Ok, I Jailbroke my iPhone. So now what? - Macenstein

Ok, I Jailbroke my iPhone. So now what?

So last night, around midnight, I decided to Jailbreak my iPhone – the main impetus being I wanted to check out xGPS. Of course the first attempt using QuickPWN didn’t work for some reason, so I had to restore my iPhone, then try again, experiencing success sometime around 1:30 AM. Since then I have had only a little free time to poke around Cydia, the Winterboard and such, but from what I have seen, there appears to be almost as bad a ratio of “crap to gold” amongst Jailbroken apps as there is on iTunes. I’m kind of an impatient fellow, so please forgive me as I attempt to cut to the front of the line here and pull from your collective experiences in the Jailbreaking world.


Above: Surely there has got to be something cooler to do with a Jailbroken iPhone than throwing Domo behind my apps and changing my battery to orange…

Now that I have jailbroken this bad boy, what should I be doing with it? Thus far I have skimmed through a couple themes, all of them god-awful. I have discovered I can skin my battery to be anything from Zelda hearts to an Energizer battery, and I have discovered the joys of the Categories app, and now have all 9 pages worth of my apps neatly tucked away into a page and a half of folders. But what else should I be checking out? What are the actually WELL DESIGNED themes? Can I get custom SMS sounds on here? What are the killer apps that I can’t get on iTunes? Leave me your hints in the comments, and hopefully we’ll all learn something (but mainly me).

Comments
32 Responses to “Ok, I Jailbroke my iPhone. So now what?”
  1. Dre says:

    Hé Doc, kind of had the same sitution as u did with de 1:30 AM and all…
    The only thing i can REALY recomand you is SBSetting. Easy way to switch of 3G/Wifi and all the other stuff…
    Have fun….

  2. Nick Penree says:

    Check out Clippy and Qik (available in Cydia)

  3. Phelim says:

    Yeah, SBsettings is excellent. Only reason I have my phone j/broken is for that and to record video every now and then.

    About custom SMS tones…. I don’t know if a cydia package can do it with a click of the fingers but, the way I used to do it was…. if you install something called ‘netatalk’ this will make your iPhone use AFP and appear in Finder’s sidebar (as if by Bonjour) when it’s connected to your network and from there you can change – but also damage – lots of things. Like SMS ringtones.

    If you go System>Library>Audio>UIsounds you get a lot of the iPhone’s default sounds: email, calendar, unlock etc. The SMS tones are titled ‘sms-received1-6.caf’. To replace these, as with the other default sounds, you need to take an .aif file and change the extension to, you guessed it, .caf and then name it the name of what you want to replace and then you’re done!

  4. Robert says:

    As Nick mentioned Clippy is great (one of my favorites) I would also recommend Backgrounder which I use so I don’t have to quit Pandora to send a text message mostly. I also enjoy Five Icon Dock, which I’m sure you can guess what this package does. iBlacklist is nice if you have a telemarketer that repeatedly calls you from the same number. Katra’s Weather shows the current temperature with a picture to indicate weather conditions on your lockscreen, I use this every morning when I wake up, it takes a quick SSH to setup but nothing to bad and the developers website has an easy walk through of the file to edit if I recall correctly. You may need OpenSSH to connect via SSH as well I think. PDANet also uses SSH for easy tethering if you like. If you use backgrounder and SBSetttings I would recommend grabbing Processes too so you can kill one of the open apps if you begin to run low of system memory. 20 Second Lock Screen is another pretty self explanatory one that I like to compliment Katra’s Weather as sometime it takes longer than the normal five seconds for the info to download.

    Sorry for the disorganization of the post I just went through my packages in alphabetical order so its not to nicely written.

  5. Gabe says:

    Well Doc,you can download pretty much ANY ring tone from Cydia!
    of Course I sometimes use “Instalous” to download apps to see if its worth buying.
    I LOVE SBSettings.

    But other than that the themes are great and other things like that.

    Hope you enjoy it!

  6. Lee says:

    I jailbreak for these apps:

    cycorder – record movies
    sbsettings – easy access to your settings
    winterboard – customise!
    pdanet – tethering
    five icon dock – um, 5 icons in the dock
    hclipcoard – copy & paste, w00t!
    lock calendar – Puts your calendar on your lock screen, this is one of my favs
    netatalk – see your iphone in finder
    qik – live video recording
    quickgold – quicksilver for your iphone
    statusnotifier – tells you if you have missed texts, mail, etc.
    xGPS – turn by turn gps, at last!
    quick dismiss – dismiss notifications by pressing home button

    Enjoy!

  7. Get winterboard. Then get the star wars sound effects pack and put a check next to it on winterboard. Life is much more fun when Chewy announces your SMS, or R2D2 tells you that you have new email.

    The primary reasons I jailbreak my phone is to install different sounds for new mail, add the ‘notify’ app so that you see new email on your locked screen, and get cycorder. Themes and all that stuff aren’t as cool as the really important things, like actually hearing a new email when it comes in.

    Personally, I can’t believe we’re 3 years in and I have to hack my phone just to get a new email sound that you can hear over a whisper.

  8. Mr Michael says:

    Installous… LOOOOOVE it. dTunes…. BEST EVER. QIK – Great!

  9. crsrc says:

    I just recently rejailbroke (rejailbreaked?) my phone and really I am starting to see why I had no problem updating to 2.2 the first day it came out and losing all my jailbroken goodness. It really isnt worth the sluggishness and crashiness. There are definitely cool things like cycorder, xgps, pdanet, and clippy and some UI hacks and themes like 5 icon dock (probably my favorite thing you can do for some reason) and of course categories (this NEEDS to be incorporated by apple) but I really dont use most of it enough to concede stability. I’ll probably keep it jailbroken until the next update comes out and go legit again.

  10. Matt Davis says:

    123SPOOF, i just got it and i’ve already had so much fun with it!!!! hahahaha

    everyone you know is vulnerable to a prank if you have this app

  11. SirCrumpet says:

    For me, being able to grab Scrobbler to send played tracks to Last.fm is worth the jailbreak by itself. 🙂

  12. Scratic says:

    I guess I’m not the only one who took a certain technoblog’s advice over the weekend. It took me a few attempts as well. (I had too many apps.) I’m in the same boat as far as finding new apps. I dig Backgrounder. It makes chat apps useful. xGPS can easliy be a contender. Where can I get Mobilechat?

  13. Justin says:

    Ahh! 94 unread emails? I have some disorder I think. I always need my phone to have no number badges up. Missed phone call, go in and view it to clear it out, always listen to voice mails, and always read new emails to at least mark them as read.

  14. Kelly says:

    Shouldn’t jail break.

  15. Hanan says:

    Let us not forget iBluetooth, which lets you use the bluetooth of the iPhone for filesharing!!!

    If you want a really nice theme check out Buuf2.
    If you wanna make it better, go to modmyi forum of it. It has a buuf2extra theme I added by moding a russian version of the theme. If you wanna see how it looks, here’s some screenshots: http://www.modmyi.com/forums/new-skins-themes-launches/32178-buuf-post3219741.html#post3219741
    and here some more: http://www.modmyi.com/forums/new-skins-themes-launches/32178-buuf-post3219741.html#post3219771
    It changes everything!!!

    as many here said, SBSettings is great, and clippy is nice.

    If you wanna change the fonts of the iphone check out FontSwap.

    MakeItMine- it changes your service provider (for you it’s AT&T) and your clock to whatever you want’ like your name… Your service can be by Dr. and the clock Macenstein, so the status bar will read Dr. Macenstein.

    If you want to SSH the iphone (to mess with all the inner files of it) install OpenSSH…

    There are so much more’ but that’s a start.

  16. zmttoxics says:

    Meh. I did it to mine for a day. I didn’t see a benefit really. Sure homebrew apps are awesome, but I generally just use google apps and use mail / phone so it was a waste.

  17. jason says:

    NES.
    I play techmo bowl ALL the time.

  18. iDarbert says:

    Cycorder, SBSettings, Clippy and iBluetooth.
    Also Osu!, great Rytmical Game if you happen to like them.

  19. musyne says:

    Light.

    Unlike the ones in the app store, it can turn the brightness to the max when you use it. Very useful.

  20. Jim C. says:

    Sure the skinning apps are nice, but there are practical applications with jailbreaking your iPhone.

    Others have already mentioned SBSettings, and it’s reason enough to jailbreak. Having easy access to toggling cell and wifi radio settings, and adjusting brightness (all without leaving your current app) are fantastic. I’m always adjusting brightness (and hate using the auto-brightness “feature”), so this makes it super easy.

    A huge application – for me – is Intelliscreen, one of the few paid jailbreak apps out there (though there is a trial period available). Two things make it worthwhile. (1) being able to quickly view upcoming calendar events, missed calls, etc. from the lock screen. and most importantly (2) HAVING REPEATING ALERTS FOR MISSED EVENTS. With the unjailbroken iPhone, if you miss hearing the alarm for an appointment, you’ll never hear it again. The “repeat until dismissed by the user” feature of alarms is common on many, many smartphones and PDAs, and yet Apple bizarrely chose to leave it out. Intelliscreen brings that feature back, and has saved me from missing meetings multiple times already. For what its worth, you can also optionally set up “missed alerts” for phone calls and SMS messages. Info on Intelliscreen can be found at http://www.intelliborn.com .

    And yes, to change SMS alert sounds (or any other device sound, like calendar alerts), you’ll need to SSH into your iPhone or use Netatalk (with mounts your iPhone as a shared drive; default password is “alpine”). Once inside the System>Library>Audio>UIsounds directory, you’ll have all those .caf files (which are simply AIFF files with the extension renamed to .CAF). Edit your sounds in GarageBand or Audacity, and simply be sure to save them as AIFF files. Then, in Finder, just change the file extension to .CAF, upload the new files (with the same name as the file you want to replace), and you’re good to go. Don’t forget to you also replace some sounds with “silent” audio files to selectively silence items on your iPhone (which I did to get rid of the idiotic “whoOP – WHOop” sounds when you send or receive messages in the SMS application).

    If I hadn’t been able to add in repeating alerts for missed events or changing the sound used for alerts to something I more readily notice, then my iPhone would have been returned, since my old Palm Treo 650 could do all of these things, and even my wife’s Symbian-powered Nokia phone. As a business device, the iPhone is lacking out-of-the-box. Jailbreaking allowed me to have a functional, professional phone & PDA device.

  21. brnmbrns says:

    – I love Clippy.

    – SBSettings is a must

    – QuickSMS (when it doesn’t crash) If they could stabilize this, it would be truly remarkable. If it crashes too often and need a sms quick reply type of deal then try BiteSMS. This will keep you from closing app’s just to respond to a txt.

    – Installous [if you’re into that]

    – I have a SICK theme that I don’t really want to share with the public, so AIM me, and I’ll hook you up.

  22. MIke says:

    Clippy is cool, but i like hclipboard as well. One’s easy to use, one’s more powerful – and you can have them both.

    But websearch is the reason I kept jailbreaking my phones. It’s a safari launcher that initially opens to a user-configurable list of search engines (plus a “launch Safari” button). Two clicks to any of my favorite search engines!

  23. Russell says:

    I have kept my 16GB Touch at 1.1.4 since early last year because I have YET to see all of the features (applications AND tweaks) that were initially created by very clever and generous early adopters. My most used favorite is this: I can plug my Touch into my television and leave AFP on and drop various movies, songs etc. right into a download folder and play them with the Finder, “Documents”, or “MyMedia” application , then delete them (hello mini Apple TV and goodbye constant re-syncing). I also LOVE the vnc app both as a gui terminal to my other networked machines, and as a hand-held controller for any mouse/keyboard. I have emulators for SNES and Genesis (Sonic lives forever) , I’ve been working on transferring my copy of TombRaider over to use the PS emulator (even if it turns out to be too slow to use, I gotta have Lara on there). I have a native VoIP phone application and the famous microphone addition to make telephony calls (not to mention Fring is also installed). I use instant messaging, free sms over wifi, have P2P file sharing, FTP , AFP, SMB, SSH , a web service and every other useful networking tool you can think of (not to mention terminal access). I have categories for the apps and system icons for mail etc that appear when locked. I have the oh-so-classy chrome theme installed. I have a 5 icon dock. I have the excellent neo-tech font in place of the system font. “Capture” works well with the exposed camera roll addition. I can download files from Safari or the Youtube application, save them, share them , or transfer them to other places. I have Art, music and games apps of all kinds. I could go on and on and STILL forget all the stuff I have on this sucker. It really is complete. I am surprised (but not really) that the latest hacks have not yet come close to accomplishing all these features. Some of them will never show up, for example, one that I paid for called “Search” actually had features REMOVED in the legitimate version just recently released. This device is now essentially a tiny Free BSD computer with a GREAT A/V system installed that works with iTunes. Really the only thing missing is FLASH (the VERY clever Java tools that allow some video content to be viewed work on occasion and I am grateful, but really Apple needs to address this serious deficiency). I have looked at upgrading, but it appears that even now, the original installer apps are not transferable to v 2.2 except some supported by Cyda – certainly the major tweaks (like a unified iPod app icon instead of two icons for video and music, or the camera roll) are not going to be saved. Can anyone tell me why I need to upgrade (what’s ESSENTIAL in the newer firmware) other than to try out all the new apps (I’ll probably just buy another Touch or iPhone is how I’ve got it figured)?

  24. Required says:

    One of my favorite themes is called Lea, A second is Blackberry Impression, Another is Vista Sidebar. Have you tried Dock or Quickgold. Dock is hard to explain but Quickgold is a app launcher but it’s far cooler than any others. Clicking the home button when on the home screen will launch it.

  25. Cris says:

    Ok, so i jail break my phone, and when i am installed a complete theme, the only thing that doestn change is my sms icon, can anyone tell me why? before it use to do it but i had to upgrade it and now only that one particular icon doesnt change. why

    anyone..

  26. Jake says:

    If you want to get a great theme then try out illumine, it has over 3000 icons.
    Also, SBsettings is a must for j/b devices as it is fast and easy to use. If you didnt know you can also theme your SBsettings.

  27. NonHeroic says:

    unlimited moives is an ok app it alows you to stearm just about any movie you can think of for free

  28. Max says:

    Hi, Get Installous. It’s a great app, and you get any normal app from the app store for free. Go onto cydia, go on manage, add, “hackulo.us” and then get the app. GREAT

  29. jenna says:

    does anyone know what the “whoop” sound file name/extension is when you send an SMS message??

  30. JordanZimm says:

    Best things to do:

    ADD THESE SOURCES FIRST:
    oopen cydia manage>sources>edit>add
    1: cydia.xsellize.com
    2: theiphonespotrepo.com
    3: sinfuliphonerepo.com
    4: cydia.hachulo.us
    This will allow you to get Cydia apps for free, these are literally the only 3 sources i have

    APPS

    1: Activator: attach commands to several different actions, such as starting apps
    2: SBSettings: allows you to tweak your iDevice settings on a whim
    3: Winterboard: Lets you get themes(most work with winterboard)
    4: lea: the most amazing theme ever
    5: lea SBSettings: adds a matching theme to your SBSettings
    6: *Safari Download Manager: Allows you to download almost anything in safari
    7: *Safari Download Plug-In: get this INSTEAD of #6 if you plan to get dTunes
    8: dTunes: allows you to get free music, its a bit of a pain though to use
    9: Iconoclasm: allows you to do mess around with your icon layout, even more if you get add-ons for this app(which are free)
    10: Rename II: allows you to rename cydia and appstore apps
    11: Installous: lets you get free appstore apps
    12: *AttachmentSaver: allows you to save email attachments
    13: iFile: allows you to browse, edit, move, create, delete, etc. the files on your iDevice
    14: Backrounder: allows you to multitask with almost ANY app
    15: Categories: arrange apps into folders or even hide them altogether
    16: *gameboy4iphone: gameboy and gameboy color emulator
    17: *nes4iphone: NES emulator
    18: *snes4iphone: SNES emulator
    19: iTransform to iPod: if you are using an iPod Touch, this ‘Theme’ will transform your ‘music’ and ‘video’ icons into an ‘iPod’ icon just like on the iPhone
    20: Lockdown: This will let you create a password, and password protect selected apps with it
    21: Mobile Terminal: This app is used for SSH’ing, not used often but very good to have handy
    22: *myTunes: this allows you to find your music/videos when you are in iFile
    23: *OpenSSH: lets you move files between your iDevice and your computer(with SSH client ON computer)

    if an app on this list has a (*) then it should only be downloaded if you get iFile, as most deal with iDevice files which can only be dealt with using iFile

    ALL of these apps can found with the four sources above, if you cannot find them in search then go into each individual source to check

    NOTE: OpenSSH isnt very useful if you have iFile, Safari Download Manager, and AttachmentSaver because you can just email yourself the files and open them on your computer/iDevice

    NOTE: a good number of these apps are apps you have to PAY for on cydia normally, but not if you find their free copies on one of those 4 sources. If you do not like the idea of this, i am just warning you now

  31. BigBoss says:

    I like:

    – Intelliscreen- news on lock screen
    BossPaper- home screen picture
    LockDockBar- easy access to apps
    SummerBoard

    Download podcasts for APPLE IPHONE SCHOOL in iTunes store.
    and then you’ll learn about good apps!

  32. Modmyi says:

    FakeOperator! A fake carrier of your choice!
    See options in Settings

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