Ryan Petrich’s Action Menu is such a classic jailbreak tweak that many developers continue to make add-ons for it years after its release. Case in point, PopSearch, an add-on that brings new search options to the classic tweak.
PopSearch allows users to highlight specific text and quickly search that text using a pop-over menu. Search engines include Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, and Bing. Settings can be configured from Action Menu’s settings. Take a look inside for a video demonstration of PopSearch in action.
After installing PopSearch, there really isn’t much to configure. Although PopSearch places a preference panel in the stock settings app, it contains no usable settings or toggles.
The Action Menu preferences will inherit a Pop Search toggle, but that is enabled by default after the tweak’s installation. Still, it’s probably a good idea to check the Action Menu preferences to ensure that everything is set up how you prefer.
To test out PopSearch, I highlighted some text in the stock Notes app. This caused the normal copy and paste pop-over menu to appear, with the additional options that Action Menu provides. You should see a new Search+ button, which I thought was odd since the tweak is called PopSearch, but whatever.
Tapping the Search+ button invokes a pop-over with the four aforementioned search options. Tapping any of the options loads a sheet containing the page associated with the search.
While viewing a sheet is definitely faster than opening Safari or Google Chrome, there are some downsides to using sheets. For starters, there are no navigation buttons to be found, so you’re totally at the mercy of whatever’s on the page. There is a Done button in the upper-right hand corner, but that button just takes you back to the sheet with the four search options.
The real problem that I have with PopSearch is that it places an intrusive looking advertisement at the bottom of each search result. To add to that, the search results from Amazon are in Chinese. I also want to mention that there is no real way to pull search results out of the sheet and into a real browser.
I suppose it can be argued that the real demographic for PopSearch are those who just want quick and dirty search results on a whim. If that’s the case, then yes, PopSearch does that to some degree. Generally speaking, however, people want to take action on search results and PopSearch severely limits the ability to do that.
What do you think about PopSearch? The Action Menu add-on is a free download on Cydia’s BigBoss repo. Try it out, and sound off down below in the comments.