RSSWidget Shows Your RSS Feeds in Notification Center

The jailbreak scene has certainly taken an early liking to iOS 5’s new Notification Center. The pulldown menu seems to be the perfect spot to put well-designed widgets that give you useful information at a glance.

Though it’s unclear whether Apple will actually allow 3rd party developers to design widgets for the Notification Center, jailbreak developers have already proven its potential. The latest example of that is the new RSSWidget

While we have seen widgets that display important information like weather and system stats, we’ve yet to see one that can display RSS feeds- until now. The RSSWidget for iOS 5 is the latest jailbreak tweak available for iOS 5 beta testers.

It allows you to choose any URL of your liking, and will update the RSS feeds in the widget, in real time. Although the utility is still premature, users can try it out by adding the repo (http://qwertyoruiop.com/beta) to their lists of Cydia sources.

If you do happen to test it out, you might notice that there is no visible way to change the feed URL. You actually have to manually edit the .plist with either iFile or the SSH method. Here’s a brief walk through:

Step 1. Just navigate iFile or your SSH client to System/Library.WeeAppPlugins/RSSWidget.bundle/ and open the file labeled com.idevhaice.rsswidget.plist

Step 2. Change the URL under Item 1 – Defaults. If you don’t see the change right away, do a quick re-spring by removing or re-installing a Cydia package.

While it would certainly be nice to have the ability to read breaking headlines at a glance, we’d probably recommend holding off on this widget until it matures a bit. But for you adventurous folks that love being on the cutting edge, have at it!

Have you tried RSSWidget yet? Thoughts?

[iPhoneItalia] [Special thanks to @iDarkMan]