the plethora of Winterboard themes for jailbroken iDevices. The Theme Center is a great addition to Cydia, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
"Theme It" is a new jailbreak app that aims to be the "Theme Store you've been waiting for." It does look very promising...
I admit, I'm not a big fan of custom themes and all that jazz. In my opinion most of the themes that come out look a little on the generic side, but I can understand why some users would be fond of the custom element that it adds to the iPhone.
WinterBoard is the de-facto standard when it comes to adding custom themes to your iPhone, and it's a prerequisite for quite a few of the tweaks that are available on Cydia as well.
One of my main gripes with WinterBoard is the fact that it can interfere with the text on your Home screen. The text for the app names turns into a grey, shadowless, illegible mess as seen in the screenshot above.
To try to remedy this issue, WinterBoard comes with a "White Text Labels" option in its 'Select Themes' section. This helps alleviate the issues surrounding the color of the text, but unfortunately still lacks the shadows that the stock look is known for...
One of the biggest cons of jailbreaking has always been how difficult it is to restore a jailbroken iPhone's settings and configuration. If you ever need to restore iOS or upgrade/downgrade to a different iOS version, there is no clear way to easily restore your iPhone's (both jailbreak and general)Â configuration.
BackBoard is a new jailbreak app that aims to help you save your iPhone's springboard/home screen configuration. There are other apps, like PkgBackup, that help you back up your jailbreak apps and settings; but BackBoard has some different features that make it appealing...
In the jailbreak community, there are plenty of ways to change the way that your iPhone interface looks. Icons especially are a large part of the iOS interface that people like to tweak to their liking.
Once jailbroken, you can do all kinds of things to your iPhone's icons. You can convert old app icons to retina display icons, arrange the way they look on your home screen in any way you want, and the list goes on and on.
Themes via apps like WinterBoard also allow you to change your icons to suit different looks. IconHarvester, by NanoTech, is a relatively unknown jailbreak app that focuses specifically on icon-theming. It's elegant and simple interface make it well worth the price for any icon lover...