also knowing the past tense of "jailbreak" would be cool

February 5, 2013 9:27 PM

I just jailbreaked (jailbroke?) my iPod Touch. What are the must-have apps, modifications, etc that I should get for it? I'm running iOS 6. I'm particularly interested in good Notification Center widgets, since that seems to be the biggest thing that can't be done through the regular App Store. Recommendations for good themes would be swell too.

I've looked through a lot of the Featured stuff in Cydia, but there's a really overwhelming amount of stuff in there and I have no idea what's good. What has particularly helped and/or amused you?

posted by NoraReed to technology (6 answers total)

Auxo
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:46 PM on February 5

If you have a 4S or a 5 then you can do some of the fancier tweaks, but I try to be slim on my 4 since I've found too many kills performance.


SBSettings (I've heard NCSettings is good too) - Many little tweaks and toggles
5 Icon Dock - exactly what it says
NoNewsIsGoodNews - Hide newsstand icon
Activator - Adds gestures, my favorite is double clicking my power button turns on the flash light
iCleaner - it removes cache files and such, on a newly restored phone it cleared 300 megs.
%hook's Law - adds the spring effect instead of the fade in, makes everything spring REALLY quick and cuts the animation time down
Tab+ - add more than 9 tabs to Safari

There's a few other's that are more nerdy: Terminal, SSH (Change your root password right after! Default root password is: alpine), iFile.

I've been wanting to give Nitrous JS a try, it's $0.99 but it enables all apps to utilize the JavaScript engine that is normally reserved for only Apple apps. There's some benchmarks that put Chrome running on Nitrous JS engine as way faster than Safari. Then you get into setting Chrome as a default browser, using Google Maps Opener as the default map app, etc..
posted by wcfields at 11:15 PM on February 5 [1 favorite]

To answer your other question, I would go with "jailbroken" as in "I have jailbroken my iPod..." The irregular verb form tends to trump the new compound's desire to be consistent with other compound forms (so as to be easily identifiable as belonging to the noun+verb compound class). And since "broke" is semantically ambiguous in that form (easily confused with a 'have no money' meaning) the 'en' form is clearer. Which necessitates 'have' preceding. Of course, other forms are perfectly acceptable...just giving you another option and a rationale for it.

I'm a linguist and I'm sorry I can't help you with your main question.
posted by iamkimiam at 1:48 AM on February 6 [9 favorites]

Wi-Fi Analyzer and/or WiFiFoFum, which let you see the wireless networks around you and their respective signal strengths. Apple blocks this functionality for iOS devices (Android doesn't), so the only way to be able to do this is to jailbreak.
posted by kimota at 6:09 AM on February 6

I second activator. I have mine set up so that pushing both volume buttons at once triggers the next song.
posted by Strass at 9:07 AM on February 6

I maintain the Featured section, and there's a list in it of Notification Center widgets and tweaks that I think are good. :) I can also link you to overwhelmingly long discussions of people's favorite tweaks, like this one and this one.

But more importantly, I can come up with pretty specific recommendations if you tell me what kinds of things you like - what are some tweaks you've enjoyed so far? What do you like doing with your iPod touch, and which apps do you use?

For themes, Jaku, ayecon, and Genesis are three of the most popular ones.
posted by dreamyshade at 10:45 AM on February 6