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Update (April 2, 2009 by BigBoss) I just pushed an update to Crash-X’s VoIPover3G v1.0.2 that will enable skype in the plist for you. No need for editing plist files just update the VoIPover3G app.

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Update (April 1, 2009 by BigBoss and ranova): Saurik just released mobilesubstrate 0.9.2805-1. This version fixes the problem entirely allowing for mobilesubstrate addons to work with Skype app. You can now use Skype app with VoIPover3G! -
Quick Tip: The voipover3g string for Skype is: com.skype.skype -All lowercase. You must add it in the VoIPover3G.plist located in /Library/MobileSubstrate/DynamicLibraries/
Full Guide to add Skype to voipover3g

Latest clippy and keyboard custom sounds now also seem to work with Skype using the latest Mobile Substrate update. If you are still experiencing crashes when you open up the keyboard, disable these two components.

If you are still experiencing crashes with the new Mobile Substrate and have disabled clippy and\or custom keyboard sounds, make sure to check other mobile substrate extensions or apps that run in the background and disable them. They may be still conflicting with how Skype runs. This is not a Mobile Substrate problem, but a problem with the extension or app itself and the author of it will have to update it. I had no problems using Clippy, Cydelete, Cyntact, Five Icon Dock, QuickGold, SBSettings, VoIPover3G, and Winterboard as mobile substrate extensions.

Known extensions or apps that cause skype to crash: mcoolphone, mobilelog, AdvLock, Hood, and Intelliscreen (it may work if you mess around with the performance settings in Intelliscreen).
You can check what mobileSubstrates extensions you have running and installed by looking in the folder:
/Library/MobileSubstrate/DynamicLibraries/

If you use Intelliscreen, From User Daron:

Eventually, I discovered that Skype would launch if I *disabled* IntelliScreen. I then tried to disable some of the IntelliScreen Performance extensions (Backgrounder, FileSchemaMobileSafari, MailToAttachmentMessageUI, PrefHooker-iKeyEx, SBHooker-iKeyEx, SBSettings, Veency, VoIPover3G, WinterBoard) and discovered that the culprit was Veency.

Thank you Saurik and everyone else that posted comments that helped us figure out the underlying problems.
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Update (March 31st, 2009): Saurik has released a new mobile substrate and the issue is fixed. No need for intelliscreen or any other hacks. Just update mobile substrate from cydia. Update to v0.9.2803-1 (or newer) of mobile substrate.

To fix the Skype crash, all mobilesubstrate based hacks are disabled on the Skype app. This means you cannot use voipover3g or backgrounder with Skype app. Do not ask how to do it or point out that it doesnt work. The developer of mobile substrate has already stated that it will not work.

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The highly anticipated app for the iPhone has just been released in the US:
Skype in the AppStore.

Now the bad news. It seems that all jailbroken phones do not play well with the Skype app. I had problems getting it to work at all, the app would crash when you try to use the keyboard to login to the app. I later found out, through trial and error, the culprit for keyboard crashing is Custom Winterboard Keyboard Click Sounds and Clippy. Getting rid of the keyboard custom clicks (tock.aiff) seems to work with regular themes. Using SBSettings Clippy toggle to switch it off seemed to do the trick also.

That problem, while small and fixable, is not the biggest problem. Skype seems to freeze within 30-50 seconds while in the app – no matter what you do (calling, idling, chatting, etc). I went into safe mode using SBSettings and tried out Skype – to my surprise, everything worked perfectly – I used it to talk to my friend for about 20-30 minutes. I decided to do a little bit more troubleshooting – deleting mobile substrates one by one to see if it helped or not, and then deleting them all. Nothing seemed to work, the app would still crash within one minute.

I decided to run SysInfoPro and compare running processes (non-mobile substrate) between safe mode and regular mode. They both had the exact processes running at the same time.

Although I didn’t delve much deeper into the problem (could have tried using Top and system logs), I have come to a conclusion that Skype crashes ONLY on jailbroken iPhones. I had a couple friends try it on their newly restored iPhones, and they worked flawlessly. Other people from multiple forums have also said it crashes non-stop for them (their iPhones also jailbroken):

“I managed to download skype and tested myself. It is buggy and all the symptoms the same as described by ranova. I have tried it on a 1G phone newly updated to 2.2.1 jailbroken. The only apps I have installed is sbsettings, ierase, nimbuzz, and skype. It still crashes after 30sec or so. It has got to be the phone that is jailbroken. I have nothing on my phone other than what you get after you jailbreak.” – duceduc

“2.2.1 jailbroken 3g here. It crashes after 30 – 60 seconds.” – jgsx

“Confirmed – Crashes like every minute.” – Zazox

Let’s hope this isn’t an attempt from Apple or Skype to cause apps to crash only on jailbroken phones (to deter the use of voipover3g). [end conspiracy theories]
Update: Saurik has just updated regarding reasons behind the crashes:

“Skype seems to be using some kind of /awesome/ DRM that involves them having an entire replacement binary somehow inside of it: the one on disk doesn’t link against /anything/ ;P. Whatever its doing, though, involves stressing dyld in some weird way.

Interestingly enough, its not anything MobileSubstrate does to the code: its just it existing in the process before it loads its replacement. (Which is extra weird, as the new MobileSubstrate links against almost nothing: just CoreFoundation.)”

So what we know so far:

• If Skype crashes when trying to input text: Disable both clippy (Use SBSettings toggle) and any custom Winterboard sounds relating to the keyboard tick (tock.aiff).
• If Skype crashes within 1 minute of having the app open: Update your Mobile substrate via Cydia. The latest version (April 1st, 2009) allows mobile substrate to play nicely with Skype. Thanks Saurik!

Temporary fix that allows mobile substrates extensions (voipover3g, backgrounder, winterboard) to run, from Autotrade at Engadget:

“For people having crashes (especially the 1 minute thing) use this FIX: I had to enable in Intelliscreen, Performance, App Boost ON and select the apps below (in my case I set Backgrounder and VoipOver3G both to ON). That fixed it, no more crashes at all, tested this on 2 iPhones.”

Well there you have it, Skype on the iPhone is amazing – sound quality sounds better than regular cell calls. I briefly tested it on T-mobile’s EDGE network (using voipover3g) and for the 30 seconds that it lasted, there was no noticable lag and quality was great! I look forward in using Skype as a regular VoIP app. Thanks for all the comments and thank you saurik for looking into this.

Hey guys! Here is pH. I’m new here and I’ll post all my tools here. BigBoss is hosting everything on the repo (thanks, :) ) and, if you want, click here to visit my english blog (ipHrojects) or click here to visit my brazillian blog (iBlogeek). My first public tool is called iPhone OS C/C++ [...]

I believe the iSpazio source should be up if you update the source package to v0-3.1 or newer. He had some domain issues and his domain, ispazio.net seems to be “lost”. The package update just updates the source to use one of his other existing domains.  !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:'https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);lang: en_US

The main bigboss.org server has been having some troubles the last couple days. It is not a traffic issue as the server has plenty of horse power to handle whats coming in. The issue has been tough to nail down but I have made changes every day and enabled different logging. I check the server multiple times a day and fix it right away if I notice a problem. So if you are having issues, just try again in an hour or so until the problem is solved. I have enabled some additional log files so I may need a couple more days of reproduction with logfiles to solve it once and for all.

Edit: if you are able to read this post, the server is up!

BigBoss Edit: If this was crashing for you, it was probably fixed on 1.0.2. Congratulations to Occipital on this nice app. I think this is one of the most innovative apps on the iPhone. It finally takes the crappy camera and does something pretty ok with it. I plan to update my reasons to jailbreak with this.

At Occipital, we’ve been working really hard on a better camera application for the iPhone, called ClearCam, and we finally launched it on BigBoss/Cydia!

ClearCam takes 6 photos in 2.5 seconds, fuses them together using an algorithm called super resolution, and creates a sharper, 4 megapixel photo with less noise. There is also a QuickShot mode that takes 4 photos in under 2 seconds and saves the sharpest to the camera roll.

You love your iPod touch as much as we do? Wish you could send SMS messages from it? Now you can: nibbleSMS lets you send SMS messages directly from your iPod touch! Although you can only send SMS messages, not receive them, it’s still convenient and cheap. Although the nibbleSMS application is free, to send [...]

To all application developers that host with me. If you would like to use this web site to announce and discuss your app, its updates, and changelogs, get feedback from users via comments, contact me and I’ll give you the ability to do so. Many of you have requested for me to announce your apps, [...]

For those of you that may find this interesting, I thought I would explain a bit about the layout and history of the BigBoss repository. Remember the repository provides developers with a free service to host their apps. I offer download stats live, the ability to host your own pages, and the expertise I have [...]

Categories. So I made changes to this about 6 weeks ago and thought I posted the update. But today when I was debugging my upcoming running programs widget for sbsettings, I noticed that categories from Cydia was about 6 weeks old and did not even contain the most recent features. So I updated this. I [...]

Is your iPhone running slower than it did after you first jailbroke it? Do you have issues where apps are running slower or taking longer to load than they use to? Some of this can be caused by what you have chosen to install on your iPhone. Let’s take a look at some things that [...]

600! Just a little over a week after we posted our landmark 500 packages in Cydia, we are now at 600 packages (603 to be exact)!  !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:'https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);lang: en_US

I am still getting a lot of emails asking one or two of the same questions: “I hid my poof icon and now I cant unpoof it” (or same with bossprefs or such). or “I just restored my iPhone and all my icons are gone“. I have written two articles on this. There is the [...]

I finally got the repository web apps working again. Remember that with these apps you can view everything in my Cydia repository without actually having Cydia open. You can see what’s new using the New Apps link, and you can see entire listing with the Hosting / Repository link (almost at 500 packages yay). These [...]