iPhone Jailbreaking

Looking for a better way to mute your iPhone? Typically the device can be silenced or put into vibrate mode with one switch. Maybe like some iPhone owners your ring/silent switch is broken. We've featured ways to get around this problem in the past, but now there's a simple, elegant solution for those with jailbroken devices.

This simple alternative to silence the device ringer or headphone volume is a tweak in Cydia called TapVolumeToMute. After the tweak is installed, there are two steps to mute the iPhone or bring the volume back to its previous level.

What's great about Twitter and several other apps on the iPhone is that you can simply pull down to refresh information. Jailbreakers may already know this is the preferred way to refresh with IntelliScreenX, for example. Apple has seen the light and will be adding this functionality to the Mail app in iOS 6.

If your device is already jailbroken with Absinthe, you can add pull to refresh to your Mail app right now for free. The name of the tweak is Pull To Refresh for Mail and it comes to us from developer xh and the BigBoss repo on Cydia.

It may seem like a simple thing, but one great feature that Cydia has over the App Store is a queue. Several packages can be browsed and selected, then the whole list is installed at once. While this speeds up the process of installing apps, the App Store exits every time you download an individual app.

All of this is set to change in iOS 6. The revamped App Store will stay open and download apps in the background, so you can continue browsing. This avoids the whole process of having to reopen the App Store every time you install or update an app. Luckily if you have jailbroken your iPhone, you can add this functionality to the App Store right now.

Now you can easily animate your iPhone lock screen and have hundreds of different animations to choose from right away. The tweak is called AnimateLockscreen and it comes to us from the BigBoss repo on Cydia for $1.00.

Once installed there are several options and any BootLogo addon can be downloaded and used for the lock screen animation. Pictured here is a still from the Mario BootLogo, where Mario jumps up to reveal the Apple logo.

Good news for those who may have been running into issues trying to jailbreak an iOS device with Absinthe 2.0. The iPhone Dev-Team has officially updated all of their jailbreak tools with the iOS 5.1.1 untethered jailbreak. The official announcement details all of the specifics, but the main tools highlighted are PwnageTool 5.1.1 and redsn0w 0.9.12b1.

Other tools that are now updated include cinject 0.5.4 (still rocky-racoon but with added updates) and ultrasn0w 1.2.7 (this includes no new baseband support, but it does make ultrasn0w iOS 5.1.1 compatible). Dev-Team states that if you've already installed rocky-racoon, there's no reason to reinstall unless you're having problems.