[Kyle Matthews]

Cydia, the brainchild of Jay Freeman (saurik), is out. What is it? Think Installer, but open source and more features. The technical description, for those who get it, is a GUI front-end for a port of the Debian APT system which saurik himself ported to the iPhone, along with a whole suite of Unix utilities he's also ported.

This isn't a replacement for Installer - I have both installed, and apps from both packagers on my iPhone. Saurik also says the same thing - "Cydia/APT does not conflict with Installer. I run both on my phone and have a large amount of software installed via Installer. There are currently no known compatibility issues between applications that expect BSD Subsystem to be installed and devices running Telesphoreo, and no reason to suspect anything major on that front. Finally, no one is forcing anyone, packagers and users alike, to start using Cydia instead of Installer."



Cydia is easy for you to get on your iPhone - if you've got Installer on your iPhone/iPod Touch, you just add http://apptapp.saurik.com to your sources, and install Cydia Packager from the System category. Give it 5 minutes (its a big install), and you're good to go.



You may notice Cydia is at the moment very developer friendly - many of the available installs are Unix utilities which the average user won't need. ModMyI, and especially francis (of the MMi sponsored DRP Dev Team, and author of WiSync) have been working with saurik to put together a variety of other apps as well - games, themes, utilities, and more. Anything can be installed from Cydia.



So... what's the point? Here's a few features of Cydia:

• Open Source - while this doesn't directly affect the average user, it is incredibly useful for developers, and bugs are also easily reportable via the project's Trac site.
• Search - Cydia has a great built in Search function (screenshots earlier in this post), and also the iPhone's Contacts-style alphabet scroll on the side for quick finding apps you're looking for.
• Resume-able Downloads - You can pause downloads at any time, and resume later. If you lose connection, Cydia will resume downloading as soon as you tell it to.

Bottom line? Saurik has done some incredible work with Cydia. Bringing open source package installing to the iPhone is a first here, and since saurik stresses the fact that Cydia is still under active development, we can expect to see some great improvements to the app, which is already at version 1.0.

Bravo.

Developers - want your app on Cydia? Send cash7c3 or myself a pm with the link to your app, and we'll get it listed within 48 hours.

[Dust Busta]

Thank You Saurik and Cydia!!!! This Is Where The Future Of The iPhones Headed And It's Looking GREAT!!

[ryan christopher]

looks pretty sweet!

adding this to my phone as we speak!

[sogo]

Looks pretty cool

[r00t4rd3d]

Been using this a little over a week now , very cool app.

GJ saurik !

Some one make a new icon

[DisownedPenny]

sweeeeet
installing now...

[maritimeswimmer]

This is Pretty sweet lads, although i kinda didn't got the whole idea of what really cydia is ? is it like installer just better and in what ways? is cydia the future of the iphone? what is the difference how does it work? i think people would like to know more aboot it as i do!

Cheers, Maritimeswimmer!

[MgNate]

This is great! Hopefully installer will learn a little bit from you. I love the GUI.

HIGHLIGHTS I LOVE!:
1) Tells what's going on when sources are refreshing
2)You can pause and resume downloads

I love it! Thanks guys!

[robbpell]

got the letters on the side like contacts been wondering if anyone else was thinking about this

[saurik]

Originally Posted by maritimeswimmer

This is Pretty sweet lads, although i kinda didn't got the whole idea of what really cydia is ? is it like installer just better and in what ways? is cydia the future of the iphone? what is the difference how does it work? i think people would like to know more aboot it as i do!

Cheers, Maritimeswimmer!

Hey, I'm the author of Cydia, and I'd just like to point out (as it's somewhat understated in the article), that I attempt to describe the reasons I wrote Cydia and some of the places I see it going here on my website:

http://www.saurik.com/id/1

I'm not entirely certain if that will completely answer your questions, but it should at least make a serious dent.

[Comwiz]

Odd, when using Cydia to install, it seems to install on the 300mb partition side apposed to the symilink to mobile that I created.... Ergo, "I should now delete videos and photos because I am running out of disk space."

Ohhh and SOURCES, please more sources.

[saurik]

Originally Posted by Comwiz

Odd, when using Cydia to install, it seems to install on the 300mb partition side apposed to the symilink to mobile that I created.... Ergo, "I should now delete videos and photos because I am running out of disk space."

Ohhh and SOURCES, please more sources.

Hmmm... when using Cydia to install an existing package from ModMyI, or do you mean the Cydia installation itself?

[dale1v]

Originally Posted by r00t4rd3d

Been using this a little over a week now , very cool app.

GJ saurik !

Some one make a new icon

Been using it over a month :P lol

Nice app! The feautures and reliability leave Installer in the dust!

[Kyle Matthews]

Originally Posted by Comwiz

Ohhh and SOURCES, please more sources.

Developers - if you'd like your app on Cydia, get ahold of cash7c3 or I and we'll get it posted.

[lyxus]

The bad thing is it cannot see which program has been already installed by installer.app