An update on my adventures in jailbreaking...
One of the earlier paid tweaks that I had gone for was
Auxo. Seemed really useful at first. Little by little I found other tweaks that did each of its best features a little bit better. It also turned out to be an unstable battery killer. My battery drains at half the speed now that I have gotten rid of it. I guess having your phone constantly save and discard screenshots for those multitasking "cards" kinda uses the processor a lot. Go figure. The most important feature was the easy way I could use it to kill all apps in the tray. I replaced it with
SwipeAway though which does the job elegantly as well.
I ended up buying
Zephyr. At first I though this tweak was creating the problems that I was having with Auxo. This tweak allows you do do advanced multitasking gestures - with more options and better responsiveness than
Activator. It's kinda pricey, but I wouldn't want to go without it. It started working much better once Auxo was gone too. Two features that I used all the time - the one-finger swipe up from the bottom of the screen to open the tray, and a three-finger pinch to close an app.
I use my phone as an alarm clock. It's a habit that I picked up almost a decade ago when I was on call as a substitute teacher. One of the pitfalls of doing that is if your ringer volume is down, you can miss hearing your alarm and then you're fucked.
Alarming overrides the volume for the rest of the device, allows you to set the alarm volume to "high" (or whatever you want) and it will always go off at that level regardless of how the ringer volume is otherwise adjusted.
I just started using
FolderEnhancer so I can keep more items in folders and reduce the number of home screen pages I have to use. I had stayed away from this initially because all of the screenshots made it look ugly, and I can't stand ugly on my phone. Turned out the look is fairly customizable, and I was able to make it fit in (but not match) with the translucent gray that I have employed in my lockscreen and notification center overlays.
Jukebox is a notification center widget that allows you to see and control whatever music you're playing. It looks like stock and is very functional and responsive. The best features - it displays album art and it's compatible with virtually any music player including the stock iPod app, Spotify, Rdio, etc. It has a "share" button where you can easily tweet your currently playing song. It also has a setting I love that will hide the widget when you kill the app that's playing music, so it's out of the way when it's not in use.
Tap to Widgets is another notification center widget that gives you quick-compose access to apps such as Twitter, Facebook, Notes, Calendar and Reminders. Stock iOS has the widgets for Twitter and Facebook, but this tweak is nice because adds the others and gives you more options for how they appear in the notification center. If you use all five you can have them side-by-side in one row rather than having five items stacked vertically and taking up more screen space. I really only use the Twitter and Calendar ones, but it's nice to have them right next to each other and the quick compose for calendars is especially nice - much easier than entering an event thru the Calendar app itself.
A couple screenshots showing the notification center widgets and FolderEnhancer:
