Push Notifications

Those red numbered badges on the iPhone home screen can be helpful, indicating new text messages or unread emails. Sometimes they can be irritating, especially when there's no easy way to tell an app to stop nagging you with its badge. One example is the Apple firmware update, which will appear as a badge on Settings until you update iOS.

Jailbreakers know that updating iOS to the latest version isn't always a good idea if you're interested in keeping your Cydia apps and tweaks. Thankfully, developer John Heaton has created the BadgeClear tweak so that annoying icon badges can be easily wiped away. No options or settings are added to your iPhone by the tweak, just added functionality on the home screen.

Push notifications are great, except when they constantly interrupt what you're doing on the iPhone. Luckily for iPhone owners with iOS 4.0 or later developer Peter Hajas has released a tweak that greatly improves iPhone notifications. In fact, Apple has even hired Peter to implement his MobileNotifier software in iOS 5.

If your iPhone is jailbroken you can install this tweak and start enjoying the benefits of MobileNotifier immediately. To get started, open Cydia and follow these instructions to add a repository.

The latest version of Google Mobile for the iPhone features some great improvements, including push notification functionality. The mobile Google app (now at 0.6.0.4416) now features an icon badge with the number of unread emails on your linked Gmail accounts. Push notifications that pop up on your home screen can be sent when a calendar event is about to take place on your Google calendar schedule.