CustomBadges Allows for Something a Bit More Interesting

Those red notification badges aren’t the most exciting thing in the world are they? Sure, you might have a new e-mail, or there may be a new update to your favorite app, but they lack flair, they lack excitement!

What if you could change those badges into something more meaningful? Maybe a funny phrase, or your favorite proverb? CustomBadges, a tweak for jailbroken iPhones, allows you to do just that…

Upon installing the tweak and respringing your iPhone, a notification pops up at your lock screen telling you exactly how to use CustomBadges. That’s a fairly thoughtful touch from the developer seeing as that this is just a tweak.

The notification also reminds you to look in your Settings app for a friendly reminder on how to use CustomBadges. Thankfully, you probably won’t need the reminder, because it’s about as straightforward as you can get.

To use CustomBadges, place your iPhone into “jiggle mode”, and once you see your app icons dancing around, triple tap on the icon of your choice. This will pull up a text entry prompt, and the icon that you selected will be the one that acquires the custom badge.

Since the iPhone’s 3.5″ diagonal display doesn’t give you much real estate to play with, you’re going to have to keep your custom badges to a minimum amount of text. If you’re creative though, you can come up with some pretty clever badges.

CustomBadges isn’t going to change your world, and I can’t think of too many applications where it would actually be useful, but it is nice to have, especially since its free on Cydia.

How do you feel about adding custom badges to your iPhone apps? Is this something you’ve been wanting, or could you do without it?