Sumeet Singh

The native applications on the iPhone are somehow incomplete in exploiting its capabilities over IP. Probably one of the reasons for the lack of heavy data transfer oriented apps is Apple’s assumption that most iphone users will use EDGE and not WiFi for their communication needs. While I use EDGE for most parts of the day and check my emails extensively without a hitch, it feels good to be able to use iPhone as a portable machine doing practically everything from setting up alarms, managing my web server, taking backups of remote machines over ssh, etc. Now that iPhone is quite common in this part of the world, it’s time to discuss the app suite on my iphone:

1. SSH: The famous Open SSH implementation for iPhone opens limitless tweaking possibilities on the iPhone. Connect the phone to home WiFi, switch on the SSH service and you’re ready to control your remote machine of choice, or upload custom themes from desktop to iphone.
2. Summerboard: Native iPhone interface is not for me. Dave Shea’s Chalkwork theme does the trick for me.
3. Boss Prefs: I personally feel Apple should have included a tool to switch off EDGE when not in use. Keeping EDGE on all the time drains out the battery within a day. Boss Pref, the swiss army knife for network services on iPhone lets you control WiFi, EDGE, SSH, Bluetooth services and save precious battery charge.
4. Customize: Who said changing the order of icons and hiding icons was not possible in 1.1.2 ! Customize lets you change icons, indicators, and enables you to hide unused icons to keep the home screen clutter free.
5. Lockbox: Keeping secret things secret. This surely won’t protect information if your phone is lost to a hacker with basic unix skills, but stands to people poking in your iPhone.
6. iSMS: Sending SMS to multiple recipients and forwarding SMSs - this application fills in for 1.1.3 feature.
7. iFlickr: Click photos and push it to your flickr account without clicking an extra button. Allows you to tag photos, and control private/public status of the photos.

All of these applications are available through Installer App if your iPhone is Jailbroken. Which apps do you use?