We’ve covered hundreds if not thousands of jailbreak apps, tweaks, and themes over the years, and many of them contain some form of toggle to enable and disable functionality on device. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a centralized means of providing toggles, instead of each developer wasting resources to come up with their own? Having a centralized toggle framework would also ensure that functionality remains more or less the same amongst the variety of different apps and tweaks.
That’s where Flipswitch — a new centralized toggle system for iOS — steps in to save the day. A collaboration between developers Ryan Petrich and Jack Willis, Flipswitch is a generalized toggle framework that’s ready to go out of the box. This is a new tool that will make it easy for developers to implement toggles into their apps and tweaks with very few lines of code.
Take a look inside as I talk about FlipSwitch, and showcase its sample tweak — Switchicons — in our video walkthrough…
Video walkthrough
Switchicons is essentially just a demo tweak to show off the toggle framework that is Flipswitch. The toggles supported are as follows:
- Airplane Mode
- Auto Lock
- Bluetooth
- Do Not Disturb
- Flashlight
- Location Service
- Respring
- Ringer
- Rotation
- Settings
- VPN
- Wi-Fi
If the toggles look familiar, that’s because they are. If you’re an Auxo user, then you’ll recognize that these are essentially the same toggles used within Auxo. That’s because the toggles were designed by Sentry, who designed Auxo.
While just a demo, Switchicons can be used if you’d like. The icons themselves can be moved around the springboard, placed in folders, etc. A tap of the icon will toggle its associated function, and the whole setup works just like you’d expect.
Interestingly, we’re already beginning to see some new themes being created for Flipswitch, even at this early stage of the framework’s development. We’ve also heard positive sentiments from a number of developers on Twitter, and Sentry says that he will begin incorporating the framework into his tweaks as well.
Activator support
What’s even more fascinating about Flipswitch is its support for Activator. Once you have Flipswitch installed on your device, you can head over to Activator’s settings to get even more out of the framework.
Activator integration means that you can assign a specific Activator gesture to a switch directly if you want to. For example, I can assign a double press of the Home button gesture to the Do Not Disturb switch directly. Or, if I really want some granular control over the switch, I can assign a specific gesture to an activation of the switch (turning the switch on), or a deactivation of the switch (turning it off). Needless to say, there’s a lot of fine tuning potential with this one.
If you want to try out Flipswitch, and its demo tweak, Switchicons, then head over to Cydia and add Ryan Petrich’s beta repo to your Cydia sources. Really, you should already have his repo as a mainstay on your device, but just in case you don’t already have it, here it is: http://rpetri.ch/repo
If you’re a developer I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on Flipswitch. Is this something you plan on incorporating into your jailbreak apps and tweaks?