iPhone4idiots

Remember antennagate? When the iPhone 4 was released there was tons of press about weak signals and dropped calls from covering the bottom corner of the iPhone. Apple gave free bumpers to everyone to “solve” this problem. I wrote back then that it wasn’t a big deal at all and that the biggest problem with the iPhone 4 was the proximity sensor. This would cause your cheek to accidentally press the mute button, hold button or hangup a call by mistake. For me it was the mute button, at least once per week. Apple claimed iOS 4.1 fixed the proximity sensor and while I agree it got better, I still accidentally mute a call every so often. If you are having this problem there is a fix that works 100% brought to you by the jailbreak community of course. CallLock, $0.99 from BigBoss, locks your iPhone screen during a call preventing you from accidentally hitting any buttons. Set it to automatic and within about 5 seconds from making or answering a call the iPhone screen locks. Now there is one minor drawback. If you want to access the keyboard, speaker, mute buttons etc. you have to slide to unlock and make that screen available again. Also, to end the call you have to slide to unlock and then press end. There is a manual setting you can choose to enable the call lock only on selected calls. Like maybe when talking to your boss so you don’t hang up on him/her. There is a similar app in Cydia called Dialer Shield that pretty much does the same thing for $1.49. Take your pick.

About a week ago Cydia made a small change that has made finding new themes for Winterboard much easier. In the top right corner of the Home page is a button which lists themes broken down into HD (iPhone 4 “Retina”) and SD (iPhone 2G, 3G, 3GS). Tap either of these buttons and you get a long list of themes with the price (including free ones) clearly displayed. Select any theme and a picture is displayed showing what it looks like and it also list how many icons the theme contains. This is a great feature as I have almost one hundred apps on my iPhone 4. Yes, most are hidden in folders but the ones I use on a daily basis are front and center. It’s very annoying to have a great theme be ruined by one or two icons not being included. Yes you can change these on your own with Photoshop and a simple SSH transfer, but who has the time to do that? OK, I did do that for KillSignCarbonBlue to get the green Messages icon to match, but 99% likely don’t want to mess with it. Thus, just pick a theme like Glasklart HD which has 1581 icons. It likely has you covered. Also, a few weeks ago Cydia added a Manage Account button on the home page. This list all the apps (aka packages) that you have bought through Cydia. If you’ve purchased numerous items through Cydia this quite helpful as well. On a separate note, Cydia seems to be running faster since Jay Freeman (aka saurik) made some upgrades. It’s still not fast, but IMO it loads noticeably faster.

So what’s better for the Holiday season than a new theme for your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch screen! Cydia has a nice selection right on the home page under Themes. What’s better is that most are free. Pictured here is KillSignCarbonBlue. It looks slick don’t ya think? Now not all icons are made over like this (Twitter and Skype are missing), but most the biggies are. I really like the Facebook and Weather icons. There was one icon (Messages) that didn’t convert over, but was still green. Luckily the solution for this is elementary jailbreaking 101. Continue Reading…

A very cool app in Cydia for your jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch is LockInfo, $9.99. LockInfo lets you fill your lockscreen or home screen with information such as weather, calendar, email, missed calls, Twitter, Facebook or RSS feeds and more. Look at my lockscreen pictured here. Starting at the top I quickly can see the time and weather forecast here in Nashville.  Under that my calendar lets me know I need to jailbreak Steve Jobs iPhone later today! Continuing down I see my most recent email from iPhone4idiots and the last call and voicemail I received. At the bottom is my most recent text telling me to hurry up. That’s a lot of the key information I want to find on my iPhone all on one screen. Continue Reading…

For anyone using their jailbroken iPhone or iTouch mainly as a computer, you can type with any wireless bluetooth keyboard with BTstack. BTstack is a $5 app found in Cydia under BigBoss. This is another great app that I’m sure Apple will support at some point, but why wait? BTW, anyone notice how BigBoss has the best apps out there? Anyway, if you can type 80 words per minute, then you can type that fast on your iPhone. Continue Reading…

PogoPlank, $1.99 from BigBoss on Cydia, is an awesome app that allows you to theme your jailbroken iPhone or iTouch down to one page. That’s right, no more swiping through pages of icons as they are all listed underneath folders on the home page. Almost all the Pogoplank themes follow the format of having the folders displayed in a wheel. This will make sense once you see the screen shots in this post and watch the video step by step here. Check it out as the guide shows you a very cool theme dedicated to my favorite drink – Guinness!!! Continue Reading…

For those of you whose iPhone or iTouch is jailbroken I thought I’d share a few cool apps. First, watch this two minute video here to see what these apps do. IMO, this is the best video I’ve made in awhile. If you agree please leave me a comment. Infinidock, $0.99 on the BigBoss repo by chpwn, allows you to add upto 10 icons to your dock. While simple, this is very powerful. Continue Reading…

So after jailbreaking one thing you’ll want to do is add sources. What’s a source? Well a source is essentially a web host (URL) which can be added to cydia to get additional software packages, themes, wallpapers, apps, games and more. Open cydia and you come to the screen seen here on the left with five tabs on the bottom (Cydia, Sections, Changes, Manage and Search). Cydia Store Products are the paid for apps. These are very nice and include things like 3G Unrestrictor, $2.99, which is a must if you like to stream video. Continue Reading…

When I first jailbroke my iPhone well over a year ago every must have Cydia app list included WinterBoard. Until recently, however, I’ve never really used it. As most of you know, WinterBoard enables you to customize the look of your jailbroken iPhone in many ways. In this post I will show you the five themes I’ve had on my iPhone most recently and ask the key question – To Poof or Not to Poof? At this point there are thousands of themes you can download for your iPhone. Some are very basic and essentially just change the background or wallpaper of your iPhone or iPod. Others do this, plus add customized icons and sliders to give your theme an even more artistic look. Continue Reading…