Sonus is a highly customizable volume HUD replacement for iPhone and iPad

The volume HUD in iOS has always left a lot to be desired; it pops up in the center of the screen and then seemingly lingers for an eternity, all while getting in the way of everything, whether you’re watching videos, looking at photos, browsing the web, or doing anything else while trying to change your device’s volume level.

A new jailbreak tweak called Sonus by ubik is just one of many attempts to make the volume HUD better in iOS, and unlike much of the competition out there, it has a lot of options that you can take advantage of to deck out the tweak and make it look and feel the way you want it to.

Starting with the obvious, Sonus takes your volume HUD and relocates it to the top of the screen, where your Status Bar normally appears. Here, the volume indicator is out of the way and doesn’t hinder your ability to do anything on your screen.

As you adjust the volume on your device, a surprisingly fluid volume indicator bar illustrates your current volume level with the following animation:

It doesn’t stop there, however. Sonus also has the ability to work as a volume adjustment slider whenever the volume HUD appears. When it does, you can opt to have a grabber appear on the indicator that lets you adjust the volume via the touch screen once you’ve already got the HUD open.

Configuring Sonus

Sonus will provide users with a bevy of options for customizing the way the volume HUD looks and feels, so if you’re not happy with the way it looks out of the box, then you can go ahead and make the tweak look exactly how you want it to. To do that, just go to the tweak’s preferences pane, which can be found in the Settings app after installation:

As you can probably tell, there are quite a few different settings cells in the Sonus preferences pane. We’ll go through all of the cells with you in the outline below:

Appearance

The first preferences pane has to do with the volume HUD’s appearance. This pane gives you options for all of the following:

  • Dynamic color that matches the Status Bar at the time of volume adjustment
  • Toggling overlay mode for a slightly different UI effect
  • Choosing appearance (color, corner radius, etc) for the overlay volume HUD mode
  • Configuring a gradient color for your volume HUD
  • Applying a background blur for the space behind the volume HUD when invoked

Size and Position

Another preferences pane is dedicated to the sizing and positioning of the volume HUD, and it provides you with the following options:

  • Selecting a custom height for the volume HUD slider
  • Selecting custom padding value (landscape and portrait) for the volume HUD slider
  • Picking the vertical positioning for the volume HUD slider on your screen
  • Selecting custom (left to right) and (top to bottom) margins for the volume HUD slider

Animation

The next preferences pane has to do with the tweak’s animations, and offers these options to choose from:

  • Toggling a fade animation for the volume HUD
  • Toggling a slide animation for the volume HUD slider
  • Choosing time duration for HUD time on the screen, animations, and slider speed

Extras

The Extra preferences pane offers a variety of miscellaneous options that are find to play with, including:

  • Toggling a fluid volume animation (more resource-heavy)
  • Hiding the Status Bar when the volume HUD is invoked
  • Tapping anywhere to dismiss the volume HUD manually
  • Displaying ringer icon when the volume you’re changing is ringer instead of media
  • Displaying media icon when the volume you’re changing is media instead of ringer
  • Choosing a color for either of the aforementioned icons

Experimental

The last preferences pane is for experimental options, which work, but may be buggy because they’re still in preliminary development.

The things you can configure here include:

  • Enabling touch-screen based volume slider control
  • Enabling the grabber to drag left and right for volume adjustment
  • Choosing the color, size, and shape of the volume HUD grabber
  • Choosing gradient colors for the volume HUD slider

Everything else you need to know

At a first glance, the tweak looks and feels a lot like SmartVolumeControl, but it has such a sleeker UI, but with a far more satisfying UI and stronger set of configuration options.

The idea of changing the volume HUD so that it appears in the Status Bar region rather than smack in the middle of the screen certainly isn’t new, but the deep levels of customization that Sonus has to offer help to make it stand out from a lot of the competition. They help to make the tweak a good fit for anyone, as anyone can form the tweak around their personal desires and needs.

Sonus is made to work on all jailbroken iOS 9 and iOS 10 devices, whether they’re iPhones, iPads, or iPod touches. It’s also worth noting that the tweak supports both landscape and portrait orientations, which not all volume HUD replacement tweaks do.

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Are you impressed with the settings and features you can gain with Sonus? Share why or why not in the comments below.