Dial is a brand new tweak that allows you to use a dialer to text or call your friends and family from the App Switcher, Siri interface, or from Spotlight. The tweak has options to outright replace both Siri and the App Switcher, or to be invoked in tandem with the two.
In principal this might sound like a good idea. Wait a minute…let’s not kid ourselves, it sounds like a terrible idea, but I was hoping that the execution would surprise me and change my mind. It didn’t. Even still, there may be some of you out there who will appreciate Dial for what it is. With that in mind, we’ve created a video walkthrough showing how the tweak works.
The option to outright replace Siri with a half functioning dialer isn’t a very good one. For starters, the dialer doesn’t interface at all with your favorite contacts. That means that if you want to use the dialer to actually call or text someone, you’ll need to know their phone number by heart. To be honest, I can barely remember my Mom’s phone number; who goes around memorizing phone numbers these days?
I understand that jailbreak tweaks are generally quick and dirty solutions to fix some of iOS’ perceived problems, but as you can tell from the video, Dial is a bit too quick and dirty. The interface isn’t very pretty and it’s quite buggy, especially with Spotlight dial enabled. To be fair to the developer, the Spotlight portion is listed as being “experimental”, but even with that disabled I ran into crashes here and there, and just overall poor design.
Usually I’m pretty forgiving when I cover tweaks, because they aren’t generally meant to be masterful showcases of design or function. Maybe I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning? Or maybe seeing some of the same tweak ideas repeated and poorly executed has gotten under my skin a bit? Or maybe I’m just offended that I bought this for $0.99?
Whatever my reasoning, I can tell you this, if you want to try Dial then I recommend that you hold of on a purchase until the developer shows that he’s committed to updating it. I’d wait until at least one or two updates before paying $0.99 for this. Sure, $0.99 isn’t a lot, but these things add up.
What do you think?