Manually adjusting the brightness of your iPhone screen can be inconvenient. Even on a jailbroken device with SBSettings, it takes a few steps to kick the brightness up or down with an on-screen slider. Now thanks to the Cydia tweak BrightVol, the side volume buttons can easily be used to adjust display brightness on the iPhone.

What makes this tweak so useful is that it won't interfere with normal operation of the volume buttons when needed. BrightVol is configured by default to use an Activator gesture to switch the volume buttons over to brightness. Just press both the up and down volume buttons at the same time, then you can adjust the brightness up or down.

Notification banners on the iPhone are pretty useful. Wouldn't it be great if you could make them even better? Now thanks to a jailbreak tweak called FlagPaint, there are additional options that can be configured for notification center banners. Just like the name, the main feature of this tweak is the ability to change the color of banners to match the app icon.

For example, if an app with a red icon such as iMap Weather Radio displays a banner alert, it will be tinted red if FlagPaint is enabled. There are several configurations under Settings -> FlagPaint once the tweak is installed from Cydia. The top setting is Tint Background, which automatically changes the color of incoming banner alerts depending on which app is sending the message.

Not to be outdone by Instagram, Twitter has added photo filters to its iOS app. Twitter version 5.2 brings eight different filters, the ability to crop and scale images, and an easy to use grid view for finding the best looking filters for your photos.

Earlier this month, Instagram decided to disable the ability to properly display images on Twitter. Twitter users are now forced to visit Instagram’s website to correctly view images posted via the Instagram app. Instagram’s chief executive, Kevin Systrom said in an interview: “We’ve decided that right now, what makes sense, is to direct our users to the Instagram website".

A mysterious and unknown hacker calling himself (herself?) "Dream JB" is promising to release an untethered iOS 6 jailbreak for the iPad mini, latest iPad and iPhone 5 on December 22. Dream JB is not associated with any known dev team, and has said he will deliver video proof of the jailbreak via Twitter on Wednesday. If true, the new untethered jailbreak will support all current Apple devices running iOS 6.0.1. This includes the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPad 2 and beyond, iPad Mini, iPod Touch 4th generation and beyond.

Most jailbreakers only use jailbreaking tools from proven sources such as the iPhone DevTeam, or Absinthe creator pod2g. And not surprisingly, a large portion of the jailbreaking community is calling Dream JB's untethered jailbreak a scam. No one knows for sure if Dream JB will actually deliver a safe untethered iOS 6 jailbreak this December, but it will be interesting to see if his promised video actually materializes, and the jailbreaking community's reaction tomorrow.

CallBar version 2 has brought a slew of improvements and bug fixes to the popular jailbreak tweak for iPhone. The beauty of CallBar is the ability to initiate or answer a call without interrupting your current activity. Assigning the tweak to an Activator gesture will provide easy access to its functions from anywhere, while answer-in-place makes it possible to pick up a call without exiting the current app.

Essentially CallBar reworks the look and functionality of the incoming call screen. Not only this, but iOS 5 users will notice that CallBar brings several iOS 6 features to their devices, such as call reminders and reply with text functionality. Settings are comprehensive and you can make CallBar active for voice calling, FaceTime, or both.