It’s been a while since I blogged, the past few weeks have been extremely hectic with the storm, work, etc. that I had been neglecting my blog. Anyways, there are a bunch of stuff I could discuss from the past few weeks, but lets focus on one right now. I’m starting from the most recent “happening” – which is how I had just updated my iPhone OS to v3.1.2¹

Now why is this worthy for a blog entry? Maybe it isn’t. Perhaps if you knew the context, it would make more sense.² Sufficed to say that this only applies to iPhone users (and those who are planning to get iPhones, I guess)

As people know, I have a factory unlocked iPhone. I paid the extra $$$ just so I wouldn’t have to worry about hacking the baseband to unlocking the thing. This also allows me to upgrade the unit and still be able to use it even if a jailbreak isn’t available yet.

I’ve also been purchasing applications from the AppStore; all the critical applications (e.g. 1Password, PocketMoney, etc.) I use are from there. Simply put, I can afford not to bother jailbreaking as far as using the iPhone is concerned. It’s already an extremely powerful PDA³ capable of handling my everyday needs and then some.

Yet, as you can see, I still waited for it to be “jailbreak-able” before I went on with the update… what gives right? It’s because the jailbreaking scene has come up with so much good stuff that the “enhancements” they put in my phone are starting to be indispensable as well.

What makes an iPhone awesome?

So now we get to the meat of the post. I’m here to demonstrate how much extra mileage you can get from your iPhone if you had it jailbroken. And the applications I’m going to present are paid applications as well; yes there’s another “store” which is legitimate⁴ and available to the jailbreak community. And the “enhancements” the apps in this store bring to the table is far more superior than what any other 3rd party is allowed to come up with in the official AppStore. Don’t believe me? Try these on for size:

QuickReply for SMS

QuickReply is an app that allows you to reply via SMS from anywhere. As you can see in the picture above, I’m able to answer our helper’s SMS without having to leave the app I was currently in (Safari). It even works on the lock-screen. This “hack” makes the whole SMS experience a more intuitive/fluid process for anyone who texts.

Action Menu Plus

Of course everyone wanted cut and paste on the iPhone, and ever since 3.0 had finally incorporated it, developers have been finding interesting ways to make things even better.

The Action Menu Plus Pack enhances the context menu but putting extra functions when available. In the case of the picture above, you see how it had 2 methods of selecting text, copying and favorites. The Pasteboard favorites feature is very useful (as you can see in the right side) as it allows me to paste long strings of text which I may need for one reason or another (e.g. when someone asks for my address and such.)

There’s no paste icon on the picture since the cliboard was empty at that time, but had it been populated, there’s also a “clipboard history” available, where you can see the different stuff you pasted and easily re-paste past pasted stuff (say that thee times fast!)

Others

There are other little enhancements which I’ll list down:

1. Attachment Saver: allows you to download and save attachments outside of Mobile Mail
2. Safari Download Manager: allows you to download anything from Mobile Safari;
3. Cyntacts: a visual hack that displays your contacts pictures in the general contact list view
4. YourTube: allows you to download YouTube videos to your device permanently for easy offline viewing/saving;⁵
5. Recent/CallLog Delete: allows you to selectively erase individual call registers
6. iFile, which is an unrestricted⁶ Finder for the iPhone.

PkgBackUp

The only thing that sucks with Jailbroken apps is if you restore/format your phone; iTunes only backs up official application data, not jailbroken apps, and it can be a pain trying to reinstall every single one of them.

Fortunately, there’s also an application that effectively makes a reliable list of all your jailbroken apps installed, and is capable of restoring them after you’ve reformatted.

It’s only limited to the applications themselves (not the actual data) but it’s better than nothing.

Luckily for me, most of the jailbroken “apps” I install are system enhancements/tweaks… so “remembering” preferences isn’t really a concern for me since they’re not applicable for the most part.

There are so many other apps I’ve installed from Cydia, but I thought I’d just point out these applications that I deemed worth paying for. I thought it was worth mentioning it because I’ve always believed that if an app is really good, it would be worth the money it commanded. And buying form the Cydia store is a fine example of that… people are used to getting stuff free, but the paid market seems to be thriving just as well in Cydia as it is in the official AppStore.

I hope that would mean that the jailbreaking scene is here to stay – cuz it would suck that I paid for these nifty apps only to find out they die out along the road ;)

post updated on October 17, 2009 @ 8:37 am