iPhone Tweaks

Looking for a cool way to take advantage of your jailbroken iPhone? Although the tweak Barrel is completely cosmetic, it's an eye-catching customization to the stock home screen. Normally when you page through home screens full of icons, nothing interesting happens.

Barrel changes all this by offering a growing list of Icon Pages Styles, which are basically animations that take place to your home screen icons when swiping left or right. There are 21 different modes to choose from, not including Normal which turns off effects.

We recently looked at an incredibly simple but effective tweak, Mail More Photos. Pull to Refresh Safari is another simple and free jailbreak tweak that could change your life. Well maybe not, but wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to press a little circular arrow icon to refresh?

This icon in the Safari address bar switches back and forth between an arrow and an X depending on whether or not a webpage is actively loading. Pressing this icon often results in Safari thinking you want to enter a new URL. All of this can be avoided with Pull to Refresh Safari.

One of the highlights of the iPhone design has always been the one and only physical button on the front of the device, the home button. Even though it's easy to use, double or triple clicking the home button is a lot different than using gestures. iPad users have been able to take advantage of multi-finger gestures to substitute for the home button already.

With the jailbreak tweak Zephyr from developer Chpwn, iPhone users can take advantage of these gestures and more. The smaller screen can make it more difficult to use these three and four-finger gestures. The great thing about Zephyr is the additional Swipe up from Bottom and Swipe from Left and Right gestures that improve multitasking and reduce home button use.

The iPhone 5 brought with it extra screen real estate, and Apple left it up to developers to optimize their apps to take advantage of the added space. Although many apps have been designed with the larger iPhone 5 display in mind, there are still some that have fallen through the cracks. Now with a jailbroken iPhone 5 and the FullForce for Phone tweak, you can stretch or expand these apps.

This means no more letterbox bars on the top and bottom of your iPhone 5 screen. FullForce knows which apps are not optimized to fill the screen, and will ask you what action to take the first time you run an app. Settings -> FullForce includes a list of apps and the behavior you want to take place when filling the iPhone 5 display.

Sometimes the best tweaks are simple. Mail More Photos does only one thing, has no settings, and can be installed on your jailbroken iOS device free of charge. Sharing with the Photos app is great, except for the built-in limitations.

Ask anyone who emails themselves a lot of photos, or even bloggers who regularly take screen captures on their iOS device. Apple limits the number of photos that can be emailed to five. Mail More Photos removes this limitation, freeing up the Photos app to email more images at once.