I am very excited to announce that after years of being asked if we would fully open the site to advertising we finally are. We are not only offering advertising to get your brand out to well over a million unique visitors each month but offering something even better. The advertising will include a full [...]

Quick update: Jailbreak is almost here. Many tweaks are getting updates such as sbsettings, springflash, and more.

Jailbreakers: Do not upgrade to iOS6 until a jailbreak is released. You will lose all your jailbreak!

iOS 6 is a total dud. I think it’s by far the worst major upgrade Apple has ever provided. It’s more like a 5.1.2 than a 6.0. Let’s take a look at the major differences moving to iOS6 from iOS 5.

1) Removes youtube
2) Removes google maps.
3) Adds apple maps. No street view, no transit directions. Remember, google has been doing maps a long time. No way apple is doing it as well in a few months.
4) Adds what? Facebook integration, ViP mail, do not disturb? iOS 5 users, you can get “do not disturb” functionality with “ringerx vip” in cydia.

This is definitely not worth an upgrade. And if you are jailbroken on iOS5 definitely do not upgrade to this. You will lose your jailbreak and that’s definitely not worth it for this.

Speaking of disappointments, the iPhone 5 seems equally disappointing. The screen is a little bigger – that’s great. The device is a little faster, also neat. But the change of the dock is huge. How many devices do you plug your iphones into? iHome, car, chargers. All this requires new cables and all these devices stop working. In my home I have 5 docks for charging in various rooms, a car deck with an iPod cable coming out of it. All this becomes useless if I buy an iPhone 5. I’ll stick with iPhone 4s another year.

Absinthe 2.0 brings us a new untethered jailbreak method for all eligibile devices on firmware 5.1.1. This release is a great collaboration between jailbreak teams and represents countless hours of work. The process requires your PC or Mac to connect your device and perform the jailbreak after updating your device to iOS 5.1.1. Remember to [...]

At WWDC, IOS5 was announced. I really thought this would go without saying, and it probably does for most of you. But do not install IOS5 beta unless you are a developer actually developing on it. It might seem fun, but really there’s nothing there you can’t get today from IOS4 jailbroken. Since IOS5 is not out until September (months away), no developers are releasing updates to support it right now. Almost everything is broken on it. Yes, you can jailbreak it tethered, but is also only for developers to start fixing things. All these beta firmwares expire which means you will have to update every couple weeks. In short, this is not meant for the public and no one should be running it.

I know SBSettings is broken on IOS5. Yes, I already have had ideas about using the notification area for IOS5 SBSettings. Therefore, all emails regarding SBSettings on IOS5 will just be ignored and deleted.

Thanks to all our users for their patience, and most especially thanks to those persons that were working on the Amazon outages. Cydia Store’s capabilities have been entirely restored about an hour ago. A tweet by saurik breaks it down: 86 hours of offline time, days and nights of screwed-up sleeping patterns to be available at a moment’s notice. A hectic weekend closes with much rejoicing and jubilation. Now, go forth and download. :)

Changes:

v3.3.1
• Fix: statusbar date on 4.2.1 or newer devices.

v3.3
• Fix: Updated fix blanks button to hopefully not crash when more than one blank exists
• Fix: Hopefully fixed the more app crashing when one of the ads cannot load.
• Fix: When moving toggles order, added back the “save” button so user knows to press “save” to save changes.
• Fix: Lock screen buttons when you hit the power button on the lock screen. Removed lock and the title so it fits.
• Fix: Internal window ordering in main drop down window to help compatibility issue with folder enhancer.
• New: Added option to more app, system options, to delete the carrier name to give more space to statusbar for things like date and free memory.
• New: Included Max’s Serious SBSettings HD theme that adds a retina icons display theme to default sbsettings. Thanks to Max at maxthemes.com for this great theme!
• New: Added retina icons for the more app for retina displays. Thanks to 42395_skyline for these icons!
• New: Added support for springboard key that was used by makeitmine app. This means that installing SBSettings should actually fix makeitmine. (I did this because it’s needed for the delete carrier name option).
• Toggles: Removed phone toggle from default. It doesn’t work on 4.2.1 and newer devices. Use airplane instead. (Phone toggle is now installable via separate package in cydia for older devices).

Note: Everytime I release an update to SBSettings, my inbox is literally flooded with a whole bunch of “SBSettings bugs” that are not even remotely related to SBSettings. Sometimes it takes a long time to debug these issues and point out which app had the issues. If you are having problems, and it’s some wacky thing that is not in the change log above, you should consider removing mobile substrate and all the apps it wants to remove, rebooting, installing sbsettings in this state, and seeing if you can reproduce the issue. Then reinstall your apps one-by-one. I know it’s a pain, but this is basically what I’ll recommend you do when I sense that the issue cannot be SBSettings related.

SpiritOfLogic’s latest PhotoAlbums+ 2.0 update fixes a couple bugs and now provides the long awaited iPad Support! For those of you that dont know what PhotoAlbums+ is, its a simple CameraRoll Management Tool.  It allows you easily create custom photo albums so you can sort out all the images/videos from your CameraRoll directly on your [...]

Yesterday, the dev team released their carrier unlock for iPhone 3g and 3gs devices. Many of you were waiting for this and assumed it was another exploit that would bring in a new carrier unlock.

Interestingly enough, it’s actually not. It turns out the ipad baseband hardware is the same hardware in 3g and 3gs devices. But the baseband is a higher number 6.x. Therefore, it seems that we can take the ipad baseband and install it on iphones then use the same unlock in ultrasn0w from last time. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work on iphone 4′s. Therefore, the unlock is for all iphone 3g, 3gs, and ipads running 3.2.2 or lower. iPhone 4 users, there’s no unlock available here nor will it be likely that one will be coming anytime soon.

Keep in mind, if your device is a 3gs new bootrom that a 4.2.1 firmware jailbroken will be tethered so you should not update to 4.2.1 due to this. However, 3g owners and 3gs with old bootrom need not worry about tethered jailbreak and are free to update.

The unlock can be installed directly from redsn0w or from pwnage if you are planning to make a new pwnage bundle.

If you are getting host unreachable errors while trying to install pay packages, these are caused by Cydiastore payment check and need to be addressed by Saurik. It is not something I can solve on my end and (most importantly) my repo is not down. You get an error message like “apt.thebigboss.org host unreachable”. But the issue is that the cydiastore check times out.

Currently, Saurik is out of town on a conference so this may not be solved for a couple days.

If you follow iRealSMS on twitter or visit the website you might have been taking part in the the beta testing for iRealSMS 3.0s latest update. With the beta now over, iRealSMS 3.0.4.5 update has been submitted to the BigBoss repo and should be available now. What is included in the new update is a [...]

Update: 6/23 – I have discovered that the email issues is invalid. It was caused by the exchange unlock extension by Zataang. It turns out you must enter a passcode at least once before exchange unlock kicks in or the email issue below will occur. I have rewritten the exchange unlock extension and synced it into Cydia.

The memory issues also seem to be non-existent on the the 4.0 final. 4.0 is actually running very well jailbroken.

Update: 6/22 – After using 4.0 release version, the memory issue below (#6) seems to not be happening. I cant tell if it’s fixed or just hasnt happened yet. The mail issue did occur one more time (issue #5 below) but fixed itself. There may be indications of a real issue here. I will update if I find more. I have released “remove recents” for anyone else that thinks having recents in the task switcher is a bad idea. It’s in Cydia now for 4.0 jailbroken users.

iOS (iPhone OS) 4.0 is on its way out most likely Monday sometime. After using it a while as a developer, I suggest you hold off for a couple weeks and allow for a stable jailbreak before updating. Here is a comparison of my iPhone 3gs running iOS4 and iPhone OS3.0 (Yes, 3.0. Nothing Apple has released since original 3.0 has been worth the effort of updating). Yes, some of you Apple Lovers out there will probably hate me for what follows. But it’s the way it is.

Before I begin, I should make sure to note that iOS 4 is not yet out. There is no such thing as iOS4 GM. There is a “GM Seed”, which is fancy, lame, hype-talk for “Beta 5″. Yes that’s right. It’s just beta 5. It even says so in the file system. It will probably expire. There may be changes.  You should consider it more of a release candidate. It is not a gold master. Therefore, many of these issues may be solved in the final release Monday. I will update this post a couple days after release if I find this to be the case.

Onto the comparison:

1) New in iOS4, Apple has a fancy task switcher that looks nice as the screen slides up letting you see the running tasks. On my 3.0 3gs, I had a nice, but not as fancy app called Circuitous that did something similar. The only difference: Apple adds all recent apps to the launcher. Yes, that’s right. You cannot tell the difference between which tasks are running and which ones aren’t. After launching a few things, the task switcher shows 10, 15 icons. You have no idea what’s running, whats not, where things are. It’s a horrible mess. (Note: I have solved this problem with my own extension which will be out by the time iOS 4 is actually released in Cydia for jailbreakers).

The task switcher is activated by double tap of home. At the same time, Circuitous on the 3.0 installed from Cydia also can be set to activate via double tap of home, and sit at the bottom of the screen so it works in a very similar fashion to Apple’s new task switcher. Circuitous does not keep all recent tasks in the bar, making it actually useful. Better yet, when paired with backgrounder app, Circuitous will actually background existing apps.  (More on this in #2).  Needless to say, Apple’s task switcher does not background existing apps. All apps built for 4.0 always partially stay running. Not so great for memory conservation or overall performance.

2) Multitasking. Everyone thinks that multitasking is now here and things will be different. “Finally” right? Well, not exactly. Unfortunately, there are only certain things that can be multitasked and most apps dont really multitask, unless you are one of the stock apple apps, then they continue to run until you are out of memory. That’s right. Every single one of apple’s apps stays running when you close it. Clock, Camera, Calendar, Stocks etc. So you load up stocks for a seconds to check something. Close it out and guess what? It’s still running.  To you purists out there (like me), this makes you having to open the task switcher every couple seconds and delete the extra running tasks. But you cant even tell what’s running and what’s recent. To make matters even worse, you have to hold an icon for a second to even get the delete button up. GAH! Unlike Circuitous, which shows all icons with the delete button immediately…. Finally, using backgrounder with Circuitous on a 3.0 provides a much better solution. You can background most apps and switch between them easily with a double tap home. 3.0 definitely for the win here.

Note: I am also solving the problem of: all Apple apps staying running when you dont want them to and plan to work with Backgrounder dev to solve the backgrounding issue so that we do have true multitasking in the task switcher.

3) Backgrounds. Excited to have backgrounds? Well of course we had this already with Winterboard or BossPaper.  The difference? Apple background gives you just one wallpaper from your photos. On 3.0, I have a rotating slide show via BossPaper and it takes up no more resources than apple’s static image.  Win to 3.0 here. (Note: BossPaper will be ready on iOS release for 4.0 release for jailbreakers).

4) Folders. Ok the Apple implementation of folders is about 10 times cooler than mine via Categories. Although, Apple’s has a severe limitation. You can only put 12 apps per folder. Categories, while a pain in the ass to use compared to Apple’s, allows you to put up to 500 apps in a folder. Imagine having 240 games installed. With Apple’s folders, that clutter is then cleaned up to “only” 20 folders. 20 folders! Plus, all the folders basically have the same looking icon. If you add ashikase’s categoriessb to categories, it loads instantly and keeps springboard’s feel nicely. Personally, I miss categories even when using Apple’s folders. Something will need to be done here.

Note: I cannot guarantee Categories will be available on iOS4 release. Categoriessb, I do not think is ready yet either. I hope to get Categories ready shortly after though.

5) Mail. Ok the mail app features sound pretty nice. I really enjoy the thread tracking feature. The consolidated inbox is nice also since I have 4 email accounts. However, the mail app has been extremely unstable. Not only that, it suddenly stopped working. It refused to connect to the mail server – all 4 accounts couldnt connect to any of their servers. My password was also deleted out of settings on all 4 accounts. While this was happening, safari was still working so the network was fine. Just the mail app couldnt connect. Reboots didnt solve it. I had to use “settings, general, reset” and reset all settings. Then I had to reconfigure all my mail accounts, passwords, passwords to wifi, springboard icons, etc. Was loads of fun.

6) Memory footprint: About every 2 days now, iOS4 has a couple runaway daemon processes (system services) that start leaking memory like a sieve.  Looking into it, one day, configd was using 50mb memory. Restarting the service fixed it for a while and it was back to its normal 1.5mb. (A reboot would be necessary for most users). The next day, Commcenter freaked out and was using 40mb memory. Later that day, APSD service was leaking more than 40mb memory. It’s a nightmare.

7) For you jailbreakers out there, most extensions that you like had to be rewritten to work on iOS4. Most of these are not yet ready.

The device not jailbroken does not compare to any 3.0 jailbroken. I suggest holding off a couple more weeks and waiting for a solid jailbreak before even trying iOS4.

After the popular BTstack Keyboard and Mouse, yet another BTstack-based application has seen the light: BTstack GPS allows to connect an external Bluetooth GPS receiver to your iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad and use it with all your GPS-enabled applications, no matter if you want to drive, sail, or even fly. Are you interested in [...]

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Many users, including me, have gotten the iPhone System pop-up: “Warning: You are running low on memory…etc” in the past few days. Unfortunately for me, my phone did a hard crash when my wake-up alarm went off this morning and I had to do a full restore (I was planning on upgrading from 3.0 anyways).

The culprit? Rock App

Why? It seems that Rock is not clearing out the log\cache file, so it constantly grows larger, indefinitely.

Solution.

1. SSH into your phone or use iFile\Diskaid and locate /var/mobile/Library/RYP/logs
2. Delete rockapp_{date}.log

Some users have indicated that their log files have totaled from 1gb to over 8gb in size!

I have not confirmed this, but a user told me that going into Rock and clicking “Clear cache” will fix this problem.

I am not sure if there was a date bug, but it seemed that it has recently hit everyone that has Rock (and extensions) installed.

Update: kwickone has stated that a Rock update is out that will fix this problem. Update Rock to see if the problem is resolved, if not, delete the log file as mentioned above. I had to fix my friend’s phone and I could not even launch Rock. After deleting the logfile, rebooted, everything was back to normal

New in Xpandr 1.0.2: Enable / Disable Xpandr in secure (password) textfields. Need a default reply for mails? Sick of typing this long text over and over again? Constantly making the same typo? Xpandr will fix this for you. Xpandr is a shortcut expander for the iPhone / iPod touch. It allows you to define [...]