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Cydia Packager Is What Installer Isn’t

by Eric March on March 1, 2008 at 7:53 pm



Draw, pardner.There’s a new sherrif Installer in town. Its name is Cydia, and it’s fixin’ to clean this place up and give the riff-raff the bum’s rush. Designed by Jay Freeman (a.k.a. Saurik), Cydia Packager is designed to be a complete and much better replacement for the standard Installer app. In the first place, Cydia’s main goal is to replace the aged and problematic BSD Subsystem with a newer, robust, open-source, and much more frequently updated core of Unix applications based on Debian’s APT distribution. This end of the project, known as Telesphoreo, ports APT to the iPhone and iPod Touch and modifies it to better integrate into this environment and work far better than BSD ever did. Further to the improvement of the core infrastructure, Cydia also intends to be a much better package manager, offering many features that Installer doesn’t. Here’s a brief rundown of some of its features:

- View packages alphabetically or categorically.
- An amalgamated Recent and Updated packages menu.
- Package search function.
- Status screen for package installation.
- Interrupted download resuming.
- Alpha-bar to quickly jump to a letter in the alphabetical list (as in the Music/iPod app).
- Faster source refreshing.

There’s only one wee little problem: There is currently no way to add sources, so this isn’t quite ready for prime-time just yet. It’s being worked on however, and from the look of things so far, it seems to be heading in a very interesting direction that may just render Installer obsolete.

The current build of Cydia Packager is available on Saurik’s own repository (http://apptapp.saurik.com) if you would like to check it out. For much more detailed information, have a look at Saurik’s website, as well as the Telesphoreo page. For some screenies, see below.

Screenshots (click to enlarge)
Cydia main screen Cydia package list (categorical) Cydia changes menu Cydia package install screen

(Source: iPod Touch Fans)



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13 Responses to “Cydia Packager Is What Installer Isn’t”

  1. Matt said:

    Nice, i really like Cydia so far, i agree, Installer is very clunky to me.

    Plus, for an even more update, 16:15 Tommorrow, Marathon Touch Beta 1 is released.
    It will be available to download at my blog.

  2. Eric March said:

    Indeed, I’m very much looking forward to it. I sent you a response on your blog about a “press preview.” I’ve already got a release template done, I just need the to do the content, the screenies and a video. :)

  3. Romi said:

    yes I agree but u can’t uninstall it only reinstall it that’s stupid

  4. MrCoolio said:

    love cydia! Has a great set of tools for the real geeks. Will work great until June comes around. (currently typing on iPod touch)

  5. gameboy4iphone v1.5.0 Publicly Released Early for Cydia Users | Touch Podium said:

    [...] Cydia? Basically, Cydia is the other Installer.app. We’ve talked about Cydia on Touch Podium, here. ZodTTD is pre-releasing it to all Cydia users because the Cydia developer helped him in providing [...]

  6. drew said:

    is cydia legal? I know apple has sum like agreement sayin 3rd party apps are illegal but is cydia legal?

  7. AaA said:

    lol.. if you jail break isnt illegal.. lol… just dont want you to use.. so you only dl itunes applications..(just voids warranty)

  8. Jody Mitoma said:

    AaA is correct, jailbreaking is in no way illegal. Local authorities cannot press charges, or worse, send you to jail, if they see that you’ve got third party applications running on YOUR device. :)

  9. drew said:

    ok thx

  10. Wesley said:

    Hello,

    I have a 1st gen. ipod. How can i get Cydia on my ipod? I dont know how to install it. Please help.

  11. Eric March said:

    What firmware version are you running? And is it jailbroken?

  12. jackie said:

    hello well i accidentally remove cydia and i done all the steps to download it. but the problem it posted unable to decode package more info to http://cydia,saurik.com/apptapp/ i done it for 10 times and its not working, if i restore my phone it might get lock. i have a version of 2.1 pls help me i need to delete some programs pls pls. thank u..

  13. jackie said:

    also the winterboard i cant remove it or uninstalled without cyndia so pls help me. i dont know why its not working thanks

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