iPhone Tweaks

Ever notice how iOS changes the time selection increments you can choose from based on the app? For example, in Reminders and Calendar you can only pick times that end in a multiple of 5 minutes. Alarms in the Clock app have no such limitation, you can pick whatever minute of the hour you prefer.

Developer Brandon Sachs decided to do something about this after seeing the Every Last Minute tweak to add minutes to the Calendar app. The result of his work is the tweak In A Minute, which adds fine-grained time selection to all of the iOS scrolling date pickers system-wide.

Ever use emoji when composing a new MMS or iMessage? Even if you haven’t, the concept is simple. Switch keyboards using the globe key and you’re presented with a bunch of little pictures instead of the letters you normally see. Pressing one of the emoji icons will embed the picture right into your outgoing message.

The QuickPhoto tweak does the same thing for actual photos stored on your iPhone. This makes the process of adding pictures or videos from your camera roll and albums faster than the default procedure. Once installed from Cydia on your jailbroken device, simply tap the globe key to bring up the camera roll “keyboard”.

Normally iOS limits the interaction users can have with the filesystem. This has its pros and cons, but if you’re trying to download and unzip a file it’s definitely a con. The iFile package from Cydia provides desktop-style file system access on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

iFile opens up your jailbroken iOS device’s files, so you can manage and customize everything much like the Finder does on a Mac. Several file types can be quickly viewed, and zip archives can be created and decompressed.

One of the interesting features in iOS 6 is the built-in Reading List in Safari. Say there’s an article you’d like to read, but can’t get to it at the moment. You can save the text to your iPhone by tapping the share button in Safari and selecting Add to Reading List.

Not only can you read later with the Reading List, but it can sync with iCloud to your other iOS devices or a Mac desktop. But what if you want to use another read later service besides the default iOS Reading List? That’s where the Readr tweak comes into play.

Thanks to the jailbreak tweak Safari Download Manager, your iPhone can download files more like a desktop web browser. Once installed, the tweak adds a highly-configurable download manager to the mobile Safari app.

Almost any type of file can be downloaded with Safari Download Manager. The destination folder can be chosen, and up to 10 files can be downloaded simultaneously in the queue. Your current downloads will be displayed with a status bar showing the current transfer speed, file size and percentage complete.