SBSettings and other Cydia apps that run in the background aren’t designed to make your system slow. But they do. Ford Pintos weren’t design to blow up when hit from behind. But they do.

It’s sad that the makers of Bossprefs have abandoned all development of this simple little program that allows you to open it to turn settings on or off, without if having to run in the background and slow your performance down. Turning wifi on or off doesn’t work on OS 3.0 and the developers laugh at the idea of anyone wanting them to fix it. Their attitude is “You idiot, why are you using Bossprefs, you should be using our SBSettings program you retarded little monkey you.”. So Bossprefs is kinda’ useless for turning things on or off, but there are other uses for it.

So what are some of the benifits to Bossprefs? Well I’d like to start by pointing out the benefits of SBSettings, and to point out that the poor little orphaned Bossprefs does the same things for you.

Bossprefs / SBSettings can;

• Hide icons; gotta’ icon that you don’t want to see anymore (Stock app, Contacts app), you can hide them
• Customize which buttons / toggles are displayed on the app page
• Add the iPhone 3GS’s numeric battery display to your iPhone / iPod Touch (i.e. “47%” next to your battery icon)

There’s a lot Bossprefs does that SBSettings also does, so if you need any of those functions (hiding programs or displaying the battery percentage), get Bossprefs instead of SBSettings.

There’s a funny quote I came across from a forum user from Tokyo named “mavis” in response to the SBSettings fan boys, and where he / she says

I really wish I had one those magical iPhones that doesn’t slow down when it runs out of RAM due to stuff like MobileSubstrate running! You guys are really lucky to have phones with plenty of RAM!

No matter what anyone says, people who are running jailbroken apps in the background, like SBSettings, will have a slower iPhone. Don’t believe me? I have actually been around people who had jailbroken iPhones, like the Neocell 2G was (before I had the Neocell 3GS)… but that’s where the similarities ended. Their iPhones would be slow as dirt compared to mine. When I’d ask’em, “Dude, how can you put up with the lag?”, you know what their answer was? “I didn’t realize it had gotten so slow.”. And you know, these are the same people who are saying “SBSettings doesn’t slow down your iPhone…” and “I run apps like SSH and SBSettings and I’m just as fast.”. …You see what I’m sayin’?? A lot of these SBSettings fan boys people aren’t “liars”, they just don’t realize, or are in denial, of how slow their iPhone / iPod Touches are.

One guy, my age, that I meet at T-mobile while paying my bill, was a jailbroken and unlocked iPhone 2G, like I was, and was clearly embarrased by the lag of his jailbroken iPhone compared to mine (he didn’t have Winterboard installed, but had SBSettings, SSH and who knows what else). His excuse for being slow? “Oh… oh… let me reboot… That’s why I’m slow, I’m faster when I reboot.”, this guy, a self-proclaimed active member of jailbroken forums, was speaking to me in a rude “Yeah, I know what I’m doing, you don’t” tone about SBSettings. I said to him “You’ve gotta’ reboot just to ‘fix’ your speed? Dude, I don’t ever gotta’ reboot my ****, I’ll reboot maybe once a week.”. Once he booted up (after like five minutes, it was nuts), he was faster. “See? SBSettings, SSH, it’s all good… Nice and quick.”. I grinned and said “So yeah? Let me open somethin’ real quick…”. On his iPhone (which was in a cheap, $0.2 rubber case), I opened Safari, loaded a page, then opened his iPod (didn’t play anything, just opened it), then opened his email, then hit the home button (when you reboot, Safari and iPod aren’t running in the background). I told him, grinnin’ again, “Do what you were just doin’ again now…”. He looked at me sheepishly, like he realized I knew a lot more about iPhones than I lead on. When he went to open an app or swipe through home screens, there was that classic lag.

I said to him, “Wow… my iPhone’s been runnin’ for four days now without a reboot, and yours has been running for what… two minutes now, and already there’s lag.”. I said to him “It can’t be because of SSH or SBSettings running, now could it?”. He muttered “Uhh…” and before he could find a response, I said “Na, you probably just need another five minute reboot…” and I, showing how much I appreciated his snobbish rude attitude earlier, said “but I don’t got time to wait around for you to reboot, I gotta’ pay my bill.” and left him be. People like this are the ones responding in forums like this.

In the end, though, don’t take my word for it. If you wanna’ use SBSettings, go for it. It’s important for you to form your own common sense and screw this groupthink mentality most people have.

Peace, J

But here’s what you need to know… there are some blogs online that are calling Pinchmedia spyware. Why are they sayin’ it’s spyware? They’re sayin’ it’s spyware because it sends back information about you to Pinchmedia, which then shares it on with the developers. The information they collect is your iPhone model, OS model, location (if you agree to allow the app to know your location), and if you happen to have the Facebook app installed, it access the Facebook app to find out your age and gender.

The app developers don’t ask your permission to collect information, and that’s the reason why some (I repeat, some) people online are claiming that it’s spyware. Their main smoking gun in calling this “spyware” is the fact you can’t “opt out” of the tracking.

Well I’m here to let y’all in on a little secret… it ain’t spyware. It ain’t. It’s not tracking where you go online, what you shop for, what search trends you use, what information you you type out… it’s not. “But it tracks where you are based on your GPS location…!” So ironic, because the very blogs and forums cryin’ bloody murder are tracking YOU! They’re tracking where your logging in from, down to the city, they’re tracking what operating system you use, what browser you use, what language you use, what connection your using (cable, DSL, ect), how long you’ve spent on the site, whether you’re new to the site or returning, what search engine terms you used to find the site, whether you “bounced” as soon as you came to the site, ect… Oh, and they don’t ask your permission to track information about you… or any of their other visitors, and they don’t give you any way to “opt out” either. In fact, I’m tracking you… But it’s not spyware, it’s Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a great, free service from Google that helps web site developers, such as bloggers (yo), track the usage of their web sites. Hmm… sound familiar? This is the same thing Pinchmedia is doing with apps that Google Analytics is doing with web sites. There’s ways to block Google Analytics so that web sites can’t access data from you… but ohh, I don’t see any of these web sites that cry “fowl” showin’ you how to do it. Why? Because Google Analytics is harmless. That’s the same for Pinchmedia. Why do you think so many apps have signed up for their free service? Same reason so many web sites have signed up for Google Analytics.

Google Analytics helps web site owners see what they’re doing right, what they’re doing wrong and helps them try to analyse what they can do to improve. And Pinchmedia helps app developers see what they’re doing right, what they’re doing wrong and helps them try to analyse what they can do to improve. I do admit the connecting to the Facebook app to access your age and sex is very disturbing (it’s done through Facebook Connect, which Pinchmedia explains here), but you know what? The very fact of having a Facebook account opens you up to that already because Facebook sells your data (age, sex, location, trends, ect) to companies, and do you honestly think  no one who cries “bloody murder” about Pinchmedia doesn’t have a Facebook account themselves (perfectly fine with whatever Facebook is doing to their data, as long as they get to post retarded crap on their “friend’s” walls).

So no… Pinchmedia isn’t spyware. It’s just another form of user statistic tracking. Google Analytics is a great, free tool for me and thousands of web sites out there. I’m sure app developers think the same thing about Pinchmedia, especially considering it’s free. If you don’t like user statistic tracking and wanna’ take a stand against it, then stop visiting the very blogs giving you this information, including using the Cydia app or jailbreaking your device.

That’s right, the Dev-team blog uses Google Analytics. As well as Cydia, the jailbroken app store that we get tools to block Pinchmedia, the home page that the Cydia app access every time, cydia.saurik.com (created by Saurik, the same person who creates the Pitchmedia blocking software), contains Google Analytics. And for the recording, Saurik doesn’t call Pinchmedia (or other companies like them) bad, he’s just allowing you a way to “opt out”. Not to mention theneocell.com does also.

And as for the “iPhone Spyware Blog”, well shoot… it’s a blog hosted at blogger.com, a Google-run service, which is they truly were against analytics tracking, they wouldn’t have signed up for a service that runs the biggest analytics service in the world and would have gone to something like wordpress.com for free blog hosting. In reality though, I’m sure the person doesn’t know anything about analytics tracking and signed up for a Google-owned Blogger account to try and catch in on their 15 minutes of manipulated, misinformed “iPhone spyware” fame. (After all, it worked, didn’t it?)

People need to stop miscategorizing iPhone app analytics as “spyware” because it’s either gonna’ do two harmful things to the public’s perception of things. It’s either gonna’ make people think “spyware” is not something harmful or bad, because Pinchmedia is no more bad or harmful than Facebook or Google Search (no more than your typical public activist’s caution of your privacy), or people are going to start thinking iPhone apps from the app store are in fact harmful or bad (the definition of actual spyware), which is wrong for anyone to be misinformed like that.

Don’t be fooled. Don’t take my word on it, or any others, use your own common sense.

Peace, J

(And just to show some realness on my part, I’m gonna’ show you how you can opt ouf of Google Analytics.)

I included some screen shots of the process of installing Cydia. I’m fully jailbroken now and runnin’ with a brand new iPhone, The Neocell 2.0, and now I’m runnin’ on America’s fastest network. Freak yeah. I got me a lotta’ customization hacking and other goodies to try out. Hello Backgrounder…

Peace, K

Peace, J