Cydia’s Best Apps: My Top Jailbreak Applications
I've been rocking a jailbroken iPhone for a few months now, and I must say I absolutely love it. It feels just like when I switched to Linux: power to the community, freedom of choice and usage, open source spirit... and you're pretty much on your own if shit hits the fan. I've blogged about the best Cydia applications I found in the past (Top 10 Cydia Apps and Top 10 Cydia Apps Redux), but I feel it's time to update that list and share it with you all. "Why?" might you ask. Simple. My needs and interests change regularly. The software source being Cydia, applications can be harder to find than with the centralized Apple App Store. New apps are added to Cydia on a daily basis, and new repositories are created daily, so new stuff is easy to find - good stuff is harder. There are a few tools on the interwebs to help you by attempting to centralize the Cydia apps information (appRater, ModMyi, hackint0sh, iPhoneFreakz, BigBoss, iSpazio), but it's still more challenging than your search-and-tap routine.
Here goes a revamped list of my current essential Cydia apps for your jailbroken iPhone in no particular order. I'm gonna leave out the obvious like Cydia and OpenSSH.
Replace your default SMS tones
You've all been annoyed at the default iPhone sounds sooner or later. They're pretty ordinary, I'll agree with you. One of the extremely useful features of JailBreaking your device is that you have the power to change the default sounds for pretty much any event. Today, I'll show you how to replace your default SMS tones with custom ones of your choosing. In order to do so, you'll need a jailbroken iPhone (running 2.x), Cydia, OpenSSH and optionally WinterBoard. You'll also need the audio file you want to use (obviously) an SSH client (ideally a graphical SFTP frontend like FireFTP) and an audio editing application like Audacity. Ready? Here goes!
Add Song Lyrics to your iPod
I'm a huge music enthusiast. An audiophile, even. However, and this is not so uncommon I hear, I much prefer the consistence of a song's lyrics than its melody. I love knowing what the singer says and feels, and you can only truly understand with a good understanding of how emotions translate into music and words. The music part is mostly instinctive, a bass line triggering a feeling in your guts, a guitar riff flipping your heart around, you can't really learn that. However, it's within everyone's grasp to understand what a song says, and I believe it's important. That's why I'm going to give you a tip to get the lyrics from every song you love onto your iPhone or iPod Touch. It's really easy, you don't have to do much.
First off, I'll assume you're using iTunes since you own an iPod or an iPhone. Apple made it so that synchronizing that baby on any other platform is a real bitch, and they've greatly succeeded. So open up your iTunes, select a song you like in your library and right-click it to "Get Info". If you look at the tabs near the top of the popup window, you'll see a "Lyrics" tab. Clicking on that should simply open the tab with a big empty text area. What we'll do here is we'll fill up that box with the song's lyrics.
Top 10 Cydia Apps Redux
About a month ago, I jailbroke my iPhone and made a list of my top 10 Cydia apps at the time. As everything else in life, that list has since evolved, and looking back at it today I felt like it needed to be revisited. The main reason why I need to write about that list is because some of the apps that I found cool at the time turned out to be inadequate in the long run. So I'll give you my current top 10 Cydia apps, now with 100% more knowledge!
My Top 10 Cydia Apps
I've had an iPhone for about 7 months. I've been a regular App Store user, buying all my stuff legitimately. This weekend, I decided to JailBreak it (how?). What convinced me to jailbreak it? I wanted control over my SMS alert. I just wanted a simple beep, no fancy 5 seconds long tone, just a goddamn beep. Apple didn't judge it important to give its users control over that. I actually didn't know much about the pros - but I knew everything I had to know about the cons. So, I figured I'd give it a try, for the sake of having more control over my device and just trying something different. I was pleasantly surprised! The whole "breaking" process was ridiculously easy - it just implied installing an application on my MBP, connecting my iPhone and running it. Everything went smoothly, and when my iPhone rebooted, it was jailbroken. That introduced me to a whole new world I wasn't aware of, honestly. First off, I had the option of installing yellowsn0w, which is an application that would allow my iPhone 3G to be carrier independant. I didn't need that, so I just didn't install it. It might be something interesting for other users though, and the possibility is there and equally easy.
Basically, jailbreaking your iPhone will give you more customization power and, if you're a Linux enthusiast, will allow you to SSH to your device and explore they filesystem. The great thing about it is that it doesn't affect everything you did before jailbreaking - you can still sync it with iTunes. Here are my favorite applications, the ones that made jailbreaking worth it for me.
What iPhone Apps do you think are essential?
I've been an iPhone user for maybe two months, and I'm loving it. It's so practical, so useful that I don't think I could ever live without it. One thing I like doing is looking out for useful third party applications. Some of them are really amazing. I'll list the ones I love best here, they're - according to my humble self - essential. Note that my iPhone is a 3G running with Fido and not Jailbroken.
