It’s about a week since the release of the untethered jailbreak for the A5 devices and a lot of tweaks are floating in Cydia for our pleasure. Among them there are some with big potentiality that will finally give you a complete iOS device.
Today I’m going to talk briefly about two of them: Belfry and AssistantExtension. Why only those? Simple: they are free and really demonstrate the potential of the jailbreaking community.
Let’s start with Belfry. When I originally bought my iPad 2 I was really bothered by the absence of some of Apple’ stock Apps such as weather, calculator and clock (I really didn’t miss stock, voice memos and the compass Apps).
I knew that they wouldn’t be there, but still I was annoyed by this fact. Today finally my worries are over. Thanks to Ryan Petrich we now have Belfry. This very simple tweak will install on your jailbroken iPad all the above mentioned Apps.
The best part is that most of them run in the native resolution for the iPad, while other (like compass) are still stuck to the 2x resolution. You can easily obtain this result by downloading Fullforce (another useful tweak). Yes, sometimes they are buggy, still a huge improvement. Remember, this is just release 1.0 so things will get definitely better as time goes by.
And, now for AssistantExtension which has made me fall in love with Siri all over again.
When it was initially revealed by Apple, Siri wowed audiences, myself included. But after a period of usage, I can say that it has still many places where improvements are necessary. As of now, you can perform different types of searches: on the web, on maps (US only), between your contacts and so on. You can have dictation and you can use it to se alarms and reminders.
But what if you can create your own custom actions? This is exactly what AssistantExtension does. This free tweak will allow you to write your own actions to be performed by Siri, simply using basic Objective-C commands. The tweak comes already with few actions pre-programmed such as the ability to open apps, create new tweets or to toggle SBSettings options (you can even have deeper conversations with Siri!).
The real beauty of AssistantExtension and Belfry is that once again an independent developer reminds us the potentialities of iOS device. Cydia proved that Apple still has a lot to learn and how powerful and important the jail-breaking community is to the whole iOS ecosystem. Without them, the iOS 5 as we now know it, would have been really different and less powerful.
So Cydia, bring it on, I can’t wait to discover what you are capable of.