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I was almost throwing my ipod touch to the thrash can when my home button went out of business, and apple in my country said "is you ipod still under warranty?", I said "no" then "sorry, we cannot help you".
Anyway, I had heard about iHome (now called mQuickdo) and decided to try it, getting it from cydia, from the ispazio repo. At first, all I wanted was to get some button or gesture for the home action, getting to the springboard and getting to the music controls for volume and skipping songs, so I thought the software had a lot of clutter. After a day I decided to try all the other stuff that was there, and what was there that got my attention at first was the integration with backgrounder, theni the the integration with sbsettings and finally the app switcher. Ill be telling you what sold me about his app, the features i´ve used the most and why I think I couldnt use my ipod without it.
First off, you use the app by sliding your finger over a bar placed at the top, at the bottom of the screen, or both as you can set that on the preferences (if you place it at the bottom, you can slide it to the top without going to the preferences and changing its position, if it bothers you while, say, writing). You can also set the function of the slide, through some presets that are there, most of what you can do with the home and the power button. You assign actions for a long short, left or right slide, and it works perfectly. If you are worried about the sbsettings trigger, they both can coexist (I just do a short slide over the battery icon and the sbsettings window appears, and I didnt set any action for that, its donde by default).
Next, you can disable backgrounder for the current app, which is a must for me. I read and write with Tweetie so I copy and paste from the browser or the mail (with clippy), and sometimes read in Tweetie and use IMPlus (both have by default backgrounder activated), and when I want to shut those down I just do the gesture, something I thought lost with the broken home button.
Probably the feature that I would miss the most without this app, is the app switcher or launcher. You configure the action you do to bring it up, and you get the screen darkened and see a dock with 5 apps which you can put there and also the running apps. This is good if you a) want to change apps withoug going to the springboard (home) and b) if you wanna see how many apps are running (so the ipod/iphone dont go slow on you, then you can choose for respring in sbsettings if you wanna close all apps and have more free memory, or at least thats what I do). From there, you just tap the icon and you're in the app.
Besides the backgrounder option, you can assign a gesture to bring up a menu with some options, like music/volume control, go home, or close the current app. Lets say you were listening music and you have paused it, just to read something on twitter or the web. You feel your ipod/iphone is getting slow (the music app can slow you down with the use of memory/ram) you can use the app switcher, go to the music app and from there just quit it. I normally use that on the music app and mobile safari, that sometimes can et up memory if you left open some tabs on it. Nice function I thought lost as well, before I had to hold the home button for several seconds, and no I can´t.
I've used my ipod almost as a substitute for a laptop when im on the run, maybe that's why the home button committed suicide. If you wanna prevent that from happening, mQuickdo will do the trick, and if you have a broken home button this is a must! The new name is mQuickdo and its licence its just $8 (iHome now its basic home button functionality), small fee for big features.
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05-21-2009, 12:11 PM
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