This is becoming a popular iPhone hack — We told you about FastSnap awhile ago, now it’s VUnlock. VUnlock allows you to unlock your iPhone screen using your volume buttons.

VUnlock is a useful hack if you’re tired of swiping the ‘slide to unlock’ button to unlock iPhone’s screen.

Obviously, this requires you to have a jailbroken iPhone

To Install:

1. Open Cydia
2. Search for VUnlock
3. Find VUnlock
4. Install and Enjoy

Not much to it, it’s free and pretty useful.

Let us know how it works out for you!

If you would like to fix the PDF security hole for security reasons without updating and loosing your jailbreak, you can do so from Cydia using a patch called PDF Patch, naturally.

This PDF Security Hole was exploited by Comex from the iPhone Dev Team to create the recent MobileSafari JailbreakMe 2.0 Star — Apple didn’t take too long to find out and fix the problem and release iOS 4.0.2/3.2.2 Updates for all except iPhone 2G/EDGE and 1st Gen iPod Touch owners — Meaning whoever owns an iPhone 2G(EDGE) or 1st Gen iPod Touch is completely vulnerable to this problem

Once you install this patch, you can rest easy and not have to worry about malicious people trying to take over your iPhone.

To Install:

1. Open Cydia
2. Search for “PDF Patch” (Without quotes)
3. Install
4. Enjoy and rest easy

If you would like to test if this worked, head over to http://jailbreakme.com and slide to jailbreak — You should no longer see the pop-up dialog. That means you’re no longer vulnerable!

- source: blog.iphone-dev.org

If you haven’t already, add this repo — repo666.ultrasn0w.com — to Cydia and unlock that new iPhone 4 of yours. It’s this easy:

ultrasn0w version 1.0-1 works on:

• iPhone4 baseband 01.59
• 3G/3GS basebands 04.26.08, 05.11.07, 05.12.01 and 05.13.04

Props to the iPhone Dev-Team. Nice work.

- source: iphone-dev

Cydia creator Jay Freeman, also known as Saurik briefly demoed a jailbroken iPhone 4 while at an interview by makeitwork.com

- source: youtube.com

There’s nothing wrong with your eyes. iPhone 4 has been jailbroken. MuscleNerd, member of iPhone Dev Team, posted a picture of Cydia running on an iPhone 4.

Planetbeing posted this on Twitter:

Think I’m the first one I know about to get a root shell (and SSH) on iPhone 4, using poor @comex’s code (since he has no iPhone 4)

Then MuscleNerd followed up with:

Congrats to @comex for another userland JB http://is.gd/d5N6I <-- hi-res Cydia via @planetbeing & @chpwn iPhone4s

Planetbeing made it clear that the release of this jailbreak is not known at this time; probably not anytime soon.

Don’t want to speak for @comex, but afaik no one has breathed a word about release date and what we have right now is nowhere ready.

Stay tuned!

Infinidock is a nice project by a fellow by the name of chpwn, and allows you to have a horizontal scrolling dock on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Full dock customization: scrolling, adjustable icon amounts, and more! Add as many icons as you want, and the dock will grow to accommodate them, and set how many you want on every page. The ultimate dock customization tool, by one of the developers of ProSwitcher. Please report all bugs and submit all feature requests via email so we can take a look!

This is perfect for people who want more than 5 icons on the Dock without making the Dock look wack. Simply drag and drop the icons into the Dock. You will then be able to swipe to scroll through the icons as they remain in your dock on each page.

This app is available on Cydia for a low price of $0.99

Note: This app requires you to have your iPhone jailbroken with Cydia installed

In the process of developing InstallerApp, which we told you about not too long ago, RipDev was investigating the technology behind Cydia. Basically, Cydia is a front-end to two open source techs – APT and DPKG. DPKG is a system that installs and removes specially prepared packages. APT allows these files to be organized in network repositories to be indexed and downloaded.

From RipDev:

Due to the highly unoptimal build of DPKG (as Jay Freeman, the author of Cydia, admits it in his article about Cydia) we had to compile DPKG and the tools needed from scratch. As a result, the same set of tools take only a little over than 1 megabyte as opposed to 32 installed by Cydia.
While testing Cydia support for InstallerApp, we of course had to use Jay’s creation a lot. And unfortunately it felt slow, and overloaded. We thought, well, why not make our own front-end to DPKG? It would be compatible with Cydia, but be focused on speed, elegance and be very, very thin. So one of our programmers sat down and made up in a week a new alternative installer that we are proud to reveal to you today, named Icy.

RipDev claims Icy is simple and they plan to keep it that way.

• It will only refresh repositories when you tell it to
• will not scroll pages of cool looking terminal text when installing or removing a package. Instead, it presents the installation process in a friendly and cool manner
• enhanced with crisp black and white interface featuring icons by quite famous artist Max Rudberg

Icy uses the same DPKG technology that Cydia uses but without the APT tech that handles the downloading of repository indeces and packages. Instead, RipDev decided to use a combination of libcurland sqlite for that.
Hungry for faster repository refreshes? Well, Icy will only download headers when refreshing repos so it won’t download again the indeces that were not changed – this saves on your traffic and makes the refreshes faster. It will pick up existing Cydia repositories and also will allow you to add more through its Add Source interface.

RipDev also added landscape support, awesome! I tip my hat at RipDev for adding landscape seeing as it’s so useful!
For those who are freaked out thinking you’ll have to take out your wallet for this, calm down, Icy will always remain free!

RipDev also mentions Installer 5 will be announced soon

-Click More to see Images of Icy-
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Cydia developer, Jay Freeman also known as Saurik has released a new version of Cydia that sports essentially an AppStore clone. It’s called Cydia Store. It’s where iPhone/Touch developers can get money from their unofficial third-party jailbreak applications. The first paid package to be released on Cydia Store is Cyntact. It’s a simple app that shows profile pictures in the contact list. It’s priced at $1.00USD at the Cydia Store.

Based off his twitter updates, he plans to add PayPal support sometime next week. He also plans to convert cydia from a package repository to a full fledged app store with an integrated payment system. He also does not plan to charge more than the 30% commission that Apple charges developers

He opened the store for unofficial AppStore developers like himself to make money from their efforts. He says “The overworking goal is to provide choice. It’s understandable that [Apple] wants to control things, but it has been very limiting for developers and users.”

WSJ reports that Freeman, who has been on the lookout daily for email from Apple lawyers, isn’t taking any chances and has lined up a lawyer in case Apple takes legal action.

Details via Freeman’s twitter:

• Direct credit card processing in the future.
• The purchase is tied to your Cydia account on the server, so even if you buy a new iPhone you will be able to install it on your new device.
• Cyntact is DRM-free. Freeman plans to work with the existing commercial applications to handle their current DRM.

Open up Cydia to update!

What do you guys think of this idea? – Personally, I’m excited. More apps will become more stable and better and will be worth every cent. For those who haven’t yet jailbroken their iPhones: What are you waiting for? Do it already! You’re missing out on a ton of awesome stuff.

Anyone who keeps their jailbroken firmware up to date knows the pain of having to continously reinstall all the unauthorized third party apps on your iPhone. BigBoss has now made AptBackup available via the Cydia applications installer. This app sneaks a list of your installed Cydia application into iTunes backup files so anytime you use iTunes to backup your iPhone’s data you will also be backing up a list of programs you’ve installed.

The next time you update your iPhone’s firmware (jailbroken firmware assumed), then restore your phone’s backup data it will upload the list of previously installed applications. This allows for an easy one button reinstall of all your old applications in Cydia.

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ZodTTD has done it again, this time releasing MAME4iPhone, the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator for jailbroken iPhones via the Cydia installer application. This emulator will allow you play thousands of your favourite arcade classics, anything from Pong to Mortal Kombat. I can’t wait to start enjoying Golden Axe on the road! To install MAME you can find it in the Games section of Cydia.

• Based on MAME v0.37 Beta 5
• Supports thousands of MAME ROMs
• Sounds is supported but off by default. Go to “Now Playing” and slide the sound slider to turn sound on
• To press OK. Use RIGHT then LEFT then RIGHT then LEFT to press OK.
• Save states not supported
• Upon installing a folder /var/mobile/Media/ROMs/MAME/ is already made for you. Place your MAME-titled zipped ROMs in the /var/mobile/Media/ROMs/MAME/roms/ folder

Which Arcade Classic are you going to play on the iPhone? Leave a comment letting us know.

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