Saurik Comments On Cydia Update

“”"Multitasking is a must and not having it is rather pathetic especially since iOS 4 has been
out 8 months.”"” This is simply not possible at this time. I
realize everyone wants it, and hell: I want it,
too; but everyone saying it is important doesn’t make it possible. The reason Cydia doesn’t have iOS 4 compliant multi-tasking is that, to
make the modifications it makes to the system,
it runs as “root”, a user that has more permissions on the system than anything else,
which means that SpringBoard, a lowly
process running as “mobile”, cannot suspend/ resume it. Now, this is something that /can/ be remedied,
and is something that I’ve been thinking of how to do for a long time, but all the obvious ways
people like to bring up for making Cydia’s GUI run as mobile with only small parts running as
root would make Cydia run slower, and speed
is something that is primary on everyone’s minds when they are using Cydia. Luckily,
there are things I’ve figured out that may make this more reasonably possible, but certainly not
for this release. “”"The ability to leave mobile substrate on when using Cydia. I understand it’s to reduce intstalling app conflicts but not having access
to SBSettings is a pain especially since Cydia
doesn’t multitask yet! BOO.”"” If you did this you would find your system
would suddenly become unusable. I realize
that it sounds all nice and fuzzy that Mobile
Substrate should modify all applications on the
system, including Cydia, but again: Cydia runs
as root. Almost all extensions in the ecosystem are NOT designed with this in mind, and when
suddenly given root access start destroying the
permissions of your configuration files and
Media folders, making all normal applications
unable to use them. Therefore, with this release of Cydia, I’ve gone through the “big ticket items”–which seem to come down to Activator (what starts
SBSettings), libstatusbar (adds notification
items to the status bar), and
SimulatedKeyEvents (injection of key events
from Veency)–to verify with their developers that they will work correctly in an environment
running as root. These extensions (plus
WinterBoard, which doesn’t work on root on 4.x but is harmless, and will be fixed in a future
release) are what are available from inside of
Cydia until Cydia is modified to run as mobile. “”"I for one can’t wait for a better looking interface. And a auto back up function would
be great. Keep up the good work. Can’t wait to see it”"” A backup function actually does not require
pushing a new build of Cydia, but it requires
time to figure out how to scale the users to
support the kind of load Cydia has. Cydia is
running with many orders of magnitudes more
users than any of its competitors have, which means that a lot of things that people like to
think “should be simple, X did it” are actually much harder to implement. I also keep privacy
at the forefront of my mind while building
features like this, and want to be 100% certain
that no one can get access to your installed
products list other than you. As for a “better looking interface”, I try hard to maintain something that competes with
Apple’s products. A few things rotted on 4.x (the positions and sizes of some buttons), and
the various “black” interfaces (the black bar and the black screen) get mixed reports, but
otherwise the main problem users have with
Cydia is not Cydia: it is with repositories.
Every time I’ve gotten actual feedback “this specific thing is bad”, where that thing isn’t something that Apple themselves do in their
iTunes or App Store applications (which
should be taken as the “intuitive model”), it is in areas of the interface I simply do not have
any control over: the content shown for a
package by the repository. “”"less geeky terms (for instance, why ‘Changes’ when they should really say ‘new releases/updates’?)”"” Maybe I’m crazy, but I always thought of the word “Changes” to be a very non-geeky end- user term for “stuff that changed”. It certainly isn’t a technical term: it was not chosen because of some geeky desire to have the
codebase match the UI, nor was it chosen
because it had some esoteric meaning in Latin
or Greek. It was instead chosen as it was a
single word that immediately meant to the
largest number of people I talked to exactly what that page did: showed you what changed.
Regardless, “New Releases/Updates” certainly won’t fit on a tab label. “”"Hopefully Cydia 1.1 will be much more faster!”"” As with /every/ release of Cydia, Cydia 1.1 is
faster than previous releases. In specific, it is
faster than 1.0.3366 by a good margin, which
itself was faster than 1.0.3222 by an even
larger chasm. On this note, however, it is
important to note that Cydia is tackling a hard problem: no other application I have seen on
the iPhone, from Apple or any third party, is
attempting to search index and manage tens of
thousands of data items, on the client, in real
time, aggregated from user-selected sources. In contrast, Cydia has some of the fastest
technology in existence with regards to
handling this data, whether it be custom
algorithms (Cydia includes a locale-aware
string comparison radix sort, which AFAIK is
the fastest sorting algorithm in any iOS application) or special on-disk data structures
(new in 1.1 is “Cytore”, a new way to store local metadata on packages that can be loaded
nearly instantaneously from flash; for those out
there who are technically minded, it is an on-
disk memory mapped hashtable, which
drastically beats out alternatives people like to
try to bring up such as SQLite). “”"less loading data (do i REALLY need to see all the changes in the list at once?)”"” Despite myths to the contrary, the amount of
data displayed in the Changes list does not
drastically affect how quickly it loads. There /
was/ a bug in many versions of Cydia 1.0 that
caused there to be at least a little delay related
to the number of items on the list, but this bug was already fixed as of 1.0.3366. The cost of
the calculation is deciding what entries should
be on the list at all (and specifically which
ones are actually updates vs. new releases),
not displaying them all at once. That said,
Cydia 1.0.3366 moves the loading of changes until after you click the tab, which makes it
more evidence how much time is being spent
on this feature (which itself is, again, faster on
1.1). “”"Less memory usage”"” Despite Cydia 1.1 continuing to attempt to
juggle tens of thousands of items in memory,
thanks to Cytore, it uses much less memory
than ever before. Other optimizations have
been made, as with every version of Cydia, in
order to decrease the memory usage of the app as a whole. Additionally, and in particular,
Cydia 1.1 is much more conscientious of
memory warnings, and attempts to throw out
as much state as possible during these events. That said, the amount of memory on even
reasonably modern devices (anything past the
iPhone 3G) available for running applications
(not in total, but available after Apple’s system applications get their share), is an order of
magnitude greater: whereas on an iPhone 3G
you were working with maybe 20MB of
available memory, on an iPhone 3G[S] you
have 150MB, and an on iPhone 4 you have
400MB available. So, despite Cydia 1.1 actually needing less memory to operate than
Cydia 1.0, the pressure on memory is pretty
much gone, and will not affect future users
thanks to hardware upgrades. “”"I agree with many of the other comments listed above, but what I find most important is
stability, speed and more advanced search
capibilities. For instance, if someone types in
an app name wrong or just wants to type in a
keyword in a search, Cydia should provide
suggestions.”"” Unfortunately, this device is simply too slow to
provide “advanced search capabilities”, and certainly not suggestions, given the constraints
of “from user-selected repositories” “in something resembling real time”. That said, Cydia 1.1 has a much better search
mechanism, including an integer-arithmetic
radix-sorted relevancy algorithm I managed to
implement. What would really be needed to have a truly
amazing search experience is to not do
searching on the client: to instead handle it on
my servers. This is how products like the App
Store, Kindle, or Netflix work: it is not at all
common for services users are used to to attempt to manage the entire database /on the
device/, doing local searching, rather than
having the data and computation for that
existing in offline-indexed search structures on
a massive server in the cloud. Unfortunately, the reason people use Cydia
are varied, and many people are using Cydia
with repositories that frankly they shouldn’t be: whether the repository contains software that is
dangerous (a niche community with tweaks
receiving minimal testing, or using bad
practices like on-disk file patching) or
downright illegal (there are things you are
allowed to do in your country that I cannot in mine), I am certainly not going to be acting as
the centralized storage and indexing gateway
for people to find and manage this content. Instead, what keeps people coming back to
Cydia is the fact that it acts as the fundamental
alternative: that rather going to Apple, with
their carefully curated set of centralized
experiences, you go to Cydia, “the wild west of software”, where software modifies other software in a kind of reckless
abandon that is going to lead to pain even in
the best possible scenarios, and in the worst
possible worlds is going to lead to things that
you will not be able to list on a default
repository, and which Cydia may even warn you about installing, but which you should still
be able to access and even search for using
Cydia’s search mechanisms. “”"Finnally, i hope they fixed those awful errors cydia give you everything time you open it.”"” Errors from Cydia do not come from Cydia. If
you type a URL into Cydia for a broken
repository, that repository is going to be low-
quality and is going to cause you problems. If it
is offline, Cydia is going to tell you it is offline,
and if it is malformed Cydia is going to get angry about that. Cydia is simply going to sit
there idly while there are a ton of broken and
offline repositories in your list: it will tell you
all of the errors involved in the hope that you
will remove the broken repositories and get on
with your life (which is a very apt metaphor, as most third party repositories are very slow, and
cause your refresh experience to take a very
very very long time). “”"I want to see a rate and review section added like on the app store.”"” We actually tried this, and it was a miserable
failure: more time had to be spent moderating
the reviews, most of which were misleading,
inflammatory, or downright inappropriate, than
anyone got value out of this mechanism: it was
even worse than on the App Store, which is notorious for bad reviews (people often rate
down a package for inane reasons, making the
data horribly invalid). Given these issues, I attempted to put together
a vision of how comments and ratings could
work in Cydia, and even made a trial
implementation (screenshots were even
handed out at some points, and I did demos at
a few conferences), but when word came up that I was even considering releasing it, I
received strong pushback from some of the
best developers in the ecosystem–the people you are most likely to want to give mega-good
reviews to–that if I continued with that they would give up on the ecosystem, due to the
issues from before. And, to be honest, I am not certain that I would
have solved those problems, and given
subsequent experiences from alternative
products, and looking at how people used the
ratings, what people said in the comments, and
how things finally got rated, I no longer believe that I would have: I believe the concept of the
off-the-shelf “comments and ratings” to be a fundamentally flawed system that inherently
leads to abuse. Now, not all rating systems need to be “off-the- shelf”, so something truly innovating and “actually solving the problem” is what I hope to one day provide for Cydia. In the meantime,
however, I always do my best to avoid injecting
seriously suboptimal tradeoffs into our
ecosystem. “”"It’ll be important though that device and iOS version are included though since so many
differences w compatibilty.”"” You are, however, preaching to the choir here.
Cydia has, for a while, contained numerous
features that would allow repositories to help
with this problem. 1) a mechanism to specify firmware
compatibility on packages (packages can
Depends: specific firmware revisions). 2) the Cydia Store lets vendors block
purchases for specific firmwares (any paid
product can register its compatibility with its
repository, and then I will filter it to users who
can use it). 3) the firmware version is sent as part of the
user-agent to the web pages for each product,
allowing developers to display their own
warnings. 4) compatibility is even more specially able to
be done by feature detection, allowing
packages to say “I need voiceover support on a device with a camera running an armv7 CPU
and a retina screen”. In essence, there is very little excuse for
packages, repositories, products, or anything
else in the Cydia ecosystem to be poorly
specified in terms of firmware compatibility.
That said, almost no packages in the
ecosystem, and even very few products (where one would imagine this to be the most
important), have this information included at
any of these levels, which is rather
disappointing. So, Cydia 1.1 is not going to attempt to
improve on any of these mechanisms, as Cydia
1.0 already has more than enough of them: the
real onus is now on the developers and artists
of specific items. “”"Also would like to see a lot of dead content pulled”"” I do not have any control over what content is
available in Cydia. I mean, I can refuse to
personally accept money for it, but I have
almost no introspection over things that are
either free or sold on the developer’s website. For years I have attempted to get repositories
to pull obsolete packages: they refuse. Instead
of lobbying me, who agrees with you and is
powerless, you need to be sending these
complaints to the default repositories: BigBoss,
ModMyi, and ZodTTD. “”"Tags saying if installation of apps/tweaks, etc need a springboard refresh or the device
needs to reboot.”"” While this is often stated, this is simply not
how this mechanism works: packages compute
whether they need a reboot or reload as they
install, allowing packages to make
optimizations like “I only need to reboot if the user is using this firmware version and has this
other package installed with this setting
specified”. In fact, all of my packages that need features like this attempt these optimizations,
and often you will not need as many reboots or
reloads because of it. Therefore, specifying this as static tags on a
package would increase the number of reboots
a user has to perform needlessly. That said, for
packages where it is not obvious (extensions
are going to require a reload, and
MobileSubstrate is going to require a reboot), such as cases of MMS clients that require a
reboot, it should certainly be best practice for
the developer to put this information on their
package information screen. This is even
easier for the developer/vendor than modifying
the package, and even then is very uncommonly specified: adding the tag
therefore won’t even change how often it is reported. “”"In regard to stability, it would be nice if Cydia had a solution for repos or apps that
didn’t add correctly, instead of just having endless errors popping up. These fixes alone,
to me would be more beneficial than a new
redesign to Cydia’s layout or other cosmetic changes.”"” With regards to repositories that did not add
correctly, as stated by Ryan Petrich, Cydia 1.1
should no longer end up in situations where
broken repositories are so unusable that they
are also undeletable. That said, many users
complain about repositories installed via a package: to delete these repositories you will
need to remove the package that represents
them. (Due to some of these complexities, it is Cydia
policy going forward that no repositories will
be installable from default repositories via
packages, and the existing ones under More
Sources will be transitioned to a new
mechanism for handling these that has been added that will allow more direct, simpler, and
safer manipulation of repositories using a
soon-to-be-revamped More Sources page.) ============ Thank you all, by the way, for your interest in
Cydia: the fact that you care at all about what
features are or are not in Cydia 1.1 means a lot
to everyone working on the project.