As most of you who follow @razorianfly will know, I recently jailbroke my 16GB iPad Wi-Fi model using the latest ‘Spirit’ tool released over the weekend, and as I noted there are little to no applications which currently have support for iPad. One app which does however is Dashboard.

Previously rejected from the App Store by Apple for obvious reasons, Dashboard for iPad showed up on Cydia late last night. Free, the app takes most of what you love about Mac OSX Dashboard, and brings it to iPad. The app, only available from jail-breaking your device, launches itself as an individual application providing the Dashboard-esque environment inside.

The app consists of a black canvas and a button in the bottom left. Once tapped the ‘Widget’ dock appears just as it would when running on your Mac. Adding Calculator, Weather, Stocks and other signature Apple system widgets is as simple as a tap. Tapping and holding of a widget will allow you to move that widget around the screen and tapping the ‘X’ button in the top left of each widget will see that widget close with the ‘Swoosh’ animation most Mac users will be familiar with.

The app claims you can install widgets directly from Apple.com, and while in my tests the app seemed to start downloading and installing widgets into Dashboard, once completed the widget icon disappeared, with no obvious way to launch said widget. There also seems to be a weird bug in which you can pinch-and-zoom widgets and reveal that each is actually situated in it’s own ‘frame’ within the app. That said, this is still version 1.0, and I’m sure most of these little niggles will be fixed in the coming updates.

Now from using and testing this app myself, its clear why Apple rejected this straight off the bat. For one, the widget design and functions are pretty much identical to their Mac counterparts (sans the fonts), of which if we’re not mistaken, Apple either owns a worldwide patent for or at the very least intellectual property rights over.

Of course, there is the minority who believe Apple rejected this app as they plan to take the idea, and work on it for a future OS software update – but this has never been proven to be the case. Yet.

[via @Viticci]