Adding Cephei Preferences

So what exactly is Cephei and what are its benefits

Cephei is a framework for your device its created for developers to make certain things easier For example PreferenceBundles (The settings page for your tweak)

Cephei is supported on every version of iOS since 5.0, on every device. So don't worry about compatibility

Chances are you have a tweak that already uses it, as it is a powerful framework and makes our lives way easier

What exactly does it do?

Our main use of Cephei is CepheiPrefs which we can use to make our preferences look amazing and create them easily

Integrating Cephei Preferences into our tweak

In this guide we will start from scratch and without any existing PreferenceBundle for our tweak

The end result of this guide will be a PreferenceBundle that looks a little something like this

Please note: This guide will be teaching the specifics of Cephei PreferenceBundles not PreferenceBundles in general, to get a better idea of how PreferenceBundles work in general please read the Adding A PreferenceBundle tutorial

So generate a PreferenceBundle using Theos the usual way, then add to your makefile

$(TWEAK_NAME)_EXTRA_FRAMEWORKS += Cephei

and now let's go to your control file and lets add Cephei as a dependency

Too add a dependency we need to add a comma after our last dependency then put in the BundleID of our dependency

For example for Cephei

Depends: mobilesubstrate, ws.hbang.common (>= 1.15.1)

Please note at the time of writing Cephei is on version 1.15.1

This is telling Cydia or our Package Installer that we also need to install Cephei and it will do that automatically for our end-user

We have now finished installing Cephei in our main folder

Lets go into our PreferenceBundle folder (The folder theos creates)

Now we need to add this too our makefile

$(BUNDLE_NAME)_EXTRA_FRAMEWORKS += Cephei CepheiPrefs

Now in our XXXRootListControler.h

'XXXRootListControler.h' is a placeholder name for the three digit unique identifier that we inputted when we created our PreferenceBundle

#import <CepheiPrefs/HBRootListController.h>
#import <Cephei/HBRespringController.h>

The second import isn't vital but it adds a cool feature where we can press a button to respring

Cool, so we now have Cephei successfully imported. Let's start using it

How to use Cephei

Cephei is now essentially 'Plug and Play' it incorporates incredibly easily into our PreferenceBundle

It adds some features which makes our Preferences look amazing

All we have to do is add them to our Root.plist just like any other PreferenceBundle cell

Im just going to list a few and how we extract the values of switches from our Preferences and have it do stuff in our tweak

All Documentation on all the different features of Cephei can be found HERE

PostNotification / ReloadPrefs

This is a handy feature that allows us to refresh our PreferenceBundle values without a respring

This MUST be added under every cell you would like this feature to be present on (such as switches)

<key>PostNotification</key>
<string>com.bundleID.somethingPrefs/ReloadPrefs</string>

Please note com.bundleID.somethingPrefs needs to be replaced with the bundleID of our preferences, this can be found in info.plist under CFBundleIdentifier

HBRespringController

This can be used as an action for a button to respring our device

<key>action</key>
<string>respring</string>

Now we need to create a method called respring in our XXXRootListControler.m

-(void)respring {
  [HBRespringController respring];
}

Now whenever we press the button whose assigned action is respring it shall respring our device

HBImageTabelCell

This can import an image into our preferences, for example as a header or a footer

It can also just be used to import an image into our Preferences as a cell

<!-- As a header (or footer): -->
<dict>
    <key>cell</key>
    <string>PSGroupCell</string>
    <key>headerCellClass</key>
    <string>HBImageTableCell</string>
    <key>height</key>
    <integer>100</integer>
    <key>icon</key>
    <string>image.png</string>
</dict>

<!-- As a cell: -->
<dict>
    <key>cellClass</key>
    <string>HBImageTableCell</string>
    <key>height</key>
    <integer>100</integer>
    <key>icon</key>
    <string>image.png</string>
</dict>

Just add them to your root.plist and they should display your chosen image

Please note that the image needs to be stored in the directory of root.plist

HBLinkTableCell

This can create a button that when pressed opens a URL to whatever website we want You can also attach an image next to it, making it ideal for a 'Source Code On Github' button

<!-- With icon: -->
<dict>
    <key>cellClass</key>
    <string>HBLinkTableCell</string>
    <key>icon</key>
    <string>example.png</string>
    <key>label</key>
    <string>Example</string>
    <key>url</key>
    <string>http://example.com/</string>
</dict>

<!-- With initials: -->
<dict>
    <key>cellClass</key>
    <string>HBLinkTableCell</string>
    <key>initials</key>
    <string>XX</string>
    <key>label</key>
    <string>Example</string>
    <key>url</key>
    <string>http://example.com/</string>
</dict>

HBLinkTableCell only requires a URL and a label to function, other parameters are optional

HBTwitterCell

This is personally my favourite as I will plug my twitter (@ThomasKodey) at any given moment

It automatically shows the Profile Picture of the person but this can be disabled by using the parameter showAvatar

<dict>
    <key>cellClass</key>
    <string>HBTwitterCell</string>
    <key>label</key>
    <string>Follow My Twitter</string>
    <key>user</key>
    <string>ThomasKodey</string>
</dict>

Extracting values from our Preferences and using them in our tweak

Cephei again makes it incredibly easy to extract our Preferences and use them in our tweak

First we need to add CepheiPrefs's HBPreferences.h header to our tweak

#import <Cephei/HBPreferences.h>

Then all we need to do is create an instance with our PreferenceBundle's bundleID

The following code i recommend to place at the bottom of our Tweak.x file so it is easy to refer too

%ctor {

  HBPreferences *preferences = [[HBPreferences alloc] initWithIdentifier:@"bundleID"];

}

Replace bundleID with the bundleID of our PreferenceBundle

Then to extract variables such as if a switch is on or off we want to add this into our %ctor;

[preferences registerBool:&variableName default:YES forKey:@"keyIdentifier"];

registerBool - Please change this depending on our variable type variableName - Please change this to the variable you want our value to be stored in 'keyIdentifier' - Please change this to the keyIdentifier we set for our switch or other item

Then make sure to declare that variable before we use it

BOOL variableName;

So now if we wanted to do something if our switch is enabled we can just use an if statement and it would look something like this

%hook randomClass

-(void)randomMethod {
  if(variableName) {
    // Do something if the switch is enabled
  }
}

%end

And that is Cephei summed up

Full Documentation for Cephei is available HERE This is not by far the most this framework can do, however this is the basics