Cydia Acquires Rock.app

[Jeton]

What about us users who can't purchase through Cydia Store?

In Macedonia neither PayPal or AmazonPayments work, because Macedonia isn't in the "supported countries" list.

Is there any hope for us?
Because as much as I hate to say this (without being accused of sounding like a hypocrite) our only way to use Cydia apps is through getting the pirated copies of them.

I really hope to get an answer from saurik.

[saurik]

I'm sorry to p*ss on your Wheatyflakes, but we purchase (with real money) Apps from Cydia and when we use Cydia we view paid-for advertising.

Our entitlement is is based on the fact that we are paying customers. Cydia is a business, not a charity. We are not getting free stuff.

I do not run the ads in Cydia: to the extent to which you are using Cydia for getting free stuff, Cydia itself is just something I do because I apparently hate my life.

When you buy a product in the Cydia Store, that purchase is tied to your account. As these accounts are handled by Google/Facebook, I cannot help you with a lost password, so unless you are forgetting your username (which people do) there is nothing I can do to help you with your license.

Meanwhile, there have only been three or four users to date who have had a payment not complete due to some error on my end; each time this has happened I have immediately fixed the bug; 99% of users who believe that their payment got lost forward me a "receipt" from Amazon that clearly is not a payment :(.

Finally, the only thing I can help with regarding the actual products you get are "I would like a refund". Users come to me expecting me to explain why this app that I don't even use (and that I often don't even understand why anyone would want, despite knowing full well that tens of thousands of people seem to think that weird app is useful) didn't work for them... you need to contact the developer, and Cydia is really clear about this.

The one thing I will admit to (which wasn't even brought up as a complaint in this entire thread) is that I am not always as "responsive" as people want me to be with refund requests, but at least I (eventually) honor them, unlike either Apple or Rock Your Phone, both of which have "no refunds" policies.

This is going to affect me deeply I think...As of now all my theme's are available only on Rock.
I hope Cydia will produce a developer dashboard and experience that RockApp has provided.

Wow...Maybe it will be for the better...bigger customer base, but damn..I really liked the way RockApp conducted its business.
Fast, Professional, and User friendly.


I guess we will see.

Cydia provides something called "Cydia Connect", which isn't /that/ awesome, but is getting better. In the franchise model that is Cydia (where you work with repositories, not with me), it is up to the repository to tell you about these features. If your repository is not working with you I highly recommend you look into a different repository.

Saurik was nice enough to leave the Summerboard implementation for us for as long as he did. Using bundles and folders allows WinterBoard to run at a more optimal level. I don't think he will update the icons folder for retina display use - and I honestly agree with him. With the use of auto-create UI icons, bundles shouldn't be that much of hassle unless you're making all new custom icons.

The SummerBoard re-implementation in Cydia is a horrible monstrosity. SummerBoard themes are nuts: they are actually language dependent because they rely on the english names of the icons, so I have to do summersaults in SpringBoard to try to cross reference the name of the application that the theme artist thought was the name of the app :(.

Seriously: I have begged and even at times /pleaded/ with repositories to run some automated scripts on their themes to upgrade them for WinterBoard and to stop accepting SummerBoard themes for distribution, but in the two years since WinterBoard was released this has never been able to happen.

Ok this makes me very happy but I have a question. I use the same Gmail account on my phone and my wifes because most of the licenses are good for 3 phonese. On Rock we had to use separate accounts to be able to purchase the same apps(MyWi and My3G). Do those apps now get 3 licenses each? I don't want to have to use a different Gmail ID on both phones and have to purchase alot of other apps again. Both of the phones seem to have updated in Cydia and those apps work fine. This might be a question for Intelliborn but maybe one of them is reading this? Also...Can I delete ROCK now?

There is no absolute limit to the number of devices you can attach to your Cydia account, only a rate limit for how quickly you can link these new devices to your account. As for Intelliborn's products, it is not yet known whether or not they will follow the normal Cydia model of purchase dynamics.

I have to say I like cydia a lot more then I ever liked rock. With that said I would agree that the reponse time from Saurik is a little slow. I have emailed him several times about an app that I purchased on my old 3gs that should have been transfered to my iphone4 but have received no resposne. I even emailed the dev and he tried to help me with getting in contact with saurik with no success.

To be 100% clear here: this is because you logged in with the wrong account. Never, not once, not even half of a single time has anyone's license managed to get lost somehow between their first purchase and install and them trying to put it on a new phone, but I constantly have people who swear to me, like "cross my heart and hope to die" swear to me, that they only have a single Google account, or that they've never used Facebook to log into anything, for whom I've been forced to carefully look up their details and then try my damndest to convince them to just /try/ to log in with their actual account. :(

Now, that said, I really am working on handling this kind of support better (through some crazy technological means), but I have a really difficult time actually finding people who actually understand this ecosystem enough to actually be able to read the e-mails that I get and actually comprehend them, are responsible enough to actually hold down a job doing it, and are able to do it in a reasonably responsive fashion, all at the same time.

I mean, hell: Rock released a little notice about this acquisition and on their employee list it indicated that their support guy quit after what sounded like he was on the job for a really short period of time... that is a really difficult job that no one is capable of doing, so the real goal is setting up the system so that you never have to contact me. :(

This is terrible news.

I have a great deal of respect for Saurik - he's done an enormous amount for the jailbreak community and we wouldn't be where we are now without him, but Cydia has always been lacking in user interface despite having years to improve.

The most useful features missing from Cydia that few seem to be mentioning are ratings and reviews. Rock lets you sort all apps by user rating, and I've found a few gems this way which I would never have known about otherwise. It has also helped me avoid a shady app or two. I've never been able to understand why Cydia didn't have this feature, but it wasn't that big a deal in the past because you could just fire up Rock to look at reviews, and then install the app from Cydia for the stability.

You would be surprised at the amount of backend politics there are relating to ratings and reviews. There is a key problem in this ecosystem that pretty much everything gets badly reviewed because "I installed it and there was no icon". We actually had reviews in BigBoss's repository for a long time, and had to pull the feature because it was causing a lot more problems than it was actually solving.

That said, I want ratings, but I am also the kind of person who wants things to be done in a way that is actually valuable and provably useful before I'm going to throw my weight behind it existing in the ecosystem. Like, for the record: the concept of "average rating" isn't mathematically valid the way that pretty much everyone tries to do it, which sucks and makes sorting by rating mostly useless.

Saurik gains a monopoly on the 30% cut of sales from all jailbreak apps, but users just lose the ability to use an app that filled in some of the shortcomings in Cydia's UI. The ONLY positive point in all of this is that we no longer are forced to use Rock's questionable installer for those previously Rock-exclusive apps.

Very disappointing.

So, I do not have a monopoly because developers have always been able to and still do sell their products on their own websites. Many very popular applications, like PDANet, are sold without the help of any storefront at all, and are doing quite well in the ecosystem. Also, frankly, if the Intelliborn applications had been available in Cydia this deal probably would never have needed to happen: that particular exclusivity is what forced people to use Rock in the way you say.

Also, for the record, developers get 70%, and "I" (my company) get "what's left". It needs to be noted that 7-11% goes to PayPal, 5-6% goes to the EU (amortized 0-25% VAT, which Rock wasn't even paying), I cover the costs for all of the bandwidth used to host the recent jailbreaks as well as firmware umbrella (many terabytes per month) in addition to Cydia's core packages (which are all free and not even ad supported), I have employees helping out with things (which includes some of the really active community members whom I occasionally have compensated for work they've done for the greater good), lawyers/accountants are always expensive, and I also have been paying a lot for the redundant storage costs for the >300 million SHSH blobs I have on file (with a running acquisition rate of like >10,000/minute).

So some words from me:

- I never liked Rock, don´t know why, maybe because of the many issues, users mailed me daily :D
- But the developer service of rock was much much better,
they have a own developer webside where you can upload themes,
see all your sold apps/themes, montly, daily and so on.

There was a major problem with people uploading themes with copyright violations in them to Rock/Appsidy. It is generally not allowed in the Cydia default repository ecosystem to allowed direct developer->user content pushes for reasons like this.

As for seeing your sales, Cydia provides live raw customer database dumps from which you can determine any kind of statistic you need (as well as a zoomable reconfigurable chart which you can use to browse your payments without resorting to low-level tricks). You are supposed to be able to get information from how this works from your repository, but apparently not all of the repositories provide the same level of service.

- I´ve sold much more themes at rock

This was not everyone's experience, but fair enough.

- Good themes and apps get totally lost in the daily cydia update
between all this childish ringtones and stupid guys who post stolen
wallpapers and call it a theme. I wish saurik and
modmyi would prevent that finally.

We are at the point where Cydia Store really should seperate the trash from the quality. And/Or modmyi, as premium side should reject themes that are no themes at all or do not have a mimimum of quality. Everyone can make a ringtone or change his wallpaper without needing a CydiaStore-theme

BigBoss does, in fact, refuse to host themes that suck. ModMyi is not the only default repository, nor is it the largest default repository. I am not certain why you believe that ModMyi should be uniquely responsible for bad content (having mentioned them twice).

[cwohayes]

I would like to know if there is some hiccup in the transition. Cydia shows that I have 2 updates available to purchased apps, mywi and tlert. When I try to upgrade it says http://apt.modmyi.com POSIX: connection refused and it kicks me back to cydia. Rock doesn't show these apps as being updated at all. Been dealing with this for 2 days now. what's up?

[saurik]

OK, so I have read EVERY post in this thread(this morning in bed on my iPad :)) - This may seem like a "selfish" post, but I'm sure there are more than a few others that share the same concerns.

I have been a Rock supporter, customer, and developer since day one. I even designed all the icons for the different categories(bet nobody knew that ;))I believe competition is healthy and it makes people think "outside-of-the-box" to better their products and service. So I was clearly excited when Rock came on the scene.

Now, as a theme creator/developer Rock has been simply incredible! Here are just a few of MY reasons, as a developer, not an average user who just cares about the UI and loading speed.

1. Developer support. I can email Mario, Glenn or Tom directly and get a response within 24 hours, sometimes sooner! I have emailed, sent texts, got on IRC chat, twittered, facebooked, and even called Saurik NUMEROUS times over the last 18 months, with not even one single reply!(btw, his phone# is publicly posted on his website, I didn't call the FBI). I have literally felt like a stalker! lol!(maybe he called the FBI??!?) My point is, if this is the kind of support and communication I have to look forward to>>>>>>>O_O!! And to top it off Saurik replies to someone on here in less thasn 10 minutes?!?!?!?! :|..nuff said.

You are not supposed to be contacting me: your relationship is with your repository, not with me. So, please do not stalk me.

2. The developer portal is a MUST have. The ability to check sales stats 24/7, great! I can give out promotional licenses to anyone I choose..perfect! Monthly statements..word! Customer database..woohoo! This has been an invaluable tool for me and I don't see how I can run my "business" without it!

Cydia's payment servers provide raw database dumps of live sales data, as well as a cool retarget-able chart. Meanwhile, Cydia is really designed to be setup "for the enterprise", and provides reverse-APIs (you implement a server, I provide example code) by which developers can have complete control over the payment and licensing process for their applications (such as for giving free copies or for integrating payments from their own website into the ecosystem).

Seriously: you should fire your repository for not telling you about these features. For the record, every developer/artist who has complained about Cydia's feature set on this thread uses ModMyi, and every developer who has defended me uses BigBoss. Meanwhile, I keep getting sent more and more themes from ModMyi, which I'm really hesitant to approve if this is the kind of support they are going to be getting. I normally try to stay neutral in these issues, but really: this is ludicrous; if I am going to have the relationship with the developer I'm also going to host their damned packages for them. :(

3. Theme promotion. Let's face it, theme's get no love in Cydia! Don't get me wrong, there are GREAT themes available on Cydia, however it is littered with a bunch of crap that is crappier than crap! The theme section in Cydia hasn't been updated for over a year!!(is it that obvious I'm a theme creator? :p). Yes, I may be bias on this because my themes have done VERY well on Rock, and have had a lot of publicity on their home page, but from what I've read on here, I'm not the only one. I am willing to bet that the "average" user who jailbreaks, does it so they can theme their device! NOBODY WANTS THEIR IPHONE TO LOOK LIKE IT DOES OTB!!!! And if their is someone out there who does, you're a screwdriver short of a tool-box! :D

For what it is worth, I agree with you here. It was my intention that the featured themes section was something that repositories would have a vested interest in maintaining, but that never actually worked out. I, myself, do use many themes, so I do not attempt to curate the list of featured themes. Meanwhile, every artist thinks their theme is awesome and deserves to be on that list, so I can't trust any of them to help me with it.

As for paid themes, I have purposely not been "rocking the boat" in Cydia while I finish negotiating with Rock. One of the goals is that, by the end of this transition period, I will have replaced the interface in Cydia for browsing paid products to a) include all products and b) have some mechanism for seeing themes (and to the millions of people who wish themes didn't exist: just don't click this button).

[TCcentex]

These ads are not run by me, I have no control over them, and they also should have been rendered in Rock.



Nor, to be clear, do I now or have I ever gotten any money from these advertisements. I do not pay repositories to do the work of tending to hundreds of developers needs, nor do they pay me to be included in Cydia. The ecosystem that I joined, which was created by the guy who wrote Installer, was that repositories are paid by running their own advertisements, and that's the ecosystem we are still living in.

Thank you for the clarification - i fell victim to some bad information and really appreciate you clearing that up

[XavierAlucard]

I'm glad this thread is going. I think it has some great ideas and even some bad ones (including one of mine). I can't wait to see the end result of the deal and of this thread.

@Saurik: I was wondering if I could offer to volunteer for you.

Edit: Yes this thread has also answered much misinformation for me. Thanks to those that posed the questions and for Saurik answering them.

[saurik]

I have always used Cydia and MMi as an end user and developer, but have been very disappointed in the lack of Cydia updates. How long has Cydia not updated it's badge after installation of a Respring app?

This bug came up either during the iOS 4 or the iPhone 4 changes, and has been fixed in "trunk" (a developer word for the internal branch of the code that work is done on). This was considered a non-critical bug and the fix is therefore being released as part of a number of other fixes.

[Leonick91]

While I hope "very high" (because there are probably some really epic tricks that we can use to improve the performance of APT), I will not ever under any circumstance make Cydia fast at the expense of making it install things incorrectly.

(You can sort by release date by clicking Changes.)

Do you think it would be possible to make it sort by actual release date and time instead of the time my device refreshed and found the new package? One would think it would be possible for the repos to keep track of this to and report it to the device on a refresh, I do of curse not fully understand how cydia, the repos, APT and so on works but still just wondering.

I do not run giant ads in Cydia. In fact, there are only four places in the entire Cydia interface (and this includes all of the packages I host, counting every place individually) where I run an ad that isn't a simple link to a package. Ads you find in Cydia are run by the repository owner and I have no control over the content of those pages. Are those ads huge? Yes. Do I hate those ads? Yes. Were those ads in Rock? AFAIK Rock also displayed the same repository-provided pages that I do.

These ads are not run by me, I have no control over them, and they also should have been rendered in Rock.

Nor, to be clear, do I now or have I ever gotten any money from these advertisements. I do not pay repositories to do the work of tending to hundreds of developers needs, nor do they pay me to be included in Cydia. The ecosystem that I joined, which was created by the guy who wrote Installer, was that repositories are paid by running their own advertisements, and that's the ecosystem we are still living in.

I do not run these advertisements of which you speak. If you believe that the advertisement is an example of click fraud, I encourage you to report it to the advertisement company and get that repository's advertising account shut down. It is a crying shame that some repositories (which shall remain nameless) seem to be attempting to even move advertisements underneath people's fingers as they scroll, and if more people try to report them they will likely get reprimanded.

I do not run the ads you are complaining about and have no control over them. These ads were also visible in Rock Your Phone, anyway.

Thanks for confirming what I answered to some of those before.
Sometime I wonder exactly how many in the jailbreak community actually understands anything about how stuff works when they can't even figure out that Cydia (and rock) load html files from the repositories to show info about packages and that the ads are on these pages...

No one in the community is willing to help me with the Featured Applications page, and the Featured Themes section is, as far as I'm concerned, under control of the repositories. I had to hound the default repositories to get me a list of such themes in the first place, and they have never bothered sending me updates. Meanwhile, the Cydia Products page has purposely not been updated during these negotiations with Rock, but will be completely revamped by the end of this transition period.

What kind of help is it you would need for the Featured Applications page? Depending on what it is I would maybe be able/willing to.

[saurik]

Really will miss the rock Dev Portal. Now at least I'm in the blind on Cydia as a Dev.

OMG, yet another developer using ModMyi that doesn't know about Cydia Connect or Roster.

[TCcentex]

@saurik

i really want to thank you again for taking the time to clarify a lot of this for us, and dispell my own personal misunderstanding of how the whole process between you and the repositories works (among other things that led me to speak right out my *****). I think it's definitely time that a lot of us with a vested interest that work out of MMi take the time to start a dialogue with Kyle to help him get a lot of these features we've been missing out on up and running. I would like to point out that for a guy who's had so many more important real-life things to worry about ("E" IS FOR EZRA), it should be up to those of us that benefit from his services to help him get us all on track.

Thanks again Saurik - you really didn't have to do any of this, even starting and maintaining Cydia from the beginning... I really appreciate your dedication to this community.

[saurik]

Saurik, I too have emailed, tweeted, everything you many times and have never gotten a response other than a LONG time ago when you allowed direct messaging via Twitter. Now even that's gone.

Twitter does not allow users to direct message people who do not follow them: I do not have any control over this.

Before I begin, let me start by saying I love Cydia, better than Rock by far, and the work done on it was tremendous.. but the lack of updates is more than disappointing, and Rock has shown us what can be done. I may sound cynical in these posts, but I'm trying to relay some of the frustration using Cydia, and what needs to be improved now that it's the sole tool we will be using for 3rd party app installation.

In order for Cydia to be the tool it should be, a few things need to be changed:

1. Allow the enabling/disabling of sources without removing them. Sometimes we like having a source around, but don't want it cluttering up everything. Other times, we just want to refresh specific sources. This is not hard.

APT does not support refreshing individual sources. This is one of those "lines in the sand": I will not reimplement APT in a way I can't merge back to the APT developers, as everyone else who has done so has caused horrible installation bugs.

2. Better queue management. I should be able to remove one item from the queue without deleting the entire queue. This also is not hard.

Click Modify, now click Clear.

3. IOS4 fixes. The red dots below Changes that says the number of updates doesn't even appear on IOS4. The "Q'd" red dot doesn't appear when a queue is present either.

This has been fixed in trunk but is considered a minor bug and is being rolled into a larger bundle of updates that will be coming soon.

4. Force options. I have installed or uninstalled more than one package that have conflicting prerequisites. I should be able to force install or force uninstall any package I want despite the requirements of the package. The potential for problems is there, but people who jailbreak and then actually use this feature usually know what they're doing. It's not your responsibility to prevent me from screwing up my phone anymore than it's Steve's responsibility to keep my impressionable eyes away from porn.

If you know enough to do this you know enough to use dpkg.

5. Continue installing after an error. Enough said. If Cydia can't download each and every package without something going wrong, my entire damn queue is lost and I have to recreate it, hoping Cydia doesn't crash along the way.. and that I left out whatever package was 'bad'. Download and then install each package individually if you have to, but don't wipe my whole queue.

This is the first time I have heard this specific complaint. For the specific case of "package downloaded fails to download" (as opposed to "installation failed") this can probably be fixed: in specific, a "reload data" should not be performed in case of a download failure. I believe this can be rolled into the next update.

6. Themes and apps need to be separated. Separate change queues, and separate info viewers. I can't stand having to click a theme based on its' name, wait for that page to load, find out where THIS particular repo has placed their screenshots or more info link, click that, wait for that to load.. it's crap. I should be able to pick a category (Springboard, SBSettings, etc) and flick through a bunch of theme screenshots and stop on the one I like.

This would require a lot of work and new knowledge on behalf of the repositories (due to the requirements relating to screenshots it would impose), and I can't even get them to run an automated script to update their themes to actually work with WinterBoard instead of SummerBoard.

Last but not least..

7. ADD THE ABILITY TO WIPE THE SLATE CLEAN, or reinstall Cydia. I can't tell you how many times I've had to figure out obscure pkgd commands because some damn package gets stuck while installing and corrupts everything I try to install, or manually delete some .list files because I typed in a bad repo url. There really is no recovering from some Cydia problems, and this needs to be addressed. Restoring should not be required to wipe out Cydia and APT. Just give me a nuke button (or even some complete removal instructions) and I'll re-jailbreak if that's what it takes.

It is not possible for Cydia to somehow fix a really really broken package installation: your entire system is now in a fried state, and you need to restore. That said, I had been trying to work with planetbeing on new ways of storing the bootstrap on disk that will allow for 100% safe and layerable jailbreaks, but they were not possible in an ecosystem that had two popular installers (as there was just too much coordination to be done). I am hoping that this work can now continue.

As for broken .list files, did you report that issue to the repository? I have tried to make APT resilient against corrupt repositories (it is not by default), but may very well have failed. That said, this may have been before I released those changes 6-7 months ago? Regardless, I'd rather just fix the APT list parser to not require this.

@saurik...

i'd like to make one very big request on behalf of all the theme creators here (if you're a themer and you don't agree, I apologize for speaking on your behalf...), and even all the app developers....

PLEASE remove the "featured apps/themes" section on the front page of Cydia and replace it with a rolling-display of the new and most popular apps & themes. Rock did this, and from their business perspective it was an AMAZING approach. They would constantly roll whatever themes & apps were actually being purchased/downloaded to give more exposure to the creators of said packages, and it really encouraged competition among the devs to produce quality work. If an app or theme wasn't good enough, it fell off the list and into obscurity like it should. If a new theme or app is submitted, give the dev a chance to put it in front of the community, and if it's good enough to last, then it should. If not, bye-bye, try again and better luck next time. Rock's featured apps/themes front-page even went as far as only displaying said packages to users who's devices didn't have them already installed on their devices, and it was a very fair and effective method.

The current format is very out of date, and very limited to a few developers and that's not fair. PLEASE consider this -- it will only encourage the work being submitted to be better and better, and the public will be better off for it.

Thank you Jay.

During the negotiations with Rock I have been refusing to drastically change the UI display for products (which I actually think was actually a good decision in seeing the aftermath). I am going to be changing the products page by the end of the transition period to include all products and to have sorting based on something vaguely similar to what you are saying.

That said, I believe that the goal of Featured Packages and Themes is to be a showcase of "awesome" that is unrelated to sales or profits: almost everything on these lists is actually free content. My goals related to this are more to hire people to maintain these lists.

Cydia has always been more stable for me and Ive gotten Rock since it started and watched it develope and found the UI and ratings very helpful but a lot of the time I still go back to cydia. So hows this merging working? Will all the Rock devs be added to the cydia (one man) team? I cant wait to do backups through cydia and have a better interface. The speed doesnt matter because cydia got faster and is always reliable.

The Cydia Store works on something similar to a franchise model, so you will be working with the repository you choose on most issues, at least until I realize that this is a bad idea to be trusting repositories with this.

Just a few requests and hopes I have for the new cydia:
...

1-5 were covered in earlier responses.

6. Support for payment options other than paypal such as credit cards across all purchases (smartscreen was the only app I saw with this so far.)

I am working on a /ton/ of new payment options, actually (such as bank transfers using your tiny Finland-oriented bank), but am unlikely to do direct credit card processing in the near future.

7. Forgot to mention this earlier- RockApp-like TRIAL SYSTEM.

Cydia was designed "for the enterprise", and attempts to force no requirements on how this sort of thing works, allowing developers to define their own mechanisms for trials and licensing. Numerous developers have taken advantage of this in their products, and hopefully more will in the future.

[Red Five]

OMG, yet another developer using ModMyi that doesn't know about Cydia Connect or Roster.

When I contacted modmyi about tracking my downloads, sales, etc, they told me that there was a Cydia web interface for that, but didn't tell me how to get to it. I emailed you about it in May and still haven't gotten a response.

[saurik]

This is awesome news, but for a new theme creator like myself I'm going to be very sad to see Rock go. They have an amazing dev portal that allows you to keep track of all your sales essentially in real-time,

Cydia provides live customer database dumps and charting/statistics, and has since I added the first third-party developer a year and a half ago (SwirlySpace needed this level of information to pay their taxes, as at the time they were handling their own VAT). I generally trust the repositories, which are whom you have your working relationship with, to handle working with you to get you account information you might need for this access.

and the newer themers like myself got some major exposure to the community thanks to their constantly-updating version of their front-page "featured themes"-type section, which seemed to keep a constant rotation of the most popular themes being downloaded. Hell, even brand-new themers like free-apple and his very popular freshman theme Afterhours got some good exposure.

I do not know what you download from Cydia: that is between you and your personal God (and probably the repository you downloaded it from ;P).

The featured themes section on cydia seems like it hasn't been updated in quite a while, so not-as-well-known theme creators like myself that have a product that is on-par if not better than half of the Cydia-featured themes have a pretty good chance of falling back into obscurity. Don't get me wrong - I see the major benefit this will be to the entire community, and the pioneer of the jailbreak experience will surely keep us all going In the right direction, but I'm going to miss Rock :(

(I've covered this quite well in some of the other responses I've added to this thread.)

also, to clarify on the iPhone 4 theming issues mentioned earler, currently NOTHING in the UIimages folder (all status bar images, progress loaders, etc) is theming at hi-resolution, even with the appropriate @2x image in the folder - only the low-res, standard versions display on the iP4 from that specific folder.

I have asked some of the theme developers I work with whether they were able to build iPhone 4 themes, and they said it worked, so I did not look into this further. Apparently this was not an exact enough question. I have determined how these filenames are being loaded and exactly why these images are not being loaded correctly, and should be able to fix this pretty quickly.

Also, the "Icons" folder in the main theme file is no longer functional (we're having to theme native apps and cydia icons by manually creating a "bundles" or "folders" file for each, ie to customize the Winterboard icon we used to drop a customized icon in the "Icons" folder, now we have to create a bundles file "com.saurik.winterboard" with an [email protected] inside... this for every cydia app)

The Icons folder is for SummerBoard themes, and SummerBoard did not support high-resolution icons. It requires me to do horrendously painful lookups for the English names of the apps, and was therefore slow and used more memory than anything else in WinterBoard. Seriously: I have been trying to get people to not use this folder for the last two years. You've had your chance to learn to not use this folder and I am not going to sit around and dream up ways to make this folder support high resolution icons. :(

, and the Wallpaper and Lockscreen (presumably [email protected] & [email protected]) when placed in the main theme folder like the last platform are not theming either. We've found a work-around with those images by adding hi-res "pictures" of these in the user's camera-roll that can then be utilized as wallpapers directly from their device's "Set as Wallpaper" function.

As stated earlier in these responses, I did not realize that this needed to be updated for high-resolution graphics now that wallpaper was a default feature of the operating system. I will probably add support for this.

Jay. There are themes that work just fine, but what we keep saying has to deal with theming ui elements. From the sound of what your saying, theming ui elements through the "uiimages" directory is a summerboard method and we should expect to not see any updates to beable to use hi res images for ui

No, this is a WinterBoard feature, and was apparently a bug/limitation and a miscommunication. Will be fixed.

What about us users who can't purchase through Cydia Store?

In Macedonia neither PayPal or AmazonPayments work, because Macedonia isn't in the "supported countries" list.

Is there any hope for us?
Because as much as I hate to say this (without being accused of sounding like a hypocrite) our only way to use Cydia apps is through getting the pirated copies of them.

I really hope to get an answer from saurik.

So, I'm 25% Yugoslav, and I'm sorry to say I have no clue how to get money out of Macedonia at this time (but will bring it up to my newer payment provider partners).

I would like to know if there is some hiccup in the transition. Cydia shows that I have 2 updates available to purchased apps, mywi and tlert. When I try to upgrade it says http://apt.modmyi.com POSIX: connection refused and it kicks me back to cydia. Rock doesn't show these apps as being updated at all. Been dealing with this for 2 days now. what's up?

ModMyi is currently offline: I am not in control of their servers or operation. During the transition period the updates to these applications are split between Rock and Cydia in order to allow users using Rock to not be disrupted by random modifications to the licensing schemes for these applications in Cydia, which explains the lack of an upgrade in Rock.

[zausser]

OMG, yet another developer using ModMyi that doesn't know about Cydia Connect or Roster.

I do Jay but it says I'm Denied Access. Not sure what's up with that.

Thanks for taking the time to drop by and reply to a lot of comments.

[saurik]

When I contacted modmyi about tracking my downloads, sales, etc, they told me that there was a Cydia web interface for that, but didn't tell me how to get to it. I emailed you about it in May and still haven't gotten a response.

I maintain that I have been relying on repositories (who compete with each other to be "the place" to list your package) to handle these types of support issues for developers. As for your e-mail, you certainly got stuck at the end of some infinitely long list of people who are looking for support on WinterBoard, because I no longer have effective e-mail triaging and lost my last two support guys.

(My current response to this has been to just redesign the entire concept of e-mail for myself: I am almost finished setting up a system where e-mails will all get databased and queried by an iPhone client that lets me play "e-mail triage: the most fun game you could ever imagine, see if you can get the next highest score!" during idle time. I am actually really excited by this, as e-mail triage either only getting done "every now and then" or simply driving people insane until they could no longer stand reading the e-mails were my issues with handling support, and while I seem to be immune to the latter, I need to get some actual coding and negotiating in somewhere, and therefore have needed a faster platform for doing it.)

Do you think it would be possible to make it sort by actual release date and time instead of the time my device refreshed and found the new package? One would think it would be possible for the repos to keep track of this to and report it to the device on a refresh, I do of curse not fully understand how cydia, the repos, APT and so on works but still just wondering.

Is this because you don't refresh very often? Is there any reason to care about the exact order? The goal of this was that, even if you added another repository, you'd always have a way to see "stuff I haven't seen before", which was the main/only use case I could come up with for such a sort (Changes is like the "dashboard" of Cydia: you open Cydia, go there, check for updates, then scroll down to the previous section, and close Cydia).

As for implementation details, APT doesn't track that, and right now neither do the repositories. Even if they did, I actually don't trust them to do this accurately, which led to another key design decision behind Changes: it must rely on no data from the repository. The reason for this is because Changes acts like a giant advertisement feed, and back in the days of Installer packages would get "bumped" to the top of the list in order to force people to see them again; repositories competed to see who could keep their popular package on the to, and the entire "sort by release date" feature was useless.

Now, Rock actually /could/ implement that feature, because they centralized repository updates, but even then the data isn't really "accurate", because they were just seeing the major refreshes from repositories. Like, if ModMyi pushes their repository at 2pm and BigBoss does at 3pm, but the packages in each were accumulated over the course of the previous 24 hours, do we really care what order those repositories went online? I just don't see the point.

What kind of help is it you would need for the Featured Applications page? Depending on what it is I would maybe be able/willing to.

What do you have installed on your device, and why is it awesome?

[Jeton]

So, I'm 25% Yugoslav, and I'm sorry to say I have no clue how to get money out of Macedonia at this time (but will bring it up to my newer payment provider partners).

Oh, that's an interesting fact!

Thank you for answering and thanks for the great work.

[saurik]

I do Jay but it says I'm Denied Access. Not sure what's up with that.

Thanks for taking the time to drop by and reply to a lot of comments.

:)

Your account is not linked to this mechanism, which normally happens when the repository in question sends me a Cydia Account ID to link you with. I managed to find a payment you made to me once, and used that store account to link your vendor account. This will give you access to some aggregate statistics in the form of a fancy chart on an otherwise ugly page (which will soon also have an even uglier way to hand refunds out like candy).

[jmabrams]

Looks like it is already screwed up. If you try to update intelliborn programs in cydia you get connection refused errors. You can not even install a bunch of apps now. Mass host unreachable errors also. Nice job on a smooth transition. NOT! Before you announce something you might want to make sure it actually works. How about getting apt.modmyi.com back online!

[TCcentex]

Less than six cents on the dollar is a pretty good cut, eh.
You seem to imagine that this is a pure-profit game. Developers get 70% and saurik takes home all 30%, and then pays for all of this infrastructure with love and ponies.
Hilarious, right? Do you have a spare ticket to this wonderful land?


The EFF did that. Sorry to tear down your idol.
I believe Mario certainly helped, but the heavy lifting was done by the EFF.


You have the reading comprehension of a gym sock.

Everybody loves to complain, but nobody likes to help.

i wasn't complaining, and I certainly don't believe this is a pure-profit game. I simply believe people should be compensated for their hard work and my comments were addressing the perception that this is a fully free-sharing community.

Mario is not my idol - I just get frustrated when people criticize Rock for a few issues when the majority of their work and presence in this community has produced positive results that helped us all.

Lastly, I'm man enough to admit that I was wrong and I, like many others do not claim to know it all and am in a constant state of learning. Your comments were rude and uncalled for.

[jonstar7]

Antman217 has an iPhone 3G but I only have an iPod 2g. WHY MUST ROCK DIE? I'm very sad