[poetic_folly]

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 (and have used BigBoss's tool to move your apps folder to give you more space - that's in Installer also), 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.

[eternal]

hey,
i have heard that we have to manually add sources by editing plists unlike installer. also i want to know that does all the previous repositories work with this app.
thanks

[saurik]

Originally Posted by eternal

hey,
i have heard that we have to manually add sources by editing plists unlike installer. also i want to know that does all the previous repositories work with this app.
thanks

Cydia is a front-end for Debian APT. It is a completely different repository format that has been around for at least a decade (and as so is much more mature and supports many more important features than AppTapp). So, no, it doesn't support existing repositories, although various repositories (ModMyI being the first) are signing on for the new experience.

The source editor will likely be done in a week, but yes, in the mean time you can happily add sources by creating a file /etc/apt/sources.list with them. (By the way, if you do a Google search for sources.list, you get almost a million and a half hits. Debian APT is _seriously_ documented.)

[JoniB]

how do i uninstall cydia?

[Nettwerk]

Originally Posted by JoniB

how do i uninstall cydia?

rm -rf /Applications/Cydia.app

[kyteflyer]

So far so good. It will be excellent when other repositories move over to Cydia. Additionally, none of my existing apps seemed to need the old BSD subsystem so its all good

[shakazulu]

Great app. Like but I think it could become confusing for normal users.
But works like a charm and great work.

[prootZ]

I tried to installer Pianist through Cydia

It gave me this error
"Cydia subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 2"

Tried to reinstall, but I just used the allready downloaded file, and same error.
So either the package is corrupt or not working with 1.1.4 + cydia?

Also a good idea would be to enable us to redownload if the file could be bad even if it passed the check

[raptorjr]

Originally Posted by prootZ

I tried to installer Pianist through Cydia

It gave me this error
"Cydia subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 2"

Tried to reinstall, but I just used the allready downloaded file, and same error.
So either the package is corrupt or not working with 1.1.4 + cydia?

Also a good idea would be to enable us to redownload if the file could be bad even if it passed the check

Got that error too. And the same error when i tried to install ToDoList.
Cydia seems pretty cool, but so far i have never failed to install something through installer.

Also, would be nice with a reinstall button for installed apps, and i like the queue feature in installer, maybe something for Cydia?

Hopefully Cydia will become more popular because it has some great features that i miss in Installer.

[gionatapiga]

better than installer,no?

[JedixJarf]

O yes, better than installer. I would like to see this app replace installer soon.

[wePhone]

Originally Posted by JedixJarf

O yes, better than installer. I would like to see this app replace installer soon.

That wouldn't be good...at all.

[JedixJarf]

Originally Posted by wePhone

That wouldn't be good...at all.

Why?

[n0m0n]

Guess my only question is that I have learned that there is a 79 app limitation with 1.1.3.
If one adds Cydia would that allow for double the apps?
79 times 2?
Thanks

[gionatapiga]

i don't think.but cydia will have a ton of apps soon.
d'u seen the last version of open ssh(4.7) that's not available in installer?
hope that cydia removes installer once for all.warning.
don't upgrade bsd from installer.the installation of cydia provides to install the perfect version of bsd subsystem,that overwrite the old version.