Ask any seasoned jailbreaker and they will be able to tell you that the Cydia Store is literally jam-packed full of themes and aesthetic customizations which are designed to make an iPhone or iPad look as different as possible from the native iOS look. This isn’t because designers believe there is anything wrong with the visuals in iOS per se, but jailbreaking is about the freedom to alter and change the way a stock iOS device looks and behaves, and producing themes is one way to drastically do that.
Up until March of 2011, the majority of theme creators took advantage of Jay Freeman’s WinterBoard application to execute their themes, but developer Andrew Liu set about a change with the release of his DreamBoard application into the Cydia Store. DreamBoard exists as an advanced theming platform which takes entire control of the device’s SpringBoard and lets users take almost total control over placing widgets and apps effectively, removing the limitations which existed through traditional theme methods.
DreamBoard has plenty of options when it comes to visual choice and even had its own ‘Dreamstore’ for a while until it closed down for reasons unknown to us. While the dedicated store no longer exists, themes and aesthetic modifications which are compatible with DreamBoard are still available through Cydia which got us wondering just what was available. With Windows Phone gaining in popularity and receiving accolades for its beautiful, Metro user interface, we decided to see what the options were in DreamBoard to make an iPhone mimic the Windows Phone look.
Metro By Rigaton1
The Metro DreamBoard theme was one of the first complete, Windows Phone/Windows 8 inspired themes. The theme itself consists of twenty one tiles with two animated ones, and no external setup required, eleven different color variations without the need to respring the device. The Metro theme also includes a powerful RSS reader which updates in real time with animations, and features the usual things you would expect, like the choice of a 12 and 24 hour clock as well as easy access to all installed applications. Metro also features a clock, weather and calendar widget which are integrated into the setup and is extremely memory friendly due to the way the pages are dynamically loaded. Metro is available through the Themeit application for $1.99 and although it claims it is not compatible with an iPhone 4S, we simply checked the ‘Force Install’ option through the Themeit options and it works perfectly fine without issue.
OS7 by Andrew Lui
OS7 is a DreamBoard compatible, plug and play theme which which benefits from the auto creation of home page tiles as well as an alphabetical list of installed applications. The Start menu which is set up on the main screen is highly customizable with users being able to ‘pin’ applications to the screen which appear as Windows Phone tiles. The OS7 theme requires no access to any paid plug-ins, is entirely free of charge and runs independently from WinterBoard. One of the downsides of standard WinterBoard themes is that they are generally missing some icons, this does not occur with OS 7, with every icon being generated automatically as a tile.
Metro 8 By Rigaton1
Metro 8 is a beautiful Windows Phone theme for DreamBoard which comes with a basic theme setup, or an alternate advanced theme for those who want a little bit more. The home screens are scrolled horizontally and contain individual headings which distinguish between sections. Each section animates beautifully with its own individual background and contains different applications selected from your already-installed software. Keeping in with true Metro UI style, the Metro 8 applications allows for both horizontal and vertical scrolling which takes the user to different screens and offers different features. Both the basic and the advanced theme come packaged together from the Themeit store at a cost of $2.99.
The three themes mentioned above are a small number available for the DreamBoard platform, with Cydia housing plenty, as well as the standalone Themeit application. For those that aren’t familiar with Themeit, it is a separate app store totally independent of Cydia which houses only themes for DreamBoard and WinterBoard. You can get the Themeit application by adding http://www.themeitapp.com/repo as a Cydia source, then download the application free of charge.
For jailbreaking iPhone 4S and iPad 2, you can simply follow our step by step guide posted here to jailbreak iOS 5.0.1 using Absinthe on Windows or Mac. For those of you with iPhone 4, 3GS, iPad 1, and iPod touches can use Redsn0w or Sn0wbreeze to untether jailbreak on iOS 5.0.1.
You may also like to check out:
- Try Windows Phone 7.x Mango On Your iPhone Or Android Phone Right Now!
- OSFaker Brings Android and Windows Phone 7 To The iPhone
- Turn Your Android Phone Into A Windows Phone 7 Device With These Apps
Be sure to check out our iPhone Apps Gallery and iPad Apps Gallery to explore more apps for your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
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