Winterboard Updated

It has been a busy week for the jailbreak community. Last week we saw the release of Spirit, a user land jailbreak, for all Apple touch devices on their current firmwares, including the iPad. With the jailbreak of the iPad, we’ve had some of our core jailbreak apps updated, but in turn, broke some things on our iPhones.

At first, Winterboard didn’t work for the iPad, but when the update was released, we saw a few odd things on the iPhone. The undocked icon labels all turned grey, causing them to all but disappear with some themes that used a grey background. A fix for this, was to turn off “Summerboard” support, in the Winterboard settings, but that ended up breaking a bunch of other stuff.

So, what happened? Well, Saurik (creator of Cydia and Winterboard) posted some insight into the issue on Twitter. Here’s explanation:

iPhone OS 1.x, where SummerBoard existed, had gray icon labels. WinterBoard has /always/ grayed out icon labels for backwards compatibility. That said, some users say the new version of WinterBoard has suddenly started graying icon labels: that probably means it is working better. To minimize user pain, I will release a new version of WinterBoard when I wake up that comes with a theme that lets you force whited labels.

Ok, I’ve managed to find/fix a bug where some themes were getting forced gray icon labels in cases that were not required by SummerBoard. 🙁 (The in-Cydia website is much faster; finished some post-Spirit scalability work: >10 seconds to <1; still need to optimize SHSH displayer.)

At this point, a few updates have been released for Winterboard, fixing the few issues we have seen. I received a few emails, myself, saying all my themes were broken. All those issues should be fixed, with these updates to Winterboard.

Keep up to date with more jailbreak and Winterboard news, by following me on Twitter: @rorypiper. What the hell else are you gonna do with your life? 😉