Mar 5, 2008

Enable App Hiding on your iPhone

TUAW reader Ian Donaldson discovered that the SBEnableAppReveal preference allowed you to double-tap hidden applications to reveal them--and double-tap them again to re-hide them. I decided to see if I could extend this behavior to other applications. After a bit of testing, I discovered the SBIsRevealable preference in the three keynote applications: YouTube, Safari and iTunes. So after modifying plutil to allow it to set Boolean values as well as strings, I went ahead and issued the following command:

iphone # plutil -1 SBIsRevealable /Applications/*.app/Info.plist

After restarting, I was pleased to find that pretty much all my applications were hidden and could now use the double-tap-to-reveal trick. The three holdouts? Photos, Camera, and iPod, all three of which use special "roles" in their Info.plist files. These roles let the Slideshow app appear as both "Photos" and "Cameras" on the iPhone, and MobileMusicPlayer as "Music" and "Video" on the iPod touch and "iPod" on the iPhone.
Source...

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