Gordidon's Blog

Tile is a bluetooth device that helps people keep track of their keys, other devices and even their dogs. The cost of a Tile is $20 and after waiting over a year for the Pre-Order to arrived, now Tile is shipping all order made after June 3rd, 2014 by this fall. If you want more information or wish to order a Tile please go to thetileapp website. Watch the video below for the unboxing.

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It's been a long time without a Gordidonblog post but since the iPhone 6 has arrived, we have to do one. I woke up at 2:45 am on Friday, September 12 to Pre-Order the most anticipated device of the year. Pre-Orders started at around 3:00 am easter time and I was done with mine at around 3:18 am. After waiting a couple of days, the big day came and on Friday, September 19 at around 7:00 pm my iPhone 6 arrived home. I wanted to share the unboxing of the device, please enjoy the video below.

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SmartWatch+ is an App for iOS devices, mainly for iPhones that gives more functionality to your Pebble SmartWatch. The app adds the power to see your iPhone's battery life, Stocks, Weather, Calendar, Reminders, Bitcoin, GPS. It also allows you to have HTTP Requests and my favorite is Find My Phone. Please take a look at the video below to appreciate all this features at once

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Tennis Pro for the Tennis lovers like me. I was one of the people begging developers to make this app since I don't know how to program in C. This app is awesome and it makes me want to play more tennis. Check the review in the video below.

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First of all a Zeppelin is a Logo/Banner of some brand or blog that you put on your iDevice instead of your carrier name. This has become very popular, many Zeppelins are submitted to Cydia everyday. In this post I'm going to show you the basic on how to make a Zeppelin.

You May see my blog's Zeppeling here.

First you would need to have a logo, name or something that you would convert into a Zeppelin. After you have decided on your logo/name, then you should put it in Photoshop or any other program similar to it.

You will need to create two PNG files from your logo with two different sizes. The first image which would be a 40px by 40px is for Retina display. This image can also be bigger, for example my Zeppelin banner in Cydia is 95px in width, but don't change the height. (My Zeppelin in Cydia is call Gordidonblog Banner)

The other image should be around 50% smaller than the previous one, at 20px by 20px if you use the first size. This is for Pre-Retina Displays. Again it could also be little bigger than that, my banner is 45px.

After you have saved this two images, then you should duplicate them 3 more times. You need to have 4 of the same image but with different names. It should look as follow for the Pre-Retina images;

black.png
etched.png
silver.png
silver-alt1.png

and as follow for the Retina images;

black@2x.png
etched@2x.png
silver@2x.png
silver@2x-alt1.png

So when you finished you should have 8 different images of your Zeppelin logo/name. You are now ready to submit your Zepplin to Cydia but before doing that, you need to compress the folder where your Zeppelin is located in order to be able to submit it. How to compress the folder? is very simple hold down the Option key on the keyboard and click on the folder, it should give you the option that says Compress "foldername". Click on that and you are good to go. It should have created a zip file call archive, thats the file you would submit to the repos.

You can submit your Zeppelin by going to the BigBoss website, Modmyi or iPhonemodding to mention a few. If your logo is not approved by any of this repos, please contact me and I will put it on my private repo. Also if you want to have it just in your phone you can use a program call iExplorer or iFile to put the folder of your Zeppelin into your iPhone. You would need to put the your Zeppelin folder into the following path: Library/Zeppelin.

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Last week I saw a video of a guy thats was able to register 25 fingerprints with Touch ID even though Apple says that you just can register 5 different fingerprints. His approach was to take 5 fingers while registering "One" fingerprint, meaning that instead of using the same finger to set up Touch ID, he used all of his five fingers. So by doing this he was able to register 25 different fingerprints to use with Touch ID. You can see his concept in the video below.

After seeing this my wife had an awesome idea. She said to me, what about if we can register both of our fingers as "ONE". Let me tell you that we tried it and it worked just find, you can take a look on the video below. This is a great solution because my wife doesn't always use my iPhone, and since there is a 48 hours limit for the fingerprint to stay valid if you don't use Touch ID then even though her fingerprint is not been used, it would be active since I'm using mines everyday.

This is just awesome, we both have our fingerprints register in my Touch ID and she don't have to worry about her fingerprints been disable or not valid.

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Here is a simple "Speed Test" of the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5.

As you can appreciate in the video above the iPhone 5S is just a bit faster than iPhone 5 in regular day tasks such as using your browser, opening apps and simple stuff like that. When the iPhone 5S overpower the iPhone 5 is in Gaming. When I talk about gaming, I'm not talking about "Candy Crush" (Please...) but heavy duty games such as Infinity Blade II or Motion Tennis. Also in booting time, the iPhone 5S seems to be faster than the iPhone 5.

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I know this is kind of late but this is my unboxing of the newly released iPhone 5S (Space Gray).

As you can appreciate in the video, the outside of the new iPhone 5S is very identical to that of the iPhone 5 which was released a year ago. As expected the 5S was not going to have a new body as in others such as iPhone 3GS and 4S, they stay basically the same on the outside. The inside even though not shown in this video is where we can find the biggest changes.

We only have 2 changes to the outside of the new iPhone 5S, one is the home button since now the iPhone 5S has the Touch ID (Fingerprint Reader) and it doesn't have the small square in the center of the button anymore so it could read your fingerprint. The other change comes in the Flash on the back of the iDevice as you can see in the video above. The new flash is a bit bigger than that of the iPhone 5. Thats the only 2 differences aside from the color, now we have a Space Gray iPhone 5S as well as a White and a White with Gold.

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This is a nice tweak that allows you to delete tabs on Mobile Safari by swiping up. When you swipe up, the tab will just disappear. You would see a small demo in the video below. This tweak is available for free in Cydia.

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Curiosa is a small tweak that allows you to see notification of other tweaks, themes and/or any other package from Cydia if an update is available. This tweak come from developer Ryan Petrich which in my opinion is one of the best in the community, he is always involve in something new. Curiosa is very simple but it works very smooth.

Curiosa has a couple of settings that you can play with, first it has the Automatic Refresh of the Cydia packages list. The When option is like the name states, when do you want Curiosa to check for new pacakges. You can choose from Hourly, Every Two Hours, Every Six Hours, Daily, Manually or After Respring. I have set it to every Six Hours because I think Hourly and every Two Hours is kind of too much but you can choose your own time.

It also gives the opportunity to choose if you want the Automatic Refreshes to be only on Wifi or using your Cellular Data. This option is kind of neat because eventually if you check every hour it would consume Data and if you don't have an unlimited plan like me, you have to be careful.

The other option that Curiosa provides is for the Manual Refresh, you can use an Activator Event so you could use to Refresh all the packages in Cydia and check for updates. By the way Activator also comes from Mr. Petrich (I'm telling you guys, he is awesome). Another way you could Refresh the list is by going into Curiosa and pressing the Refresh Now button located almost at the end of the page.

One final comment about Curiosa is that you can also provide a Keyword for it to look every time it Refreshes. For example if you haven't install Call Bar because you want a special feature on it, you could put CallBar as a Keyword so every time Curiosa Refreshes and there is an CallBar update, it would notify you, then you would check to see if your feature has been added. Very useful tweak....

Unlike Activator, Curiosa is not available in one of the majors repos. In order to download Curiosa you would need to add Mr. Petrich repo: rpetri.ch/repo/ into your Cydia's sources. If you don't know how to add sources, you can check: Add Sources in Cydia.

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Lately the Weather apps are coming in bunch. I like to have one that tells me everything about the weather, meaning percentage of rain, snow and how sunny is it going to be. Almost all the Weather apps that I have downloaded do all this but the new Yahoo Weather app is just gorgeous. It's clean and smooth, it has many details that others don't show.

The only bad think about the Yahoo Weather app for iPhone is the icon. The simplest thing to do in this whole app and its the most unattractive part. If you have a jailbroken iPhone you can solve this problem by downloading an awesome new tweak call Yahoo! Weather is Better. This tweak allows you open the Yahoo Weather app by taping on the Apple's Weather icon. Now you can hide that unatractive Yahoo icon and tap on the Apple's Weather app icon to access the Yahoo's app.

If you want to have a much better experience with your Weather app then you should add the following repo from DBA Technologies; http://apt.dba-tech.net/beta/. If you need help adding this source please check my post on How to add sources in cydia. In this repo you would find a tweak that would allow the user to see the current temperature in your Weather icon. The name of this tweak is WeatherIcon 6. Remember that the Apple Weather Icon is a static icon meaning that it does not show the current temperature but with this tweak you would be able to see the current temperature without opening your app.

This is the best combination for your Weather app in a Jailbroken iPhone. Yahoo! Weather is Better and WeatherIcon 6 are on top of my list of best cydia tweaks. Go get it in Cydia, both are free.

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I like to use my iPhone with Rotation Lock. I don't really like all the rotation screen stuff but I do like to watch videos in Landscape. So with Rotation Lock you are no able to watch your videos Landscape because you have it lock as Portrait. Hey there is a little tweak in Cydia call LandscapeVideos that allow you to have Rotation Lock but watch videos on Landscape automatically. This is just awesome in my opinion, small tweak but great idea.

It has 3 settings to work with. One is to enable the tweak (on/off toggle), the second one is to choose when do you want the videos to play in Landscape, you can choose from Always to only when Rotation Lock is on. The last option is Orientation, this is basically the way you want to see the video, meaning if you want to see the Landscape from the left, the right or just both ways. Hope you enjoy the video.

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Multitasking is very important in any device. If your device does not have or support multitasking then you would have a hard time working with it. Now a days multitasking is everything, time is money and multitasking is your saving account. So in order to save money you'll need to multitask the right way.

Over the years there have been numerous multitasking tweaks in the Cydia store and concepts all over the web trying to fix what Apple is lacking on their App Switcher. I'm going to be talking about Auxo and MissionBoard Pro in this post, since there seems to be the most popular now a days.

Auxo Music's Controls

MissionBoard Pro Music's Controls

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In the video below, I will be showing you guys how the intro of my reviews is going to look when I do it on video. Also you can see how is going to look as soon as the review is over. I made this video using Adobe After Effects, iMovie and Final Cut Pro X. I'm learning how to use After Effects and Final Cut Pro X and I will be updating this intro whenever I learn something that would make it look better. For now I think this is a pretty nice.

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Have you ever go to your sister's house and asked for the Wifi Password but she seems to forget the password and after she spent 3 hours searching for it, then you get the password. Well WifiPass is a pretty nice tweak available in Cydia that saves your Wifi Password in plain text for quick reference.

Lets say you go to your Aunt house this weekend and she gave you the password for her Wifi to be use with your iPhone but you go again the following weekend with you new iPad and she is not there to give you the password. Well use your WifiPass from your iPhone and get the password for your iPad.

It's pretty simple and useful, you just have to use your Wifi setting from within your iDevice, choose the Wifi you want, enter the password and thats all. Then WifiPass would store the password by itself. This is the best way to store Wifi Passwords. If you want to look for the password, open WifiPass and voila, there you go.

If you take a look at the picture above you can appreciate WifiPass; for example, MabelWireless is the name of the Wifi Network and in the line below there is the password, I have blank-out the password for security reasons. But you can appreciate how good this small tweak works.

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AppsGonefree was first introduced to me by one of my cousins. I was very reluctant to use it at first because I thought this was a waste of time. I have found this App very useful, it has save me a lot of money. I mean don't get me wrong I still paid for Apps but is like everyday you found an App that you like or want and if you paid for every single one, you may just get broke (I may be exaggerating but you get the idea). Another thing is that I don't like to pirate this Apps, I'm a developer in progress and I wouldn't like people pirating my Apps. So like I said AppsGonefree is awesome. You may not find all the Apps that you want but at least you can find some.

This App is very simple but useful like I said before. As soon as you open the App you would see the logo which I presented in the image above and then you would see all the paid Apps that are free for the day or maybe for more than one day (Image below). Also you can go back to previous days and check if those Apps are still free. Trust me this will be the App that you open everyday even before opening your girlfriends messages (maybe I went to far). AppsGonefree is in the Apple store and is free to download.

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We all know how difficult is to be updating your iDevices after you have Jailbreak it. First of all you need to update it via iTunes, then you need to restore all your data, apps, music and all the good stuff. After all that you have to re-jailbreak your devices and install all the sources and packages from Cydia.

Updating your iDevice from iTunes is very straight forward, restoring your data and apps is easy thanks to iTunes or iCloud, depending which one you use. Re-Jailbreaking it's a 5 minutes process and not difficulties should you encounter. On the other hand, installing sources that are not by default in Cydia and packages is kind of a hassle. Apps from the iTunes store can be install without you having to re-spring your device every time but it's very different installing packages from Cydia. The majority of packages that people install from Cydia, needs a re-spring and this is kind of annoying if you need to install around 20 packages because it would mean that you would have to re-spring approximately 20 times.

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NitoTV is one of the most exciting things about Jailbreaking your Apple TV. It's kind of the Cydia store of the Apple TV. Since there has been a lot of attention on the latest Jailbreak "Evasi0n" by the Evad3rs, I wanted to take a moment and show you guys how to put nitoTV from your newly jailbroken iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch.

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This is going to be a small topic since is very simple and there is not much to explain. Some people like to have the Dock of their MAC with certain icons in there (Office, CS6, etc) as well as to have it for every user that uses the computer (Useful for Small/Large Businesses or Schools). This use to be done by copying the profile from the Administrator account to all other account (for information on how to do a profile in a MAC please click here.) but since the released of Mountain Lion things has changed. Some steps are more complicated and some like this one are much more easier.

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I have notice that a lot of people like to have their contacts in their Google account (Gmail) even though they have an iPhone or any other Apple product and they have their contacts there. I don't see the point of this unless your are getting rid of your iPhone and going to an Android device. Since I have notice this and people are having problems transferring their contacts in this post I will show you how to do this in a painless way. There are many ways to do this but I think the way I will be showing you guys is one of the most simples.

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