There are many processes that occur on your iDevice when you are out and about tapping things and having fun on it. One small launch of an application could be the execution of over one hundred lines of code. The problem is, you never get to see what's behind the structure of an application launch process in iOS. All you see a beautiful graphical user interface that acts upon your touch with incredible animations. Wouldn't it be cool if you could see what was really going on in the background of your iDevice while you fiddle around with all of the things that you do on a daily basis?
A new jailbreak tweak dubbed WallpaperLog by iOS developer Filippo Bigarella lets you see what's going on through a live Console view that shows on your home screen above your wallpaper and below your applications. It looks like something right out of the matrix, but it's pretty neat to say the least. When we say live, we mean live. As you open applications and use jailbreak tweaks and stuff of the sort, you will see the green console text on the home screen scroll through lines of text that mirror exactly what you are doing as you can see from the screenshot above.
Filippo has decided not to release WallpaperLog to any of the official repositories because, "its implementation is not suitable for non-developer users" (Bigarella). Apart from the fact that he will not be releasing it to any major repositories, he has still made the '.deb' file publicly available for anyone that wants to toy around with it. There are some prerequisites that you need to think about before downloading it such as: Filippo will not offer any support for it since he is not releasing it officially and also you need to have some general iOS knowledge to truly understand what the Console is actually telling you.
If you can grin and bear with the prerequisites, then you can download the '.deb' file from this link which Filippo made available via his Twitter earlier this afternoon. It does have a dependency for the tweak called 'syslogd to /var/log/syslog' which you will have to install after installing the '.deb' file. If you've never heard of that tweak before, it was made by Jay Freeman (saurik) and you can download it from the Cydia/Telesphoreo repository which comes pre-loaded with your jailbreak; it looks like this:
While the tweak probably isn't helpful for anyone, it's very awesome looking and is a pretty cool idea. I would love to see this tweak become live on a major repository some day with possibly the ability to see it on a blank home screen page with no applications. Console logs are extremely helpful in troubleshooting and they simply look cool. You can use it to show off to all of your friends and they will be jealous; very jealous. You can see the official iOS console log by plugging your iDevice into your Mac and launching Xcode to use the computer-based console log. I think this tweak will be staying on my device for a while.
Name: WallpaperLog
Price: FREE
Version: 1.0
Repo: N/A
Developer: Filippo Bigarella
Editor's Rating: 4/5
Sources: Filippo Bigarella
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