How To Smoothen Out Cover Flow Animation In iOS 5 On iPhone And iPod touch

When you think of the strengths of iTunes, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, you may think Smart Playlists, Siri, Notification Center or maybe, just maybe, iCloud.

SmoothCoverFlow

You may not – in fact almost certainly won’t – consider Cover Flow, which is not only visually rather nice (providing your album covers are of a decent resolution), but makes it rather easy to browse through albums.

Problem is, it’s not always a smooth experience – particularly on the slightly older devices. Luckily, Cydia enthusiast deVbug has created a tweak which streamlines the Cover Flow slide.

The name? SmoothCoverFlow of course, and although it doesn’t affect the lockscreen album art display, the dev is working on that, and the next update should improve the Cover Flow experience throughout.

SmoothCoverFlow

As usual, it’s acquirable over at the BigBoss repository, and doesn’t cost a penny.

Please note, this particular tweak is only compatible with iOS 5, so you’ll have to upgrade your firmware in order to enjoy it.

Hopefully, an untethered jailbreak isn’t too far away for iOS 5. Apple has certainly tightened security in the past year or so, with the time between release and untether becoming increasingly sparse. The Chronic and iPhone Dev Teams have been plugging away, and we’ve seen promising exploits; but the advice is, if you do like the idea of an iOS 5 untethered break, stick with 5.0, which will most likely be the first iOS 5 to be fully pwned – if at all.

You also will need to be on a jailbroken iOS if you wish to install SmoothCoverFlow. For jailbreaking iOS 5 tethered using Redsn0w, you can follow our complete step by step guide posted here, or here if you want to use Sn0wbreeze on Windows. Since jailbreak on iOS 5 is currently limited to tethered boot only, you can install ‘SemiTether’ patch (instructions here) from Cydia to make your jailbreak semi-tethered on iOS 5. For those of you on iOS 5.0.1 can follow our instructions posted here on how to jailbreak using Redsn0w or here using Sn0wbreeze.

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