I was always opposed to jail breaking. It seemed to much effort and then having to wait longer before you could update your device, as each ios update broke the jailbreak.

However we know don’t get snazzy new features with ios so I decided to try the latest jailbreak. It really is easy, so easy you are ready to rock and roll in less than 10 minutes.

So what is the net gain of JB. Being honest the impact is small but the feel is so much better.

On my iPhone 5 I know when I have the phone on mute as I have a little silent icon in the status bar. The same for notifications from other apps. These appear in the statusbar. I have setup the ones that I know that I have some messages for example. I also have changed the operator icon just for fun. Saving space on the statusbar I have showing the battery % but there is no need for the battery icon as well. So I removed the battery icon. When the phone is charging a lightning bolt appears. The other really useful tweak is making Google Maps app open instead of Apple Maps. Such as godsend. Then there is the adding of one column of apps on the home screen and an extra line of apps in each folder. This makes a world of difference in enabling me to have all my apps on one page and games on the other. With my iPad Mini I have done the same but adding more columns. My Mini also has the tweaks mentioned above. Both devices have a better youtube app that allows for high quality downloads. Finally on both the screen whiteness changes to a lighter orange warmer feel during the evening. Hard to explain but makes reading so much better on the eyes at night. I used sbsettings to have system toggles in the notification centre. I have also bought octupus keyboard but prefer the default iphone keyboard. So I just have a tweak now that changes the colour. I can tether my ipad to my iphone for free as well.

The iPad had a few more tweaks. Full screen safari and retina iphone apps automatically showing at 2x mode.

There are a few visual tweaks but nothing major. Whilst the above sounds a lot, there is only 9 tweaks installed on my iPhone and 11 on my iPad.

You can now buy Photoshop Touch for the iPhone and Android, and it pretty much does everything you can do on the iPad version.

It’ll costs $5, and features filters, to layers (and super-easy layer styles), scribble select tool to the Camera Fill feature (insert camera images straight into your document), which is even more useful on the portable iPhone.

You can also use the app in any orientation, even upside-down in portrait.

At least this is a lot less than the desktop version.

NPD Display Search has come up with the following graphic to illustrate just how much more popular the Mini is compared to the full size iPad

It makes you wonder what could have happened if Apple had released the Mini first and later released a 10 inch tablet. Would Google, Amazon and others even stood a change of gaining market share.

Apple Inc. in February reversed its stance on a corporate-governance measure related to executive compensation, implementing a new rule that executive officers must hold triple their base salary in company stock.

The move, which hasn’t previously been reported, came even though a month earlier Apple’s board had urged shareholders to oppose a very similar corporate-governance measure proposed by a shareholder.

Doesn’t sound too painful.

Apple Macs and other hardware is very costly compared to its competitors.

However Apple does use eBay to flog its refurbished macs. This will help save you a few pennies.

Also if you are a student there are discounts on offer and the discount varies from being at college to university. University students get the biggest discounts. Only catch is you have to use the education computers. That’s how Apple verify your a student.

Software developers Panic are working on new AV software and are investigating Apple’s new-ish Lightning Digital AV Adapter. What they found is that unlike the previous 30-pin module, the Lightning adapter doesn’t carry a native 1080P signal. In fact, when mirroring, Apple says the optimum resolution is 1600 × 900 and when that signal is shown on a 1080P display, it is likely up-converted, showing artifacts consistent with streaming and uncompressing video data.

So when they split open the cable and there is a full ARM processor with 256MB of RAM to process video signals inside the adapter cable. Panic thinks that they are actually streaming an AirPlay network signal through the cable and it is being decoded by the ARM processor.

Why would Apple do this? It’s likely Apple wants to move people to AirPlay wireless streaming to Apple TV so this is just a stopgap solution. Rather than making a larger Lightning cable, it sacrificed on wired video out quality as well as HDMI (And VGA?) cable costs.

Is this being sneaky or clever?

Just for a bit of fun, I filmed the power off animation I use on my iPhone 5. I had to use my iPad Mini to film the iPhone 5 so hopefully the quality isn’t too bad.

Details of the tweak used are listed in the description within the YouTube video. Link is here.

Major League Baseball this week announced plans to expand support for Apple’s Passbook mobile ticketing app, which will be accepted at 13 ballparks this season. This is a big increase from when just four teams — the San Francisco Giants, New York Mets, Boston Red Sox and Kansas City Royals —supported the app.

It is confirmed that the latest iOS beta by Apple will break the evasion jail break. However it won’t be too long before a revised jail break will be produced.

But even it there is a gap, or even if the latest version of iOS can’t be jail broken, will people update their devices. If you think about it the latest iOS is really good. But with a jail broken device just adding a few tweaks makes the world of difference.

I for one would hold off updating my iOS software just to keep my tweaks. Would you?

A new report out of China claims that LG Display saw shipments of its 9.7-inch iPad display panels drop 90% in January, from 6 million units in December all the way down to 600,000. The drop-off is said to be a main factor in LG’s poor performance in the month.

According to supply chain sources, the downturn was caused by a combination of a few things including the fact that January was the first post-holiday month, the growing popularity of the iPad mini, and a general shift in the market to lower-priced tablet.

However, iPad Mini panels grew tremendously over the month.