Traveling at the speed of light? Measure just how fast you’re going with a speedometer you can add to the Maps app via a Cydia tweak for Jailbroken iPhones. Speed for Maps is a small utility that you download to measure how fast you’re traveling in miles per hour, feet per second, kilometers per hour, meters per second, or knots if you’re traveling the high seas. A small, circular badge is added to Maps that displays your current speed — useful for biking and boating, but maybe not so much for driving where your panel instruments already give you everything you need. Regardless, it’s a simple tweak you can find in the Cydia repository if you’re interested in adding the tiny overlay.

[via FunkySpaceMonkey]

Everyone may not have to share Macs and iOS Devices with others, but there are many of us that do. For the Mac, it’s easy and a great idea to set up User Accounts for times when someone needs guest access or has a different OS setup than what we normally use from day to day. A common complaint for iOS users is that there are no User Account options, only parental controls and such. Dave Caolo recently posted on 52 Tiger how to child proof your iPhone, which we recommend reading. He lists many ways to child-proof your iOS device but an easier way for Apple to do this would allow User Accounts on iOS devices.

iUsers for iPad is a Cydia hack for jailbroken iPads by Pedro Franceschi that gives you something close to having OS X’s user accounts. The hack is set up inside Settings.app >> Extensions >> iUsers. Add a user by simply tapping “Add User”, insert a name, passcode and choose whether they have admin rights or not. This means each user can have their own set of app positioning, home screen wallpapers, settings, etc. Now this won’t save your iPad from wondering fingers or accidental App Store purchases but it does offer some deal of restriction for your personal iPad setup.

According to the video, if you want to switch accounts once they are added, simply go to the lock screen and tap the Accounts button. The iPad does a quick springboard reboot (which could bother some people) after selecting the account you want to open and it even remembers apps states for each account. Obviously this is dangerous for backups, but if you want to try something like this, it looks cool.

This isn’t Pedro’s first Cydia tweak, back in May we showed you PhySwitch, which lets you cycle through apps with the volume keys. iPad Jailbreakers, if you want to try out iUsers, add the repo: cydia.iblogeek.com to see it in your Cydia apps.

Demo video after the break. (more…)

Swype, a popular alternative typing system that comes pre-installed on a variety of Android devices, was unofficially ported to the iPhone and released yesterday as a tweak for the iOS keyboard on Cydia. The peculiarity of Swype is that it allows users to write sentences by simply sliding their fingers on the keyboard, without ever lifting them, and manages to compose words thanks to a mix of predictive auto-correction, and proprietary technology that has allowed Swype to become a cult among Android users. The creators of Swype have been saying for years that they have a working version for iOS devices, which could be released on the App Store if only Apple let developers submit apps that enhance system functions like the default keyboard.

For this reason the official Swype for iOS may never see the light of day, but that hasn’t stopped Cydia developers from building their own version, which was released yesterday for free. Unlike what initial reports claimed, the Swype available on Cydia is an unofficial port, which doesn’t use Swype’s technology but uses Swype’s brand. According to Swype CEO Mike McSherry, interviewed by GeekWire, the port that’s been released on Cydia is more or less a “hack”, a re-imagination of the original Swype by developer Andrew Liu. The port, as also seen in the demo videos, is buggy and doesn’t come with Swype’s popular “blue tracer line” for the keyboard; moreover, Swype’s CEO is unsure whether Liu re-used some of Swype’s code, or simply rewrote his own version basing on the Swype experience for Android.

McSherry said that he saw Liu’s unofficial release of Swype, and he’s still trying to make sense of it.

“I don’t know but it appears he wrote some of his own code to emulate a Swype-like experience and is using our brand,” he said. ”I don’t know if this is a ‘hacked’ version of Swype or not….I’m thinking not.”

Nonetheless, McSherry notes that I am not the only one interested in learning about Swype for the iPhone. And perhaps Liu’s unofficial release simply indicates the desire to bring it to the iPhone and iPad.

You can find the instructions to install the unofficial Swype for iPhone here. Check out the demo video after the break.
(more…)

The long-awaited new version of popular jailbreak tool JailbreakMe has been released today and, as previously announced by developer and hacker comex and the Dev-Team, it is capable of jailbreaking a variety of iOS devices running iOS 4.3 and above, including the iPad 2. The procedure of jailbreaking allows users to install unauthorized software on their devices, like Cydia, an alternative marketplace that contains apps, tweaks and graphical modifications Apple can’t approve for sale in its App Store. The popularity of JailbreakMe raises from the fact that the tool is entirely Safari-based, enabling users to press a button in their browser to install Cydia with ease, without having to plug the device into a computer, restore, and follow other additional steps. JailbreakMe takes a few minutes to install Cydia, and it’s completely reversible in iTunes with a restore.

Because of the issues with people leaking the hack behind JailbreakMe 3.0 in the past week, creator comex was forced to accelerate the release, fearing a patch from Apple coming soon with a software update. Just like JailbreakMe 2.0, in fact, the new tool uses a vulnerability in iOS’ PDF display engine to allow the installation of Cydia from Safari. The hole will likely be fixed soon by Apple with a software update, perhaps iOS 4.3.4, but the same Cydia developers are offering a tweak called PDF Patcher 2 (available in Cydia) which patches the JailbreakMe vulnerability after the jailbreak.

JailbreakMe 3.0 supports the following devices as explained by a Dev-Team blog post:

• iPad1: 4.3 through 4.3.3
• iPad2: 4.3.3
• iPhone3GS: 4.3 through 4.3.3
• iPhone4: 4.3 through 4.3.3
• iPhone4-CDMA: 4.2.6 through 4.2.8
• iPod touch 3g: 4.3, 4.3.2, 4.3.3
• iPod touch 4g: 4.3 through 4.3.3

The Dev-Team also illustrates the current scenario of restoring a device to older versions and SHSH blobs:

Q: Will I permanently lose the jailbreak if I need to restore my device?

A: For all except the iPad2, saving your SHSH blobs should let you always restore your device to iOS versions where this jailbreak works. The iPad2 is a little more complicated. If you have a wifi-only iPad2 and saved SHSH blobs, you’re in good shape. But if you have the GSM or CDMA iPad2, you won’t be able to restore to 4.3.3 or lower once Apple stops signing its baseband. There are a few ideas that might work to get around this limitation, but for now it’s best to assume there’s no going back to 4.3.3 once 4.3.4 is out for iPad2 GSM or CDMA owners.

As we said above, the exploit will likely be fixed soon by Apple (some bloggers are already claiming as early as this week), so if you’re willing to jailbreak your iPad 2 on iOS 4.3.3 or iOS device, head over JailbreakMe.com now, and follow the steps to install Cydia. For Cydia app & tweak recommendations, check out our coverage from the past months, and give a try to Cydia Search to browse available software for your jailbroken device from your desktop.

Apple and the jailbreak community have always enjoyed somewhat of a cat-and-mouse game between them and today we are learning that Apple has pounced to fix up one of the common circumventions used by jailbreakers. The circumvention in question doesn’t involve an actual exploit to jailbreak devices but rather a way that people were using to downgrade from one iOS version to another – often to a version that was capable of being jailbroken.

Apple had implemented a system where it would only authorize certain iOS builds to be installed, making it nearly impossible for downgrades. The circumvention was that by using SHSH blobs people could use iTunes to restore to a previous firmware version. According to what the jailbreak Dev-Team has said in a blog post today, that is all changing in iOS 5 as Apple moves to a new signing process. As the Dev-Team explains, the new process will become much more like the BBTicket (Baseband Ticket), which will make it much more difficult to reverse engineer:

Starting with the iOS5 beta, the role of the “APTicket” is changing — it’s being used much like the “BBTicket” has always been used. The LLB and iBoot stages of the boot sequence are being refined to depend on the authenticity of the APTicket, which is uniquely generated at each and every restore (in other words, it doesn’t depend merely on your ECID and firmware version…it changes every time you restore, based partly on a random number). This APTicket authentication will happen at every boot, not just at restore time. Because only Apple has the crypto keys to properly sign the per-restore APTicket, replayed APTickets are useless.

It isn’t all bad news though, restoring to pre-iOS 5 firmware versions will still be possible (although it will probably require an old version of iTunes) and tethered limera1n exploits will not be affected by this. As for why Apple has decided to now change this process, the Dev-Team explains that it was only a matter of time before Apple made the changes and that with delta iOS updates, it was made all the more necessary. The Dev-Team ends the post by noting that whilst Apple has “stepped up their game”,  there may be ways to combat this move.

[Via Dev-Team Blog]

A new jailbreak tweak to hit Cydia this week, from Florian Denis (developer of another tweak, iReply), aims to offer an alternative to the popular SBSettings. The tweak, named SwitcherSettings, works by presenting your SBSettings toggles in the application switcher screen, offering easy access to various settings such as AirPlane Mode, Bluetooth and SSH.

SwitcherSettings is said to be completely compatible with any and all of your existing SBSettings toggles, and unlike SBSettings, it doesn’t require a respring when removing or adding toggles. You don’t even need SBSettings – you can remove it and SwitcherSettings can still run your toggles.

SwitcherSettings is fully compatible with all your SBSettings toggles, and presents them directly into iOS, offering a native user experience: a quick access to your settings, exactly like Apple would have coded it.

Finally, just like SBSettings you can see some vital information about your device including IP address and available memory, just swipe across to the second SwitcherSettings screen as seen above. SwitcherSettings is available from the BigBoss repo for $2.49 – running on devices capable of iOS 4.

A few hours after the release of redsn0w for iOS 5 beta 1, some developers found out it was technically possible to develop widgets for iOS 5. In the new OS, in fact, Apple is restricting the use of “widgets” (they don’t even call them this way) to the Stocks and Weather applications, which, through the Settings, can have a “widget” or “ticker” in the new Notification Center. Currently, the widget section of Notification Center can only be used on the iPhone, as the iPad didn’t get the functionality for some reason.

iSpazio reports [Google Translation] the first third-party, fully functional iOS 5 widget has been released in Cydia, and it’s called UISettings. Available for quite some time in Cydia as an extension of the multitasking bar, the app has been completely rewritten to work as a widget under iOS 5, providing shortcuts for a system respring, a WiFi and Bluetooth switch, as well as AirPlane mode and Brightness controls. The concept’s similar to the popular SBSettings tweak, though UISettings is limited to a handful of shortcuts and controls.

The widget can be downloaded from the developers’ beta repo (http://qwertyoruiop.com/beta), and a new version is already in the works. The possibility of developing and releasing custom widgets in Cydia may offer an interesting alternative to Apple’s restrictions if the company decides to prevent developers from building third-party widgets in iOS 5, although everything can change come the final release of the OS this summer. Apple may even announce new Store sections for widgets (or Safari extensions) and surprise developers a few weeks ahead of iOS 5′s release. This is just speculation on our side however, so in the meantime you can download UISettings and check out how a custom widget integrates with Apple’s Notification Center.

As tweeted by MuscleNerd an hour ago, the screenshots above show an iPod touch 4th generation running the iOS 5 beta seeded to developers last night and already jailbroken to install Cydia. According to MuscleNerd, there aren’t “many surprises” here, as the device was jailbroken using the existing limera1n code and a tethered boot from a computer.

What this means for jailbreakers is still unclear. There have been jailbreaks for early iOS betas in the past, though in most cases the Dev Team preferred to wait for a public release before unleashing the necessary code to install Cydia on iOS devices. Furthermore, the exploit that allowed MuscleNerd to jailbreak his iPod touch is likely based on bootroom holes found in the past months on the iPhone and iPod touch — meaning, there’s no confirmation whatsoever iPad 2 users will get a proper jailbreak once iOS 5 comes out this fall / more betas are releases throughout the summer. Still, the images above show the new iOS 5 with Newsstand and Reminders running alongside Cydia — that’s a good start.