Originally published in the Smoking Apples Magazine Issue 5. Grab it now—free no strings attached download—if you haven’t already.

Though still seated below a minor 10%, the iPhone and iPod touch jailbreak community continues to grow with a steady rate despite the continued hindrance from Apple. Jailbreaking is the act of more of less ‘freeing’ your device, by unlocking restricted components to allow for new and exciting application possibilities and device tweaks either not yet implemented or disapproved by Apple. Since the launch of the original iPhone several years back jailbreaking has seen many advancements making jailbreaking all the more appealing. Before taking a look at some of these advancements, here’s a couple quick notes about some of the fear, uncertainly, and doubt involved with jailbreaking, and even some of the cons to doing it.

First off, your battery can potentially see a quicker drop after jailbreaking. Chill, though… it all depends upon what you choose to install that will actually make the difference on the battery. There’s various extensions that can essentially run full time on the device, so the more you choose to install the more it will take a hit on your battery. In all honestly, I have everything you see listed below and more running on a daily basis and after a day of using my phone every free moment I get I’m usually sitting with a fair amount of battery. There’s some upsides to help the battery and speed, too. Some tweaks exist to remove useless daemons running in the background and to stop some of Apple’s pesky apps like Mail and Safari from backgrounding on their own. There’s also an SBSettings (more info in the post) toggle to change the screen brightness at will (honestly only takes a couple seconds) as well as an SBSettings toggle to kill processes and free memory (a function Apple forced developers to remove from their applications). Speed can be an issue too, but it’s not for me. On both my past 3G and current 3GS I’ve never had an issue with speed. Things seem to run just as fast as they do on the stock iPhone OS. Finally, another big thing is security. The ridiculous rumors that fly about huge exploits on jailbroken phones honestly astounds me as jailbroken phones typically have far less security issues then the stock iPhone OS (if any) as the jailbreak community is quick on patching up any holes that should be their from Apple (which is honestly very rare). The only thing I would recommend is changing your root password for SSH should you choose to install it.

So, here’s a look at some of my most beloved and also some of the most popular applications and extensions on the jailbreak scene.

Themeing

The stock iPhone OS interface certainly is one with rather exquisite beauty and elegance, and in my opinion is unarguably the best or smart phone interface seen to date. Despite the allure it does harness, the iPhone OS interface in no way delivers what could be a truly outstanding and lustful interface. Due to considerably poor interface and icon design choices by the developers of otherwise exceptional applications, an extremely large majority of jailbroken iPhone and iPod touch users have taken it into their own hands to customize their device’s interface with extended elegance through themeing.

Themeing is undoubtedly one of the most desired customizations many users have after jailbreaking their device. Although many choices have appeared over the years, Jay Freeman’s Winterboard has unofficially become the de facto standard for system wide device themeing. You can theme virtually any interface element with WinterBoard (in any application)! WinterBoard is nothing more than an assistant that helps load themed images into the system, but it does so in a way that ensures no images are replaced so you may safely return to the system default at any point. Despite the fact you could completely refresh your device’s interface to dazzle others with sheer lust, themeing was far from its potential until recent months. Several new additions to the scene have helped create an extremely versatile themeing experience.

The long-existing SpringJumps brewed up by Lance Fetters is a delightfully handy extension that allows you to jump to any page on your SpringBoard with the single tap of an icon. One use of this extension can be seen in the screenshot above where I’m using themed SpringJump icons coupled with an 8 icon dock to allow my to navigate the beautiful interface with an action even quicker than a swipe – a tap. Yanik Magnan’s Iconoclasm is a powerful new extension on the scene that allows you to place SpringBoard icons virtually anywhere on your SpringBoard with custom x and y coordinates. You can set the number of icons per page, and where you want them, all on a per page basis. Another rather recent inductee to assist in the jailbreak themeing scene is Infinidock. This slick extension allows you to set literally an infinite amount of items in your dock with smooth scrolling and customizable spacing preferences.

IconHarvester

With themeing of these wonderful devices came forum additions in communities new and old. These design communities really are ‘communities’ in the strongest sense of the word as user contributions can bring posts for a single theme up to several hundred pages simply to ensure everyone has each application themed. Unfortunately, navigating through these posts to find all the icons you need is never a simple task especially when sites completely lack a search function (though a couple tricks with Google do suffice). Luckily, one fellow with startup NanoTech got just as annoyed as the rest of us and developed IconHarvester to automatically browse and download icons from the MacThemes forums providing the most seemless on-device themeing experience possible thus far.

Although it has its fair share of quirks, IconHarvester does a rather spectacular job at digging up all user-contributed icons on those 180 page posts so you don’t have to. This app goes a step further and not only lets you select which icon of the ones it found that you would like to use, but it will also generate icons for any unthemed icons you still bear should the resources be included by the themer.

SBSettings

As a revolutionary successor to the much-admired BossPrefs, SBSettings by the same developer, BigBoss, will quickly become an invaluable tool for any jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch user. With a simple swipe across the status bar, SBSettings gives you access to a number of settings which are otherwise hidden or time-consuming to access.

Whether you should be lying in bed and you’re tired of Safari thinking it knows what’s best for you by throwing itself in landscape, or you need to flip on the WiFi for faster streaming. Perhaps the AutoCorrect is annoying the ducking hell out of you or your case manufacturer put your silent switch in an incredibly hard to access location (*cough*mophie*cough*), SBSettings is not only at your finger tips, it’s a swipe away.

Music Controls

Even on the iPod touch, controlling your tunes is a pretty weak experience considering the iPod touch is assumedly… you know… an iPod. Shake to refresh is more annoying as hell than it is intuitive.

Music Controls by phoenix3200 is a brilliant extension that uses a double height status bar (just like tethering on the iPhone) to give you control over your currently playing music. With Music Controls you can pause / play and skip to previous and following songs with a simple tap… from any app (yup, taglines it is… taglines it is). Music Controls doesn’t stop at just iPod.app either, it harnesses the power for controlling media in well over a dozen applications including Last.fm, RSS Player, and Pandora.

Snow Cover Pro

I think album art on the lockscreen is great, and apparently, so do the EyeDevs, the folks who designed and developed Snow Cover Pro. Snow Cover Pro presents your album art in a classic crystal CD case or vinyl slip case with plenty of other stunning styles available.

Full-Blown SMS Replacement

Avid texter or not, biteSMS is sure to make you hot (uhm, career in taglines, anyone?). biteSMS not only resembles the clean interface of the native Messages application, but hides in exciting new features that are sure to get you… excited.

biteSMS’ QuickReply and QuickCompose provide you with the fastest possible texting experience you’ve ever seen. Incoming texts show up just as seen above. Tap the textarea, keyboard slides up, you’re good to go. It doesn’t matter what app you’re in, or even if you’re on the lockscreen, biteSMS provides a few quick gestures that’ll make composing and sending that text not only blazing fast, but also uninterruptive to whatever you’re doing on your device. biteSMS also features their own network that allows you to send SMS and (in some areas) MMS messages at what may likely be a very reduced rate in your region. iRealSMS, the founders of these quick reply and compose concepts just tossed out their 3.0 release recently with a similar feature lineup but with some competitive differences as well.

ActionMenu and Inspell

Sure, copy and paste finally hit 3.0, but that doesn’t mean it’s as powerful as it could be. ActionMenu brings tons of power to your copy and paste menu by providing additional options such as clipboard history, favorites / templates, web search and send to Twitter (for text clips), and plenty more. Also by Ryan Petrich, the developer of ActionMenu, is Inspell, more powerful spelling correction for the iPhone and iPod touch. Inspell is nested in the copy and paste menu and provides various dictionary correction suggestions for words it notices are misspelled, just like a traditional word processor, web browser and the like.

Firewalls and Analytic Blocking

Several months back there was quite a bit of hysteria after one blogger discovered several analytics companies were gathering what some feel to be very sensitive information through integration with some of your most used applications. Four of the major analytic companies worked cooperatively with Jay Freeman (saurik, iPhone dev team member and Cydia creator) to bring jailbreakers PrivaCy, a set of four toggles to turn off analytics bundled with some applications. Developer Yllier went a step further to bring host-specific filtering with Firewall iP, an extension that allows you to selectively filter to what hosts an app may connect. It’s all completely customizable and can be toggled off at any time with a simple SBSettings toggle.

3G Unrestrictor

As outrage poured out over iPhone users not being able to use popular apps like Slingplayer and Skype over a cellular data network, jailbroken iPhone users sat contently while streaming TV and making Skype calls over their cellular network. 3G Unrestrictor by Kim Striech gives you the power to trick apps (on a per-app basis) to thinking they’re on WiFi. Whether you want Safari and YouTube.app to hand over the high quality videos, maybe you wanna download a 20MB application over 3G, or perhaps you want to stream from your Slingbox while on the go, 3G Unrestrictor brings you that power. Again, if for whatever reason you need to turn 3G Unrestrictor off for a bit, the SBSettings toggle is there.

YourTube

Tired of having to continually waste bandwidth and time as you attempt to get that lolcat video to stream for every friend you show it to? YourTube is here for you! YourTube is exactly what it’s called, it puts power into your hands and allows you download low or high quality YouTube videos (right in the YouTube application!) and keep them on your device so you can watch them any time, internet connection or not. This delight was brewed up by founding dev team member pumpkin and a few buddies.

MewSeek

Longtime jailbreak iPhone developer errrick first brought the community Mewseek for P2P file sharing and now he’s done it again with Mewseek Pro which brings powerful music search to your device using a variety of music search engines. On the OS 2.0 level Mewseek Pro allowed you to import tunes directly into the iPod.app however this function was crippled with the 3.0 update. Though the developer says he’s continuing to work on this function, it still remains useless. Don’t let that stop you though, the next fantastic app lets you listen to your music in all it’s album art glory.

iFile

Also one of my jailbreaking favorites, iFile is an advanced file manager. Similar to App Store options such as iFiles or Air Sharing, iFile allows you to manage all any document; email, drag and drop it, zip – unzip it (okay, might not exactly be drag and drop, but I like Daft Punk). iFile goes further to offer native music playback just as the iPod app does with album art an all. Files can be accessed via a local web address or as a Bonjour server. The iFile developer has claimed that a coming iFile release will integrate with the upcoming iBlueNova which allows for powerful file sharing over bluetooth.

Categories and Categories SB

Categories is a fantastic app / tweak that allows you to stash some of your less used applications into folders to keep that springboard tidy and organized. Categories SB goes a step further and has the folders load right in your SpringBoard for fast an slick access. Stacks by Steven Stroghton-Smith is also a worthy competitor for hiding your apps but keeping quick access to them. Stacks are fairly similar to the stacks you’d see on any Mac system.

Safari Download Manager and AttachmentSaver

Regain power of your device with Safari Download Manager by Dustin Howett and AttachmentSaver from Youssef Francis. These lovely extensions let you save virtually any file off the interwebs or any attachment emailed to you right to the file system. Both extensions go a step further and offer fantastic integration with iFile, you’d almost think these guys were part of the verbatim system.

LockInfo

Recently released LockInfo by David Ashman is also another of my most loved applications and I’m sure Steve Streza would toss in a praising word or two as well [Ed note: There’s some back scratching going on here I’m sure…]. This beauty keeps nearly everything you’d want right on your lockscreen. Don’t worry about missed SMS and push notifications because of silly UI design, LockInfo keeps new mail, push notifications, calendar events, SMS, phone, voicemails and more right on your lockscreen. LockInfo also features plugins for popular todo applications 2Do, Appigo ToDo, and Things as well as weather, Twitter, RSS, and other fancy plugins. LockInfo also supports themeing, and to be honest, I have one of the less-developed themes.

ProSwitcher

Another fairly new contender on the jailbreak scene from Ryan Petrich and chpwn, ProSwitcher combined with the legendary Backgrounder provides a stunning Palm Pre-like interface for multitasking with applications. Although the iPhone and iPod touch weren’t created to have to many apps running in the background, other tweaks can allow you to have Safari, Mail, iPod and the like stop backgrounding on their own to free up some needed memory.

My Setup

Just a few quick words about what I’m running on my device as as you can see above I’ve got some pretty heavy themeing going on. The main theme I’ve got running is a custom mix of iHome and iHome Matte from lauro’s Home [S] eries which actually inclused the work of totushi and his wonderful SilkyMatte where I think Thyraz may have even played a hand too. The Categories[SB] icons are seen themed with kediashubham’s Matte Nano who is actually the designed behind Matte UI which is responsible for nearly all of the rest of the system themeing. One exception to that however is my Matte StatusBar which whipped up by the great dew825. Finally, there’s Thyraz and friends to thank for the slick SBSettings theme, SBMatte. There is some other minor elements themed by the wonderful members of the MacThemes.net forum, whom I must thank as a community for their incredible work. Hopefully I’ve convinced you that jailbreaking is a pretty epic good time, but whether I have or haven’t be sure to let me know in the comments along with any other questions or annoyances you might have.