iPhone Tweaks

Here’s the scenario: it’s a critical moment in the iOS game you’ve been playing for weeks. Just as you approach the end of the final level, the game stops mid-action and a pop-up tells you the battery is at 20 percent. So much for any momentum in the game, at least the iPhone battery status is clear.

This issue can be avoided with the free tweak PowerBanners on a jailbroken iOS device. PowerBanners is a simple solution to the problem of low power app interruptions. Once installed, low power alerts at 20 and 10 percent battery life will display as a banner notification without stopping the current app.

App switcher cards are convenient, but what if they could be accessed directly from the iPhone lock screen? RocketLauncher makes this possible on jailbroken devices, adding app previews and icon access to the lock screen in style.

Once installed, RocketLauncher works using tap an hold gesture on the lock screen. This will bring up the app icons and preview cards, which will launch upon selection. Of course, if a passcode is enabled the passcode lock keypad will appear before the app is launched.

Heavy Spotify users will enjoy a new jailbreak tweak appropriately named SpotiSearch. With this mod installed on the iPhone, looking for Spotify tracks is as simple as entering a search term in the default iOS 7 Spotlight search.

A swipe from top to bottom on the home screen reveals the Spotlight search field. Integrating Spotify results is achieved by installing SpotiSearch from Cydia and configuring a few options in the settings.

If you often have a lot of text message conversations going on simultaneously, you will definitely want to install the MessageSwiper7 tweak from developer MattCMultimedia. There's not much to it, but it will save you time and maybe some aggravation which, after all, is half the reason we tweak our iPhones.

MessageSwiper7 lets you swipe from one text or iMessage conversation to another without having to go back to the main window that lists your conversations. That's all there is to it, but it effectively cuts out 50% of the effort - instead of going back

Jailbreakers were met with a conundrum after Apple released a major update to fix a security flaw in iOS 7. The update patched a vulnerability that according to Apple, could allow an "attacker with a privileged network position" to "capture or modify data in sessions protected by SSL/TLS." Luckily the evad3rs released evasi0n7 1.0.6 so users with jailbroken devices could upgrade to iOS 7.0.6 and patch the bug. However as most jailbreakers already know, performing the entire jailbreak process all over again can be a major hassle. This is why developer Ryan Petrich's new tweak called SSLPatch is a godsend.

The free tweak allows users to protect their jailbroken device from the SSL security flaw without the need to upgrade to iOS 7.0.6. All you have to do is install SSLPatch from the BigBoss repo on Cydia and the job is done.