Today some more details were revealed on the anticipated Mac Version of Cydia, that we showed you guys a few days ago. The details came from a tech website called arstechnica, who have revealed some much needed information about this Mac version of Cydia from Cydia’s creator Saurik.
Before we dive into talking about this new mac version of Cydia however, we are going to talk a little bit about Cydia itself and how it functions. First of all it is important to understand the difference between the official App Store and Cydia (as this relates to a lot of speculation that is going on about the Mac version of Cydia). A lot of people who are new to the jailbreaking community see Cydia as an entity that is trying to compete with the official app store and this is deffinately not the case. As Saurik points out Cydia actually contains only 4 real applications… the rest are tweaks which modify specific built in functions on your iDevice.
Examples of such tweaks would be SB-Settings and Winterboard. These tweaks, are based on a framework called MobileSubstrate. This framework makes it relatively easy to install and update such tweaks; and having such a framework makes it a lot easier for developers to built them. As Cydia and the jailbreaking world is so reliant on this framework, it will also be a crucial part of the Mac OSX version of Cydia…
Saurik goes onto saying the following:
Freeman created a new version of MobileSubstrate which he dubbed “CydiaSubstrate.” This new version can run on both iOS as well as Mac OS X on the desktop. “Just like you can make all these modifications on the iPhone, you can make these same modifications on the desktop,” Freeman said. “Until now, there has never been a way to easily install modifications to the system or third-party applications, as well as keep them updated.”
Such hacks are technically possible via command line tools, hex editing, or other techniques. But such hacks can be difficult to maintain, and generally require some programming knowledge to keep from breaking.
Developers who want to offer users some way to change how Mac OS X behaves—such as adding menu bars on more than one monitor, for instance—could use CydiaSubstrate to build the mod and distribute the resulting software via Mac Cydia.
As you can see this new CydiaSubstrate is almost like when Apple introduced the iOS firmware. They created a piece of software that would be compatible with all of their future devices, and this is exactly what Saurik has done.
Saurik was also quick to point out that just like the iOS Cydia, it’s goal is not to compete with the upcoming Apple Mac Store, but to offer users a wide variety of tweaks to modify the way their computer runs. He hopes that his upcoming project will be a big hit, and hopes to have it released in the next few weeks.
It’d be kinda cool if it offered an iTunes-type experience, where you download the tweaks and stuff you want on your desktop, then sync to your iOS device.