The volume HUD has always been a pain point for iPhone owners; the fact that it pops up right in the middle of the screen as you adjust your volume is intrusive and becomes a nuisance when you’re trying to watch videos or listening to music while viewing photos/reading e-Books.
Countless jailbreak tweaks have been released over the years in an attempt to repair this problem. Most of them move the volume HUD out of the way in creative ways, and now the latest to join that list is HUDPlayer by iOS developer pxcex.
This tweak takes a banner notification-style approach to the volume HUD. It integrates your volume level indicator into the banner, which also displays media metadata of anything that’s playing, such as the name of the song, the artist, and a small album artwork preview.
HUDPlayer was designed to work with both your media and ringer volumes. The new volume HUD style appears even when you’re not playing any music, and you’ll see a ringer icon instead of music information in this case:
The tweak also comes complete with colorization and theming options, so you can customize it to look the way you want it to. In our example below, we show you the difference between both the dark and the light themes that come as a part of the package:
HUDPlayer adds a preferences pane to the Settings app where you’ll find a few settings you can tinker with:
Here, you can toggle the tweak on or off on demand and configure the way the volume HUD banner looks and feels. Among the options are:
- Using a macOS-inspired volume sound
- Applying a dark-colored blur
- Using automatic color extraction from the album artwork of Now Playing music
- Make the corners of the album artwork rounded
- Colorize the volume indicator bar
- Choose how many seconds of delay there is before the volume HUD disappears
Personally, I don’t mind the stock settings and the light blur, which look and feel similar to the stock volume HUD, just in banner form. Of course, opinions and tastes may vary, so I invite you check out the tweak for yourself and try to achieve the look and feel you’re aiming for.
HUDPlayer can be downloaded for free from Cydia’s BigBoss repository and will work on jailbroken iOS 9 and 10 devices.
What are your thoughts about HUDPlayer’s approach to making the volume HUD better in iOS? Share in the comments section below.