jailbreaking

I, for one, HATE group chats. They always seem to go off on tangents that I simply don’t need to be a part of or they simply end up becoming a drunken symphony of vibrations on my nightstand if I was the one who had to get up early the next day while everyone else stayed out and continued the drinking. Every now and then, however, they are good for some things. I know families that use them to keep their slightly overbearing parents at bay with short updates on their lives (instead of long, drawn out phone calls every night). […]

Here’s another jailbreak tweak that helps you further customize the look and feel of iOS 7. In this case, it’s not the UI color, or the icons, or any other part of the constant parts of iOS that you see every time you look down at your phone, but it’s still a part of your cell phone experience on a constant basis: the notifications. Using this tweak, called FlagPaint7, you can change how the banner notifications look whenever an app has something to tell you, and the look of the banners on the lock screen look as well. From rounding the corners,

There’s a universal search tool that a lot of people are familiar with on Mac called Alfred. This program sort of takes the idea of Spotlight, and searching one place to find anything on your computer, and kicks it up a notch by adding in the ability to also search certain places on the web, type in calculations, launch apps, etc. all in the goal of trying to eliminate the mouse as much as possible. It is actually pretty got at it, too. Winning awards all over the place for productivity and getting praise all across the web. One iOS

Thanks to a jailbreak tweak developer, you can now have that “show in finder” functionality found in OS X on your Mac carried over to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 7. The tweak is free and requires no setup. Simply install it and then you have the new found power to be able to hold down on any result in Spotlight (you know, the feature that lets you search when you swipe down on any homescreen on your phone) to have it take you to where on your device that app is located instead of just opening

Based on someone’s iOS 8 concept of a “mission control” upgrade to control center in iOS 7, a jailbreak tweak developer came up with Vertex. Vertex allows you to replace the app switcher and the control center with a sleek combination of the two. Essentially it takes the app switcher and squishes it up to the top half of the screen while adding the control center options below it. While it may sound a bit simple, it does actually aid in iOS 7 a bit more minimalistic in a way and gets a little addictive once you’ve used it for a while. It’s

Personally, I only use Spotify for my music. I happen to switch phones so often and it’s one of the only music apps that works across all the different operating systems. Add to that, it’s social network-like other benefits and you can see why I’m glued to it. Unfortunately though, when using my iPhone, Apple doesn’t want me to be able to use it as my default music app (unlike my Android devices). I have to always default to the built-in music app, which in my case, is completely empty and a waste of an icon on my home screen.

Need something to show off the fact that your iPhone is jailbroken? How about adding a Matrix movie style raining text effect to the lock screen? Yeah, that’ll make them go “what the…” (while possibly also making them go “nerd!” but who cares, right?). A tweak called RainLock does just that by adding a fun matrix-like animated raining text effect to your device’s lock screen. You can customize the text, the color, the speed, etc. to make it more suitable to your liking, but it does also default to the movie’s signature green alien-looking writing if that’s more your thing.

Chat heads is a feature of the Facebook app that allows you to communicate with your Facebook friends without having to leave whatever you are looking at in the Facebook app. It accomplishes this by giving you a little floating head on your screen whenever your friends message you through Facebook. These can be moved around the screen, tapped to enter the conversation, and even thrown away in an oddly satisfying “dragging to the trash” sort of motion. For Android, however, this feature is even more exciting in that it allows you to have those chat heads with you even when

In the world of theming for iOS 7, nothing is sacred, not even your status bar and the battery icon. While most theming tweaks in iOS 7 allow you to change pretty much every aspect of the OS, the major ones (like Springtomize, for example) don’t allow you to change the icons in the status bar, while others (like Winterboard) require you to change the entire theme across the device usually. Thanks to a clever jailbreak tweak called Alkaline you can now change just the battery icon by itself in a quick and extremely easy way. All you have to

Sometimes jailbreak tweak developers simply have an annoyance with iOS that they really just want to fix. One such example of this annoyance-fixing is the tweak we’re checking out today, called MessagePopper. Now, normally when you are texting someone using iOS 7 and you leave the messaging app, receive a new message from someone else, and return to the messaging app, it’ll automatically put you in the conversation with the original person instead of taking you to the person that just messaged you. This forces you to go back to the conversation list then tap on the new conversation from

Activator is a great app that allows you to use gestures to launch apps or perform actions. From tapping the homescreen with three fingers, to pinching when in an app, to a ton of other options, it can really add a lot of functionality to your iPhone, iPad, or iOS device. But what if you want a more violent gesture to perform an action? Knock is here to help. Installing this jailbreak tweak (which costs $0.99) allows you to use a new gesture in activator in the form of tapping hard on the front or back of the device. Here’s

If you’re like me, you sometimes get quite bored with your wallpaper causing you to search out new ones and install them on your phone as the mood strikes you. If you feel this is taking up a bit too much time in your daily life, may I suggest a jailbreak tweak called DailyPaper. This tweak will automatically download a new wallpaper from Bing at midnight every night and set as your device background so you can wake up to a new look everyday. Issue being that you don’t get to really choose the wallpaper (or even a category for

If you like controlling your music from the Control Center (makes sense, no?) or from your lock screen, you may notice that there isn’t an option for repeat or shuffle in these places. Apparently a jailbreak tweak developer noticed this as well and he decided to do something about it. Enter CCShuffler, the free jailbreak app that simply does just that. Add his repo to get access to it, install it, and that’s it. You’ll then see repeat and shuffle as icons in the aforementioned places. Here’s how to add shuffle and repeat in video and written form below. I.