ScreenRecorder is a new application by Elton Bolzanac that allows you to record a video of your iPhone screen. Per the description of the app:

This application let’s you take video captures of your screen. This is extremely useful for quick tutorials or demonstrations, or when you want to show proof of a new hack you have accomplished. There are obviously many other uses for this. For example, you could use this like a “Notes” application, but with video instead of words!

Keep in mind that video recording is a very intense process, so crashing is very frequent on videos that have a capture time of more than 45 seconds.

I haven’t tried this app myself but from what I understand it is pretty unstable. While it sounds like a very promising app, I think it’s a little pricey at $1.99. Maybe a few updates to make it more stable will make this app very useful.

Have you tried ScreenRecorder yet? If so, please share your thought by leaving a comment.

If you have recently “hacktivated” your iPhone, which means activating it to work with carriers other than the official ones, you may have encountered push notification issues. In most cases, push notifications don’t work properly or even don’t work at all.

There is a simple fix for this and it’s called Push Doctor. Simply add the following source to Cydia then look for Push Doctor: http://www.cmdshft.ipwn.me/apt/

After installing Push Doctor, reboot your iPhone.

Push Doctor works very well with 3.1.3 and 3.1.2. It is free and has the support of the Dev Team, so you can go with it safely.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about why Cydia sucks and how it could be improved. Maybe Saurik heard me because he decided to give Cydia a small update that aims at making it faster.

This update supposedly speeds up the loading time and improves the error checking when refreshing the sources.

I installed the update but unfortunately, I didn’t see much improvement in speed. Hopefully, you’ll get better luck than I did…

Have you installed the update yet? Does it feel like Cydia is faster?

When the iPhone initially launched in 2007, the much anticipated iPhone OS required an arsenal of jailbroken apps to perform even the mildest tasks such as MMS and video recording. But through product refreshes and several software updates, that list of apps is shrinking and the iPhone OS is now considered among the industries top mobile platforms.

Now that functions such as copy/paste and video recording are available in the stock OS, jailbroken applications like Clippy and Cycorder are no longer necessities. Now I know your thinking, “So what are you saying Cody, I no longer ‘need’ to jailbreak my iPhone?” Not even close.

As long as Apple continues to disable users from customizing their springboard backgrounds and their icons, and of course forcing them to remain with AT&T even though other carriers get far better coverage in their home area, and continue to ignore several other missing features, iPhone users will have a reason to jailbreak. One app I continue to jailbreak for, because you can only get it from Cydia, is SBSettings.

Now let me explain.  The feature I think Apple continues to miss the boat on is shortcuts. If I want to turn my bluetooth on, it is a 4 step process, 5 if you count the unlock screen. Same with changing the brightness, it’s a 4 or 5 step process. Other mobile platform developers have addressed the need for shortcuts to commonly used functions in the form of widgets or shortcuts in an always on screen task bar, but for some reason Apple resists.

Enter SBSettings By Big Boss. A simple, skinnable device manager that’s actually been around for quite a while. The application and themes for it can be searched for and downloaded from the Cydia App Store, so of course it’s available to jailbreakers only.

The first thing you’ll notice about SBSettings is how easily and quickly it launches once installed. Requiring nothing more than a finger slide across the top banner, the application drops down in the form of a window with several icons. Now the default theme is gaudy but I found it was easy to install downloaded themes by clicking the ‘more’ icon you see in the image below.

The theme I use is ‘iPhone Congruency’ and I love it because it looks stock, like it is supposed to be there. Once you got it looking good, again from the ‘more’ icon, you need to decide which ‘toggle’ icons are showing. If you don’t see a toggle you want, more can be downloaded through Cydia, and can be added in this same ‘toggle’ screen once downloaded.

I personally like the ‘processes’ toggle. Although the iPhone isn’t known for having great multitasking capabilities, the phone can still get bogged down with Mail, SMS, iPod, and Safari apps all open at once. The ‘processes’ toggle lets you shut these apps down and give your iPhone a quick boost in recovered RAM.

With toggles to turn bluetooth and wifi off and on with one touch, this app is definitely a time saver. It also gives you other great features like a quick launch App dock to launch apps from instead of scrolling through all of your icon-loaded spring boards, and the ability to re spring (or restart your iPhone, once again with one or 2 touches instead of 5 and 6 touches.

Between the time saving shortcuts, ease of use, and the fact that I can make it blend in with the rest of the phone’s GUI with a quick skin download, this free app from BIG BOSS available from Cydia is a must have in my opinion.

Hopefully Apple will stumble across this little gem at some point and really take the idea of ‘widgets’ and  ’shortcuts’ more seriously. It would really be nice to see some sort of implementation of Apple’s popular dashboard widget screen get ported to their mobile devices. But for right now we must use the tools we have in front of us, and with apps floating around like SBSettings, maybe thats not such a bad thing. ;op

Chpwn is one of my favorite jailbreak devs because he creates really useful apps and mods that just make your iPhone experience better. He worked with Ryan Petrich on ProSwitcher, he developed InfiniDock, and today, he just released InfiniBoard.

InfiniBoard is a jailbreak application that simply brings vertical scrolling to your iPhone springboard. It lets you add as many icons as you wish to any page, and access them by flicking up and down.

I’ve played with InfiniBoard for about an hour now and it works as described. The way I went about it is that instead of moving my icons one by one to a page, I used MultiIconMover to move all my icons at once. It saved me lots of time.

On the springboard, I left my first and second page of apps with 12 icons per page. These are the apps I use the most and I wanted to keep part of my springboard “clean”. On the third page, I added every other application so I can just browse through them by scrolling vertically.

I’ll have to test InfiniBoard on a longer period of time to figure out if I like it or not. So far, I think it’s worth the $1.99. What do you think?

When jailbreaking your iPhone, you always take the chance of messing up with the settings and losing all your Cydia apps. If you “experiment” a lot with your iPhone, I’m sure you’ve had to restore your iPhone on many occasions.

The problem when restoring your iPhone is that you have to resintall all your Cydia apps, which can take quite some time, depending on howm many you have.

Thankfully, there are a few options available out there that will allow you to easily backup and restore your Cydia applications.

Backup & Restore Jailbreak Apps with PkgBackup

PkgBackup is a $3.49 application but I think it has to be the best out there thanks to its great UI and ease of use. In top of backing up and restoring your jailbreak apps, PkgBackup will also preserve the way your icons are arranged on your springboard.

iClarified has a great tutorial on how to use PkgBackup. Check it out here.

Backup & Restore Cydia Apps with AptBackup

AptBackup supposedly works the same way as PkgBackup except it doesn’t save your icons arrangement. Personally, I was never able to get it to work, and it actually got me in serious  troubles before.

You might be luckier than I am though. I know a few people who use AptBackup and never had any problem with it.

Manually Backup and Restore Your Cydia Applications

If you feel like messing around your iPhone folders and don’t mind taking risks, there is a way to manually backup your jailbreak apps. I haven’t done that myself, and to be honest, I probably never will, but I want to share this option with you.

Simon wrote an interesting tutorial on his blog on how to manually backup your jailbreak apps. Read it if you’re interested.

My favorite way to backup jailbreak apps is still PkgBackup. Sure it costs a few bucks, but to me, it is from far the most reliable and easiest option.

Do you ever backup your jailbreak apps? If so, how do you usually go about it?

Are you tired of telling iTunes NOT to update to 3.1.3 every time you plug your iPhone in? Well, there’s an app for that. It’s called Fake 3.1.3 and it is ideal for people like me who don’t like being bugged by recurring iTunes alerts.

Fake 3.1.3 will make iTunes believe that you are running firmware 3.1.3, although you will still be on 3.1.2 with the older baseband. It kinda reminds me of FWchanger, although this one just helped make the App Store believe you were on a different firmware.

Fake 3.1.3 is available for free on Cydia via the http://cy.sosiphone.com repo.

I’ve always been a big fan of iPhone tethering, which has saved my butt a few times, especially during my travels. Today, a blog reader by the name of DarkN sent me a really nice tip about MyWi, a jailbreak app that allows you to both tether your iPhone AND create a Wifi Hotspot so you can share your Internet connection with computers around you.

This has to be the most useful app I’ve seen in quite a while. I had heard about MyWi before but I thought it was only an app to tether your iPhone so I didn’t even look at it. But being able to use your iPhone as a wireless hotspot is just amazing!

If you can’t see the benefits of using your iPhone as a wireless router, then let me give you an example. My fiancee and I are currently in Thailand. Unfortunately our hotel doesn’t offer wifi. I do however have a local SIM card and a data plan which I use to tether my iPhone. By creating a wifi hotspot with my iPhone, I literally turn it into a modem/wifi router and my fiancee can now connect to the internet with her iPod Touch.

How to Turn Your iPhone Into A Wireless Router

Step 1: Make sure your iPhone is jailbroken and that it is running at least OS 3.0.

Step 2: Launch Cydia and search for “MyWi”. If you don’t have Rock installed on your iPhone and you don’t want it, choose the “MyWi (no Rock)” version.

Step 3: Purchase ($9.99) and install MyWi then reboot your iPhone.

Step 4: Launch MyWi and tweak the settings to your liking:

• Change the hotspot name
• Change the channel
• Enable Wep security
• Enable USB/Bluetooth tethering

That’s it. You should now be able to use your iPhone as a modem and share your internet connection with other computers or iPods around you.

Note that using your iPhone as a wifi router is an absolute battery killer. Make sure it is plugged in so you don’t run out of juice in just a few minutes.

My friend Patrick over at JAiB finally said out loud what I’ve been thinking for quite some time now. In an article titled “why does using Cydia have to suck so much”, Patrick explains his frustration about how slow Cydia can be:

Cydia is slow to load and refresh its data, so you have a wait on your hands straight away when you launch it.

When it finishes loading I generally go straight to the Changes tab, to see what’s new.  Today the Things for LockInfo plugin immediately caught my eye and I knew I wanted to take a look at it.

The plugin’s main screen said to scroll down for screenshots.  There’s another very noticeable wait period while the page loads ads before I’m able to scroll down and see the Screenshots bar.

Once I tap the screenshots bar I get … nothing useful to me at all. Instead I just get a page with a banner for the plugin’s source – modmyi – and another general ad, and no screenshots anywhere to be found (after again waiting a fair while for that page to load). I tried refreshing the page a couple times – but no screenshots showed up.

So I gave up and ended up grabbing the plugin without seeing screencaps.  Not the end of the world, but frustrating and just dumb really.

This has happened to me so many times that I can’t even count them. I got frustrated on so many occasions that I simply closed Cydia, probably missing out on some great jailbreak apps or themes.

I sometimes feel like Cydia is like a great movie that keeps being interrupted by commercials: I can take the ads for a while, but at some point I just switch to another channel.

Saurik, the creator of Cydia is is no way responsible for all these ads. He just provides a platform for the various repos and each of them display their data as they want.

How Can We Make Cydia Better?

I believe there are a couple simple things Saurik can do to improve the user experience on Cydia.

Rewrite the Way Cydia Updates

I don’t know about you but waiting 20 seconds for Cydia to “load data”, then wait another 20 seconds while “downloading release”, then another 20 seconds while “downloading packages”, and finally wait another 20 seconds while “reloading data” is just plain painful.

I’m no programmer but I’m pretty sure there are some ways to improve the loading speed.

Set Some Standards

Again, I have no idea what’s going on behind Cydia but I can’t imagine it would be too hard for Saurik to create a format that all repos would have to follow in order to show in Cydia.

For example, a proper format would include the following information in this specific order and across all repos: app name, description, screenshots, source information, more details. Just like the App Store app, I’d like to be able to get all the information about the app on one page only.

Of course it’s easier for me to be a critic than actually do something about it. After all, who am I to complain about Cydia?

Well, I am an iPhone owner with a great respect for Cydia and the amazing work Saurik has accomplished. I think he is out there with the Dev Team as one of the pillars of the jailbreak community.

This being said, having this blog is a great opportunity for me to send a message and hopefully being heard.

I know Patrick and I are not the only one out there feeling a bit frustrated with Cydia and I am confident that Saurik will know how to take this into account and maybe work on implementing some standards in a future version of Cydia.

What about you? How do you feel about Cydia?

There are several ways to protect your iPhone by restricting access to it from the lockscreen. You can use the stock feature that allows you to set a password containing 4 numbers. You can use this hack to add an alphanumeric password, or you can use AndroidLock.

AndroidLock is a new application available in Cydia that brings Android’s lockscreen protection to the iPhone. After installing the app, you have to activate it in the Settings.app. To do so, you first have to create a pattern and save it. Then, in order to unlock your iPhone, you have to connect the dots according to the pattern that you previously created.

On the example above, I have to go from bottom left to top right, then top right to top left, then top left to bottom right, in order to unlock the iPhone and gain access to the springboard. Obviously, you don’t see the pattern until you have completed it.

I do think it’s a great alternative to setting an alphanumeric password. However, the downside for me is that I can’t really see the picture of iVan the dog anymore, which is the picture I have on my lockscreen.

As I am traveling quite a bit these days, thus increasing my chances of losing my iPhone, I have set AndroiLock to protect it. I created a simple unlock pattern that doesn’t make it a pain in the butt for me to do, but it makes it very hard for a potential thief to figure out. That won’t protect me from losing or having my iPhone stolen, but at least it won’t be easy to access the data on it.

What do you think? It’s a pretty nice mod, isn’t it?