Four Island

While yesterday was quite a bad day, my luck today has turned for the better! For one, I'm not angry at geohot anymore. Nope, when I finally got home to my Windows laptop today, I plugged my iPhone 4 in, synced it and ran limera1n. And, you know what? It didn't work. :( However, I tried again, this time closing iTunes before jailbreak and guess what! It worked! :D

Once again, I kind of jumped around in excitement, screaming "OMG YAY JAILBREAK OMG SCROBBL I LOVE YOU" until people started staring and I realized that those "people" were the voices inside my head....

Anyway, I'm very happy to now be jailbroken because there are some really awesome things that you can do with a jailbroken iDevice, some I had used before, some that I only tried out today:

• Scrobbl - This may be the biggest reason that I jailbreak and that's because it's just so awesome. Without a jailbreak, to scrobble songs to last.fm, you have to sync your iDevice with iTunes and use the last.fm iPod scrobbler, which, as we've seen, doesn't work too well with iOS devices. I mean, seriously, last week, I scrobbled my iPhone and found that while a whole ton of songs got scrobbled, it somehow completely forgot to note that I had listened to the album Fantasies by Metric three whole times. It often gets things wrong and requires you to sync to scrobble, and is just so annoying. With Scrobbl, songs are scrobble AS YOU PLAY THEM. You can set it to only scrobble via WiFi and to ignore podcasts (which was another problem I had with the official scrobbler--who cares about the podcasts? I don't want to scrobble them!) and it's just fantabulous. One of my favorite jailbreak apps.
• Backgrounder + MultiFl0w - Backgrounder is an amazing app that brings true multitasking to iDevices. Not iOS 4's fake multitasking (which, however, is in some cases more apt for the job because developers can specify actions upon task switching, like pausing your game), but true multitasking that can be enabled/disabled for certain apps at certain times. I really love this because it allows me to background Palringo and go watch a video and I'll know if someone's trying to talk to me because I'll hear a noise and then I'll go check Palringo and omg! Someone's talking to me! :P MultiFl0w is a replacement for iOS 4's task switcher and it's really quite pretty--it shows up to 9 open apps using an Exposé-like display. Note, MultiFl0w does cost $4.99. Backgrounder is free.

• SBSettings - Short for SpringBoard Settings, (yes, that's what those SBs everywhere stand for), SBSettings is quite a useful tool for iDevice users. It allows you to swipe across the status bar (gesture customizable) from any app and have a screen appear with options and settings in it. The best part is the toggles: you can have a bunch of toggles sitting up in your SBSettings tray and when you want to do something like turn off Cell Data or turn on Bluetooth, you simply have to swipe across the top and tap the toggle. You can also download additional toggles: I downloaded one called Rotation Inhibitor which allows you to toggle whether or not the current app will rotate automatically--and yes, it actually allows you to lock rotation in landscape mode. Horray. You can also theme SBSettings--in the picture on the left, I'm using a theme called "Bold Retina" (there is a variant that works on non-Retina displays). Finally, for you iPod touch users who are want to see how much battery life you have left in percent (because this feature is built-in on iPhones), you can enable this under "System Options" in SBSettings.
• Infiniboard (and Infinifolders!) - Infiniboard, Infinifolders (and Infinidock) are a series of awesome, SpringBoard-enhancing tweaks by chpwn. Infiniboard and Infinifolders are great for organization. With Infiniboard, you can put as many apps as you want on one SpringBoard page and just scroll through them vertically. Infinifolders is very similar: it allows you to overcome the 12-app limit on iOS 4 folders and lets you scroll through folders vertically. They're both pretty great: Infinifolders has the advantage of having being a named group, but Infiniboard has the advantage of actually working on iOS 4.1. Currently, Infinifolders just blanks the screen if you open a folder with more than 12 apps in it. Ouch. These apps do cost money, but they're pretty useful.

• LockInfo - I am absolutely in love with this. I didn't even know about it until I noticed that TimTam tweeted using it. I looked into it and it's a whole lot more amazing than it appears! First off, the basics: the Apple iPhone mysteriously lacks the ability to show the owner any useful information besides the time and any notifications that have popped up (such as SMSes) on the lockscreen. Users have to unlock the phone to see stuff. It's confused me before; I can never remember if I just received an email or not. LockInfo allows you to display information on newly received email, upcoming calendar events, missed calls, SMSes... But it's more awesome than just that: there are plugins available for LockInfo that lets you see more information on your lockscreen; Twitter, for instance. Yes, awesomeness. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was a plugin for Things, the to-do app I use. Splendid! But by far the best part of LockInfo is the InfoShield (pictured on right). While your iDevice is unlocked, simply swipe down from the status bar and the InfoShield will appear, containing all of the information that LockInfo shows on the lockscreen. It's like the notifications tray on Android phones. Very awesome. :D This app does cost money, though, but it's so totally worth it.

Some other awesome apps you should try if you're jailbroken are MultiIconMover (a convenient tweak that allows you to move multiple icons at once (note: does not work with folders)) and WinterBoard (allows you to theme your SpringBoard and lockscreen. Some would advertise this app more prominently, but I don't really use it that much).

Wow, I didn't really expect to be reviewing all of my favorite jailbreak apps when I started this post, but at that point, I didn't even have LockInfo yet and I'm in love with it, so, :P. Anyway, the other reason why Sunday Is Funday is the fact that Ubuntu 10.10 came out today! The upgrade itself was pretty easy (easier than 10.04--nothing went wrong!) and nothing seems to be going horribly so far. I'll write a full post about 10.10 when I've used it for a bit and discovered any horrific problems that need to be ranted about (and besides, this post is plenty long already :P), but let me just say now: I really love the new Ubuntu Font. It's just so fantastic and pretty. <3 Ubuntu Font.