It was just a few days ago that Jonas Gessner’s tweak Unfold was released, bringing to life Anton Kudin’s concept for a new iOS unlocking animation. In it, the familiar “Slide to Unlock” of Apple devices was replaced with a folding animation that gave the unlocking gesture a three-dimensional effect. It has been, without a doubt, a hit.

Now, a second tweak—from another developer who found inspiration in Kudin’s work—has hit Cydia: John Coates’ new Unlockize is now available for download. There are two immediate differences between the two tweaks. First off, while Unfold was released as a free package, Unlockize will set you back $1.99; however, that two dollars will net you a full half dozen animations as well as some other options and features Unfold doesn’t offer. I’ve tried both, and while I actually prefer the unfolding animation of Gessner’s tweak, it’s Unlockize that found a home on my device due to it’s other features—specifically, the “Blinds” animations, which simulate vertical or horizontal blinds behind opened to reveal your home screen:

(above: Jeff Benjamin’s review from iDownloadBlog)

It’s also nice that Unlockize allows you a bit more customization of the slider, slider background, and slider text than Unfold does. It’s still not easy with either tweak to fully customize—neither, for instance, seems to play well with custom sliders yet (both override them with their own arrows, although Unlockize at least lets you disable it entirely)—but it’s a small complaint for such a well-implemented tweak. Check it out now in Cydia’s BigBoss repo.

By default, iOS devices come with several statusbars: a black version, a silver version, and a translucent version. Which one you see depends on what you’re doing on your device; different apps use different colors, even within the default Apple apps that are installed on every device that ships. Blackout changes that, giving users who install it a persistent black status bar.

Responding to a demand from the jailbreak community, developer Adam Bell (the same developer behind the great Cover Flow like tweak Cascade) has released Blackout as a free tweak on the BigBoss repo. It requires no setup beyond the initial install. To give you a better idea of the change Blackout brings, consider these statusbars: the first is the default iOS black, which Blackout extends to all apps; the second, the default iOS silver. The third is another jailbreak option: my own BlackStatusIcons, a theme for Winterboard that, instead of switching that color of the statusbar, keeps the silver bar but switches the color of the icons to black. (That theme was designed with a goal similar to Blackout’s: to keep the statusbar design more streamlined and less candy-colored.) Finally, we end up with another look at the Blackout version.

Tweaks like this may seem like petty details, but to me they are a huge part of what makes the jailbreak community such an interesting place, and jailbreaking such a worthwhile practice. And above all they prove that no detail is too small to consider—sometimes it’s the smallest ones that make the biggest difference.

After several years of jailbreaking iPhones (and helping others jailbreak their devices), I’ve come to realize that Cydia—the third party app store that circumvents Apple’s lockdown on what can or can’t be installed on your iDevice—offers a lot of functionality that many users never explore (or were never aware of in the first place). Here, then, is a short list of some of Cydia’s most useful but overlooked features. Hopefully jailbreakers new and not-so-new alike will find something useful in them.

-Manage Account: Log into your Cydia account from the Cydia homepage with the Google or Facebook ID you used to buy your apps, and you’ll find

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