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.

I learned about an interesting petition from Google’s blog today. www.freetheairwaves.com is attempting to get people involved to free whitespace between broadcast television channels. What’s wonderful is how they make it so easy to get involved. So if you read my site, go take a second and sign the petition. It’s a good thing.

I won’t be buying a new iPhone tomorrow for a variety of reasons. I thought it might be important to note them now and perhaps see how my viewpoint changes over time.

While I’m quite excited about the iTunes App Store and real software for the iPhone, it’ll all run just fine on mine. The only piece of software that will convince me to go iPhone 3G will be a working GPS application. Read: An actual real-life GPS application like you’d have in your car.

I figure that one is quite a ways off, if at all even possible. I’ll leave that little piece of wizardry to Garmin or another big player but I bet it would be one of the most, if not THE most popular application for the iPhone.

Beyond that, it doesn’t do anything new. Edge speeds hardly ever bother me. Most of the time I have a wifi signal. What’s the point in upgrading if you don’t get an upgrade?

I recently cleaned out my laptop by doing a complete reinstall of OS X, which means that I have to go back and reload all of the goodies I’ve spent years finding.

One of those goodies I had forgotten about until today was my screensaver. Soundstream is just one of those things that makes my mac so much fun.

Rather than your typical screensaver with a blob moving around on a black background, this screensaver takes input from your microphone and reacts to the sounds. Go ahead and boop or bop or beep. It responds to everything and makes idle time just that much more fun. It’s like an iTunes visualizer for everything. I love it!