What is a header for iPod Touch app developing, and what is this header for: "SBStatusBarDataManager;"?

Question

Many tweak developers use the header SBStatusBarDataManager;. What is this header for and what is the purpose of headers as well? This is mostly refers to jailbroken ipods/iphones.

Answer 1

This status bar on iOS is the thin strip at the top of the screen, that's usually visible whether you're running an app, or on your launch screen, right?

It normally shows your mobile network carrier, the signal strength, the wifi status, the time, and some information about the battery.

Springboard is the iOS app that manages things like this status bar. The SBStatusBarDataManager is one of many objective-c classes within the Springboard app.

To figure out what you can do with this class, you can reverse engineer it. One way to do that is to use a tool like class-dump or class-dump-z. Run those tools on framework files, to see what's available in that framework. Or, run it on a program, like Springboard, to see what's in Springboard. Running class-dump on Springboard.app/Springboard (which you can find by ssh'ing into a jailbroken iPhone), will generate lots of headers, describing the classes inside Springboard. One of those headers will be SBStatusBarDataManager.h. This header is a summary of the things in SBStatusBarDataManager that other jailbreak apps or tweaks can use.

If you look at an iOS 5 version of the header here, you can see that there are available data to get, or set, the information you see in the status bar, like the signal strength or carrier name or battery state, or force the status bar to update itself. For some examples, you might Google "SBStatusBarDataManager site:pastebin.com" to find code samples that people have uploaded.