Being able to see Flash banner ads isn’t exactly necessary, but there are still some sites out there with unpassable Flash intro and the like where being able to view Flash if you want to would be helpful. If you want Flash running on your iPhone, Comex (creator of the Spirit and JailbreakMe hacks) has been working on Frash for awhile now. It’s still Alpha so it’s use at your own risk.

Do you need Flash on your iPhone? Not really. But would you like to be able to install what you want on your phone without Steve Jobs telling you that you don’t need it? Yes. If so, follow the steps below:

1. First, it requires that your iPhone is jailbroken (use jailbreakme.com if you haven’t yet)

2. Open Cydia

3.Tap Manage

4.Tap Sources

5.Tap Edit, then tap Add, then type http://repo.benm.at/

6.Tap Add Source, then tap Done, then search for Frash and Install both Frash and Frash Toggle (if you want to be able to turn it on and off, I recommend it)

9.Respring

Now you can view your favorite flash sites. When the site has Flash content you will see a grey Flash box:

Tap the box and it will start the Flash:

Remember that it may not always work correctly and could cause crashes due to it still being in Alpha. Let’s hope Comex gets a release out soon.

Related posts:

1. Jailbroken iPhone – iOS 4 – How To Be Prepared
2. Top 15 Best Jailbroken Apps for the iPhone
3. Adblock for iPhone – A cleaner mobile web

iOS 4 is OUT! It is rumoured and has a very high chance of being released at about 10:00 AM PST (Cupertino time).

Warning – If you want to hactivate or use Spirit do not proceed, do not upgrade to iTunes 9.2! If you will use redsn0w then you will be fine.

1. Upgrade to iTunes 9.2
2. Sync / Transfer everything
3. Backup
4. If using RockApp make sure to save your package list so the next time you jailbreak you can restore your packages
5. Restore to stock firmware (helps reduce the chance of bricking, had an experience with this)
6. Sn0wbreeze has been released. Get it to jailbreak.

Update: for 4.0 and 4.01 along with the new iPhone 4 you will want to use the new tool at www.jailbreakme.com

Related posts:

1. Guide to Installing Frash (Flash 10.1) on your iPhone through Cydia
2. Top 15 Best Jailbroken Apps for the iPhone
3. LockInfo 2.0 – How the iPhone Lockscreen Should Be

It looks nice and has easy to use close buttons. The springboard icon can be turned off. One missing feature for now is the inability to turn off icons for the stock apps like Phone and Mail. Circuitous hooks into Activator like a lot of recent jailbreak apps which is great and any new apps should use it as it is becoming the standard and makes management of what gestures and buttons do what centralized.

One thing that I like about Circuitous that the other task switching apps don’t do is that it can open up on the lockscreen if you want it to:

If you still use Kirikae or ProSwitcher and you want to try out Circuitous there is no reason not to as it is free and it can be used at the same time as the others with no incompatibilities that I’ve seen. Hopefully all this competition for task switching apps creates even more innovative features to come.

Related posts:

1. Best New Reasons to Jailbreak your iPhone
2. Top 15 Best Jailbroken Apps for the iPhone
3. LockInfo 2.0 – How the iPhone Lockscreen Should Be

1. iRealSMS - As a heavy texter, the default way of receiving and sending text messages felt way too limited. iRealSMS completely fixes it. When you receive an SMS, it pops up in a new window that let’s you reply right in it. No more having to open the SMS app. You can also quickly send a message right from the lockscreen too. The new version supports contact pictures in the popup and MMS too.

2. Backgrounder (with ProSwitcher) – Being able to multitask has long been a serious limitation of the iPhone. Push Notifications was Apples solution. It was not really a solution as it only let you receive notifications and not actually multitask. Backgrounder allows you to basically minimize applictions to the background and go back to the homescreen to open another. You just have to be careful of opening too many applications because of running out of memory, especially on the 3G. ProSwitcher is an interface built on top of background that emulates the Palm Pre’s cards style multitasking. You can configure it to be activated in almost any way and it provides a nice looking, easy, and quick way to switch between multiple running applications.

3. SBSettings – This app allows you to add toggles for different settings to a drop down menu that is accessible from anywhere. It makes it so much easier and faster to toggle things such as Bluetooth, 3G, WiFi, Brightness, and more. No more going back and forth between tons of submenus in the Settings. It also has a few tweaks such as adding free memory to your status bar, hiding apps, and more. Another bonus is that is supports theming.

4. Categories (with CategoriesSB) - Another problem with the iPhone shows itself once you have installed a ton of apps. If you have enough apps to fill up 5 or 6 springboard pages it can become quite annoying to find what you are looking for. Categories adds a folder system to your springboard. Easily grouping apps together provides a much needed way of organizing all of your apps so your pages are not so cluttered. CategoriesSB is an extension that integrates Categories better. Read more about it here: http://jordandev.info/?p=165

5. LockInfo – The lockscreen is a very empty place. It could be used for so much more. A lot of apps have started to come out to try and use all that empty space for something useful. It started with Intelliscreen, but the current best of the bunch is LockInfo. It let’s you see the weather, SMS messages, emails, push notifications, twitter, todo lists, and a bunch of other useful things right on your lockscreen. New features include email previewing and notification clearing right from the lockscreen. You can read more about it here: http://jordandev.info/?p=228

6. Winterboard - Apples limitations on customization are so bad that you cannot even add a wallpaper to your homescreen, only your lockscreen. Winterboard allows complete customization of basically everything. You can add icon themes, wallpapers, tweaks, and even full UI themes so you can make your iPhone look exactly how you want it to.

7. GRiP – Apple’s recent Push Notifcation system was a welcome addition to be able to receive messages from apps that are not running. Getting Twitter, Facebook, IM, sports scores, and more is great. The problem with Apple’s implementation is that you only ever see the most recent message. What if you had received 10 different messages? You have no idea what they were. GRiP fixes this by adding a whole new way of managing these notifications. Each application’s notifications will show up in their own popup list. You can tap on that application to open it. Read more about GRiP here: http://jordandev.info/?p=98

8. Adblock – MobileSafari has no built in ad blocker. If you want one, get this. It works great and it’s functionality is pretty self explanatory. You can see examples or read more about it here: http://jordandev.info/?p=122

9. ActionMenu – When Apple finally added Copy and Paste, it was done by using a menu that popped up whenever you tapped and held down on some text. This extends that functionality by giving you more actions you can perform. Some examples are Copy All, Dial, Lookup, Tweet, etc. It also provides a clipboard history manager and a favorites list where you can store things you want to paste all the time, like your email or something similar.

10. Quickscroll – Have you ever been on a website or reading your twitter timeline or something where you have had to scroll down through what seems like thousands of pages? You have to swipe the screen madly to get to the bottom. Quickscroll replaces the standard scrollbar with one that you can grab and scroll very quickly with. You can scroll around the whole page very, very quickly. It works in every app that I’ve tried it in, including things like viewing photos. It also has a handy feature where if you tab the scrollbar it will scroll one page at a time which is nice for reading a lot of text.

11. qTweeter – If you have ever wanted to be able to post to Twitter or Facebook or both while inside an app or from your homescreen then qTweeter is for you. It provides a quick way to post messages by adding a menu you can drag down from the top of the screen. You can shorten URLs and add images also. It also has a nice feature where if you are in MobileSafari you can post a link to the current page you are on.

12. iFile – With iFile you get a file manager and viewer where you can access your entire iPhone’s hard drive system. It is great for storing things on your phone, moving files around, editing configuration files, and many other things. You can download songs, videos, or documents in MobileSafari and view them here.

13. Safari Download Manager – Provides a download manager for MobileSafari where you can queue up downloads in the background. It also integrates nicely with iFile letting you open up completed downloads.

14. 3G Unrestrictor – If you have ever needed to get around restrictions apps have on only allowing certain things on WiFi and not 3G this works great. You can view high quality youtube videos, get higher bitrate on streaming radio apps, use SlingBox, and more.

15. Overboard – If you do not like swiping between pages to get to your apps Overboard provides an overview of all of your pages where you can easily see and select where you want to go.

Related posts:

1. LockInfo 2.0 – How the iPhone Lockscreen Should Be
2. Best New Reasons to Jailbreak your iPhone
3. Guide to Installing Frash (Flash 10.1) on your iPhone through Cydia

The new features of LockInfo 2.0:

• Push notifications on your lockscreen listed
• Preview your emails from the lockscreen without unlocking
• Delete your emails after previewing
• Mark As Read your emails, SMS messages, and Push notifications right from the lockscreen
• Manually refresh your email, weather, and twitter plugins
• Privacy settings to hide email subjects, email previews, or SMS message text
• Adjustable font size
• Performance and stability improvements

The plugins that are included are:

• Mail – see your email
• Calendar – see a listing of the next events in your calendar
• SMS – new SMS messages
• Phone – missed calls or voicemails
• Push Notifications – listing of Push notifications received

Available optional plugins:

• Clock – adds the current date and time with a collapsible calendar
• Todo – integration with either 2Do, Appigo Todo, or Things
• WeatherIcon – integrates with WeatherIcon for live updating forecast for your location
• Twitter – lists your timeline and updates on a specified interval

Other recommended packages to have:

• Lockscreen Clock Hide – goes great with the above mentioned Clock plugin to hide the stock time
• Lockscreen Dim Delay Control – made by the same author to control the amount of time your lockscreen stays open before dimming
• Lockinfo Icons – replaces the stock Lockinfo icons for the different plugins with more stock iPhone app lookings ones(can be seen in my screenshots)
• Lockscreen Mini Slider – smaller slider, more room for LockInfo (can be see in my screenshots)

Customization Options:

• show on Lockscreen, show on Homescreen, or show on both
• order that the plugins show up in
• scrolling
• extend all the way to bottom (useful if you have use the mini slider mentioned above)
• block popups (stock popup alerts for SMS, Push, etc)
• font size
• collapsible sections
• hide empty sections
• transparency
• can be customized with themes (though plugin support depends on the theme)

Screenshot Tour:

The 5 stock plugins, collapsed and expanded (notice the new refresh and X mark as read buttons):

Previewing emails, basic text and HTML:

Added the Clock and WeatherIcon plugins, collapsed and expanded:

Added the Twitter plugin, then enabled as homescreen

I really like the new way that emails and other messages can be marked as read with a simple tap of the X button. It saves me time from having to open it or even just preview it. I was previously using Elert for this and don’t feel the need to keep it enabled anymore.

Having a list of Push notifications is great. I am currently using GRiP (my post on that here) which provides me with a list of the notifications grouped by the app they come from but having all my notifications in one place is a nicer solution. I just wish that you could open the app that the Push came from by tapping it.

The new manual refresh, privacy settings, and adjustable font sizes are nice to have.

One of the bugs that was fixed was how LockInfo would sometimes not show up on the lockscreen. You would have to unlock and lock again to get it to show up some of the time. That is a very welcome fix as it was probably the biggest gripe I had with LockInfo. As for performance improvements I didn’t really notice much as it already ran perfectly fast in the first place.

Missing / Wanted features or plugins:

• To be able to tap on links while previewing emails and open them
• To be able to tap on links in the Twitter timeline and open them
• To be able to tap on Push notifications to open the corresponding app
• Facebook plugin
• RSS Reader plugin that syncs with Google Reader
• the Calendar in the Clock plugin
• some sort of application badge plugin, how great would it be to be able to show the number of updates available from the badge on Cydia for example
• support for themes that can’t use non-native plugins (if possible? for example ame235′s teehanlax theme doesn’t support previewing emails)

Apparently the Plugin API is going to be released in the coming future so hopefully some of the above features can become a reality.

I have used the beta for awhile now and it’s now completely won me over from any other competitors (Intelliscreen, Smartscreen, etc). All in all a great lockscreen add-on that makes the iPhone’s lockscreen what it should be. This is the kind of thing that Apple should be implementing in OS 4.0. Don’t hold your breath. LockInfo 2.0 is $5 and is worth every penny.

Any thoughts? Comment below.

Related posts:

1. Great New LockInfo (iPhone lockscreen extension) Theme by ame235 (emulates teehan+lax)
2. Top 15 Best Jailbroken Apps for the iPhone
3. LockInfo – great iPhone Lockscreen improvement

You may be familiar with teehan+lax’s mock photos of what they consider to be what the iPhone desperately needs, a new lockscreen. It looked suspiciously like a better looking LockInfo. Well ame235 took it upon himself to take their idea and create a new theme for LockInfo with it. And I have to say, it looks great. It is much better than the stock LockInfo.

Here is my old LockInfo:

And here is it with the new theme applied:

You can still collapse the categories:

And it has a nice slide out calendar under the clock:

To get this theme download the “235 teehanlax LockInfo Theme” from Cydia/RockApp and apply it with Winterboard.

Not all plugins are supported at the moment (Weathericon, Todo, Twitter, and the new Push plugin are all not working), but according to recent posts on his website (http://www.ame235.com/ame235/) he has already built support for them. You can try out the beta if you download it from there.

Beta:

Any thoughts? Comment below.

Related posts:

1. LockInfo 2.0 – How the iPhone Lockscreen Should Be
2. LockInfo – great iPhone Lockscreen improvement

I recently decided to try out Windows Media Center. Instead of spending money on a cheap, small HTPC and setting up Windows Media Center, XBMC, or something else I figured the easiest way would just be to use my Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender. So I went about finally setting up Windows Media Center on my new installation on Windows 7.

I found the movie browsing rather lacking, basically just a big grid of all the movies I have. I hardly had any DVD covers so the presentation was a bit lacking. So through searching for ways to spiff it up a bit I stumbled upon a plugin named Media Browser (http://www.mediabrowser.tv/). I also found a great program for automatically populating cover art, background art, and all of the metadata you need for Media Browser to work well with your movie collection. It’s called Media Center Master (http://www.mediacentermaster.com/). It takes a bit of organizing your movies into folders to get it to work properly but it is worth it.

Here is how my movie browsing looked before:

And here is how it looked after installing Media Browser, organizing my movies, and using Media Center Master to fill out the metadata:

You can customize it by changing wallpapers, changing the icons, changing the way your folders are layed out, and many other things. It makes it possible to browse your movies in a standard grid, in a strip, in a list, and even in a nice looking coverflowish layout like above.

Once you select your movie, it brings you to the details screen where you can see information on the movie and the actors.

If you go and select an actor it will show you a selection of movies that actor has performed in.

You can group your movies into sections by year, genre, director, studio, and more.

It also works great for TV series.

I highly recommend this plugin. If you have any other must have plugins or ways to enhance Windows Media Center let me know in the comments.

No related posts.

CategoriesSB – Cydia – 99 cents

An new jailbreak addon came out awhile ago that I recently got around to trying. CategoriesSB is an extension for Categories. If you use Categories then you need CategoriesSB. It’s that good.

Features:

• Loading time to open a folder is reduced to almost nothing. This makes it so that you can use nested folders without more and more loading time making it frustrating.
• It now works with things like extensions like 5 columns.
• You can add a folder called ‘Recent’ that will work like a quick launcher of the most recently used applications.
• You can scroll the folder either vertically or horizontally.
• You can keep the dock at the bottom when you open a folder now.
• You can enable swipe to close.
• more

All of these features should just be implemented in Categories as they are very useful and feel like they should have been there from the start.

My old categories folders looked something like:

while my new ones are much improved (yes I know the wallpaper is gone but I’m referring to the icon layout):

For 99 cents the increase in usability for Categories is significant enough to recommend that anybody who uses Categories must have CategoriesSB.

Any thoughts on it? Comment below.

Related posts:

1. GRiP – Improving a jailbroken iPhone’s Push/Email/SMS/etc Notification System
2. Top 15 Best Jailbroken Apps for the iPhone
3. Circuitous – another great multitasking app for the iPhone

I recently purchased LockInfo, a great Lockscreen app available on Cydia/RockApp for $5. I had the trial for a few days to see if I would like it better than Intelliscreen and liked it so much I now use it instead.

What does it do? It let’s you view your email, SMS, Calendar, todo, weather, missed calls and voicemails on your Lockscreen. Basically everything that Intelliscreen can do, minus the RSS feeds. I now use it instead of Intelliscreen because I find it easier to use and nicer to look at.

It is very configurable. You can set what is collapsed by default is you prefer a cleaner looking screen like below:

Or for an even cleaner screen you can make it so that only sections that actually have items will show up:

I usually have my default set as:

Another nice feature is that you can add this screen as the first page of your homescreen, either instead of or in addition to the lockscreen. Then you have all of the same info and your dock like this:

I currently have the WeatherIcon, Appigo Todo, and Clock plugin installed. I find all 3 to be very useful. You can even get themes for LockInfo, a popular one being Gruppled. See here for information on that: Gruppled

I really recommend at least checking out the trial of this app to see if it’s what you are looking for. Anybody used it and have any thoughts? Comment below.

Related posts:

1. Great New LockInfo (iPhone lockscreen extension) Theme by ame235 (emulates teehan+lax)
2. LockInfo 2.0 – How the iPhone Lockscreen Should Be
3. Circuitous – another great multitasking app for the iPhone

Up until now, I hadn’t really thought about ads on my iPhone. A lot of sites I use have a mobile or iPhone specific version that are usually very sparse on the ads if there are even any at all. But then sometimes you run across that annoying site that has a bunch of ads loaded on along with annoying flash ones that put a big can’t play icon over a good chunk of the page.

Well, no more. I recently decided to try out Adblock for the iPhone. It is available for jailbroken phones only. It costs a hefty $8, which I think is what put me off when I first saw it available months ago. Now that I’ve used it for awhile I can say that it was worth it to me. Screens of it in action on a couple sites below.

First, standard CNN:

Now, ad-blocked CNN:

Standard Mininova:

Ad-blocked Mininova:

The results are cleaner pages with less junk that you don’t want to see. It doesn’t always block 100% everything, but the filter subscription does update. It’s done a great job so far for what I expected it to do though. Another great thing about Adblock is that it improves page load time by not downloading the extra content at all. If it was reduced in price down to between $2-$4 I think it might sell more as it seems a tad high for functionality you can get for free on desktop browsers.

Anybody used it and have any thoughts? Comment below. You can also read more about it on the developers site at http://cocoamug.com/adblock/.

No related posts.