Tips

Tired of pulling your iPhone out of your pocket every time you need to check for new notifications? Sure, you can set your device to vibrate on silent but then your phone will shake every time a new message comes in. There's another way, that's more discreet and allows you to take control of when you check for new messages, without even looking at the iPhone.

The jailbreak tweak PocketNotify has no settings to configure, simply install the package then set PocketNotify to an Activator gesture. This gesture should be a using a physical button, something like Volume Button Down Short Hold. Now whenever you short hold the volume down button, the iPhone will check for new notifications.

Cropping a screen capture on the iPhone normally requires several steps to get the desired image. After all, every time you snap a screenshot by pressing the power and home buttons the entire screen area is captured to the Camera Roll. The jailbreak tweak ScreenshotPlus changes how this works, so you can pre-crop any screen capture before saving.

Once installed, ScreenshotPlus only has one setting to configure. This option toggles whether or not the tweak displays the dimensions in pixels of the cropped screen shot selector box. In order to use ScreenshotPlus, an Activator gesture must be assigned to "screenshot mode". Once configured, enter screenshot mode by performing the selected gesture.

Sometimes iPhone owners need help making a decision. Nowadays with so many purchases happening exclusively with plastic, there aren't always stray coins lying around to flip. What luck, arguably the most advanced, portable personal assistant ever created can now flip a coin for you instead. Tell Siri to flip a coin and she'll do just that, letting you know immediately whether it was virtual heads or tails.

There are some other tricks you can use to get help with random numbers or even play games when you're missing a pair of dice. You guessed it, just tell Siri to roll the dice and she will tell you which side of the six-sided dice are facing up after the roll. Ultimately when you need two random numbers from 1-6 or one number from 2-12 this can be handy (simply add the two for a bigger number). But what if you need a larger random number?

The date picker wheels in iOS may look pretty, but when it comes to setting an alarm in the Clock app they can really slow things down. Scrolling to the correct hour and minute, then picking AM or PM is not the simplest or easiest way to set an alarm. PadClock changes all of this for those with jailbroken devices.

Once installed, the tweak has no options to configure. PadClock does just one thing that will save anyone who frequently uses iPhone alarms a bunch of time. Instead of date picker wheels, when entering the alarm time a numerical keypad is provided. The time is directly entered using the keypad, then the AM, PM or 24 button is selected.

Even Apple fans must admit there are some handy features included in Android. For example, there are several gestures that can be used to quickly call or email a contact on an Android phone. With iOS, iPhone users must open the Contacts app, tap the contact name, then select the phone number, email or Send Message button to communicate.

When it comes to efficiency, the jailbreak tweak QuickGestures eliminates these extra steps, adding a more Android-like feel to the Contacts app. There are three gestures that can be assigned to contact names: swipe right, swipe left and long press. Each of these can be assigned to a different action.