This tweak gives iOS notifications a makeover

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iOS’ notification system it set up so when you miss notifications, they’ll stack up on the Lock screen and in Notification Center until you have a moment to look back at all of them.

The notifications are separated with padding and are plain Jane, but for those that want to switch things up a bit and make notifications look a bit more modern or appealing, a new jailbreak tweak called RedesignedNotifications will let you personalize the look of your Lock screen and Notification Center notifications to your own personal preference.

Customizing the look of your notifications

Depending on how much you like to change the look of your device’s stock appearance, RedesignedNotifications comes with options that can be either make the notification experience feel minimalist or extreme. Personally, I’m a fan of minimalism, so I’m not one to change too many colors or styles – I like simple dark and light color schemes, such as gray and black, and simple-as-can-be styles.

For those of you that are a lot like me, RedesignedNotifications can, without a doubt, appeal to your desires to change things up. This also goes for those of you that are a little more exotic and like having starkly-contrasting colors on your device because you like to stand out from everyone else.

This tweak gives you control over not only the colors of the notifications themselves and the text within them, but also lets you configure the following items for your notifications:

  • Notification transparency
  • Rounded corners
  • Width of the notification cells
  • Text and icon alignment
  • Notification privacy
  • Rounded icons
  • Text shimmer animations
  • Light or heavy font

It’s also worth mentioning that the tweak affects notifications that stack up on not just the Lock screen, but also in Notification Center.

Configuring the tweak

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As is the case with most jailbreak tweaks, you can expect to find a preferences pane for RedesignedNotifications in the Settings app. This is where you’ll make your notifications for the Lock screen and Notification Center look exactly how you’ll want them to look.

Below, we’ll outline what these features do:

  • Full Width Cells: makes the notification span the entire width of the display.
  • Round Corners: gives notifications rounded corners and lets you adjust the roundness radius.
  • Privacy Mode: hides the notification’s description label so others can’t see the content.
  • Left Align: aligns the notification text and icon to the left side of the notification.
  • Transparency: lets you fine-tune the transparency of notifications with a slider.
  • Round Icons: makes app icons in notifications round instead of square.
  • Hide Icons: hides app icons from notifications.
  • Shimmer Label: makes your notification labels shimmer like the ‘slide to unlock’ text does.
  • Light Font: enables a lighter font with a smaller footprint for a cleaner look.
  • Custom Cell Color: lets you choose a color from a picker for the notification cell itself.
  • Custom Primary Label Color: lets you choose a color from a picker for the app name in the notification.
  • Custom Secondary Label Color: lets you choose a color from a picker for the app description in the notification.

Note: the developer is working on releasing a 1.0.1 update in Cydia as of this writing that will make it possible to send yourself notification previews so you can see what your changes look like. Any time you want to save your changes, you should tap on the “Save” button at the top right of the preferences pane, which will make your device respring and save your changes.

Thoughts on RedesignedNotifications

Although I’ve always thought iOS’ notifications looked perfectly fine as is, you never really know what you want until you see it with your own eyes. When I saw some of the preview images in Cydia for RedesignedNotifications, I fell in love with the gray notification background, black text, and left-aligned notifications that spanned the entire width of the display (see the top-most right-hand image in this post).

I don’t particularly need all of the bells and whistles, such as shimmering text, privacy mode, and all the rounding effects, but they’re nice to have available if your tastes ever change or if you decide that you suddenly want to make your notifications a little more private. It’s also some work on the developer’s part to try and appeal to the various audiences out there, which have varying tastes.

If you like customizing things, like the notifications that appear on your Lock screen or in Notification Center, I think you would have fun customizing this tweak to your liking and taking it for a spin.

RedesignedNotifications can be had from Cydia’s BigBoss repo for $1.50.

Let us know your thoughts about Redesigned Notifications in the comments below!