Motion is a new jailbreak utility available in Cydia that makes your iPhone homescreen just a bit more interesting. While Motion may not add a ton of functionality to your device, it’s a fun tweak to play around with and show off to your friends. It basically adds transitions and effects to the movement to all of the icons on your springboard.

Motion is a tweak that makes your icons move. There are a whole bunch of settings you can use to liven up your home screen and make your icons dance around.

• Rotate: Make your icons rotate
• Scaling: Make your icons grow
• Skew: Make your icons tilt sideways
• Jump: Make your icons jump
• Transparency: Make your icons fade in and out
• Waves: Make your icons move in waves (vertical and horizontal)

You can use these settings alone, or in combinations.

Motion is already available in the Cydia store and will run on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 4.x 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.

• $1.00 — Cydia Store Link

More jailbreak resources:

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

If you’re jailbroken on iOS 5 you’ll definitely want to check out the newly released Springtomize 2. It’s by far one of the easiest ways to customize your device running on iOS 5. To start customizing just purchase Springtomize 2 in Cydia then pop into your Settings app and start tweaking every little aspect of your springboard easily and directly from your device.

Springtomize 2 allows you to tweak icons, folders, animations, app switcher, dock, and much more. If you’ve purchased it already, what are your thoughts? Anything else you’d like to see the ability to customize in a future update?

$2.99 – Cydia Search Link

Trying to rearrange one of your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad home screens and curious how to move multiple apps around at once? Well, if you’re Jailbroken, you can! Multiiconmove allows you to move multiple icons so you can get your home screen exactly how you want it, as fast as possible. We’ll show you how after the break

Multiiconmover cuts your time down by letting you move multiple icons at one time. It’s available from Cydia for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

1. Launch Cydia on your jailbroken iPhone
2. Search for Multiiconmover
3. Install the app.

Once Multiiconmover is downloaded, there will be no app icon on your springboard, it automatically goes into action.

1. First, hold down an icon like you were going to move them.
2. Once the icons start jiggling, tap the icons you would like to move
3. Drag one of the icons you would like to move to the spot that you want. Note, you must have enough room on the page for all the icons you have selected to move.
4. Once your icon is where you want it, tap the home button and you will see all the icons you’ve selected move to the location you wanted.

Did you like this app? Did it help you cut your time down when moving icons around on your springboard? Let us know in the comments.

Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to news@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)

Jailbroken and curious how you can diagnose those annoying springboard crashes that plague jailbreakers? While the benefits of jailbreaking outweigh the annoyances for many users, a crashing springboard can still be beyond frustrating. If your springboard is crashing sporadically, there can be several reasons why. There is also an easier way to fix it than to completely restore your phone. Hit the jump for some helpful tips and tricks on ridding yourself of evil crashing springboards!

Resprings are, of course, a necessary evil when it comes to jailbreaking. While stock apps don’t typically have access to lower level parts of the phone, jailbreak apps do. Anytime you install something that changes lower level files, you’ll typically have to restart the springboard in order for those changes to take affect. But what happens when your springboard starts resprining on its own? Or if your jailbroken iPhone starts crashing into safe mode? I know it can be frustrating, but there’s typically a reason.

An app you installed is not compatible with your version of iOS

I know this is easy to point out, but it’s something a lot of beginning jailbreakers overlook. Most jailbreak apps will tell you in the app description if you need to stay away from it based on your version of iOS. They probably mean it. Running an app that doesn’t play nice with your iOS version can cause considerable headaches, so heed their warnings. A lot of people had issues related to compatibility on 4.2.1 after the tethered jailbreak was released.

Most apps were not updated for 4.2.1 so if you installed them, the odds your springboard was going to crash or your phone was going to start rebooting randomly was pretty good.

You have certain apps installed that don’t play nice together

This one is a bit harder to diagnose. Sometimes the best to do is ask around a jailbreak forum. If your device just recently started producing random crashes, uninstall any apps you’ve installed recently. If the issue goes away, one of the apps you uninstalled was the issue. I typically start installing them again one by one. When the crashes start occurring again, I know what app is the culprit.

And as a common courtesy, shoot an e-mail to the developer and let them know what apps you have installed, what iOS version your’e on, and what issues you were having. Feedback is crucial when it comes to making good apps. The more a developer knows, the better their apps can be.

It’s also worth noting that jailbreak developers typically will list issues with other apps in the release notes. Always read those before updated a jailbroken application. That brings us to our next culprit.

A recent app update is causing the crashes

This isn’t typical but sometimes app updates can cause compatibility issues either with your iOS version or with another app. This is far less common but still an issue from time to time. If you recently updated an app and your iPhone starting misbevaving afterwards, uninstall that app completely. If the issue resolves itself, the update was an issue. Again, report the issue to the developer so they can fix it. Most developers (especially jailbreak) are extremely responsive to user feedback.

This is another example of why it is important to read update release notes as well. If the developer knows the update creates an issue with another app, they’ll list it. You can save yourself the headache by passing up that update.

You installed a bad app from an untrusted repository

Cydia allows you to add repositories at your own will. For new users or easily gullible users, this can be dangerous. I can not stress this one enough – do not EVER, EVER install an app from a repository that you are not 100% positive is safe. Adding a repository for a beta from a trusted developer is one thing, but don’t add random repos on your device unless you either know the person hosting it, or know the app you are downloading is tested and from a trusted developer.

If you do happen to install an app from an untrusted source, immediately remove the app from your phone and delete the repository.

You restored from a backup that was previously jailbroken

This is the big one. And typically the most common cause of crashy springboards. I never recommend jailbroken users to restore from a backup. For example, if you are jailbroken on iOS 4.1 and want to upgrade to 4.2.1 and jailbreak using greenpois0n, you should not restore from a backup.

Never ever restore from a backup that could potentially have bits of an old jailbreak in it. I see this cause issues more than anything. And unfortunately, the only remedy is to completely restore your phone and start over. Not fun for anyone.

If you guys have any other springboard issues and remedies, be sure to share them with us in the comments. We’d love to hear them!

Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to news@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)

There’s a Jailbreak bug that affects Springboard (the Home Screen system on iPhone and iPad) and causes your icons to go fuzzy and disappear. Depending on which version of iOS 4 you’re on, and which Jailbreak tool you used (limera1n, greenpois0n, redsn0w, etc.) you may or may not experience it or be able to replicate it, but if you do we have a simple if temporary fix for you after the break.

Though the disappearing/fuzzy icon bug isn’t much more than a annoyance — you can still use the icon in question — is also quite easy to go around.

You can tell if you have the problem simply by swiping quickly from Home Screen to Home Screen. If you you have the bug, some icons will disappear or turn fuzzy. To fix it, just swipe some more and they’ll eventually re-render.

Again, this bug is not incapacitating for your iPhone but it is a bit disconcerting when you see one of your icons has disappeared. (Luckily the name remains under the icon so you can still figure out which app it is).

This bug seems to have started after iOS 4.0 came into effect. We will have to see if it is still in effect in iOS 4.3.

Effect

• Your icons will appear fuzzy and difficult to see.

Cause

• Swiping rapidly through Home Screens

Fix

• Keep swiping until the icons re-render properly.
• If you’re desperate, restore your iPhone and re-Jailbreak with a more recent tool

If you’ve had this problem let us know which version of iOS you’re using and which tool you used to Jailbreak. If you’ve come up with any better fixes, let us know in the comments!

3DBoard uses the iPhones accelerometer and gyroscope to present a “3D” view of the Springboard/Home Screen icons and it looks pretty nifty. Sure it’s pure eye candy and not as functional a tweak as SBSettings or LockInfo, but cool has to count for something, right?

It’s coming to Cydia soon and will cost $4. Anyone going to grab it?

Video after the break!

[YouTube via Gizmodo]

Developer and hacker, James Whelton has managed to “Jailbreak” the iPod nano, getting past its cache comparison and installing a rather simple tweak that can remove default apps and replace them with ‘blank spaces’ on the nano’s springboard. This can open up the iPod Nano to more hacks and mods from other hackers, including the ability to potentially view Movies or TV Shows, set Calendar Events and set a passcode lock.

Whelton pointed out some hidden strings that he discovered in the iPod nano OS as well.

Next is the discovery in some of the device’s plists of reference to support of Movies, TV Shows, Apps, Games, vCards, Calender events and so on, with a few other cool things like a passcode lock. With the bypass I figured out, I hope to enable these pretty soon. It seems like the OS is a rehashed version of the previous nano’s OS.

Details on how to jailbreak the iPod nano are said to be released in a few days. It’ll be interesting to see what Team Jailbreak will do with the newly hacked Nano. Would you want Movies and TV Shows on such a small screen? Are there any particular mods you would like on the sixth-gen nano?

Check below for a video of the hack in action.

[MacStories] [Nanohack.me]

Yesterday’s iPhone 4.0 sneak preview event gave us 7 new “tent-pole” features, 1500 new APIs for developers, and once again took Apple’s mobile OS a step closer to feature parity and a step further towards elegant functionality… but we didn’t get everything we wanted. And no matter how hard we tried, we found we didn’t even get everything we needed. In other words, iPhone 4.0 is still missing out in some key areas. Even though we got some good stuff, this is what we didn’t get:

• No new Home Screen/SpringBoard. We understand that Apple has 85,000,000 legacy users now trained on the iPhone Home Screen system (aka the same app launcher metaphor going back to the days of PalmOS). We knew when Apple said as much during the iPad announcements that they weren’t going to confuse that “already trained” customer base. It’s the price of being an established OS, after all. So Apple didn’t radically re-invent the Home Screen. They did make it layered — it can lift up to show you multitasking apps and slit open to show you apps inside folders — but that’s it. And part of “that’s it” means…

• No themes. You get wallpaper and that’s where your customization ends. You still can’t remove built-in apps (though you can hide them in a folder so they take less space). You can’t chance the look of icons. There’s no animated backgrounds to be had. More disappointingly, however…

• No widgets. Want to know the latest weather, Facebook or Twitter updates, or stick a big clock on the screen? There’s an app for all of that, sure, but you have to go into and out of each individual app and the Home Page remains a giant grid of uninformative icons. Android and Nokia have had widgets for a while now, webOS lets you flick between live Cards, and Windows Phone 7 will have live tiles. iPhone… will be waiting on 5.0? More’s the pity too because…

• No new notification system. We got local notifications, so there’s some measure of offline alerts, but they’re trapped in the same single, modal, popup hell that’s existed since iPhone 3.0. (And it’s particularly ludicrous on the iPad!). Again, still, if you get a couple SMS, a few Twitter DMs, a game challenge or two, and calendar reminder, and then an IM, you’ll only ever know that IM existed — everything else is completely and utterly destroyed in terms of notifications, and while some apps will badge with a number for unread items, you have to go find them and that’s “pull”, not “push”. Maybe this is also a 5.0 feature…

A lot of other stuff failed to put in an appearance as well.

• Apps can now embed SMS, but why isn’t that a system-wide, OS level, quick-reply API included in the alerts?
• Calendar still has no week view. iPad calendar rotates to landscape, why can’t iPhone?
• Photos gets Faces and Places, but no MobileMe or other syncing abilities. It’s 2010, isn’t it?
• Weather is still 1.0. Even stocks has been updated. Compared to HTC’s weather, it’s in the dust.
• Settings are still bound to an app. You can’t tap the title bar to quickly toggle Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or any of a half-dozen other useful things.
• Mail gets universal inbox, threaded messages, and fast switching, but still no IMAP IDLE (at least GoogleSync can now be used alongside ActiveSync, but still…)
• Safari still lacks Flash, Java, or any other plugin and likely always will. But it should really have gotten in-page text string search.
• iPad gets orientation lock via a hardware switch where the iPhone’s mute switch is located. How about at least a software gesture?
• What about a universal “back” gesture while we’re at it as well? Tapping the title bar auto-scrolls a list to top, couldn’t swiping from right to left take us back to the previous screen, in every app?

iPhone 4.0 was full of functional goodness, no doubt about it. Perhaps we’ll even see one or two more come WWDC in June (Mobile iChat video?) Even given Apple’s size, there are limitations of time and resources that mean they have to choose what features get done now and what get left for later. You can’t have everything immediately. Did doing multitasking come at the expense of doing notifications this time around? (or did iAd?) Maybe. But that’s for Apple to decide and for us, the users, to take them to task over.

And, oh yeah, there’s still no built in task app (or sync).

Anything else missing from iPhone 4.0 that really ought to have been in there?

Ocean Observations brings us a couple concepts on how they’d improve the iPhone Home Screen (Springboard). The first, above, embeds a tiny CoverFlow for apps at the bottom of the screen. While interesting, since Springboard currently supports only portrait mode and icon view, as TiPb’s asked for before, why not let it rotate to landscape for full-screen coverflow?

Next video concept, and another idea from Tog after the break!

Expose is awesome on the Mac, especially in Snow Leopard, but do we want it on our iPhone? The above proof-of-concept video offers a take on how it could look and work. Unfortunately, at that small size, are the tiny Home Screens discoverable? Would it work better if, instead of the Home Screens, it was a set of user-enabled background apps that were shown via Expose?

For both, holding down the Home button to launch would, of course, require giving up the current Voice Control activation, unless more complex controls like tap, tap, hold were introduced and weren’t too user hostile.

Meanwhile, Human Interface Guideline legend Tog offers his own opinion on what the iPhone home page system (called Springboard) needs to do to handle 180+ apps. His suggestions, pictured above, include labeled pages, vertical as well as horizontal scrolling, user-controlled icon positioning (i.e. the ability to leave empty slots), the ability to rename apps, containers (folders), aliases (so you can have the same app in multiple containers), and tags (which he says Apple is already working on).

Take a look at the video and check out Tog’s post, and let us know what you think.

[Via MobileCrunch and Daring Fireball, thanks Matthew for the tip!]

Prior to Macworld 2009, Daring Fireball mused openly about how neat it would be for the iPod Shuffle to get voice functionality, and on Wednesday last it did. Now Gruber is reminding us that his “wish-list” for iPhone OS 3.0 includes:

a new home screen app (a.k.a. SpringBoard), designed from the ground up for a system where users have a few dozen or more extra apps installed. Managing dozens of apps on the iPhone today is simply a pain in the ass. Second, maybe an answer to the question of where the background notification API is — you know, the one we were told at WWDC to expect a few months ago, but which we haven’t heard a word about since. And maybe — pretty please, Mr. Forstall, with sugar on top — copy and paste.

But is this really a wish-list, or a (somewhat disingenuous?) way of passing along actual, leaked information on the new OS? MacRumors seems to think the latter, saying they have reason to believe a new SpringBoard, Push Notification (or Background Tasks), and Cut/Copy and Paste will indeed be on the iPhone OS 3.0 feature list. For good measure, they’re also tossing in magnetometer support (i.e. compass functionality like the Android G1 enjoys).

Added to yesterday’s rumors from Boy Genius about MMS and Tethering, however, and we’re afraid things are lining up just a little too much like a 3.0 panacea for iPhone’s previous OS “greatest misses”. And if that’s the case, it might be expectations — rather than notifications — that get “pushed” for next Tuesday’s iPhone OS 3.0 Sneak Peak. (We’re nothing if not fickle audiences, after all).

So, are these really inside information on what we’ll be seeing come March 17? Or are these truly more wish-lists than feature-lists?

(And are we waiting on Kevin Rose to add Mobile iChat to the 3.0 mix?)