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.

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Source: http://ericasadun.com/ftp/EricaUtilities/

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iPod Family Hacks How-tos iPhone

TUAW reader Ian Donaldson discovered that the SBEnableAppReveal preference allowed you to double-tap hidden applications to reveal...

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derekbarrera

how do I run these commands erica?

December 02 2007 at 5:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

doug

Interesting result, I nuked my phone editing the plists (i'm pretty sure I accidently deleted something while I was SFTPing into edit the plists. Anyway I did a restore, but that leaves many of the low level files in place. Which means that I have a "stock" 1.1.2 install where i can hide youtube, itunes store and safari. Interesting result indeed.

December 01 2007 at 7:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

mark Gordon

HI can someone upload a modified plist i have no idea how to edit one
cheers

December 01 2007 at 3:48 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

doug

how do I get the plutil to work with integers I keep getting an error for the 1

November 30 2007 at 9:14 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

richard

How in the world did you get the Leopard dock? It looks amazing!

November 30 2007 at 12:52 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Adrian vG

Are you this guy Mr. Spam?

November 30 2007 at 2:55 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Robert Brown

Can someone tell me how I even connect to the iPhone without using iTunes so I can customise it in the ways various threads on TUAW say you can.

I have a UK iPhone (latest firmware).

November 30 2007 at 2:17 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ian Donaldson

Hey thats sooo cool! I am mentioned in there in the first sentence! Oh ya I figured out how to hide the Photos & Camera Icons. All you have to do is edit the info.plist file and add SBIsRevealable into each of there separate roles! This also works for the iPod as well. Now every icon can be hidden!

November 30 2007 at 1:37 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jhone

Thanks for this great find Erika. could you make a gui program for those that are not technical expert like your Make It Mine app. Thanks in advance

November 29 2007 at 10:52 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Matt

The Customize app from Installer does this as well, just the tap of a finger too.

November 29 2007 at 10:49 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply