George Zhu’s BLOG

All these hacking tips are orginally posted by Ian Donaldson and Erica Sadun. They are gathered here to ease my local access.

Replace Current Time With Fake Text

To make SpringBoard show the fake time string on status bar, you need to add two properties (SBFakeTime and SBFakeTimeString) in:

/var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist

Set as following:

<key>SBFakeTime</key>
<string>YES</string>
<key>SBFakeTimeString</key>
<string>George’s Phone</string>

After SpringBoard restart, the status bar will be like this:

Hide/Show Icons by Double Tapping

First, add the following property into com.apple.springboard.plist:

<key>SBEnableAppReveal</key>
<string>YES</string>

Then add the following property into each and every Info.plist in /Applications/*.app:

<key>SBIsRevealable</key>
<true/>

Restart SpringBoard, most of the system applications’ icons will be invisible until you double tap the icon, double tap an visible icon can hide it. A screenshot of the SpringBoard:

There’re some exceptions:

1. Photo, Camer, and iPod will not hide
2. 3rd party applications’ icons will not hide initially (may need some more hacking in plist)
2. If an application is not listed in the M68AP.plist, its icon is visible after SpringBoard restart (you still can double click to hide it though)

Use iPod Dock on iPhone

The iPod dock looks slightly better than iPhone’s, to let iPhone show iPod’s dock, add the following property to com.apple.springboard.plist:

<key>SBUseNewDock</key>
<true/>

Restart SpringBoard to see its effect:

Use Custmized Carrier Text

This will replace the carrier name from AT&T to your customized string, add the following property to com.apple.springboard.plist (put your favorite text into <string></string>):

<key>SBFakeCarrier</key>
<string>CMobile</string>

After SpringBoard restart, the carrier text will become CMobile.

Show Numeric Signal Strength

Add the following property to com.apple.springboard.plist:

<key>SBShowRSSI</key>
<string>YES</string>

Restart SpringBoard.