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Adventures In Jailbreaking

// November 16th, 2009 // Technology

The iPhone is a fantastic device, with many excellent features and apps, but not without it’s faults. Apple’s restrictive policies meant that many features were locked away from a stock device for sake of stability and a solid user experience. Multi-tasking is left by the wayside in favor of giving individual apps plenty of memory, even with the faster and more technically-capable iPhone 3GS. Thus, a community of hackers began to dig into the guts of the iPhone to unlock these features and create apps to take full advantage of the finest smartphone to date. Jailbreaking, as the process of running modified firmware on an iPhone is called, was a risky process in the very beginning. There was the potential of ‘bricking’ your phone, leaving you with a very shiny paperweight. These days, thanks to the iPhone Dev-Team and the infamous iPhone hacker Geohot, jailbreaking the iPhone can be as simple as pressing a button. So, how do you jailbreak the iPhone? There are few different methods, both on Mac and PC. The two biggest are the iPhone Dev-Team’s Mac Pwnage Tool and Geohot’s Windows Blackra1n program. Jailbroken apps can be found on ‘Underground App Stores’ like Cydia and Rock Your Phone. The best how-to instruction for both programs can be found at iClarified, a fantastic Apple resource site. Anyway, enough exposition, on to the pretty pictures! Here’s a quick shot of my homescreen, using a custom theme called Suave with the jailbreak app Winterboard.

Winterboard is the number one jailbreak theming app, allowing you to create custom backgrounds and icons, as well as modifying additional UI elements to your heart’s content. Notice the custom alert badge and five-icon dock.

Above is a combination of two different apps, Backgrounder and Kirikae. Backgrounder, as the name suggests, allows you to run multiple apps at the same time on the iPhone. Instead of having to close out of one, open another, then close out the second to reopen the first, apps are stored in memory. Kirikae puts a solid UI and Windows-like Taskmanager onto Backgrounder, creating a list of favorites for quick-switching and killing backgrounded apps. A must-have for any jailbroken iPhone. The second screenshot includes customized ‘flags’ to indicate what apps are running in the background on the springboard.

One of the biggest quirks of the iPhone is that in order to turn on and off functions like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, you had to dig through several pages of settings to reach their toggles. Jailbreak app SBSettings is an excellent solution. With a single swipe across the top panel of the iPhone, an attractive (and themeable!) UI slides down, with a number of options now just a swipe away.

Finally, there is Orbit, a very slick jailbreak app for quickly moving between pages on your iPhone. Instead of swiping back and forth through up to twelve pages of apps, Orbit creates a Mac-like Exposé view all of your pages, allowing you to jump quickly from your homescreen to your last screen in just two taps.

This is the first of probably a few writeups on the iPhone I’ll be doing since it’s my new Favorite Toy, so expect more sometime soon, likely about some of my favorite apps, both jailbroken and otherwise.

Feel free to throw me some questions or comments!