[mrblader]

It's been some time now, and I am getting pretty antsy about not being able to customize my phone with themes. I loved the original summerboard and the use of Customize.
And with the introduction of Winterboard it made personal themes a synch. The only problem is, Winterboard seemed to slow down my 2.1 FW. I dealt with it because I really wanted a springboard wallpaper.
But with the many improvements of performance and speed to FW 2.2, I was worried about slowing things down again with Winterboard on my fresh install of the new firmware.

Now, I have read that with the new 2.2 firmware came an newly written version of Winterboard, and that performance and speed was not affected as it was with the older Winterboard.

Is this true?

I know, all I need to do is just download it and try it for myself, but I would really like an OVERALL opinion and thoughts on these things:

Was there a noticeable difference in performance when first installed?
Does performance decrease with the more themes applied?
Do you have to restart your phone more often to speed things up?

Any and every thoughts would be Much Appreciated.

Thanks for reading,

MrB


P.S. Just to let everyone know, I am not trying to be critical of Saurik's application. There should be no doubt for anyone reading this that this is an amazing app. It is because of developers like Him, who put in countless hours into their own projects, that are gracious enough to let us "little people" enjoy their amazing creations.

[reyza]

It's still a little slower but not as bad as it once was. Just don't install too many widgets and you're good to go. I went without it before and I had to go back. You have much more fun with the phone if you can customize it.

[ksiphone]

for me the ability to personalize the phone is worth the nominal drop in performance/speed. also, with the introduction of sbsettings and the processes widget, you have the ability to kill applications that seem to stay open after they are used (safari, mail) which helps with memory and speed issues.

i would suggest installing sbsettings first and baseline your performance then install winterboard and apply themes rebenchmarking your memory usage. you'll be able to make a much more informed decision

[Mes]

Originally Posted by ksiphone

....I would suggest installing sbsettings first and baseline your performance then install winterboard and apply themes rebenchmarking your memory usage. you'll be able to make a much more informed decision

That's exactly what I did last weekend!! Used Pwnage, reinstalled everything 'except Winterboard and Backgrounder'. Did a base-line. Phone seemed very responsive. Then installed Winterboard, did notice a noticeable free memory reduction, but VERY LITTLE decrease in responsiveness. This leads me to believe the order of installation also can play a role in performance. JMHO

[cpjr]

Same here.....I think the minimal decrease in speed is much justified

[Zwayne]

Originally Posted by cpjr

Same here.....I think the minimal decrease in speed is much justified

^^^I concur....I haven't noticed much lag.

[brianmarocco]

I also have not noticed much. One thing that I did that might have made a difference, probably not, was that all system sounds that I wanted to change I just directly replaced that stock ones and did not use WB for that.

[Ad1tya]

It is just a bit slower, but just dont go overboard with your size of themes and no. of themes.
Eg. Dont have a active background, etc, youll be fine.

[Enkidu]

WinterBoard's amazing features definitely make up for the little lag it causes.

It's really not that big of a deal. Resprings might take a little longer, you might loose some seconds of your life here and there, but having your precious little buddy customized the way you like it defintly makes up for that. At least, that's how I see it.

Oh, and if you leave out .html backgrounds and lockscreens with a whole bunch of crap in them, I'd say you could hardly tell the difference in performance.

Also having too many other mobile substrate plugins will slow down your iPhone much more than WinterBoard does. So if you're worried about performance, at the moment, you should first of all make sure, you're being selective about stuff that uses mobile substrate.

But don't misunderstand me. I currently have the following stuff installed that uses mobile substrate and my phone runs without any problems at all (since I removed categories (Sorry BigBoss)):
-SBSettings, Winiterboard, Dock, Quickgold, Stack, Backgrounder, Five Icon Dock, Reflective Dock, mailtoattachment, iRealSMS & Notifier

Some of those (Quickgold!) are pretty heavy on the system, but after testing, and deleting lots of other stuff, that I had installed, this settup works without any of those lags, I've experienced before (in older FW's and with other apps (Categories, as I mentioned)). No panic attacks, no freezing screens, no extra long reboots, no safe modes. To be honest, the only app that crashes on a regular basis is Cydia.

Also note, that after testing out the memory usage and overall-performance of different combinations of apps and plugins, I restored with a fresh blank (incl. Cydia only) ipsw, using Pwnage Tool, setting the iPhone up as new, and then installed those apps I chose to keep.

I have around 30 (+-3) MB RAM available, with only phone and mail running in the back. Before the restore with a similar settup (few more mobile substrate apps), I had around 20 MB available. I had occasional app crashes and complete freezes (I think SBSettings was involved a bunch of times). After the restore those issues completly disappeared.

Also just fyi, I use a theme that includes: Lockscreen stuff (but no html), Springboard wallpaper and icons (150+), customized statusbar, loading screens, some app themes, UI sounds, keyboard, dialer and some other minor stuff. Actually this is a whole lot of stuff (most themes don't ahve all that), but like I said, I hardly notice any performance loss at all.

Conclusion: Don't worry, go for it! Other stuff that is around causes much more trouble than WinterBoard. Just set your priorities, decide what functions/features are important to you and leave out all the rest.

Good Day

[mrblader]

thank you for your detailed response Enkidu.... very much what I was looking for, I appreciate the time you put into your response!

Cheers,

MrB

[Enkidu]

No biggie, just trying to share something useful in a spot, where I find lots of useful things all the time.
Good to hear, you could benifit from it!

[ksiphone]

on a tip i got from another thread, i tried nate true's dock app. i was using quickgold and stacks instead of having pages of icons. i decided that although quickgold is a great app, i never used it to search for text and rarely used it to search for contacts. replacing the two aforementioned apps with dock, i was able to recover around 20+ mb of avail memory and have all my apps avail from within any other app. now, b/c of the newly released "clippy" i can copy text and quickly switch to another program to paste.

if you don't use quickgold to its fullest, i would suggest switching to dock. either way, i would suggest staying away from stacks if you are having memory issues. its a fun app, but not nearly as functional as dock in my opinion.

i also deleted 5 icon dock since i went with the dock app. now, after i reboot the phone, open sbsettings, i have about 60mb of avail memory (almost half of total 128!!) and about 40-45 of avail memory with sbsettings open. for my usage, this setup is much more functional and my phone hasn't crashed on me at all.

in the end though, install what you like keeping in mind you don't have unlimited resources with which to work.

[Enkidu]

Originally Posted by ksiphone

on a tip i got from another thread, i tried nate true's dock app. i was using quickgold and stacks instead of having pages of icons. i decided that although quickgold is a great app, i never used it to search for text and rarely used it to search for contacts. replacing the two aforementioned apps with dock, i was able to recover around 20+ mb of avail memory and have all my apps avail from within any other app. now, b/c of the newly released "clippy" i can copy text and quickly switch to another program to paste.

if you don't use quickgold to its fullest, i would suggest switching to dock. either way, i would suggest staying away from stacks if you are having memory issues. its a fun app, but not nearly as functional as dock in my opinion.

i also deleted 5 icon dock since i went with the dock app. now, after i reboot the phone, open sbsettings, i have about 60mb of avail memory (almost half of total 128!!) and about 40-45 of avail memory with sbsettings open. for my usage, this setup is much more functional and my phone hasn't crashed on me at all.

in the end though, install what you like keeping in mind you don't have unlimited resources with which to work.

Absolutely agreed. Choosing between functionality and style is something you'll have to do so many times. Going for stability is a third option, and basically means less functionality and style. You just have to find a balance between the three, that matches your priorities.

Of course there is stuff, that offers you more than one of the above listed.
Dock is perfect example for that. Works almost perfect (limitation of "Recent Apps" to only show those apps you launched from springboard), looks nice and yet is not a big threat to your system memory,

[illuminatty]

How do you do this? Can you list the directories and how to do this? I've been trying to figure this out forever.

I was talking about manually putting sounds on your phone without winterboard

[JAG2621]

How many threads are already on this topic?