Apple’s App Store Now Challenged By Cydia Store
March 14th, 2009 by iPhoneTechZone
The competitor to Apple’s closed and tightly controlled App Store, Cydia Store, has recently opened. It works on only jailbreaked phones, so that constitutes a complicated process for most users. With Cydia Store, developers of jailbreaked apps can also charge for their products.
The advantage of Cydia’s App Store is that it hosts applications that do things ‘legal’ applications can’t do. For example, the camcorder software Cycorder is only available through Cydia. Same applies to applications that let the user do user interface customizations which are not possible otherwise.
Cydia uses Amazon payments to process the paid applications. The ‘Download’ button for free apps turns into ‘Purchase’.
The user experience is not as smooth as on the App Store, you have to go though a web interface to identify yourself and make the payment.
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5-Row QWERTY Keyboard for iPhone
March 2nd, 2009 by iPhoneTechZone
If you’re like me, you’re probably annoyed with Apple’s idea that you need to press a separate key on the on-screen keyboard to get to numbers. No more, thanks to the new application simply called “5-Row QWERTY Keyboard.” Yap, it works just like it sounds, adding a fifth row with numbers on top of the rest of the QWERTY keyboard!
You may think that as a result, other keys get smaller, hence impossible to use. Wrong! Take a look at the image above – the application simply condenses other keys, leaving just enough room for numbers. Best of all, when you press the “Shift” key, numbers change to their symbol equivalent!
The way I see it, this is easy – you want this! If you have a jailbroken iPhone, simply search for “5-Row QWERTY Keyboard” in Cydia, and take it from there. Otherwise, if you needed a reason to go the “jailbreak way,” now you got it, right?
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