Two months ago I wrote that jailbreak on iOS 4 still had its importance, but when JailbreakMe came out earlier this month I was very disappointed that the iPhone 4 wasn’t really supported. Sure, I could jailbreak my iPhone and install Cydia - but what for? Tweaks and apps weren’t updated for the Retina Display and new device, there was the possbility to break FaceTime and MMS and, overall, it seemed like JailbreakMe for the iPhone 4 was released just for the sake of it.
Fast forward 20 days, and I can’t imagine having a un-jailbroken iPhone 4 anymore. What happened?
Updated apps happened. It was a matter of a week before developers started releasing updates for their Cydia products, and as I saw the updates going live I wondered how much I had to wait before actually jailbreaking the phone. FaceTime on 3G convinced me: My3G allowed me to use FaceTime anywhere, just like normal phone calls on my carrier. I don’t know if this would be possible in the US with AT&T, but I can say that call quality under Three’s network is impressive: when I have 5 bars, it looks and sounds just like FaceTime on wifi. I eventually replaced My3G with 3G Unrestrictor, but the result is the same. FaceTime Anywhere (somebody please file a trademark for this) convinced me to give Cydia on the iPhone 4 another try.
So after my awesome FaceTime session with Robert Scoble (me: 3G FaceTime in Viterbo, Italy - Robert: wifi in Boulder, Colorado) I opened Cydia and looked for the tools I used to have on my jailbroken 3GS. To my surprise, I found an updated version os SBSettings, and even some “HD themes” for it. SBSettings, in case you don’t know, is a great tool that lives in the iPhone statusbar which lets you perform actions such as Respring, Reboot and Shut Down with a few taps, but also allows you to install toggles for menus otherwise living in the Settings.app such as Wifi, 3G, Data or Location. And there’s even more, like Fast Notes, possibility to hide apps and hundreds of other toggles to install via Cydia.
So after FaceTime on 3G and SBSettings, it was time to install Activator. With Activator you can assign custom activation methods to almost any action on your iPhone, including buttons. For example, you can achieve the same results of pressing the home button by “double tapping on statusbar” or play / pause iPod.app by tapping on the volume heads-up display. Activator comes with many built-in actions and methods, and it works great on iPhone 4 and iOS 4. In fact, I’ve set up some stuff with it. When music is playing (either from iPod app, MyArtists, Spotify or a podcast in Mobile Safari) I can double tap on the status bar to invoke MusicBarExtended and control audio from there. I can play / pause and skip forward. Also, thanks to a beautiful skin I found on MacThemes, it looks great on the Retina Display. MusicBarExtended is faster and more useful than Apple’s default widget controls, it requires less taps and it’s always there, even in the lockscreen.
Another nice tweak I installed is SpringFlash. I’ve already mentioned this somewhere, but anyway: set up an Activator gesture to turn the flashlight on. Mine is tap on volume heads-up display. Boom.
My last Activator gesture is Multifl0w’s one. The new Multifl0w came out a few days ago (available in Cydia) and it’s changing the way I switch between apps running on my iPhone: Apple’s task switcher lets you see up to 4 apps per “page” (or 5, with chpwn’s tweak), and it lets you see the icons. Multifl0w is Exposè for iOS: invoke it, and you get thumbnails for the apps you can switch to. It displays up to 9 apps at a time, and the animations are perfect. Should Apple develop Exposè for iOS? Maybe in a future iPhone. Right now, it’s up to jailbreakers and Cydia devs to overcome the limitations and provide us a better way to multitask.
As for “better ways” to do something, my iPhone 4 has now a better way to display the copy & paste popup menu. Actually, it’s not just a copy & paste menu, it’s an Action Menu. This great little tweak puts additional icons in the aforementioned menu, and we’re talking about awesome stuff like Copy All, Dial, Favorites, Find, History, Locate and Lookup. It can also be extended with a Plus Pack available in Cydia, which I bought immeditely after I read about the complete iOS 4, iPad and iPhone 4 compatibility. Action Menu 1.1 works great no matter the device you’re using, its icons are beautiful on the Retina Display. Favorites and Clipboard History are, probably, the most important custom features I currently have on my device. Basically, it’s Clipmenu for iPhone: I store passwords and snippets in my Favorites (not exactly secure, but no one else uses my iPhone besides, well, me) so that every time I install a new Twitter client I don’t have to fire up 1Password. The clipboard history is useful as you think: retrieve everything you copied in one tap. Hell yeah.
The tweaks and apps I mentioned above are the most used ones, those I couldn’t live (and work) without anymore. But, there are lots of other ones which I don’t use on a regular basis, still I really suggest you give them a try. With User Agent Faker you can browse the web just as you do on the desktop, without “mobile limitations”: change the user agent string from iPhone to something else (like Safari 5 or Chrome) and enjoy web page in all their desktop glory. It’s got some problems with Flash fallbacks (the browser think you’re on Safari, remember?) but, overall, it’s a very powerful tweak. Same applies for Infinifolders: a powerful (and must-have) tweak that allows you to put more than 12 apps in a iOS folder. You can choose the scrollbar style, paging and scrolling bounce, too. This, together with Five Icon Dock (compatible with iOS 4 and iPhone 4) helps me in saving a lot of space (page-wise) on my iPhone.
Other apps I use are Signal and Strenght: Signal lets you check on the nearest cell towers and even remembers them for future reference, Strenght (developed by TUAW’s Erica Sadun) lets you see the effect of the Death Grip directly on your iPhone screen.
As for graphical mods, take a look at the screenshots I posted over at my Img.ly account. (1, 2, 3, 4). Again, I found most of the files over at MacThemes forums.
I was wrong about Cydia developer not caring about iOS 4 and iPhone 4 updates. I stand by my statement, though, that jailbreak releases should be better coordinated between Cydia devs and jailbreak creators, just like Apple does with 3rd party developers and the App Store. However, it’s good to see the iPhone 4 gaining more and more features thanks to Cydia and jailbreakers’ creativity.
What’s even better, is that jailbreak for iPhone 4 has been out for just 20 days. We’ll have a follow-up to this post in a few months.
