One of the common modifications a lot of people like to do with a jailbroken iPhone is to change the look and feel of the dock. A person can remove or change the background blur, increase the amount of icons or even completely get rid it. Vinculum, by developer William Vabrinskas, adds a whole new dimension of functionality to the dock by tucking an Android-like app drawer neatly underneath it just a quick swipe away.

Within Vinculum there are a lot of options including hiding the grabber, changing the size of icons, and using a dark background which also changes your dock background. You can also set it to automatically activate search after swiping up, this makes it just like Spotlight and could replace it for some users. As with most jailbreak tweaks, users can customize the experience to suit their needs.

Vinculum was created to fulfill a request on Reddit and was initially going to be known by a different name, but was rejected due to possible copyright infringement:

“Well after Nexus was rejected for copyright infringement I looked up synonyms for Nexus and Vinculum was one of the ones that came up. I chose it for two reasons, it sounded cool, and it’s definition. Vinculum means “a connecting band of tissue, such as that attaching a flexor tendon to the bone of a finger or toe”. To me this was perfect because I was “stitching” together Android and iOS. I created somewhat of an organic connection between the two with this tweak so I thought it was fitting.

The idea for the tweak was actually a request on r/jailbreak”

With this tweak also comes the additional functionality of hiding apps from the springboard. This sort of goes hand in hand with the tweaks true use-case, by hiding most of your apps it makes you to look in your drawer for apps that you’ve hidden.

Hiding apps is easy, just press and hold on any icon like you would when moving apps and a little ‘hide’ button appears on the bottom right of the icons. To bring it back just head on over into Vinculum’s preference pane and re-enable the app you just hid. In addition, I should also add that hiding apps only hides them on the SpringBoard and not in the drawer itself.

I have been testing this tweak for William since he was calling it DockDrawer. It has came a long way in terms of stability and functionality while remaining true to it’s original intent. I haven’t fully integrated it into my day to day work flows, but it’s really nice to have tucked away when I need it, and I love that it provides a dark background blur for my dock.

Vinculum is $0.99 cents on the ModMyi repo in Cydia, go check it out today if you’d like to hide apps and have more functionality in your dock.

Josh also runs JailCast, a podcast dedicated to the world of jailbreaking that does regular in-depth episodes. You can back and support Jailcast over Patreon and via PayPal.

There are a lot of weather apps available on the App Store. They all offer a wide variety of features such as detailed forecasts, picture and video of local weather reports, and just about every weather metric one could think of. Bruhometer, by William Vabrinskas takes a slightly different approach to the this.

It’s an app that doesn’t take itself too seriously, hence the name and the fact that pretty much every sentence in the app has the word ‘bruh’ in it. He has a very organic inspiration for creating it, he and his brother were driving when they saw some clouds rolling in:

My motivations really stemmed from two sources. First was my brother and I were on a long trip heading to our family vacation and it was about to rain. You could see the dark clouds rolling in. I said to him: “I can feel the barometer changing, it’s going to rain pretty badly”.  He knows I use the word bruh/bro a lot and he combined bruh and barometer and said “You can feel the Bruhometer changing”.

That’s when the idea hit me. We started talking about different sayings involving the word bruh to describe the weather. It just went from there. Second, I just wanted a weather app that was entertaining but also straight to the point. No need to ask anyone how the weather is because the app tells in plain English how it is.

You can also tap on the little up and down arrows to toggle between Celsius and Fahrenheit as well as tap the little calendar icon on the bottom to bring out the 5-day forecast. Better yet, there’s an easter egg if you tap anywhere eight times or more, I’ll leave this one as a surprise for anyone curios enough to check it out. He has also included a Notification Center widget which is pretty handy and just as real about the weather.

There you have it, a weather app that grew out of a simple idea and tells you the weather how it is, in plain English. It’s a breath of fresh air with all of the other serious apps we see nowadays. Simple, elegant and funny. Bruhometer is a free app available on the App Store go check it out today if you’d like a little levity in your weather.

Return is a new tweak coming out soon by William Vabrinskas for $0.99 on the ModMyi repo through Cydia. Return will display the most recently opened apps above your Control Center for ease of access. Additionally, the tweak also allows you to clear them if you so choose. Every time you open a new app it will push the one at the very right out of the screen and shift the other three over to make room for the new one. It’s very simple and has a native feel.

There currently aren’t any options, but he’s got a preference pane and he plans on adding in some settings for choosing the amount of apps displayed, favorites and paging if it’s requested enough. I mentioned to him that it would be really cool if he could add in a button to go back to the home screen and he says he will look into it if people are interested in that enough as well. For now I made a home button shortcut with Polus to get me by.

Overall there isn’t much to Return — it’s simple, small and yet very effective for it’s intended purpose. William likes to use elements that are present within stock iOS and that lends a very vanilla feel to his tweaks. If you look closely at my screenshot you can see a familiar little “x” in the top right corner of the darkened view. It’s the same exact one that is in the Notification Center and does almost the same thing, except that it will clear the apps in the Return view rather than clearing your notifications. He’s also rounded the corners of the Control Center as well as the darkened view for aesthetics. As someone who doesn’t normally appreciate rounded corners in apps and things like that, surprisingly I really like how it looks here.

When he first sent me the alpha build I said something really dumb like, “Man, if you put some toggles and media controls in there you’ve got an Auxo competitor.” He came right back with, “Dude, they’re in the Control Center…”

This brings me to an interesting point — almost anytime there is a tweak that lets you quickly switch apps or really anything to do with toggles, etc. — people automatically start comparing you to Auxo. This is both a good and a bad thing. A3 Tweaks has basically become a main stream development team and the tweaks they produce become the standard that everyone compares everything to. In that spirit Return doesn’t really directly compete at all, it’s more of a conceptual competition. I could go into more detail about this, but I’d rather not rattle on about Auxo when I’m not reviewing it.

If you like simple, elegant tweaks and want to try something new you can actually jump in the public beta by adding William’s repo and downloading it for yourself. Just remember it’s in beta status and any issues you have should be taken as such. It would also be great to get some feedback about it as well. There are also some other things he’s working on in there that you may want to check out, just remember it’s all beta software so be careful! When it’s released it will be pulled off the repo and he will only continue supporting the paid package he releases to ModMyi. Additionally, the beta also won’t be quite as polished as the one he submits.

There will also be a little giveaway when he releases it and the details for that will be included in the comments of the Reddit post for this article.

Thanks for reading and I hope you like Return as much as I do!

After a really in-depth part one interview with William Vabrinskas, developer of Shade and many jailbreak tweaks, we’re now here with part two. Just as you guessed it, part two is just as good as part one, if not better. This time we’ve got more questions to go through, however, the interview is just as long and covers a wider range of topics. For those who may have missed part one, Vabrinskas went into a lot of detail to describe how he got started with programming, some of his first tweaks, and what inspired him. Those who want to find out more can also check out an interview he did with Jailcast about a month ago.

Question 4: Can you highlight any hurdles or things you had to overcome during development and how you overcame them?

The app itself was pretty simple to make the only real hurdle I had was issues with the app when it went into landscape mode. The instructional text on the startup screen would overlap with the tool bar on the bottom causing visual issues. I solved this problem by fading the text out when the app was rotated into landscape mode.

Question 5: Any plans for a lite version?

Currently I don’t see the need for a lite version as taking away a feature in this app would break its functionality. What I mean by that is every feature in the app is necessary for its core function. If there was to be a lite version I would maybe reduce the amount of colors you could save or remove the camera functionality and only allow the user to upload a previously taken photo, but again I don’t see this being feasible or necessary.

Question 6: Any other apps or tweaks you can talk about?

I have many projects in the works for release in Cydia actually. None of them are polished enough yet to talk about but I am working with icons again so look out for another SpringBoard modification tweak. I am also working on improving Boxy 2 by adding some new functionality to it. For example, the ability to place icons anywhere on the home screen grid, square icons, the ability to save custom layouts, and per page layout options.

Question 7: What do you like developing for more the App Store or Cydia and why?

While developing for each of them is basically the same, I really enjoy developing for the Cydia more. I have way more freedom when it comes to coding and the results are usually more satisfying. When I see something on the device that I want to change the research starts. I shuffle through tons of headers looking for the correct classes and methods to use in my tweak. Once I find everything, I begin building it. It is always an amazing feeling when your first respring your device after installing it and it just works. Nothing compares to that feeling.

Question 8: What do you think of paid versus free app/tweak upgrades?

It really depends on the circumstance. I know when I created Boxy for iOS 6 every upgrade was free. As soon as iOS 7 came out and it broke every function of Boxy, I had to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. It was essentially like creating a new tweak. So when I released Boxy for iOS 7 I named it Boxy 2 and charged $1.99 again for the tweak. No one really complained about it because it worked and brought much improvement from the previous version. Only in circumstances like this can I see the need for a paid upgrade.

Question 9: What are your opinions on piracy?

A lot of people will agree with me when I say piracy is bad. But I feel that in some cases piracy is useful. For example, it can be used as somewhat of a “trial” for a tweak. A user can try out a tweak they intend to buy before they use it. Quite frankly, as a developer, I like this idea because I don’t have to program in a trial version and I don’t have to worry about the hassle of refunding someone if they don’t like my tweak. Unfortunately this requires trust in the user that they will buy your tweak if they like it. This is not always the case and this contributes to the high piracy rates of most tweaks.

Question 10 How do you think developers can combat piracy, or how can the community as a whole help ward against it?

There is no way to combat piracy unfortunately. Implementing complicated or even simple DRM can cause major issues with user experience and force users to never buy from you again. Personally I just create quality tweaks that people want to buy and I provide the customer service to back it up. I feel if the user knows they can contact the developer and he/she will answer promptly they will feel more inclined to buy from you again. The community can help promote a tweak and its developer through reddit or other social media to prevent piracy from occurring. It’s the same concept as before, if the community sees that a user had an excellent experience with a tweak and the developer then others will want to support that developer as well.

As of now, that’s all we’ve got. Thanks for reading and be sure to check out William on Twitter.

I normally write a little summary before the interview to give the article a little more meat and to summarize that the developer said, but here William did such a fantastic job of writing his story in his own words that I don’t think I could add anything. One thing I can mention is that this is a slightly old interview that I actually spaced on publishing here for various reasons and since then he’s started working on a new tweak called Return. It’s a very lightweight tweak that essentualy just puts a row of your recently used apps above the Control Center. I’ll be previewing it really soon so stay tuned! Lastly, he also just released an app on the App Store called Shade so go check that out!

Question 1: Can you tell the story of how you got into developing?

Like many jailbreak developers I started out programming in high school (2005) on my TI-83 programmable calculator. The language, BASIC, was far from what I program in today but it laid the foundation for my passion for programming. I would use it program basic functions like solving the quadratic equation to more advanced programs with specialized “User Interfaces”. It paved the way for me and my interest in programming. When I graduated high school in 2009, I went to St. John’s University in Queens, New York where my major was in Pharmacy and then later to become Toxicology. Neither of these fields of study had anything to do with programming, but it was a still an interest of mine.

By this time I had been jailbreaking my iDevices for about 5 years but I didn’t really do much other than install and make themes and what not. I was not the avid jailbreaker I am today. My career in programming for the Jailbreak Community started early 2010 when a friend of mine was messing around on his laptop with a fake windows error popup generator. I thought that was a nifty little novelty but I wanted it to actually BE a popup and not just an image. I wanted it to popup when you clicked on internet explorer and have it say “You meant Chrome right?”.

So I did some research and found out these error messages could be easily programmed with a Windows script type called Visual Basic or vbs. I learned that a VBS script could be compiled as an executable file and then disguised as internet explorer. When I finally did that it intrigued me. I spent the next coming months learning visual basic and programming a variety of things. I actually developed a web browser code-named Napalm but it never came to fruition, it was more of a learning project for me. Visual Basic was nice but I was starting to gain interest in the jailbreak tweak section of Cydia.

I noticed all of these tweaks coming out, they were nice, but none of them were “exactly” what I wanted. I always installed the standard tweaks: Activator, SBSettings (remember this in the days before control center?) and Winterboard. I wanted more with my device and I wanted to be the one to control exactly what my device looks like and how it functions. This is how my endeavor into jailbreak developing began. I knew I needed a Mac to start work on learning this Objective-C programming language but I didn’t have the money to buy one, so I did the next best thing.

I had an old laptop and I installed OS X on it, at the time I think it was at 10.6. Now that I had OS X I could begin programming. I decided to take on a project that was very ambitious. I wanted to add an SBSettings type style control to the Media Controller on the lock screen of the device. I knew exactly ZERO about Objective-C and Theos but I took on the project anyway. To me it wasn’t too steep of a learning curve as Visual Basic has similar method calls to Objective-C but don’t get me wrong it was still days and even months of learning and fiddling before I got anything functional. Finally, after all my hard work I released my first Cydia tweak with ModMyI under the glorious not so specific name at all: Media Controller Brightness, here is the 1.0 release.

It worked and people liked it, in fact the 1.0 version has 2227 downloads and in total the tweak has 40,503 installs. This was impressive to me. Seeing this response really got me motivated to creating more and more the community. I went on to creating many more tweaks, such as:

1. Remove Slide Show Button (removes slideshow button from iPad, 27,065)
2. SMSConfirmation (tells you if your SMS has sent or failed to send, 114,924)
3. InstaURL (my first paid tweak $0.99, browse the internet from anywhere with an activator gesture)
4. QuickGesture (Paid $0.99, using activator you can quickly disable multitasking gestures)
5. Go2Now (free, launch a predefined URL using and activator gesture, 12,406)
6. QuickHide (free, hides the display when something is in close proximity to the device, 23,801)
7. Boxy/Boxy 2 (my very first “flagship” tweak. $1.99, rearrange icons on homescreen using presets or user configurations)
8. Sticky ($0.99, another “flagship” tweak, adds a sticky note to the lock screen)
9. Tabless (free, first ever iOS 7 tweak, removes the tabs from the lockscreen, 257,990)

My development skills still continue to improve to this day and I don’t think I will every stop contributing the jailbreak community. I love the thrill of a new release and I love to see people using my tweaks. I put a lot of work into them and respond to every email I get regarding my tweaks. I am extremely happy to have gotten into developing as it has become my passion.

Question 2: What inspired you to make Shade?

I couldn’t sleep one night and I was looking at the wall next to my bed and I thought to myself, “I wonder what color that is? There should be an app that tells me that”. I was already aware of the Benjamin Moore paint identifier app but I wanted an app that provided more information. I figured others would too.

Question 3: How long did you work on it?

Shade did not take me too long to get the core functionality. After 20 minutes of research I realized my idea was possible and I developed the core functionality in 3 hours in between my classes. It took 2 more weeks of beta testing and designing to get the UI exactly right.

With so much material to cover, we’ve decided to split this developer spotlight into two parts. So be sure to stay on the look out for part two coming later this week. In the mean time, be sure to follow William on Twitter for updates about his tweaks.