LockScreen Lab is an iPhone app that lets you design custom Lock screens that can include important information like a calendar, contact info, to-do list, and your blood type. This is great for people who have a passcode setup on their iPhone, or if you just want to make it easy for someone to contact you when they find your iPhone.

There are four different types of objects you can add to your design: contact information, to-do list, calendar, and text box. For all objects you can adjust the color and opacity.

For contact information, there are 4 different styles to choose from -- two horizontal ones (one with one line, another with two), one that's a corner banner, and the fourth is actually a way to display your blood type and looks like a red liquid drop.

Text boxes allow you to adjust the font size, alignment and opacity. The todo lists are kind of neat, but you have no control over their size. There are 4 different looks for your lists: check boxes (that can be checked/unchecked), bullets, stars, dashes, and Apple symbols.

Lastly, there a four different calendars to add to your lock screen backdrop: two vertical ones and two horizontal ones.

One thing I noticed about the objects is that you cannot adjust their size. For example, in my Lock screen, I have my email address on the bottom and a calendar on the left. They are both designed to be full length/width, so the banner with my email address overlaps with calendar making it so I can't see one of the days. I'm a little OCD with stuff like this, so the overlap is drying me nuts.

The Good

• Easy to use
• Includes great little objects
• Customization for colors and opacity
• Access to Photo albums

The Bad

• Can't adjust the size of objects

The Conclusion

LockScreen Lab is great app for creating custom wallpapers for your Lock screen. I had never considered including information like my blood type and an emergency contact, before, but since I have my iPhone setup with a passcode lock, I'm going to always make sure I include this information from now on. LockScreen lab makes this easy to do.

$1.99 - Download Now

Lock Screen Designer is a great little app for creating custom wallpapers for you lock screen. It's filled with skins, frames, and decorations that you can combine with photos to create something that reflects you.

One of the disadvantages to the iPhone is that Apple doesn't allow much personalization to the look, but a couple of areas that they do permit such customization is with the home screen background and lock screen. Lock Screen Designer will help you make the latter truly unique.

To create your lock screen, first choose a skin, which is the background of your design. You can do this by scrolling through them one at a time, or you can pick from the thumbnail view. Then you choose a frame and add a photo and decoration if you wish. Included with the decorations are sticky notes with customizable text and calendars. When complete, you save the image to your Camera Roll and assign it as your lock screen wallpaper.

The paid version of Lock Screen Designer includes additional skins, frames and decorations (including calendars) that can be downloaded from inside the app.

Free - Download Now

$0.99 - Download Now

Slider Pro is a lightweight but useful jailbreak mod in Cydia that lets you customize the slide to unlock text on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. It comes with a handful of great presets including adding the date and time to your lock slider. Time and date are available in a number of different formats. If you'd just like to add custom text to the slider, you can do that as well. Once installed you can just pop into your general Settings app and customize it from there.

If you're looking to add functionality to your lockscreen but don't want to overload your jailbroken iPhone with too many tweaks and mods which may conflict with each other or just bog down your device, then this may be the way to go. It's especially convenient if you have an app like IntelliscreenX or LockInfo and want to hide the lock clock to create more room for additional widgets. It'll allow you to use space that's already there in a more efficient way.

Slider Pro is already available in Cydia and will run on any iOS device running iOS 4 or higher. If you're looking for even more tweaks and utilities to install, check out our guide to the best jailbreak applications for iOS 5.

• Free - Cydia Link

More jailbreak resources:

• How to jailbreak guides
• Jailbreak apps, hacks, and themes
• General jailbreak and unlock help forums

Lock Screen Weather is a clever app that allows you to display local weather information and graphics on the iPhone Lock screen without requiring a jailbreak.

• Current weather conditions on your Lock Screen
• Optional five-day weather forecast displayed below current weather
• Tens of thousands of cities around the world supported
• Current weather and forecasts updated automatically and according to where you are (optional)
• Background sounds captured right in the nature (optional)
• Both Fahrenheit (℉) and Celsius (℃) scales supported
• Originally designed graphic assets reflecting every significant weather change

The way it works is by playing a silent track through the iPod app, then using the album art for the track to display the weather based on locations you set within the app settings. Because of the dynamic abilities of how album art is displayed in the iPod app, and subsequently shown whenever you lock your iPhone or iPod touch, this app essentially tricks the iPhone into displaying updated Lock screen weather without breaking any of Apple's strict developer guidelines.

The only drawback is, whenever you have the app running to display weather on the Lock screen, you won't be able to listen to any music from the iPod app (or any other App Store app that uses audio output or album art, such as Pandora). This is, however, a very adept workaround and gets the job done without the need to jailbreak and install apps like IntelliscreenX.

• $0.99 -- App Store Link

Having trouble finding what you need in the app store? Send us an email to news@tipb.com and let us know what you’re looking for, and we’ll do our best to find you just the right App for That!

The TiPb forums are naturally a great place to talk, commiserate, celebrate, get help, and offer advice to your fellow iPhone users. In order to create a new thread of your own or reply to any of the existing threads, you must be a registered member. Becoming a member is easy and free so if you haven’t already, head on over and register now!

• The Verizon iPhone 4 is almost here, if you are making the jump what device and company are you leaving?

• Most of you purchasing a Verizon iPhone 4 will want to pick up a case and screen protector, which will you be choosing?

• Post an image of your current lock-screen, everyone else is doing it so why not join in on the fun?

• For those of you who might be new to the iPhone and are on the hunt for some killer applications and/or games, be sure to visit our iPhone Apps and Games forum.

See you in the forums!

SmartScreen provides widgets for your iPhone lock screen -- provided you're jailbroken, that it. The demo above shows calendar, stocks, and weather, but the developer will be making an SDK available so other apps can get in on the widgety goodness. Conceivably Twitter updates, IMs, to-dos -- any information snippet really -- could be added.

On behalf of non-Jailbreakers, Gizmodo asks Apple to bake this type of functionality into the official firmware, and let's face it -- they need something for iPhone 4.0 next year. Does it complicate Apple's current, zen-like lock screen? Sure, but that lock screen is currently so informationally sparse, maybe it could use some complication?

If you try out SmartScreen, let us know what you think.

[Thanks angelrat101 for the tip!]