What iTunes 9 and OS 3.1 Means For FCSB, Iconoclasm, and Related Projects
When app arrangement was announced for iTunes 9, lots of people with an unreasonable amount of apps installed started freaking out. I started freaking out for an entirely different reason; I knew that meant the days of FCSB, Iconoclasm, and other related projects were numbered.
As soon as I got home today and was informed a jailbreak was available, I jumped on it and decided to see what this meant for users of FCSB. The good news is that as far as FCSB on the device is concerned, it works as well as it did on 3.0. Bringing iTunes into the equation is what makes the situation a tad more complicated.
If you use FCSB and all your pages contain 16 icons or less, you can use FCSB just fine and iTunes’ app arrangement will even work; the first icon of the second row will be on the fifth column of the first row, etc…
As soon as you plug in an iPhone with more than 16 icons on one of its pages, iTunes’ Applications tab will have Sync Applications unchecked, and you won’t be able to move your icons around. Checking the Sync Applications box also deselects all applications that are installed on the device.
Now, I’m not expecting iTunes to work with FCSB out of the box; clearly Apple could have just assumed they were working with a 4x4 SpringBoard and said “jailbreak users can screw off”. However, I believe this is a bug in iTunes, and not actually Apple trying to keep us from jailbreaking.
I say this, because clicking the “Apply” button and then clicking “Cancel” when asked if you want to uninstall all apps on your device unlocks the Applications tab, and everything becomes modifiable. Unless you rearrange icons in the iTunes window, your 5-column layout will remain untouched by iTunes.
So, FCSB is fully working with iTunes 9, but this bug makes syncing a three-click process instead of a one-click process. I have yet to try this out with Iconoclasm, but I assume the same applies.
I’m sure to get lots of emails regarding this in the coming days so let me sum it up.
- FCSB works same as it always did if you don’t have 17+ icons per page.
- If you have 17+ icons per page, you will need to Apply, Cancel, and Sync each time you plug in your iPhone or iPod into iTunes to keep iTunes from removing all your apps from your phone.
This is annoying, yes, but unless Apple fixes the bug (which no unjailbroken user should ever run into), there is no way for me to fix this or hook into iTunes to make it work with FCSB/Iconoclasm/etc..
On a related note, Five-Icon Dock does not cause any issues with iTunes. Note that if you have a fifth icon on your dock, it will be swapped with the fourth on each sync.
I have yet to decide what will happen with FCSB and/or Iconoclasm; I’m going to think about it for a couple days before actually announcing anything.
edit: FCSB will not uninstall correctly on 3.1 due to a change in the SpringBoard plist format; I will release a fix soon, either run apt-get remove net.r-ch.fcsb -f or disable it in the meantime.
