If you’re running a jailbroken iPhone, I guess that one of the tweaks you installed from Cydia is ProSwitcher. This simple yet powerful utility from Ryan Petrich allows you to switch between apps running in the background using a Palm Pre like “cards” UI, which is undoubtedly useful and easy to use. Just assign an Activator shortcut to it, launch it anywhere on your iPhone and switch between the apps you’ve backgrounded in a matter of seconds.

Now, you can install and use ProSwitcher on the iPad.

Since the first release of the Spirit jailbreak tool for iPad, we all tried to install ProSwitcher from Cydia - just to see it crashing our devices. Being highly dependent on Mobile Substrate, it wasn’t exactly the easiest utility to port from the iPhone to the tablet. But the developers started the conversion process right away, and now you can install the tweak using Ryan Petrich’s alpha repository: http://rpetri.ch/repo/. Just add the source in Cydia, open it and install ProSwitcher.

As you may know though, alpha repo means the software is still buggy and has to be refined, so don’t freak out if the iPad crashes sometimes.

Despite its alpha status, I found this version of ProSwitcher highly enjoyable. The settings work, you can customize the way ProSwitcher works for you and even decide whether you want to show a Springboard card or, say, dim the background when cards appear. I initially set up PS to show up on home button double press anywhere on my device, but then I realized that pressing the home button twice inside an app doesn’t automatically send it to the background. So I went for a “swipe down statusbar”, which even resizes the current app to a “card” with a very nice animation effect.

For anything else, it’s the ProSwitcher you know and love. It works, it’s useful and nice to look at. A must have for anyone who has a jailbroken iPad.