Comments on: Thoughts on Cydia?

By: toNYc311

toNYc311 — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:39:00 +0000

Cydia seems to be much more user freindly than the new Installer 4. And the developer of Cydia (Sauric) is actually very contactable and not only that very friendly. I have sent him personal emails on various occasions and he actually replied PERSONALLY! I have been using the new Installer and like it’s predecessor it is a very buggy beta right now. Installer on firmware 1.x.x stayed in beta for a long time before seeing an actual final version. The final Installer worked pretty well in my opinion. But I have to say there wasni communication with Nullriver.

RipDev has taken over and they seem more communicative. At least they reply to emails. I say give RipDev time to improve Installer 4. It looks like it is full of more potentialthen it’s predecessor. It would be great if both developers could work together. But that doesn’t seem likely. In the meantime Cydia seems superior right bow as I use it more than Installer 4. This is all a work in progress I guess.

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 09:58:11 +0000

You got it Mike!

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 05:54:28 +0000

I don’t see the point in waiting for Installer. Cydia is here, it’s ready, and its awesome. Start reviewing for it!

By: juanjux

juanjux — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:43:29 +0000

JONESY,

In the last version there is in fact a profile selection where you can select “User” and then you only see the graphical user apps (you can also select “hacker” to add the command line utils and “developer” to see all.)

By: jonesy

jonesy — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:37:46 +0000

Can I vote NEITHER? So Installer was terrible for us because the developers (Nullriver) had zero communication skills and basically were uncontactable and their web pages were nevery updated. This made it nearly impossible to figure out how to get your application included in Installer and what the schema for their xml sources was.

Bring on Cydia, where the developer was much more visible and vocal (at first) and seemed highly motivated in bringing APT’s proven functionality on Linux to the iPhone. From what I understood he was more focused on allowing Cydia to update every Unix pacakge on the entire phone rather than a user friendly solution for installing 3rd party apps, games and utilities. He did mention trying to add this ’simple mode’ functionality but it hasn’t happened as yet. Now even this developer has gone AWOL with only the odd extremely long winded and incomplete blog post about 2.0 development (missing the vital headers download).

To be honest I think all the iPhone hackers are off writing apps for the App Store and trying to get in on that early cash. For a rumored $1000 day wouldn’t you? Both Installer AND Cydia might be doomed.

By: Doug

Doug — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:56:30 +0000

I have played witht he APT package manager when I was using Ubuntu. But I don’t see much improvement over the xml based installer sources.

the only differences would be bandwidth(which of course, dependencies would help)

then again I don’t know the FULL details. . .i just know working together is always better

By: juanjux

juanjux — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:27:13 +0000

From a technical point of view I see Cydia being much superior to Installer. It uses the tried and proved (on Linux) APT package manager which handles almost everything you can take into consideration when managing packages. On the other side, Installer is just reinventing the wheel (they just added dependencies.)