A rather interesting application hit the Cydia store today, called Flex by iOS developer John Coates. With Flex, you can actually create your own modifications on your iOS device without any programming knowledge. Having knowledge of the inner workings of iOS does help, however.
When you open Flex, you will see three separate tabs: Patches, Cloud, and About. The Patches tab is your home tab and this is where all the modifications that you create will appear after you have created them. The Cloud tab will allow you to download modifications that other Flex users have created. And the About tab includes documentation, such as how to use Flex:
Creating modifications is done by tapping on the '+' button from the Patches tab. You’ll be guided through finding the application you want to modify, and then you’ll be able to browse through all of the libraries, classes, and methods associated with that application. You can create a modification for just about anything on your iOS device, so the application is pretty limitless. Anything that you create or download can be enabled or disabled from the Patches tab at any time.
If you don’t want to create anything, you can simply browse through the patches that other people have already made and uploaded to the Cloud in the Cloud tab of Flex. You can tap on any of them that interest you and download them. You can enable them from the Patches tab after they finish downloading. None of these modifications will cost any money.
For obvious reasons, it’s difficult to recommend Flex to everyone. Flex goes really deep into iOS… very deep. So deep that some novice users may actually create things that could be detrimental to the device, or even to software on the device. While things can be easily enabled or disabled from the Patches tab in the Flex application, it’s not absolutely foolproof. We really recommend having some kind of knowledge of the inner workings of iOS before trying to create your own modifications in Flex.
The developer notes in the Cydia description some examples of the modifications that you can make in Flex:
- Show all timestamps in iMessages
- Show contact photos in iMessages
- Remove the camera grabber from the Lock Screen
- Enable unlimited Mobile Safari tabs
- Hide the Newsstand application
Flex is compatible with both iOS 5 and iOS 6 and works on any iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. The package is for sale in the BigBoss repository for $3.99. Use Flex at your own risk.
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