Dashboard X. First let me say that I probably wet myself when I first installed this. I thought that this would be one of those tweaks that are faulty and break everything it could. I was completely wrong about that. Dashboard X from Ori is the tweak of the month for me. Now iPhones can still beat Androids because of this. It’s putting widgets on your homescreen. Widgets designed for Dashboard X and for the Notifcation Center! It’s a simple process. You hold ANYWHERE on the homescreen, and it’ll go into wiggle mode. Then  you hold it again and something pops up. That something is the start of a whole new life for your device. It’s the place where you activate widgets. When you tap on one, you’ll have the choice of two options. 1 = Interaction & 2 = Auto Center. Interaction is if you want to be able to touch the widgets. Like if you are using the weather NC widget, you’ll be able to swipe on it and see the forecast if Interaction is turned on. Auto Center just adjusts the widget to the center. Though sometimes it’s off by the slightest much and it messes with you. (or at least me)

Dashboard X is $1.99 in Cydia.

BatteryInfo from Chef, is the best Notification Center tweak out there that deals with the battery. It has plentiful to show you and it’s amazing! It shows you your capacity of the battery, (factory and the condition now), tells you the temperature of the battery which is again amazes me. Then it has your load cycles and a lot more in it. It used to be a huge widget, would take up half of the screen, but they shortened it into a half of that and it’s so awesome. If I were you, I would totally buy this now.

BatteryInfo is $0.99 in Cydia.

Switchy. (from John Coates) The tweak that was imagined, has came to be.  Switchy was originally from a blog someone has posted. (which if I can find, I’ll post) and this person thought that the multitasking tray could have been improved much more if Apple could aim for other things. Someone made that happen a few days after. I personally thought that this would not be a tweak to happen in a long time. But I was proven wrong.  It pushes the multitasking tray up further for more space. The first section is basically settings with your Settings.app in there, Brightness bar, and a button for ending all apps. The next slide over is your music. It has the same buttons as before, even the sound bar. But now it shows you the songs name, artist and album name. Pretty neat. Slide over again and it’s an extended multitask tray. Instead of one coloumn, there are two. So that means you don’t need to slide as much to find that one app that is still running in the background. All in all, it’s an amazing tweak and I love it, oh so much.

Switchy is $1 in Cydia.

This isn’t the first price-comparison app to hit the market. Many people have been using RedLaser (or similar apps) for the last few years. Previous entries to this shopping-app category have mainly included barcode scanners, though, which allow users to scan the barcode on any item (or enter the name of the item manually) to search for lower prices at nearby establishments. And while this is certainly a handy program for the average shopper, the problem is that it still requires users to run hither and yon to collect products at the best possible prices.

NetPlenish, in a way, seeks to remove this element of effort from the equation. The app will save you both money and time by allowing you to order a bevy of products online (although you may initially scan items from your weekly shopping lists to easily recall them later). While you might not be too keen to have perishable items like meats, dairy products, and frozen goods shipped to your house, there are plenty of non-perishable goods that you can order online, securing the best prices and front-door delivery in the process.

Although you will have to pay a little extra for shipping, large orders may result in reduced or even free shipping (although it depends on the retailer). And the best part is, you don’t even have to go from site to site to compare prices; the app does it for you (making up for shipping by saving you on fuel). All you have to do is set searches for the items you want to buy, create shopping carts, and check out (the app will even store your credit card information to make ordering items as quick and painless as possible). Of course, it won’t do your couponing for you (and sites like FreeStuffandSamples.com are definitely not featured). But it can save you tons of time and money, which is sure to please plenty of consumers.

What’s interesting to note is that while this app has obvious appeal to consumers, there are also plenty of retailers ready to jump on board. They want consumers to know when they are offering the lowest prices to make sure increased sales, and NetPlenish can help them get that information to the public. So far, several big names have signed on, including OfficeMax, PetSmart, Sears, Sephora, and Target (among others). And with more retailers being added every day, you may soon be able to use this handy app to secure the best prices on nearly everything you purchase. So download this freebie from the iTunes Store or Android Marketplace post-haste and get started with saving.

NetPlenish
Developer: NetPlenish Inc

Rated: 4+

Price: free Download

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First up we have Giffy, a tweak that should have been added into the iOS itself, made from IanP. Lets back up a second. When you save a picture from Safari, it saves it in Photos.app. But when you save a .gif file and when it goes into Photos.app, it is only the still image. But with Giffy, it saves the whole “video”. There isn’t a play button to watch it play, it just plays as soon as you tap on the pictures icon. If you think this is stupid, think again. This is what makes jailbreaking iDevices fun and exciting, being able to do something you wanted it to do from the start.

Giffy is $1.99 in Cydia.

Next up is Auto App Killer from ipodtouchmaster. Auto App Killer frees up apps that are taking up too much memory. Let’s say you have a some apps open, and you are playing a game like COD:BOZ. The iDevice will try and free as minimal as possible, allowing the game to run on minimum RAM and not maximum. But with Auto App Killer you can choose and decide when the iOS will kill an app. In Settings.app, there is a slider for the tweak that allows you to choose when apps should be killed when the RAM gets low or at a certain point. It’s really great when you have a device that doesn’t have a lot of RAM to begin with.

Auto App Killer is $1.49 in Cydia.

Lastly is SwipeSelection from iKy1e. SwipeSelection allows you to use gestures on the keyboard. I have yet to find all gestures, (if there are more than one). But now editing on your iDevice just gotten easier than cutting pie with a coat hanger. You can swipe back on the keyboard and your cursor will move back also and put on finger on the keyboard and another swipes back and it will highlight that text. Pretty neat-o.

SwipeSelection is free in Cydia.

 Snap2PDF is a vital app for professionals and students as it helps them manage all their documents smartly. To convert your document to PDF form all you need to do is take a snap of the document. That’s all that is required. It is also possible to easily organize the PDF documents you have converted.

 Snap2PDF uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to scan your documents. It simply transfers the content from the document to your iPhone instantly.

 Here are some impressive features of the app:

1. Anti-shake function is available so that the best results can be provided
2. OCR technology to scan your documents
3. Smart recognition of text in 21 languages that include English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Dutch, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Romanian, Slovak and Swedish
4. Converted PDF documents can be shared via e-mail
5. File management is very simple. You can create categories for your converted PDF documents and group them accordingly.
6. Effortless scanning of multi-page documents
7. Built-in image enhancing function to give you images with clear definition and good clarity
8. Quick and easy document search through keywords, document name, description and OCR text
9. Image rectification and Gamma correction

 This app is available in the iTunes store for $1.99. You can download Snap2PDF here.

• The Weather Channel

The first app on our list is The Weather Channel. One of the most popular and useful apps available, it provides you with access to a wide range of information about the weather including the temperature, wind speed, humidity, the UV index, the dew point, and more for a given area. It also provides you with the hourly, 36-hour, and 10-day forecast so that you can plan the upcoming days well in advance. Other useful features include an interactive map with animated radar, the Social feature that enables you to read and post tweets about weather in your area, and the iWitness feature where users can view and upload images and videos of the local weather conditions. US users also receive notifications about severe weather alerts. Best of all, the app is completely free. The one complaint that users often report is that it has large, distracting advertisements, but dealing with such ads is worth it to keep such a useful app free of charge.

• Weather HD

Weather HD is next on our list due to its absolutely stunning visuals. Weather HD goes beyond giving you the basic information such as the current temperature, highs and lows, humidity, chance of rain, and wind speed. In addition to providing all of that, it takes advantage of the iPhone’s high-tech screen to present you with vibrant, high-definition videos that represent what the weather currently looks like in your area. If it currently storming outside in your area, the background of the app will be an HD video of a thunderstorm; if it is sunny and slightly cloudy, sunlight and clouds is exactly what you will see on your screen. In fact, these video representations are so accurate that they even represent the current time of day so that the graphics are lighter during the day and darker at night. The utter eye candy that this app will provide you is well worth the $0.99 you will spend on Weather HD.

• AccuWeather for iPhone

The next app on our list, AccuWeather for iPhone, is another free app that is very similar to The Weather Channel app. With AccuWeather, you can view the 15-day forecast for your area or an area to which you are traveling so that you can plan the next two weeks ahead of time. AccuWeather offers an enormous database of weather data with information on over 2.7 million locations throughout the world. Useful features include severe weather alerts, calendar integration, social sharing options that enable you to effortlessly share weather updates with your loved ones, interactive maps, and contact location viewing so that you can see the weather where any of your contacts live. In addition, AccuWeather is a must-have if you suffer from weather-related health issues such as allergies since it gives health-related forecasts. It will even let you know how suitable the current weather conditions are for outdoor activities such as walking your dog or mowing your lawn. The only issue that many users have reported is that the latest version, 5.0.1, has a somewhat cluttered interface.

• PocketWeather

Finally, the last app on our list, PocketWeather, is notable, not only for its extensive feature set, but also because it is available in a lengthy list of languages. Whether you speak English, Spanish, Swedish, Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, German, Hebrew, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Greek, Italian, or Danish, PocketWeather will satisfy your weather-information needs. The app is able to provide you extremely accurate information about the predicted temperatures, highs and lows, humidity, hourly forecast dawn, sunrise, sunset, zenith, precipitation, and dusk times for the upcoming ten days. Moreover, it comes with useful features including earthquake maps, temperature graphs, coverage of the sun and moon, and an up-to-date summary of the weather conditions in your area at the moment. PocketWeather is another free app that provides you with much more information than the iPhone’s built-in weather tool.

The App Store is loaded with weather apps, and we have picked out four of the best for your convenience. After reading our review simplify your life by heading over to the App Store to download the one that best suits your needs.

Thanks to John Page for this guest post. E-mail him.

Read more:

• How to connect your iPad to the TV: Different methods – http://www.softwarewithstyle.com/guides/16
• iPhone battery life – http://www.softwarewithstyle.com/question/show/id/34
• 10 Useful, little-known facts about the iPhone – http://www.softwarewithstyle.com/guides/12

With this app, students losing homework and blaming the dog for eating it could come to an end. Using Three Ring, teachers can easily create a digital portfolio for each student where they can organize, grade, and share all assignments. The app, in conjunction with Three Ring‘s website, allows teachers to take either a video recording or a picture of student’s work using a phone or other device and then upload quickly and easily onto the website. Basically, it’s like an online filing cabinet where a teacher can keep track of all student work. It eliminates the possibility of a teacher losing an assignment in the depths of the filing cabinet and keeps the students’ work front and center, where it belongs.

Using a digital portfolio would provide a more efficient grading system and help both teachers and parents track a student’s performance. Still in its beta stage, the app seeks more seed funding but that hasn’t stopped it from making a name for itself already in the world of education. Last week Three Ring earned the award for Best Education Startup at New York Tech Day. Launched only six weeks ago, nearly 2,000 educators in Maryland, New York, and Delaware are using the app. They hope to make it available for parents, teachers, and administrators in the near future. Students would be able to turn in homework assignments digitally and the teachers could send a student’s assignments with feedback straight to the parents.

The creators, Steve Silvius, Alec Turnbull, and Michael Lindsay, education reform enthusiasts, say their goal was creating an easier way to maintain and organize student portfolios since portfolios are powerful teaching tool but can be burdensome to manage.

How the app works is the teacher first snaps a picture or video of a student’s work, tags the work with the correct student name, assignment, type of assignment and how that assignment meets any of the common core standards. Then the teacher sends it to Three Ring‘s website and has access to it at any time from a computer or Internet-capable device.

The teacher has a choice of how they organize their students’ portfolios and can search the work either by class or by student name. They can group assignments together and label them however is easiest for the teacher to later search those assignments. They don’t have to sort through a mess of papers to find a specific assignment to grade and comment on, they simply have to search it on the website.

The creators hope to sell the app and website service to any schools who want to use the Three Ring system. However, Linsday made it a point to say that he and the fellow creators don’t mean for this app to replace handwritten assignments; it’s more meant to help teachers organize all those assignments and lessen their load they have to take home each night. It also is a digitized record of a student’s performance in the class making it very easy for other teachers, administrators and parents to track how a student is doing all around.

It can take hours to create your own filing system and then tons of effort to maintain that system. Three Ring makes filing and organizing student work easy and less time consuming, which, in the life of a busy teacher, would make a world of difference. Rating: 4/5 stars.

Editor’s Note

Thanks to Evan Fischer for this quest post. He is a freelance writer and part-time student at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California.

Three Ring
Developer: Alec Turnbull

Rated: 4+

Price: free Download

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The new and improved app supports most blogging platforms including WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, Type Pad, and Drupal but has been reported as most compatible with Blogger and WordPress. Featuring much easier ways to include links, pictures, videos, and a rich text mode to allow you to preview your posts, Blogsy makes it possible to blogging very user-friendly with an iPad. It also allows rich text formatting by simply highlighting the text and selecting the format you want from the tool bar.

Creators claim that Blogsy is better than the other options out there, including the perfectly adequate WordPress app, because it was created with a touch interface design in mind. Blogsy‘s new integration with Picasa, Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo makes for quick photo and video uploading. With the “drag and drop” feature in Blogsy, you can easily get content, pictures, text, and videos into a post by simply dragging it from any website and dropping it into your blog posts.

With Blogsy, users can also write and send emails with rich text formatting. So for blog platforms that allow email-to-post posting, Blogsy will still be useful for bloggers on sites not yet supported by the app.

For WordPress users, Blogsy might just become their new best friend. In a WordPress blog you can create and edit an HTML or visual version of posts using your iPad. Blogsy also grants users full access to the WordPress Media Library API, so the app includes support for Custom Fields and Featured Images. With one of WordPress’s thousands of themes and your iPad, you can create and run a beautiful and professional blog even when on the go thanks to Blogsy. In an ElegantThemes review, a user claims the extra money for a premium theme is well worth the one time payment if you’re truly passionate about blogging and since Blogsy only costs $5 from iTunes, you’ll have plenty of cash left to invest in of those premium themes.

Blogsy is sure to be only the next step in blogging technology. With several platforms to choose from and within each platform, so many different choices, the world of blogging doesn’t seem likely to disappear anytime soon.

The CEO of Blogsy, Lance Braton, said he and his crew created the app because as bloggers themselves, they were fed up with the other options available. They grew tired of still depending on their desktops or laptops for content management when creating blog posts from their iPads. They saw what a powerful blogging device an iPad could be with a more user-friendly app and voila, Blogsy! Rating: 5/5 stars.

Editor’s Note

Thanks to Evan Fischer for this quest post. He is a freelance writer and part-time student at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California.

Blogsy
Developer: Fomola

Rated: 17+

Price: $4.99 Download

While most people will likely begin by creating their own lists, the app does provide categories to help you get started (bread, condiments, dairy, etc.), and they’re arranged in alphabetical order for convenience. From there you can simply add specific items to each category (wheat bread, English muffins, and bagels under the “bread” heading, for example). And with the barcode scanning app you can even add some of your favorite items directly to the list as you shop, both to tally up the bill before you get to the checkout and to save for future reference. Like most barcode scanners, this feature will not recognize some items (those that shop at national chains shouldn’t have any problems, but anyone who frequents Trader Joe’s likely won’t have much luck with this function). In any case, items that are scanned can be added to your favorites list for selection at a later date (like next week’s trip to the grocery store).

Oh, but it gets better. Have you ever come home with a gallon of milk and a carton of eggs only to realize that your spouse had the same idea (and now you have more than you can reasonably use before the items spoil)? If you both download this free app you will never have this problem again. It allows for lists to be shared and synchronized. So if you’re at the store and your partner can’t get through to you (the ringer on your cell is set to silent again), he/she can simply populate your list with additional items and they’ll pop right up while you’re walking around the store.

Not done yet. You can also add notes to specific items (like when you find them for less at another store) and you can even create separate lists for different stores to stay organized. And the app can sort your list by aisle (rather than item name) to make sure you don’t have to double back needlessly as you wind your way around the store. As if that wasn’t enough, it even lets you know when there are coupons available to print out for items on your grocery list. Of course, unlike RedLaser it won’t inform you when something is available for less at another store, or if it contains common allergens. But you can easily add these notes on your own. And with all of the extra functionality, Grocery iQ beats the competition hands-down.

Editor’s Note

Thanks to Evan Fischer for this quest post. He is a freelance writer and part-time student at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California.

Grocery iQ
Developer: Free State Labs, LLC

Rated: 4+

Price: free Download

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In fact, there are a plethora of apps for your iPad when it comes to making lists, managing time, and getting organized. Some are free but offer only limited features and functionality (Wunderlist, Evernote, Errands To-Do List, etc.) while others come with all the bells and whistles that the thriving entrepreneur could possibly want, but at a cost that is fairly steep for an app (such as Things for iPad at $19.99 and OmniFocus at $39.99). So it seems you’re either sacrificing functionality or dropping a ton of dough (unless you decide to download several free or inexpensive apps that can deliver all of the features you’d get in just one higher-priced application).

However, there are a couple of middle-of-the-road options that can offer the many features you crave without the ones you don’t really need at a price that is eminently affordable. And Toodledo seems to consistently rise to the top of the list. At $2.99 it matches the price of Tisk Task, an app that lets users create and populate lists, set priorities and due dates, and even add notes, but which has suffered from navigational issues and an apparent difficulty when it comes to deleting lists. Taska is another good option (at $4.99), and reviewers note that it’s very user-friendly, but some have also said that it’s a little too simple and that there are issues syncing it with an iPhone.

Toodledo, on the other hand, offers syncing through their website so that you can use both your iPhone and iPad, whichever you happen to have on hand. The format is easy to use and understand with all kinds of options for customization. You create multiple folders and assign tasks to them; set priority, duration, due date, and so on; take notes on a notepad or attach them to a specific task; copy, paste, and set certain tasks to repeat on a schedule; set reminder alarms or start and stop a timer to track your work (no more relying on http://stopwatch.onlineclock.net); pin tasks to a map so you can plan a route or squeeze things in wherever you are; password protect your tasks; and much more. The list goes on and on (fitting, really, since it is a listing app). So if you’re looking for a task manager that will deliver the features you need on your iPad at an incredibly low price, Toodledo could have you saying goodbye to all the rest.

Editor’s Note

Thanks to Evan Fischer for this quest post. He is a freelance writer and part-time student at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California.

Toodledo - To Do List
Developer: Jake Olefsky, LLC

Rated: 4+

Price: $2.99 Download

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Curiosa, a tweak that we all have been waiting for, is out in Cydia. Curiosa gives Cydia notifications of when tweaks have been updated. But behind the scene, it actually refreshes Cydia and updates the database. So next time you go into Cydia, it will be updated with all new stuff including updates just as it was if you were in Cydia and refreshed it yourself. There is a price to pay. You cannot find this in Cydia’s own Repos, you will have to manually add the new repo yourself. The new repo is http://rpetri.ch/repo/ and you just add that and search Curiosa and you can now install it!

Curiosa is free, but in a different repository.

This isn’t new, but its update just fixed everything that was messing it up before. Winterboard is a theme software that “masks” icons, lockscreen and various others to do different stuff and is all reversible. I’m sure that a lot and 99.99% of all jailbreakers known about Winterboard so I will not go into it as much. Winterboard is really great now, it’s fast, easy and there are a ton of themes out in Cydia and is awesome to see all these themes being applied!

Winterboard is free in Cydia.

Sorry that there aren’t a lot of tweaks this week, but we should be back in schedule next week. Thank you for reading! Follow me on Twitter: @pfoa_foozelz and @foozelz.