**Note: “SB” settings stand for SpringBoard settings.

To access your SBSettings home, simply swipe your finger at least 50 pixels across the status bar.What will come down is this:

Here you can right away see 4 main options, Brightness, Processes, SSH and Wi-Fi.

The brightness tab is pretty straight forward, simply press the button and adjust your brightness on the fly, without have to exit whatever you are doing, go to the settings application, waiting for it to load… etc.

The processes tab allows you to view all applications running in the background, so if you find that your device is running a lot slower than it should be, try ending a few useless processes this should make a lot more memory available and allow you to continue using your iPod Touch/iPhone nice and smoothly. There is also a “Free Up Memory” button, will free up any available memory to make your device faster.

The SSH button lets you toggle your SSH connection. If you have no idea what SSH is, or how to use it, go to this tutorial. Disabling this feature can help save battery power, which is great when you are already running low.

And finally, Wi-Fi. Same as the SSH button, you will toggle your connection to the internet, which will save more battery than just by disabling SSH.

Now, for the smaller icons, there is: More, Refresh, Dock, Respring and Power.

By clicking on “More”, you will close the SBSettings drop down menu and open the actual application. you can now adjust a lot more that just brightness.

Firstly, is the themes pages. Yes, you can apply themes to your SBSettings menu, there are 4 main ones already given, however Cydia offers a wide array of themes created by other people.

Then there is the “Set Toggles” tab. The name of the tab is pretty self-explanatory. You can add to the 4 main toggles. A very useful one to have is “Fast Notes”, for when how have to take something down real fast, but don’t have a pen or a piece of paper and loading the notes app would just be too long.

Next on the list is “Dock Applications”. As I mentioned before, on your SBSettings drop down menu there is a Dock button, here is where you select the applications you wish to be placed there. Let’s say you have an application that you don’t use, but still sometimes need to access and find it a waste of space on your home screen, you can select that application so that it goes to your SBSetting dock. By doing so, it is out of sight, but can still easily be accessed.

The “Hide Icons” tab lets you select apps that you don’t want one your home screen but then cannot be accessed through any means, except by “unhiding” them.

The next tab, “Mobile Substrate Add-ons” is used to toggle faulty add-ons so that they can then be removed through Cydia.

Extras are little options like memory in status bar, numeric battery and much more.

And finally the last page, “App Folders” simply gives you the directory in which a chosen app is found. The point? We haven’t really figured that out yet really, seeing that all AppStore apps are in the same directory and Cydia in one own.

So that’s it for the “More” button on the drop down menu, so lets get back to that.

The refresh button will refresh your IP info, available storage and available memory.

The dock button, as I said previously, allows you to quickly access apps pre-selected in the “More” page.

The “Repsring” button will simply respring your device. This comes in handy when, for example, you are transferring files through SSH and need to update your device.

And last but not least, the “Power” button. When pressed, you are given 4 power options. Reboot (useful if your lock button is broken), Power Off (also very useful if lock doesn’t work), Lock and Safe Mode, this is especially useful if you have just installed a cracked application and it keeps crashing, put your device in safe mode and it might run perfectly, if not, the .ipa is invalid.

This is a guide explaining what to do to your status bar to make it as useful as possible.
Some of you may have already done this, or may think it is all pretty obvious to do. However this guide is mainly aimed at those would might not have realized everything or those are not as ‘jailbreak literate’.

[1] The first thing to do would be to create the maximum amount of space possible in the status bar.

At the start your status bar will look like this:

To make maximum space in the status bar, do the following:

1) Download ‘MakeItMine’ of Cydia:

This allows you to change your carrier name (in the top left). Having the carrier name is pretty useless.
And so after downloading MIM(MakeItMine) chance your carrier name to just a single space
After MIM your status bar should look like this:

2) Download off Cydia an application called ‘Battery Control’:

This app is a paid app with a trial. However i’m sure some of you will find a way to get it for free….:D
This app will allow you to change your battery to just a numeric value (e.g. 69) instead of the little symbol, the numerical value and the percentage sign ( e.g. 69% [=] )

Once this has been completed your phone should look like so:

3) The final thing to do is if you have a Winterboard theme (or just edit your info.plist) edit it like so:
- Find in the theme folder a file called info.plist
- Add to the file:

<key>TimeStyle</key>
<string>margin-left: 0px; padding-top:2px; font-size: Xpx; letter-spacing: .01em;</string>

Change ‘X’ to whatever number you want, the smaller the number, the smaller the size of the clock. I recommend around 12.

Make sure this is placed between the <plist version=”x.x”><dict> at the top
and the </dict></plist> at the bottom of the file.

This will change the time at the top of the screen to as small as you wish.

The info.plist should look like so:

And after, the time should look like this:

[2] The next thing you want to do is add things to your status bar.

1) The first thing you will want to get (and almost all of you probably already have) is SBSettings off Cydia.
This will allow you to have multiple toggles (e.g. turning on and off 3G) from your status bar. Also another feature of SBSettings is that under the ‘more’ button you can add a few things to your status bar. For example you can have it show your available free memory, the date and a few more things.

2) The second and perhaps one of the most important things you will want to get is called ‘Status Notifier’ and it can be found on Cydia. Once again this app is a paid one, but yet again im sure many of your have your ‘ways’ of getting it for free. This is the app:

This app will allow you to have notifications in your status bar. For example you can set it to show a phone icon in your status bar when you have a missed call, an envelope when you have mail and a text bubble when you have a text.

Once StatusNotifier has been configured your status bar could/should look like this:

3) Another thing to add to the status bar is…. the weather
By downloading ‘Weathericon’ from Cydia (for free) you can have the weather show up in the status bar as either:
- Just the temperature,
- Just an icon (e.g. A picture of a sun if its sunny )
- Or both

Once you have downloaded this app, simply respring, go into your settings -> Weather Icon. Then under ‘Status Bar’ enable ‘show Image’ and/or ‘Show Temp’
By default Weather Icon uses the first place in the stock Weather app. However, this can be changed on this same page.

If all has been done correctly so far your status bar should look like so: NOTE: In this picture I do not have show image enabled, and so I have only the temperature.

4) Here are two more ways to increase the productivity of the status bar but they are sort of linked so I will do them together.
These two tweaks, available through Cydia are called ‘MusicBar’ and ‘MusicInfo’.

MusicBar allows you to control you music using the status bar. (All you do is touch the top left of your status bar and it changes to look like this:

PLEASE NOTE: This tweak will not work if you used MIM to remove your carrier. This is because it is activated by pressing your carrier on the status bar. Apologies.

Musicinfo allows you to see what song is playing (Your Status bar changes to display the song info for 5 Seconds when a song begins) It will look like this:

This guide was written by UKSGreen and is posted here with his approval

There are so many applications and add-ons available on Cydia. From useless fart soundboards to applications that allow you to access system files and strings of your ipod’s firmware.

Here are our top picks:

Number 1 would have to be an add-on called “SBSettings” by BigBoss. This add-on will give you a condensed version of the Settings application already provided by apple that can be accessed by swiping your finger across the status bar. A window will slide down allowing you to toggle the following options:

1. 3G
2. Bluetooth
3. Brightness
4. Edge
5. FastNotes (An extremely light version of the Notes application, the name is self-explanatory)
6. Location
7. Airplane Mode
8. Processes (Provides the ability to view applications that may be slowing down your device by running in the background, also lets you terminate them)
9. Wi-Fi

Other toggles can be added by downloading them from Cydia or by downloading certain add-ons. You will also be able to toggle settings like numeric battery, numeric Wi-Fi, Date in the Status Bar and many others. Other capabilities include, hiding application icons and adding applications to the SBSettings dock for quick access.

Number 2, an application called “Backgrounder”. This application is extremely useful if you are a multi-tasker, let’s say your downloading an application on a file from Safari, and at the same time, you want to show one of your friends a hilarious video on Youtube, but you don’t want to quit Safari because of your download. If you have this application, all you have to do is hold down the Home Button and wait for the message “Backgrounding Enabled” to appear in a small dialog box, then let go and you will be brought to your home screen, allowing you to run any other application, in this case Youtube. Then, once your done with your video, simply go back to Safari and continue whatever it is you were doing.

The following images shows the processes running in the background. Even though I am on my home screen, there are 4 applications still running.

Number 3 is an application called “iFile” by BigBoss again, it allows you to directly access system files and string, giving you the ability to edit or modify them at will. **CAUTION** if you do not know EXACTLY what you are doing, and we mean EXACTLY don’t even download this application, the slightest mistake may lead to having to restore your device. Never the less, if you do know how to use it, it is very useful when it comes to editing themes or system strings. A tutorial will soon be up, on how and why you may use iFile.

Number 4, Installous. The goal of this application is to replicate an the AppStore by Apple. The only thing is, everything is free!! You may not find every single app in the AppStore, but almost all of them are there, well at least the good and popular ones. The use of the app is pretty straight forward, but for those of you who still aren’t iPod oriented a tutorial for Installous is available here.

Number 5, WinterBoard of course. For those who dont know it, WinterBoard is an application that will apply themes downloaded from Cydia to your devices, changing the icons, backgrounds, lock clock, sliders, loading screens, Wi-Fi logo, carrier logo. Basically everything that is graphical can be modified, removed or changed. If you have never heard of it, or do not know where to get it or how to use it, we wrote a tutorial a while back just about WinterBoard, go here.

Number 6, an add-on created by David Ashman called LockInfo. This will enable you to view your emails, the weather, events in your calender and much more directly on your lock screen. Very cool thing to have, helps stay organised, and is quick and easy.

We are well aware that there are many other packages available on Cydia that have yet to be discovered and may even be considered indispensable, if you know of any, or have any questions about the packages mentioned earlier, feel free to write about them in the comment box below. Also, as we discover them, if we feel that they are worthy to be posted on this page, we will, so do not worry, there is more to come.