I have updated the repository section (finally). It now polls both repositories real time showing package details and download counts. You can see all the packages we host and information about each. You can even download them from the web interface and install using dpkg -i. Check it out!

Note: Remember 2.0 and 1.1.x repositories are separate and all the apps had to be ported.

Today, Cydia got a nice face-lift and some nice new features. The first can be seen when you enter the “manage” page. You will be given choices between mananging your packages and managing your sources. Note that manageing sources does not mean that you can add old installer sources. You still must have a valid apt source for Cydia.

Finally, you are now able to edit which packages you do and do not want to see. Cydia comes up and asks you for your preferences at start to ask you which “role” you play. If you are a user and you do not want to see all the console applications, select “user”.  “User” is similar to the level that most installer users are familiar with since installer did not contain a lot of development / hacking packages. Hacker displays the GUI apps as well as command line apps used in SSH or terminal. “Developer” will filter out nothing, showing you everything. Many “users” may find some of these packages annoying. This is why you now have a choice! You can later change this selection by going into “manage” and clicking on “settings”.

In addition, you can filter on “sections” (these are Categories in Installer). You can just tap the “edit” button on top of the “sections” page. If you tap that you will see this screen that lets you enable / disable various sections. Very cool, indeed.

There appears to be a major bug in Appstore / iTunes which is a service that is constantly running on the iPhone.I have had many issues with just using AppStore with a lot of apps installed. It takes often 10 or more minutes to try to install. It fails over and over and has to keep retrying. If I log the events using “top”, I can see the iTunesStore binary running with most the CPU in the system and a crash report process constantly coming up. Often times, the phone reboots and takes forever to restart. It seems that deleting some apps helps this work better. I will be looking into this more.

This also seems to affect Cydia and probably will affect Installer 4. Sometimes you install something and find no icon. From what I can see, the above issue occurs during this state. When you install something even from Cydia, the iTunesStore app is again using all the CPU, the phone is running slow, there is a spinner next to the carrier icon, and no icon shows up. If this happens to you, try these steps to resolve it:

1) Uninstall the item(s) that are not showing up in Cydia
2) Reboot the phone
3) Reinstall them in Cydia

Repeat until it works.

So the appstore has not impacted installer much. In fact, since the 11th the bandwidth for the repository has almost doubled. One of my hostings even closed me down today. Speculation could be that many folks are updating to 2.0 then having to downgrade and reinstall all their apps.

Added a BossPrefs control called “Dock Control”. This will allow you to toggle on and off Dock from within BossPrefs.

Added a new version of TouchPad Pro v4.44. This adds Spanish language and adds GPL licensing  notification to the about screen.

RepoName has been added to our repository. This version is an update to what was previously in installer with some GUI reorganization.

If anyone is interested, I got a reason why dyndns turned off the DNS. Due to the nature of our setup, we had to use a webhop. The dns was disabled because dyndns thought the site was being ddos attacked. But it turns out it was not an attack just that the site was getting about a million hits per day and their servers could not handle it.

The community sources v3.85 solves the DNS issues I had. After you update, check your sources tab. If you have anything “untitled source” please refresh again, and again, and again, until these all go away. Sometimes it takes 2-3 refreshes. Once done, you should have no further issues and even China users can download again!

Dyndns.org has decided to block thebigboss.org without any explanation. This means my email and both repositories are currently down. I contacted their phone support and they will not answer questions and I must email abuse@dyndns.com to get any information.