Jason Lancaster

I jumped on the iPhone jailbreaking bandwagon very early when it was actually hard to do. Nowadays, it’s so easy you’d be silly not to. But for those of you that still haven’t (or have but aren’t sure what to install), these ten applications extend the iPhone beyond what Apple allows and upgrade the experience of owning an iPhone ten-fold.

1. Music Controls – Play Pandora and many other music applications in the background. Popup controls work when you double tap the home button. I use this every single day and it’s the only jailbroken application I’ve ever purchased.
2. Categories – Eliminates clutter on your screen by creating a new application and moving apps you choose (like games) into it.
3. Five Icon Dock – Believe it or not, 5 icons fit perfectly into your dock. If you’re like me and text message all the time this is indispensable.
4. Flashlight – The brightest possible flashlight you can get. Apps from the app store don’t even begin to compare to this sucker!
5. Lock Calendar – Put a calendar on your lock screen. If you’re like me and forget things, like birthdays, this will help!
6. PrivaCy – Eliminate anonymous usage stats from being sent.
7. SBSettings – Quick settings screen that allows you to swap services on/off, kill processes, free up memory, etc.
8. SpotBright – Show recently launched applications under the spotlight search menu.
9. xGPS – A free GPS tool that, while not as accurate as TomTom, is light years ahead when it comes to usability.
10. iHulu – Watch certain Hulu episodes right on your iphone. Streams over 3g. Totally cool when you’re stuck somewhere you don’t want to be and need something to occupy your time.

Wordabble is live! I’ve submitted requests for reviews in few places. I’ve talked about it a lot in the past few posts, so I’ll keep this short and sweet to simply say: If you have an iPhone, buy Wordabble!

One of the more useful iPhone applications I’ve found and used goes beyond Apple’s SDK by installing a quick-glance menu on the iPhone’s “locked” screen. In it, you can add calendar items, mail, sms, or a variety of other things. It’s a great idea and something the iPhone is desperately missing.

So you can imagine my dismay when, after installing on my pwned (hacked) phone and thinking to myself, “this is a good product, perhaps I should buy it” I ran into a brick wall:

No. Not happening. You just can’t do this, no matter how cool your software is! This screen says two things to me:

1. Developer is overly confident that their software is the bomb, will never fail, never break, never act differently than a user might expect.
2. Developer wants distance from the users of his/her product because users like me are dumb and will contact them about stuff they just don’t want to be bothered with, like their bomb-less application crashing.

It’s great developers are finding an outlet outside of Apple’s App Store to sell applications but this one is not for me.

As Adam wrote on his blog, Wordabble is now in review on Apple’s App Store.

Once the application is available, I’ll be contacting lots of people in attempts to get reviews and (hopefully) positive talk about the application going around. If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, I hope you’re excited to play!