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Review: Caterpillar for iPhone
Caterpillar is a new iPhone program from some of the guys at Unsanity (the same group that brought you such apps as FruitMenu, ShapeShifter, APE and LabelsX). The new company is RipDev, out of Russia.
Caterpillar adds numerous features to your iPhone - be sure to see the gallery below this feature review:
- FaceLift is a major new feature that allows you to use Summerboard themes without having Summerboard actually installed, which saves some memory and even adds some features to those themes - see this page for more info. You can see some screenshots of this below.
- uCalendar, which puts a calendar/event list on your iPhones ‘Locked’ screen - basically allowing you to see your agenda with a single click of the home button. Those of us who have used Palm or Windows Mobile devices can certainly appreciate having this little feature back.
- Uninstall allows you to remove any program that has been added to your iPhone as if it were a web shortcut - meaning that if you hold down the icon until it wiggles, you will see a black ‘delete’ icon, which will remove it from your system just as if you had used the Installer.app program to remove it. Very, very convenient and cool.
- System Font let’s you change the font used by everything from your Dock icons to system menus. While some items don’t display properly using specific fonts, most do and it certainly adds a little more personality to your iPhone.
- Reminder will do just that - remind you via repeating vibrations or sounds when you have received a message and not yet viewed it. You can also specify the sound set to use and use pre-defined profiles (see the screenshots below).
- Smart Dialer adds yet another feature many switchers will be quite familiar with. When in the iPhone dialer, you can hold down the # key and as you type a number (letter), a popup list of contacts whose information matches is displayed. So much better than constant scrolling…
- ScreenShotter turns on the hidden iPhone API call that let’s you take a high quality screenshot of the iPhone by holding down the ‘home’ button while toggling the ‘mute’ switch. The screenshots below were done using this method.
- Privacy, last but not least, gives you the option to turn off that annoying SMS preview that always interrupts me when I am I the middle of something else, or shows a message from my friend Andy which usually contains some sort of graphic and vaguely unsettling homo-eroticism. I like this new option.
(Review and screenshots after the jump…)
The software is remarkably stable and works as advertised - that being said, there are a few things you should be aware of - note that these may have been issues specific to me though. I did, however, manage to resolve them, but again, they were issues incurred by someone who has a wee bit of experience with software and technology in general (me, in case you didn’t pick that up…).
- If you have Summerboard installed, remove it before installing Caterpillar or you will likely run into a situation where your screen will not respond to taps once you have entered a program (for instance you can click Mail, but can’t go further than that). Oddly enough, you can use the slider and tap home screen icons. Bizarre-0.
- You should also remove Dock, the perfectly awesome screenshot/app launcher, as it appears to conflict with the screenshot API changes.
- On my iPhone, when Reminder was active I was not able to hear any sound at all from my phone. Not a beep, click, tap, voicemail, song or anything. I uninstalled, reinstalled and eventually disabled Reminder and was able to regain that functionality. Keep in mind that my iPhone had Summerboard previously installed and may have possibly had a conflicting application installed. Some day soon I will likely restore and start fresh and will of course update this post of thing change in this regard.
- Once you purchase a license, it is tied to that device only. At the time of this post, it is unclear what device ID the license is linked to, but we have a request into RipDev to find out.
While the licensing for the software is a tad unconventional ($20 for 6 months, up to $45 for a lifetime license), the slick interface and seamless integration with the iPhone OS itself is well worth it. Some may claim that buying a license like this with the imminent release of iPhone 2 and the AppStore might be foolish, but there is no doubt that the jailbreak community will continue to flourish even after June…too many people are willing to write decent software and offer it outside of Apples bailiwick for apps like Caterpillar to disappear.
Overall, Caterpillar is a very satisfying application that is recommended for those with a techno-lust for customization.
Caterpillar can be obtained by adding ‘http://repository.ripdev.com’ to Installer.app. See this page for instructions on adding a source.
Ok, who’s ready for some screenshots? Click an image to to view it full-size, then use the nav bar at the bottom of your screen to move back and forth. Please feel free to post questions in the comments section.
