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 [...]

New in v1.1.0: Can now apply filters based on Calendar and Availability CalendarPro (Profiles) is a highly configurable ring profile manager that lets you use your Calendar events to control how your phone will ring or vibrate for notifications ranging from phone calls to push notifications. CalendarPro offers seamless integration into the normal Calendar application [...]

A quick note on memory usage (and hopefully this is the last note on libhide for months to come). There have been some questions as to how much additional memory is used by moving libhide into mobile substrate. I would argue that the answer is none. Here is why. First, the dylib itself, only takes a few kbytes of memory while running. Whatever is required to load a dylib and it just makes a list of your apps so that would be an array of some strings. Literally less than 100k including the 15k to load the dylib into memory. The “old” method had some overhead also. Springboard, itself, had to keep a list of hidden apps. But since it was not just focused on hiding icons, it had to keep more information in this list. Restrictions block protocols so that had to be handled. The new dylib prevents springboard from having to keep track of these things freeing up that memory. It’s a pretty bold statement to say that with the new method you are using *less* memory, but I will say it is roughly the same.

Update: I have v2.0.3 done and released in the main repository for beta testing. Changes: apps should no longer all be unhidden after installing something from appstore or sync from iTunes. (Respring solved the problem on 2.0.2). I’ll probably release this publicly in a few hours After over a 1000 downloads and no complaints, I’m releasing it public now.

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Bug Report: If you sync with iTunes or install an app or update from appstore, all hidden apps are unhidden. Solution: just respring and everything is back to normal. I’ll look into this for next version. This is due to my spotlight speed up code.

Update: I have v2.0.2 done and released in the main repository up for beta testing. Changes:

- You can now hide iPod app

- Further spotlight speed ups, in fact, I think spotlight is probably slightly faster with the extension than without because I bypass some logic. Recommend uninstall spotbright for better spotlight speed with this. It will work with spotbright, but both do much of the samething and libhide does it faster. In fact, I believe libhide’s spotlight is faster than spotlight without libhide because it cuts off some internal logic and makes everything visible.

- Added ability for an app to hide from spotlight search results or not. No app uses this yet.

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I believe I have solved the reported libhide issues and released v2.0.1 for beta testing. Please if you are capable of it update your libhide using this deb and then this command in SSH: dpkg -i libhide_2.0.1.deb.

Remember, as a beta tester you are expected to understand this may not be stable, although it does work for me tested on 3 devices. You must also be able to install this without help and report issues with a syslog if requested.

To use this, you will need bossprefs or sbsettings and simply hide some icons and unhide them. Note that mobile substrate safe mode should show all hidden icons, and a respring would hide them again.

Changes from 2.0:

1) Fixed speed issue of respring which was causing many older iphones to take forever respringing and in some cases, if enough hidden apps existed, go into an endless reboot loop.

2) Fixed major lag caused on spotlight

3) Added spotlight support for hidden apps. Spotbright is no longer needed. Your spotlight will be a bit faster if you uninstall spotbright if using libhide 2.0.1 or newer.

4) Fixed output bug in the update process and removed all the debug messages from the updater app (runs when you install from cydia only).

5) Added 2.x support. On 2.0 on 2.x firmware, you would have had no hidden icons.

For those of you worried about another mobile substrate addon for hiding apps, this also handles the hidden icons in spotlight so you may no longer need spotbright. That lets you remove one substrate in place of another.

Note: due to the all sources package adding my beta repository for users that were not capable of being beta testers, I have removed my beta repository and asked Saurik to update my main repository source that would force the beta repository to be uninstalled.

Edit: Results based on comments:

1) Some people find disabling EDGE as is in SBSettings works fine. (These folks probably have push disabled and are not using any apps that have notifications / push services.)

2) Some people find this method did work for them.

3) Some people find that a fake APN works for them without battery drain. Others experience massive battery drain.

Unfortunately, we still don’t have a solution that can be implemented yet.

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Disabling EDGE on iPhone v3.0 has been very hard. It’s still not certain, but after some testing and user reported success (a big thank you to Jorge Rendon!). The main reason the EDGE toggle in SBSettings and BossPrefs hasnt been updated is because I have not known what it takes exactly to disable EDGE on 3.0. The problem is that the OS reenables it. If you “mess up” your APN, the OS goes crazy trying to enable it draining your battery in about 90 minutes from full charge. So that’s not the way either. These steps do seem to work, however. Give them a try. If the reports are mostly positive, I will integrate this into the EDGE toggle.

1) Open settings app and disable Notifications. These appear directly under carrier, if you have them. They only appear if you have installed an appstore app that requires push. If you don’t have these, skip this step.

2) Disable push mail fetch.

3) Disable EDGE using SBSettings

4) Load settings app, enable airplane mode. Wait at least 10 seconds.

5) Load settings app and disable airplane mode. Wait for you to get service again.

6) Load SBSettings. You should have no Data IP (IP N/A).

7) Try using safari on Data. It should fail. Wait a bit, Load SBSettings your data IP should remain N/A.

Feel free to test this. If you get a Data IP address, you have indication that your Data may be getting reenabled. I am interested in the results of this.

Most likely a reboot of iPhone will retain the state.

An ECID Grabber that difrnt created. It makes the process of getting your purplera1nyday certificate faster and less complex. Read More / Download At: http://difrnt.com/blog/?p=25 *Getting your ECID and purplera1nyday certificate may be crucial to your 3Gs Jailbreak! Screenshot: UPDATE #1 difrnt also created a iBEC and iBSS Grabber! If you find it too hard to manually grab [...]

Long time no speak everyone. We have made alot of updates and wanted to inform everyone of just a few. Firstly, our main feature Spoofing is still free so long as the calls are kept under 2 minutes. You still have to listen to a short 10 second ad before your call is placed but [...]

The iPhone battery is one of its weak points. Luckily, several after market add-on batteries exist. I have bought many of these batteries and am writing a review and comparison of each. Below is an extensive comparison of 5 addon batteries for your iPhone and recommendations on each. One thing that all batteries have in [...]